Jay Hitherton's Blog

"To what degree might different languages shape their speakers different concepts of themselves and the world? What are the implication of such differences for knowledge?" Some studies have proved that Bilinguals and Multilinguals have a different brain than their Monolingual counterparts. This can also alter the way we see our world. Language is used to communicate out thoughts and feelings to one another. Sometimes when people speak different languages, they tend to have a certain tone and jargon that 'marks themselves to this particular language territory'. They may say the same thing in the intended language spoken but the way that the message is  interpreted is different. We are not identical and we all do not share our common thoughts with each other.

"Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains." - Peter Diamandis Sense perception can alter the way we know the world. This quote from Peter Diamandis  is a great way to present the idea that Sense Perception and Reasoning connects with each other. The reason of a thing's existence can be explained through Sense Perception. Reasoning separates most people from a delusional and ignorant state. If you know the reason of the things in life through the means of sense perception, you would know the reason as to why one exist. The influx of data that comes in to our brain is too much. One example of this is Optical Illusion. Optical Illusions happen because of the brain trying to 'trick' us.

"A balance between shared and personal knowledge is extremely important in the quest for truth" (Oxford p.38) This statement tells us that the truth lies between your shared and personal knowledge and experiences. Shared knowledge has been shared and possibly manipulated over the years that the knowledge had peen passed down. These manipulation can affect the way that we know things and can even make us gullible to believing in baseless facts. This is where our personal knowledge comes along. Our intuition plays a huge role into which shared knowledge that we obtain is the truth. Our personal knowledge acts as a filter to filter out the baseless knowledge we get from people because we are susceptible to being manipulated by others. Evidences that looks very convincing can present the fake knowledge is real and the only truth. One of the examples of this is the Flat Earth Theory. Back in the days, people thought that the earth was flat and people were scared to fall off the...

"By participating in the ownership of shared knowledge an individual belongs to a particular group possessing a particular perspective on the world" (TOK guide) Shared knowledge is defined as the knowledge you receive from different Areas of Knowledge. This may come from your studies in school, the activities you do outside of school and other social ventures we are apart of. This type of knowledge is unique to every person who are attending different events to obtain their portion of knowledge that come from a variety of areas of the world. Shared knowledge defines who we are because we use terms that we have learned in each of our Area of Knowledge that we have come across and may only be used in some of these Areas. But some of these areas can help us view the world on a different perspective. We obtain shared knowledge from different people. This knowledge is stored in our minds. When we see things, we say things to ourselves such as "Why are my feelings hurt?...

Knowledge is the facts and information that we receive from experience or education. Knowledge makes us know about the world. Knowledge is the key to our survival. But everything in the world is not perfect. Even Knowledge. All of the things we know about the world are not true. SO how do we know what we know? One example of the problem with knowledge is maps. Maps are used to present how the worlds looks like in a flat surface. The purpose of maps was primarily for navigation. During the Age of Discovery, European cartographers started to create maps for these voyagers. One of the first (and most popular) maps were the Mercator projection map. The Mercator projection map was made by a European cartographer Gerardus Mercator. It was made in the 1500s for those travellers. This map retains the shape of the landmass but distorts its shape and area of the map as a landmass reaches near the poles of the Earth. This map is not perfect. We can assume that this map was biased toward...