TIME

THEMES AND HOMEWORK

What is Knowledge?

THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

Exercise 1.1.:

Try to divide the following statements about somebody having (or not having) some knowledge into three groups, according to what the knowledge consists of.

a.Everybody knows that the earth is round.

b.''Lloyd George knew my father, my father knew Lloyd George.''

c.They haven't been here long and know only a little English.

d.He doesn't know his left foot from his right foot.

e.I know when the train is due to arrive.

f.Having been there many times, she knows Italy well.

g.I don't know how to drive a car,

h.... but I know that one has to press the clutch to change gear.

i.Nobody here knows how old the Principal is.

Judging by how you divided the sentences into three groups - what three meanings can "to know" take in English?

READING 1: WHAT IS PROPOSITIONAL KNOWLEDGE?

What is known in 'knowledge that' is a proposition, expressed in the clause which, (in the most obvious cases at least,) follows the word ''that'' A proposition is what different sentences, even in different languages, with the same meaning have in common (B. Russell, 1862-1970.) Propositions are capable of being true or false: this distinguishes them from promises, questions, commands, proposals, etc., (which like propositions are expressed in sentences.)

Exercise 2.2.:

Which of the following sentences express propositions? What kind of sentences are those that do not?

a.You shouldn't waste food.

b.I think you shouldn't waste food.

c.What a waste of food!

d.The amount of food wasted is about 20% of what is used.

e.I hereby propose that we reduce the amount of food we waste.

f.Is there really so much waste of food?

g.The amount of food wasted is tremendous!

h.Waste not, want not.

i.What we waste we did not deserve in the first place.

j.Does everyone feel as bad about food wasted as we do?

READING 2: KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION

KNOWLEDGE
[14c; from Old E. cnawlaecan, knowledge.]

One aspect of knowing, that which conventionally comes from ''study, investigation, observation or experience'' (Websterís, 1986.) Knowledge comes both from direct experience and from information provided by others. Some psychologists discern three types of knowledge: ''Propositional knowledge is knowledge of facts or truths stated in propositions; it is entirely language-dependent. Practical knowledge is knowing how to do something, as exemplified in the exercise of some special skill or proficiency. Experiential knowledge is knowing some entity by direct face-to-face encounter with her/him/it; it is direct discrimination of what is present in relation with the knower'' (John Heron, 1981, quoted in John Rowan, 1983.)

INFORMATION
[14c; from Lat. informare, to give form to.]

Ours is a society based on information -- far too much of it for most of us, pushing us into 'information overload' (Alvin Toffler, 1970) and persuading us that information, even information for its own sake, always has value: ... ''We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge'' (John Naisbitt, 1984.)

NOTE! Email your answers to the exercises above now toalex@alexmorgan.com

Foundations of Knowledge

FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

1. Perception

Exercise One

Look at the picture below. What are the two ways of "seeing" the picture? What does this tell about perception?

Exercise Two

Human beings are usually said to have five senses.

a.List the usual five senses and their sense organs, and make further subdivisions if appropriate.

b.Try to decide on an order of the five senses, according to how essential they are for our functioning in the world.

c.Some people claim that we could have Extra Sensory Perceptions (ESP) such as mind reading, clairvoyance etc. Does the concept of ESP make sense? Why / Why not?

READ more about today's topic in your lecture notes and see some more illusions here http://www.illusionworks.com/).

2. Memory

Memory has various aspects, and Ebbinghaus, (in 1885 already,) identified four things that can be called remembering:

a. recall
b. recognize
c. reconstruct
d. re-learn

Try to give a more detailed description of what these involve and an example from your own experience of each of these. A distinction commonly made, (e.g. in the two-process model of Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968,) is that between sensory, short-term and long-term memory. Sensory memory gives us an accurate account of the environment

3. Language

Language can be value-laden i.e. depending a certain type of language and choice of words contains value judgements. We can play different language games (Wittgenstein) by using language in this way. Some linguistists such as Noam Chomsky believe that all languages have universal structures (universal grammar) and that people have innate ability to learn language.

NOTE! Email your answers to exercises above now

to alex@alexmorgan.com

Rationality and Logic

RATIONALITY AND LOGIC

Introduction

Rationality. A person is said to be rational when he adopts beliefs for appropriate reasons or behaves in a way that "makes sense" given certain objectives or goals. Aristotle believed that the main feature the distinguished humans from other animals were their capacity to reason - to be rational. The word "rational" can be used to describe behavior, beliefs, arguments and policies if they make sense or are appropriate to achieve some goal. Opposite of rational is irrational - for example if I freak out while giving the lecture about theory of knowledge it would be appropriate to say that I am irrational because my behavior does not help to achieve the aims of the lecture. Only rational agents such as humans can be irrational. Entities that have no capacity of reason, such as rocks and trees, are said to be non-rational.

