Reflections vol 1...

What have i learned during the first theme ???

This book from Russell is a canonical book, you can go back to it and read it now and then as it has a fundamental knowledge. Russell believed that we cannot know anything, the only thing that we know is propositions about possible facts and every statement of fact must have a system of knowledge. Also he is using the term “sense-date” for what we know immediately about something through our senses. Sense-data is the most important thing in knowledge by acquaintance. Russell’s main goal was to formalize knowledge by putting propositions and statements of fact in a true or false formula and connect philosophy with science.

A proposition is based on knowledge by description, while a statement of fact is based on knowledge by acquaintance. In some cases a statement can be meaningless i.e. “The king of France is bold” as we know that there is not a king in France. In this case, we just have to find ways to translate these problematic statements in order to understand them. Basically propositions and statements of fact are verbal expressions. Some other verbal expressions can be questions or commands. All verbal expressions have the power to change the world. For example when the priest during a wedding says here I call you man and wife, from that moment and on these two people will be a married couple.  

Also very interesting, is a Russell’s famous student Ludwig Wittgenstein belief that our emotions shape our knowledge. He used the quota that “The world of a happy person is much different than the world of an unhappy person”. According to him, our emotions can change our sense-data. But Russell has not done any reference on the impact of emotions to our knowledge; he just believed that all the sense-data we get from our environment, are being categorized in our minds.

In the end of his book, Russell attacks Hegelism by supporting that we cannot know the totality of world, we know only the individual facts. And also he was opposed to the beliefs of Kant and idealism in general, who supported the idea that matter exists only in relation to ideas (in our minds). Russell on the contrary, believed that physical objects exist independently; world exists even without our experience.    

The big idea is that in order to have knowledge, we must have mediation! And today Media can make knowledge possible, through all these different types like videos, sounds, images and their converge. There are more details about media convergence and it's effects an the book "Convergence culture" by Henry Jenkins.

First theme...

Research Journal

I chose the journal New Media & Society. This is a journal mainly active in the fields of communication, media and cultural research. Also in some cases it publishes studies about geography, economics, sociology, political & information studies and finally humanities. It is important to highlight that the researches published in this journal, are conducted with theories and methods of high quality; with both qualitative and quantitative methods.

The 2011 impact factor of the journal is 1.394.

Research Paper

The article that I have chosen is from the same journal and its title is “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience” written by Alice E. Marwick and Danah Boyd. [Article’s impact factor is 8.0].

In this research paper, authors are trying to investigate how Twitter users imagine the people they are talking to through this social network (their audiences) and what kind of strategies they use to steer them.

The authors conducted their research with the use of qualitative methods. In order to examine how Twitter users imagine their audiences, they were based on past literature and open-type interviews. They started their interviews by posting their questions directly to their own followers’ (on Twitter) walls, but also they send them as @reply to the Twitter users whose posts are shown in the public timeline. The questions were formed in a way that they could approach different kinds of users so that the researchers would gain a diversity of users’ views.

Russell’s Book

A) People, usually think that defining a simple common object like a table is a simple process. Though, Russel through his arguments proves that this is not as simple as it looks. The objects’ characteristics like color, shape, smoothness are differing among the people who see the object and their points of view. For example if a person A sees a chair during the day he will say that the chair is brown but if a person B sees the same chair during the night he will say that its color is black. Thus, Russel is using the name of 'sense-data' for the things that we can immediately identify through our sensations. Things like these are colors, sounds, smells, roughness, etc. So, we can say that what we think that our senses tell us is not the truth about an object, but the truth about this object’s “sense-data”.

B) “Proposition is a unique fact that we know about an object through knowledge by description”. This means that we all can know facts about certain objects without having personal experience (acquaintance) but we have to base our propositions entirely on facts that we are acquainted with. 

Facts are our personal experiences, what we know about an object through acquaintance.

A statement of fact is a total of statements about a particular object that leads us to a belief which has to be true. For the belief to be true, it has to correspond to the fact, otherwise it is a false one.

C) According to Russell, all knowledge is based on the knowledge by acquaintance.  Unlike sense-data, all the other information about an object does not contain knowledge. These information are known to us by description knowledge, which is the one concerning objects in the cases where we know that there is an object matching to a certain description. Furthermore, this knowledge has to be valid and for that reason must have the form “the so-and-so” (definite form).

D) Russell believed that philosophical knowledge is not essentially different from the scientific knowledge. The results obtained by philosophy might not differ in a great extent from these obtained by science. But their basic difference is the criticism.  Also, he supported that as we cannot prove Hegel’s beliefs, that “the universe as a whole forms a single harmonious system”, and so we are unable to prove the non-existence of space and time and matter etc.