Is This Right?

To paraphrase Pat Summitt, if you have to stop and think about whether or not it's a good idea, it isn't.  That's comforting in some ways, though I'm not sure I agree.  Do you?  Certainly, this philosophy depends on a clear sense of both ethics and morality.  In this vein, let's keep exploring what these mean, both categorically and personally.  Please do a little research (you may choose to begin here) on definitions of Ethics and Morality.  Read, think, synthesize, create.  Share your sources and share your own definitions.  Please complete this writing by 9:30 Monday evening and arrive Tuesday having read everyone's definitions.  It's the right thing to do.

The Pathos of Righteousness

As we continue to plumb the depths and implications of emotion as a way of knowing, please seek out, share, and contextualize two appeals based on emotion.  For each, consider whether or not the same effects could be achieved without employing emotion.  Also, explain whether or not these particular uses of emotion are ethical.  To do this, you will need to explore and share your definition of ethics.  Please complete your post by 9:30 Wednesday evening.  Come to class on Thursday having read one another's work.  I'll be particularly interested to hear your assessments of your classmates' emotion-free scenarios, and to begin to discuss ethics and their implications.

It's like...

As Richard Wilbur demonstrates in Advice to a Prophet, metaphor, and the emotions and understandings that it imparts, are vital to our understanding--our knowledge--of ourselves and the world we inhabit.  For Sunday evening at 9:30, please share two metaphors by which you define your world.  Return to Douglas Hofstadter's definition: what are "the filters through which we scan and sort reality?"  To help you on your way, read through the handout of illustrative quotations elaborating on emotion as a way of knowing.  Explain the nature of the metaphors you select, what functions they serve for you, and their shortcomings--what do they filter out?

Spirals and Turkey and Phi

Oh my!  Taking Brianna's lead, let's explore Fibonacci, via Vi Hart and her Math class doodles.  Please watch all three parts (links to parts 2 and 3 are underneath the Subscribe button, and appear in the video at the end).  Please do not say "Mr. Bogel told me to" when your Math teacher asks why you're doodling during class.  Please do doodle during class.  After you watch these videos, think and write about the relationship between patterns, design, and necessity.  We talked about this in class while wearing Einstein's glasses, you'll remember, and were led by Cathy to read and think from right to left.  Can you identify another pattern in your world that seems designed but is in fact a necessary result of circumstance and process?  Are there times when this distinction is a matter of perspective, and thus open for debate?  These are the questions I'd like you to address in your post.  Please complete your thinking and writing by Sunday, 12/1, at 6 pm.  Then read one another's work before class on Tuesday 12/3.  On Thursday 11/28, before you eat, please watch this holiday eating guide.  Your fellow celebrants will be impressed.  As they stare, awe-struck, at your plate, you might regale them with a recitation of this ode to the spiral.

The Art of Knowing

Whether your moment of knowing in Art comes from tonight's talk by Anna Schuleit Haber, from your own work, or elsewhere, please share the source of your knowledge moment, the knowledge question you've extracted, and your answer to your own question.  These are due by 9:30 Wednesday night.  Please read your classmates' work before Thursday's class.  Finally, flashing back to last post's flashback, here's a new comic version of Prufrock, courtesy of the inexhaustible BoingBoing.net.

Will Knowledge Fit in a Juicer?

Let us go then, you and I, when the knowledge is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table...Sorry.  English teacher flashback.  Our discussion, yesterday, of Bohm's and Dillard's musings on memory, time, knowledge, and creation, led to many fruitful questions about the nature of thought and originality.  As we also began to explore, these questions can operate with equal alacrity in numerous areas of knowledge.  This is the nature of the Knowledge Question (née Knowledge Issue).  For this post, please read this guide to Knowledge Issue Extraction, brought to you by the enigmatic Mr. Hoye.  Focus your reading and understanding on the descriptions and examples of progressively better and more useful Knowledge Issues.  That done, please select and read an article from either 3 Quarks Daily or Arts & Letters Daily (links to both are found on the right).  From that article, extract two Knowledge Questions (yes, we're using these terms interchangeably): one bad and one good.  In your post, explain what makes the bad KQ bad and the good KQ good.  Please also include a link to the article you select.  These are due Monday before 9:30 pm.

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet--We're Hunting Knowidge

By now, you and your peripatetic partner have identified a moment of knowledge with different implications for each of you, based on your cultures, your societies, your unique perspectives as knowers.  By 9:30 pm on Wednesday, please record below what you found, what it means to you, what it means to your partner, and whence the differences.  Read the full class's posts before we meet on Thursday and arrive ready to discuss, please.

SoScietal Knowledge

After today's productive and enlightening discussion, I believe I've learned my lesson: focus! To that end, let's build on the thinking and writing you did on the ways and extents to which science is shaped by societies.  In your science class tomorrow, or in your work from earlier this term, select a moment of knowledge that is a product of the society that produced it.  You might identify an idea that is presented as an objective truth but that doesn't hold up to the scrutiny of other perspectives, or you may discover a truth that is knowingly dependent on a certain societal bent.  Either way, identify the moment, explain the perspective(s) at work, and consider (in writing) how another perspective would change the facts or meaning(s) of the facts.  Please complete this work by 9:30 Wednesday evening, then read others' writing before class on Thursday.

Lead On, Grasshopers

To follow up on this weekend's Leadership Symposium & Gala, I'd like you to consider leadership.  What does leadership mean to you?  What are the ideal qualities of leadership?  Primarily, please think and write about what your cultures (family, native, other) have taught you to value in a leader.  My goal is for us to examine the overlap and differences between your perspectives as knowers, which we will pursue in our discussion on Tuesday.  Please post by 9:30 pm on Monday, then read one another's comments before Tuesday's class.

