Welcome back (physically) everyone!
Tomorrow we will be looking at another exemplar essay in class, so that you can get a few more dos and don'ts for your own essay due next week. So please make sure to bring your copy of the assessment criteria to your lesson.
Secondly, despite the reminders, our poll on the aims of the course has received replies from only 16 of you. What about the other 74? Don't you have any opinion about the course? One of the goals (if not a specific aim) of what we are doing is to try to develop informed and supportable opinions. So please take a few minutes to reflect on your experiences to date and add your view.
Next week, we will start a section of the course on the Arts. I don't know anyone who has no views on the Arts - you all study literature, I have evidence that suggests that many of you like certain kinds of music, then we have the visual arts, and performing arts... So get those ideas and examples ready...
Monday, April 20, 2009
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8 comments:
I think I am getting slightly confused, is a justified knowledge claim the truth? i.e if I want to assess the credibility of a particular justification process, can I use a truth test?
Yazzie,
The answer is in the question. How helpful is that, huh?
So does this mean when 1+1=2 is true,if can it be justified?
One may say the sum is 11 which is credibly supported when you look at the axiome above.So based on this can we say justification relies mainly on what is universally accepted and not the truth?
Yazzie,
Here's the post that I removed last week...
Not necessarily. If you ask me "what is the time?", and I look at my watch and it reads 10 to 11, and so I tell you it's 10 to 11, then I've made a knowledge claim and it's justified by the fact that I own a generally reliable timepiece and my sense perception is in order. But it might possibly be that my watch has stopped or someone changed the time on it as a practical joke on me, or... Despite these possibilities, I think my claim is still justified with reference to my watch (ie I have good grounds for my claim), but there is still a chance that I am mistaken.
So I hope you can see that it is possible - very possible! - for a knowledge claim that is backed up by some form of justification to be false.
But maybe we need to be clearer about what we mean by "the truth". The trouble is that sometimes people use "truth" and "belief" as synonyms, and that isn't very helpful unless you accept that whatever you happen to believe is the truth (although there may be some situations where belief and truth are more or less the same - if I believe that I am angry, can that not be true, for example? Can I believe I am frightened when actually I am not?
But here is where the various truth tests might help.
Correspondence truth is where a statement is in accordance with the state of the world. So if I say "the sun is shining in Tema today" and the sun is indeed shining in Tema today, then my statement is true by correspondence. In this example, the claim is justified with reference to sense perception.
Coherence truth is where a statement fits with other statements that are known or accepted to be true. To take a negaive example, if I claim that there are sharks in Lake Volta, there is no need to organize a fishing expedition there in order to find out if this is true, because the claim is not coherent with other claims that we all accept as true - namely that sharks live only in salt water, and that Lake Volta is filled with fresh water. This form of justification might originally rely on empirical evidence, but I hope you can see it also involves principles of reason, such as non-contradiction.
It is good that you are asking these questions because they are about the very central concepts in TOK - truth, justification, knowledge claims - and we need to get a clear understanding of how they might relate to one another.
Hope this helps a little bit...
Hot Ice,
What does "universally accepted" mean here? If it means that we all agree because we are mindless morons who accept whatever someone happens to say, then there's a problem.
But if we all agree because there are excellent epistemological grounds for doing so (ie it's clear that the claim is true, and THAT'S why we all agree about it), then universal agreement and truth become synonymous and unproblematic, I think.
Then there might be some middle ground - most of us agree because a few expert authorities who have the skills and experience to find the truth all agree.
Now which of these situations would apply in the various areas of knowledge?
if some tells you that you are a thief because your friend is a thief, is that a reasonable justification? is the person justified to call me a thief???
Always simple,
In order to get a meaningful answer to your question, you would need to relate it to the discussion that is going on in this thread. As it stands, I don't see any connection.
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