TOK presentation: The Acquisition of Personal Knowledge

Definitions

Emotions: Strong feelings determined by one's mood, circumstances, and relationships with others.

Language: Method of human communication, spoken or written. Use of words is structured, conventional, and coherent.

Reason: Thinking, understanding, and forming judgements logically.

Personal Knowledge: Knowledge of a circumstance or fact gained through firsthand observation or experience.

AOKs

Natural Sciences: The study of the physical world, e.g. chemistry, physics, biology, geology. Also includes human physiology and the study of it. Its sub-disciplines include psychology, neuroscience, and pharmacology for example. Give insight into why humans act the way they do from a scientific stance-point that does not consider aspect of the human sciences.

Evidence (1)

• Directionally motivated reasoning
• Emotion-biased decision making phenomenon
• "Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe."

• RLS: Smokers are more likely to read the article headlines "smoking does not lead to lung cancer" as opposed to "smoking leads to lung cancer".

People are more dependent on emotions such as anxiety or guilt than assessment of the weight and credibility of empirical evidence or logical computation, therefore are prone to bias and more subjective when assessing information, which often results in cognitive faculties.

Evidence (2)

• Confirmation bias
• Tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms one's preeixsting beliefs or hypotheses. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues.

• RLS: The assessment of the quality of scientific studies are vulnerable to confirmation bias, as scientists rate studies that report findings consistent with their prior beliefs more favourably, often ignoring inadequate or contradictory evidences.

Confirmation bias makes us gather the information selectively and in a biased way, thereby contributing to overconfidence in personal beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. It often results in systematic error of inductive reasoning. Thus, it can be concluded that emotional reponse makes us become subjective and variable, preventing objective evaluations and reasoning process.

Counterclaim

Emotions help us make logical considerations, which are beneficial to reasoning process.

Evidences:

1. Accuracy motivated reasoning: accuracy goal leads to more complex inferential cognitive processing procedures, therefore people are less biased of information.

2. Damasio’s gambling experiment: participants using emotions to reason when investing money won against the ones that were incapable of using emotions.

Our desire to avoid the risk or fear of loss enhance our reasoning process.

Mini conclusion

• Emotions influence how we perceive information. We are predisposed to acquire personal knowledge that is in-line with our emotional state. Whilst the motivation of having to be accurate enhances the use of an objective reasoning process, this is indirectly also triggered by emotions: the fear of being wrong or the fear of loss for example. When we acquire personal knowledge we thus always indirectly or directly strive for a conclusion that we desire emotionally.

Evidence (1)

• Demands for blueberries has increased from 300 million to 1.5 billion pounds since the marketing campaign.

• While the product didn't change at all, people started adding the perception of health when they were told antioxidants are healthy.

• However, a study has shown that focus group in the United States didn't know what antioxidants were.

• "In marketing, the term 'Superfruit' is used to advertise a product that has a high level of antioxidant activity. In scientific research, the term is virtually meaningless."

- Diane McKay

• "Superfruit" - implication of remarkable health benefits, however, scientific evidences are often animal-based or phytochemical analysis.

Shows that people are easily influenced by marketing tools, which make them rely more on popular belief than scientific evidences. Language can manipulate people's perception, thus influencing their reasoning process.

Evidence (2)

• Anti-marijuana propaganda in 1930s
• Use of words such as "devil" and association of negative image such as murder and insanity
• Marijuana's side-effects have been over-reported and dramatized.
• However, it has been scientifically proven that the drawbacks of marijuana aren't any more harmful than other commonly used drugs (i.e. nicotine)

Shows that manipulation of language affects the perception towards knowledge regardless of scientific evidence.

Counterclaim

• Language does not affect reasoning since human minds share the same neurological configurations, thus allowing us to follow similar cognitive reasoning patterns regardless of cultural variability. (i.e. language)

• Evidence: Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

• Humans share the same set of basic faculties, variability due to cultural differences is not important, due to the human mind being a biological constructions, humans share same neorlogical configurations, expected to have similar cognitive patterns in a reasoning process.
• Caretaking Experiment: Positive or negative caretaking behavior as environmental events can have a profound effect on a being's reasoning and perception only because of that being's brain/biological systems within the body.

Language is a cultural variability whose effects on our reasoning process can be deemed negligible due to predisposed cognitive reasoning patterns.

Mini conclusion

Language has an impact on reasoning. Language manipulates perception, in how it presents information, think “loaded language,” the way we use language to reason a conclusion heavily impacts how we acquire personal knowledge. Although humans might have similar cognitive patterns, they are upon to variation within them. Although the caretaking experiment proves our counterclaim, the fact that there were different outcomes triggered by language does come to show that language impacts our reasoning process when acquiring personal knowledge.

Other RLS: Ebola "Crisis" 2014

Other

RLS

Ebola Scare in the United States in 2014, where emotion and language triggered people to reason that an Ebola epidemic was near, although in actuality, out of the 9 reported cases, 2 resulted in a death.

This shows a tendency that emotions and language make us more likely to notice phantom scares than considering world-changing but incremental improvements.

Personal

Real Life Situation

Personal

RLS

Influenced by emotions

• Tendency to avoid products labeled "made in China"
• Emotions - national identity (hatred, disregard, contempt)
• Reasoning - insufficient evidence to support this belief

Influenced by language

• Donald Trump, influential figure,
• "Climate change is a big scam for a lot of people to make a lot of money."
• Language - downgrades or belittles the devastating impact of climate change using strong diction
• Reasoning - scientific evidences support