Is It Me, Or Did You Just Change the World?

For Tuesday morning, please reflect on the text below.  Your writing should include—though not be limited to—answers to the four questions that follow the excerpt.  We will begin our class discussion here, and write further for Thursday.

“If when we learn new things we can see the world differently, then as we learn new things we react to it differently.  We are then living in a different world, a world with different possibilities, different impossibilities.  Which world is the right one, the real one?  Is it the new world or the old?  What do we mean by this question?  And, ultimately the question, if this is true, what new things should we try to learn so as to live in a different world?” (Lawrence LeShan, Alternate Realities: The Search for the Whole Human Being. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987, 8.)

1. What happens to us when we learn?

2. What happens to the world when we learn?

3. Do human beings, living in the same society, live in different worlds because of what they know?             

4. How does the following quote, from Emerson's Self-Reliance, affect your thinking on the previous question? “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all...that is genius."

Tuesday Update:

Please continue your conversation in the context of the following ideas and questions, the first in honor of the 84th anniversary this week of the publication of The Sound and the Fury.  This writing should reflect your consideration of your classmates' first round of comments on this post, as well as our class discussion.

"Fact and truth really don't have much to do with each other"
-William Faulkner


"Every knowledge system is shaped by the characteristics of the society that produced it.  We are accustomed to considering the flow in the opposite direction, seeing how scientific and technological advances have shaped modern society.  But it is of critical importance to recognize both flows.  We have the kind of society we have in part because of the fruits of science and technology.  But the converse is also true: we have the kind of science we have in part because of the particular nature of the society in which it was developed."  (Willis Harman, Global Mind Change: The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century.  Indianapolis: Knowledge Systems, Inc., 1988, 27.)


1.  How has your knowledge system been shaped by your society?  For example, how has science been shaped by your society?
2.  Can different societies have different sciences, histories, etc.?
3.  To what extent do you agree with Faulkner's assessment?

And speaking of decoding, check this out.  

What's Going On Here?

Congratulations!  You're off to a brave and productive start on your TOK journey.  As I mentioned in class, I'd like you to go one step further and define--for yourself, for me, for one another, and for visitors here--what it is we're up to.  Theory of Knowledge is sometimes called a course in practical philosophy, a study of metacognition, and an epistemological investigation.  But so what?  For Thursday morning, please write a thoughtful, thorough paragraph describing the course as you see it. As I'm delighted one of you asked in class, yes, it can also be funny.  We'll use your descriptions to assemble a collective blurb for our blog.

I Think I Forgot How To Think

I think it's time to slow down a little: let's go to college.  To be precise, please attend the Universities of Rochester and Oxford.  First, work through this logic tutorial on consistency and validity.  Once on the site, follow the Tutorials link, then select Tutorial One.  Continue until you finish Exercise 1.4.  Next, please tackle these logic puzzles.  Work patiently and with a pencil, reasoning out the consequences of each statement and, where appropriate, its speaker.  In your post, examine the ways your thinking changed or developed to accommodate this task.  What was most difficult?  How did you arrive at the answers?  Consider (in writing) how the skills the tutorial develops help you understand and tackle the puzzles and paradoxes.  If you get angry at logic, take a break and read this.  Finally, an ear worm inspired by our last class.  Please post by 8 am Tuesday.

There's a Hole in the Logic, Dear Liza...

To continue to hone your reasoning skills and simultaneously reexamine ways of knowing, please read your own post and the post below yours (last poster, read the first), searching out, identifying, and explaining any and every logical fallacy along the way.  Use and link to the guide at right (top link).  Please share your findings before classes start on Thursday.

More Than a Feeling

Greetings, Knowers.  As we begin to build our TOK vocabularies, we're developing a list (and understandings of that list) of ways of knowing.  To date, we've discussed Sense Perception, Language, Reason, Emotion, and Faith, along with the beginnings of an exploration of Intuition and what that might mean.  I respectfully submit that the list may be incomplete at this time.  I also want to share with you all Cynthia's astute observation that there seems to be a lot of overlap.  Yes!  It is often very difficult (perhaps at times impossible?) to draw clear distinctions between the ways we know certain things.  That said, for Tuesday morning at 8 am, I would like you each to identify two moments of knowledge (two things you know) and the ways of knowing employed for each.  Employ two different ways of knowing (one for each) and, as best you are able, identify one discreet way of knowing for each moment.  Identify what you know, the context of the knowledge, and how you know (the way of knowing).  Take a risk--try to use the way of knowing that confuses or confounds you most.  If you feel your brain begin to melt, don't worry: the nights are getting cooler.

I Do Not Think That Means What You Think It Means

Building on our discussion of Ludacris language, please spend a day or so listening.  Seek out a word or phrase or statement spoken near you, in which you identify an additional, unintended meaning.  Report the situation, the statement (you do not need to include names of those involved), the intended meaning(s), and the additional meaning you've identified.  Please post this before first period on Thursday.

What in the World?

Let's take a look around.  For 8 am on Tuesday 9/17, please look through the maps here.  Once you've worked your way through them, choose three and do some thinking and writing about the perspective that each presents, how it relates to you, and what insight it has to offer you.  What surprised you?  How did it change your thinking?  What did it reveal to you about your perspective that you perhaps hadn't considered?  Come to class prepared to discuss your and others' responses.