Logic (Greek logos,"word,""speech,""reason") is a science dealing with the principles of valid reasoning and argument. There are two types of logic (a) deductive and (b) inductive. Inductive logic means making generalizations of a limited number of exemplar - for example "since all my boyfriend have been horrible chauvinist - I can only conclude that men are pigs." It is clear that inductive logic never give us 100 % certainty - it could well be that the next man this woman meets is absolutely wonderful, handsome, rich, modest, considerate, flamboyant yet humble kind of figure that the woman will love forever. In the following we concentrate on deductive logic which tries to determine the conditions under which one is justified in passing from given statements, called premises, to a conclusion that is claimed to follow from them. Logical validity is a relationship between the premises and the conclusion such that if the premises are true then the conclusion is true.

The validity of an argument should be distinguished from the truth of the conclusion. If one or more of the premises is false, the conclusion of a valid argument may be false. For example, "All mammals are four-footed animals; all people are mammals; therefore, all people are four-footed animals" is a valid argument with a false conclusion. On the other hand, an invalid argument may by chance have a true conclusion. "Some animals are two-footed; all people are animals; therefore, all people are two-footed" happens to have a true conclusion, but the argument is not valid. Logical validity depends on the form of the argument, not on its content. If the argument were valid, some other term could be substituted for all occurrences of any one of those used and validity would not be affected. By substituting "four-footed" for "two-footed," it can be seen that the premises could both be true and the conclusion false. Thus the argument is invalid, even though it has a true conclusion.

2. Syllogisms

What is now known as classical or traditional logic was first formulated by Aristotle, who developed rules for correct syllogistic reasoning. A syllogism is an argument made up of statements in one of four forms: "

All A's are B's" (universal affirmative)
"No A's are B's" (universal negative)
"Some A's are B's" (particular affirmative), or
"Some A's are not B's" (particular negative).

The letters stand for common nouns, such as "dog,""four-footed animal,""living thing," which are called the terms of the syllogism. A well-formed syllogism consists of two premises and a conclusion, each premise having one term in common with the conclusion and one in common with the other premise. In classical logic, rules are formulated by which all well-formed syllogisms are identified as valid or invalid forms of argument.

Exercise 1

Which of the following is a VALID argument

3. Truth tables

A formal system of logic enables us to see whether an argument is valid, i.e. whether the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion, regardless of the content of the propositions. A syllogism, as we have seen, is an argument of a standard format, with the two premises and the conclusion being all of the same form, such as: ''some A are B,'' for instance.

In propositional logic, on the other hand, the basic constituents are simple propositions which are combined into more complex propositions by means of logical words, like ''not'' and ''and''. For example, in the proposition. The logical form of a complex proposition consists of

i.propositional variables:
p, q, ..., and

ii.logical connectives:
¨ (''not'': negation,) & (''and'': conjunction,) v (''or'': disjunction,) => (''if ... then'': implication.)

Using these symbols for the logical connectives, the logical form of the above proposition can be written as

p & q => p .

(Note that in logic, as in mathematics, ''or'' always has an inclusive meaning: so ''p v q'' means ''p or q, or both.'')

Exercise 2.

Using the logical connectives, and choosing propositional variables as appropriate, write down the logical forms of the following sentences.

a.If it rains, it rains.

b.Either it will rain, or it will not.

c.If Mr. Jones is happy, Mrs. Jones is unhappy, and if Mr. Jones is unhappy, then Mrs. Jones is happy.

In serious work, the system of propositional logic is studied as an axiomatic system: all the theorems are derived, or proved, from a very small number of axioms, which are usually considered intuitively obvious. Fortunately there is a simple procedure for deciding whether a particular logical form expresses a valid argument or not: we can set up a 'truth table' for each logical connective, based on what we mean by it, and from the truth tables for the connectives we can construct the truth tables of forms of argument.

Truth tables for the connectives:

5. Fallacies

Fallacies are arguments that seem to be correct but prove under examination not to be so. Fallacies can be (a) formal fallacies or (b) informal fallacies. Formal fallacies has to do with the logic of the argument, informal fallacies can cover wider range of means that lead thinking astray for example use of emotive language. In the following we concentrate on the informal fallacies. In theory there is an endless amount of fallacies but some of the more famous one have been given fancy Latin names.

