Core Flashcards
Assertion
A linguistic act - either spoken or written - that has a truth value
Truth value
The state of being either true, false or indeterminate
Belief
Propositional attitude of truth
Proposition
The content of the assertion. The underlying meaning of what you’re saying
Propositional attitude
Whether or not the individual asserting the proposition has the attitude that it corresponds to reality.
Traditional, platonic definition of knowledge
Justified true belief
Justification
Evidence, or other support, for your belief
Gettier cases
Situations in which one can have justified true belief, but not knowledge
Knowledge by acquaintance
First-hand knowledge based on perceptual experience, knowledge of, kennen
This and practical knowledge make experiential knowledge
Practical knowledge
Skills-based knowledge, knowledge how
This and knowledge by acquaintance make experiential knowledge
Knowledge by description
Second-hand knowledge which comes in the form of language, knowledge that, wissen
How are knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description related?
- Description depends on acquaintance. Must be possible to source back to someone who has had first-hand experience
- Acquaintance spills beyond description. Acquaintance can never fully be described
- Description colours acquaintance
- Acquaintance fades with time
Empiricism
The belief that all knowledge is ultimately based on sense experience
Verbal overshadowing
The tendency of a verbal description to influence and distort perception
Informal knowledge
Second-hand stock of cultural and local knowledge, random facts and trivia - not organised into an academic discipline
Shared knowledge
The stock of academic knowledge, informal knowledge and practical knowledge which can be communicated verbally or non-verbally to other people
Reasonable knowledge is based on
- Evidence
- Problem of biases
- Fallacies - arg. ad ignorantium
- Coherence - does this knowledge fit with the generally agreed upon knowledge
Argument ad ignorantiam
Putting the responsibility of disproving a hypothesis on an external party “you can not prove x is false”
Personal knowledge
Experiential knowledge plus those parts of academic/formal and informal knowledge which you have made on your own
Inert knowledge
Lost knowledge, never accessed by anyone
Some criteria to help decide when to trust experts
- Credentials: they have relevant expertise
- Evidence: support position with evidence
- Corroboration: their views are supported
- Track record: their reputation is reliable
- Neutrality: no biases
Algorithm
a set of step-by-step rules found in computer programs (and elsewhere) which is designed to achieve a specific task
Citizen journalists
ordinary people who actively gather, report and spread news via social media (example: Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011)
Agenda settings
the tendency of the news media to influence which stories the public consider important (has to do with selection of stories)
Framing
the treatment of stories in a biased way, the use of pictures and language to shape the way a story is presented
Sensationalism bias
the news media’s tendency to focus on sensational news stories to the detriment of less dramatic but equally important ones
Bad news bias
the tendency of the media to focus on bad news rather than good news
National bias
the tendency of the media to present be nationalist
Obstacles to personal knowledge
- Ignorance (mostly ignorance of our ignorance resulting in overconfidence)
- Apathy
- Fantasy (wanting something to be true to believing it to true – wishful thinking)
- Bias
- Peer pressure
Dangers with shared knowledge
- Authority worship (uncritically accepting something as true because an authority says it is true)
- Groupthink (peer pressure leading to everyone in a group to believe the same)
- Power distortions (vested interest – corporations wanting something to be true. E.g. funding in a particular study)
- Fragmentation (fragmentation of knowledge – no big picture)
