I think language is symbols that has meaning and people use language to describe things. But after the activity we did during the class, it changed my point of view.
During the tower build activity, we started with absolutely no communication I tried to understand what others are doing and help them. But later on I found their method would not work so well, then I tried to use gestures to express my opinion. Unfortunately, they didn’t understand what I was talking about. Gestures didn’t work so well in this soundless activity.
Then why my gesture didn’t work? Because my gestures mean something else to others, it is not a common understanding. And I think experiences are more important than somebody talking to you. If you want to have a better understand of this activity, try is the best way to experience.
What I use to think and now I think
Reasoning and memory
RLS:
“which day did she come here？ is it the 14th or the 15th？”
“She came here for three days, today is the 17th.”
Sometimes memories will confuse us, as time pass by some memories will become unclear and we are not sure if it is reliable or not. I think reasoning might be a good way to check out. In the RLS I mentioned before, people could use different areas of knowing for reasoning, math is an area of knowing. Sometimes a detective would reasoning to test whether the situation described from a witness is true or not.
There are two types of reasoning, inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning they are both based on logics.
Sometimes memories could cheat us but logic and reasoning cannot.
Language VS imagination
Real life situation:
A scientist is reading the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelly and becomes inspired to try to bring life to a dead body.
Language and imagination are both ways of knowing. I think language in TOK means the symbols that have meanings; we get information from those symbols. Imagination is a natural ability, nobody teaches us how to image. Within imagination, there is logic and reasoning I think these is where we get the information from and also the image people created in their heads.
The most typical products that combine these two woks are the fictions, novels or even fairytales. People write the images in their heads by using the symbols that have meanings try to tell other people about the story or their own ideas.
Another real life situation could be when someone is talking to me, I would automatically try to image if I were the person or try to recreate the situation that the person is taking about. I think language and imagination works collaborative, one helps another one.
Does it really matter if what we believe is true?
I think believe or faith doesn’t have to be true like religions, there is no God up in the sky but there is still many people believe that is God is actually there and helping them. The truth is religion is just a way in old days to control people’s mind but I think nowadays it’s not bad to believe in religions; sometimes what you believe in would give you power and it gives people a way to release themselves.
Placebo effect is an effect meaning that although the patients has received an unhelpful treatment, but “expected” or “believe” that the treatment will work, and make the patients suffer less from the illness. It is the same if you compare to religions. The treatment is not working but we believe it is true, therefore sometimes our believes don’t need to be true.
But sometimes it is really matter if what we believe is true, for example KKK or Falun gong. These two examples are having the wrong knowledge claims. If people believe in something they might do things that reflect their believes, therefore if people believed in the wrong way they might do the wrong things. 10 years ago, there were few people burned themselves in front of Tiananmen because they believe in Falun gong, they believe they are going to the Haven by doing this.
So sometimes it is really matter if what we believe is true, it will harm if we believe in the wrong thing. Anything has its double sides, what more important is how can we distinguish between truth or false and be strong with your opinions.
TOK reflection
We have just started our TOK course this week, we first talked about 16 words and one of them is the word perspective. Perspective means a particular way of thinking about something. Your perspectives might be totally different from others and that is because of your experiences, religion and the environment you are staying. We discussed four questions:
- Is it wrong to place yourself in the middle of your own map of the world?
Africa is in the middle if the map on image 1, Australia is in the middle of the map on image2. These two examples show different perspectives on how people see the world. The activity we done before which is to draw world map without any help, and of course everyone’s world map is different. The reason of that might be the environment.
And we found out that the world we know now is very different from what we know the world when we were child. Family is basically the world of a child, as we gain more knowledge education and on the Internet or travel a lot our worldview expanded. That is another example of perspectives.
- What does this say about how we see ourselves in the world particularly in relation to others?
I think I can use the example of child views v. now views. When we were child we only need to consider about your parents, or ourselves maybe at that time you will think, “everybody has to think about me first”, but now it changes you found out that there are not only you on the planet there are more people than you thought, there are some people living under a bad life-conditions, somebody might have the same thoughts as you, etc. then you started to think about others and I think this is the start point of a person’s socialize.
- What is the connection between maps and politics?
I think the general relationship is map shows the territories and the boundaries. I like the point that Josh rose up: “map separates the country,” it reminds me that several years ago some Tibetan wanted to be separate from China I think this is also related to perspectives, what we thought about then and what they thought about themselves is totally different. Taiwan is also an example; mainland China think Taiwan is a part of China, but Taiwanese people they don’t think so although they call themselves a part of China. I think the reason of this is because of education, what our teachers and parents told us were different and therefore we think about it differently.
- Is there a thing as a correct map? Why?
In my opinion every map is not exact it has error, if we compared the map the true world, then the map will be wrong. This is about one perspective; another perspective is depends on what is the purpose of the map. If you were a diver you might want a GPS map shows all the streets, if you were a helicopter diver you might want a topographical map, then is map is correct.