1. False Cause (Post Hoc Ergo Procter Hoc)

Assumes that because one event follows the other, the first event caused the second one.

Examples -
"I got fired today because I walked under the ladder yesterday" (some people think that walking under the ladder brings bad luck)
"Just when I was thinking of you, you called me. We must have a telepathic connection!"

2. Appeal to authority ... "everyone" ... tradition...

Replaces the laborious task of presenting evidence and rational argument by appealing to authority or "everyone" or tradition etc.

Appeal to authority
Example -
"Dr. Smith is right because he is a famous scientist."

Appeal to "everyone"
Examples -
"Join the millions of satisfied customers who havebought Lee jeans"
"Elvis is alive. Millions of fans cannot be wrong."

Appeal to tradition
Examples -
"Our timetable has always had academics in the morning and activities in the afternoon. There is no need to change it."
"We will not give up using meal forms, because we have always had them."

3. The Slippery Slope

If one event occurs then others will follow (usually with bad consequences)

Examples -
"I cannot let you leave earlier for holidays, because if I did that I would have to let everybody leave earlier."
"If Vietnam turns to Communism, soon the whole God damn world will be marching under the Red Flag."

4. Hasty Conclusions

To draw a conclusion based on insufficient information.

Examples -
"We have been together already a week. Let's get married. I know I love you."
"I have met some fantastic UWC students. They all must be fantastic."
"I got a bad grade in my English essay. I will never learn to write essays!"

5. Red Herring

Distracting the arguer by introducing irrelevant information

Examples-
Father: "Joey, it is time to brush your teeth and get to bed"
Joey: "You didn't tell that to Suzy"
Father: "Suzy's older than you" [Father got off track]
Joey: "But I am taller than she is!"

6. The False Dilemma

Offering "either or" situation even if more options could be available.

Examples -

"You can either take the test or write an essay. Either way you will have to work hard."
"If you don't go to university and make something of yourself, you'll end up as an unhappy street person."
"You must either split up or get married. This cannot go on!"

7. Attacking aperson (Ad Hominem)

A fallacious attack in which the thrust is directed, not at a conclusion, but at the person who asserts or defends it.

Examples -

"He is not a good teacher because he a Buddhist."
"I don't think we should believe his argument for extending holidays. He is just lazy and greedy fellow looking forward to spend more time doing nothing."
Logical thinking does not come to us naturally, but we seem to be able to deal with certain situations more easily than with others.

Exercise 3.

a.Four cards are lying on the table, each has a letter on one side and a number on the other:

b.Which cards do you have to turn over to test the following rule: ''If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other side?''

c.

d.As a bouncer in a bar, to test the rule ''If a person is drinking beer, they must be 18 or over,'' what do you check:

i.the age of someone drinking beer,

ii.the age of someone drinking coke,

iii.what a 25-year old is drinking, or

iv.what a 16-year old is drinking?

The above exercises are logical problems with the same structure. Which of them is easiest to figure out? Try to think of a reason why. (Also from Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works, 1997)

For extra exercises in logic visit this webpage

http://w3.rcnuwc.uwc.org/academics/tok/Critical%20&%20Creative%20Thinking

NOTE! Email your answers to exercises above no

to alex@alexmorgan.cow m

MYSELF AS KNOWER

Note:

This weekís session will review research by Belenky, et al. on "Womenís ways of knowing". The following is an extract from the Introduction to their book; note that I have "edited" some sections in the attempt to make it shorter (thus more accessible?). This is problematic: please understand that this is done for "internalî use only.

Some issues to think about:

…How might people (you and me!) think of themselves as knowers?

…How can we explore how others think? (Interview-based research methods)

…How might the outcomes of this research apply to the rest of us (can they be generalised)?

oIf female researchers interview only females, can their results say anything about males?

oWhy do some researchers adopt a "feminist perspective"
What are some benefits of such ëstandpointí research?

Introduction:

To the Other Side of Silence

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

- GEORGE ELIOT Middlemarch

WE DO NOT THINK of the ordinary person as preoccupied with such difficult and profound questions as: What is truth? What is authority? To whom do 1 listen? What counts for me as evidence? How do I know what 1 know? Yet to ask ourselves these questions and to reflect on our answers is more than an intellectual exercise, for our basic assumptions about the nature of truth and reality and the origins of knowledge shape the way we see the world and ourselves as participants in it. They affect our definitions of ourselves, the way we interact with others, our public and private personae, our sense of control over life events, our views of teaching and learning, and our conceptions of morality.

In this book we examine women's ways of knowing and describe five different perspectives from which women view reality and draw conclusions about truth, knowledge, and authority. We show how women's self concepts and ways of knowing are intertwined. We describe how women struggle to claim the power of their own minds. We then examine how the two institutions primarily devoted to human development - the family and the schools - both promote and hinder women's development.

Most of what we say is based on extensive interviews with ordinary women living ordinary lives. Our informants were rural and urban American women of different ages, class and ethnic backgrounds, and educational histories. At the time of the interview, many of the women were in the midst of dramatic personal and intellectual changes, and they told us about recent, as well as distant, transitions in the way they perceived themselves and the world around them.

We listened as women told us their life stories and described the people and events that were catalytic in shaping the way they viewed themselves and their minds. Not all of the women's stories were happy ones. This is as much a book about pain and anger and static lives as it is about hope and lives in blossom. It is also a book about the "roar which lies on the other side of silence" when ordinary women find their voice and use it to gain control over their lives.

Background of the Study

The project began in the late 1970s. As psychologists interested in human development, we had spent a large part of our professional lives studying the intellectual, ethical, and psychological development of adolescents and adults in educational and clinical settings. We became concerned about why women students speak so frequently of problems and gaps in their learning and so often doubt their intellectual competence. We had also become aware of the fact that, for many women, the "real" and valued lessons learned did not necessarily grow out of their academic work but in relationships with friends and teachers, life crises, and community involvements. Indeed we observed that women often feel alienated in academic settings and experience "formal" education as either peripheral or irrelevant to their central interests and development.

Looking back on our experience and talking with other women inside and outside the classroom reinforced our feeling that education and clinical services, as traditionally defined and practiced, do not adequately serve the needs of women. Anecdotal reports as well as research on sex differences indicate that girls and women have more difficulty than boys and men in asserting their authority or considering themselves as authorities (references edited in this para); in expressing themselves in public so that others will listen, in gaining respect of others for their minds and their ideas; and in fully utilizing their capabilities and training in the world of work. In everyday and professional life, as well as in the classroom, women often feel unheard even when they believe that they have something important to say. Most women can recall incidents in which either they or female friends were discouraged from pursuing some line of intellectual work on the grounds that it was "unfeminine" or incompatible with female capabilities. Many female students and working women are painfully aware that men succeed better than they in getting and holding the attention of others for their ideas and opinions. All women grow up having to deal with historically and culturally engrained definitions of femininity and womanhood - one common theme being that women, like children, should be seen and not heard.

In spite of the increase in the number of women students in higher education and professional schools, faculties, usually predominantly male, argue against a special focus on women students and resist open debate on whether women's educational needs are different from men's. Although women's studies programs began to proliferate in the 1970s and to attract female students and faculty, they were typically assigned a marginal status in the academy and have had relatively little impact on the mainstream curriculum and academic programming (Howe and Lauter 1980). Even when the content of coursework includes issues of concern to women, strategies of teaching and methods of evaluation are rarely examined by faculty to see if they are compatible with women's preferred styles of learning. Usually faculty assumes that pedagogical techniques appropriate for men are suitable for women.

Along with other academic feminists, we believe that conceptions of knowledge and truth that are accepted and articulated today have been shaped throughout history by the male-dominated majority culture. Drawing on their own perspectives and visions, men have constructed the prevailing theories, written history, and set values that have become the guiding principles for men and women alike. Our major educational institutions particularly our secondary and post-secondary schools were originally founded by men for the education of men. Even girls' schools and women's colleges have been modeled after male institutions to give women an education "equivalent" to men's. Relatively little attention has been given to modes of learning, knowing, and valuing that may be specific to, or at least common in, women. It is likely that the commonly accepted stereotype of women's thinking as emotional, intuitive, and personalized has contributed to the devaluation of women's minds and contributions, particularly in Western technologically oriented cultures, which value rationalism and objectivity (Sampson 1978). It is generally assumed that intuitive knowledge is more primitive, therefore less valuable, than so-called objective modes of knowing. Thus, it appeared likely to us that traditional educational curricula and pedagogical standards have probably not escaped this bias. Indeed, recent feminist writers have convincingly argued that there is a masculine bias at the very heart of most academic disciplines, methodologies, and theories (Bernard 1973; Cilligan 1979, 1982; Harding and Hintikka 1983; Keller 1978, 1985; Janssen-Jurreit 1980; Langland and Gove 1981; Sherman and Beck 1979). Feminists are beginning to articulate the values of the female world and to reshape the disciplines to include the woman's voice, while continuing to press for the right of women to participate as equals in the male world.

THE ABSENCE OF WOMEN IN PSYCHOLOGY

Until recently women have played only a minor role as theorists in the social sciences. The authors of the major theories of human development have been men. As Carol Gilligan (1979) has pointed out, women have been missing even as research subjects at the formative stages of our psychological theories. The potential for bias on the part of male investigators is heightened by the recurring tendency to select exclusively or predominantly male samples for research. This omission of women from scientific studies is almost universally ignored when scientists draw conclusions from their findings and generalize what they have learned from the study of men to lives of women. If and when scientists turn to the study of women, they typically look for ways in which women conform to or diverge from patterns found in the study of men. With the Western tradition of dividing human nature into dual but parallel streams, attributes traditionally associated with the masculine are valued, studied, and articulated, while those associated with the feminine tend to be ignored. Thus, we have learned a great deal about the development of autonomy and independence, abstract critical thought, and the unfolding of a morality of rights and Justice in both men and women. We have learned less about the development of interdependence, intimacy, nurturance, and contextual thought (Bakan 1966; Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1977,1979,1982; McMillan 1. 982). Developmental theory has established men's experience and competence as a baseline against which both men's and women's development is then judged, often to the detriment or misreading of women.

Nowhere is the pattern of using male experience to define the human experience seen more clearly than in models of intellectual development. The mental processes that are involved in considering the abstract and the impersonal have been labeled "thinking" and are attributed primarily to men, while those that deal with the personal and interpersonal fall under the rubric of "emotions" and are largely relegated to women. As dichotomous "either/or thinking" is so common in our culture and as we tend to view human beings as closed systems, the expenditure of energy in one part of the system has been seen inevitably to lead to depletion elsewhere. Historically, it has been assumed that the development of women's intellectual potential would inhibit the development of their emotional capacities and that the development of men's emotional range would impair intellectual functioning. Although it seems ludicrous to us now, just a century ago the belief that women who engaged in intellectual pursuits would find their reproductive organs atrophying was widely held and used to justify the continued exclusion of women from the academic community (Rosenberg 1982).

From the moment women gained a foot in the academic world, they sought to examine and dispel beliefs suggesting sexual polarities in intelligence and personality characteristics. However, research studies and critical essays on the topic have focused on the demonstration of women's intellectual competence, minimizing any differences that were found between the sexes (Maccoby and Jacklin 1974; Rosenberg 1982). The focus has been on studying the intellectual capacities most often cultivated by men rather than on identifying aspects of intelligence and modes of thought that might be more common and highly developed in women.

WOMAN'S VOICE IN DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY. THE WORK OF CAROL GILLIGAN

(Edited)

By listening to girls and women resolve serious moral dilemmas in their lives, Gilligan has traced the development of a morality organised around notions of responsibility and care. This conception of morality contrasts sharply with the morality of rights described by Piaget (1965) and Kohlberg (1981, 1984), which is based on the study of the evolution of moral reasoning in boys and men. People operating within a rights morality - more commonly men - evoke the metaphor of "blind justice" and rely on abstract laws and universal principles to adjudicate disputes and conflicts between conflicting claims impersonally, impartially, and fairly. Those operating within a morality of responsibility and care - primarily women - reject the strategy of blindness and impartiality. Instead, they argue for an understanding of the context for moral choice, claiming that the needs of individuals cannot always be deduced from general rules and principles and that moral choice must also be determined inductively from the particular experiences each participant brings to the situation. They believe that dialogue and exchange of views allow each individual to be understood in his or her own terms. They believe that mutual understanding is most likely to lead to a creative consensus about how everyone's needs may be met in resolving disputes. It is the rejection of blind impartiality in the application of universal abstract rules and principles that has, in the eyes of many, marked women as deficient in moral reasoning.

(text edited)

When scientific findings, scientific theory and even the basic assumptions of academic disciplines are re-examined through the lens of women's perspectives and values, new conclusions can be drawn and new directions forged that have implications for the lives of both men and women.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT: THE WORK OF WILLIAM PERRY

In our study we chose to listen only to women. The male experience has been so powerfully articulated that we believed we would hear the patterns in women's voices more clearly if we held at bay the powerful templates men have etched in the literature and in our minds. However, we did attend to men's experience by turning to the excellent map charting epistemological development of students, drawn by William Perry and his colleagues from interviews gathered each spring from students as they moved through their undergraduate years at Harvard. In his influential book Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (1970), Perry describes how students' conceptions of the nature and origins of knowledge evolve and how their understanding of themselves as knowers changes over time.

While a few women were included in Perry's original study as subjects, only the interviews with men were used in illustrating and validating his scheme on intellectual and ethical development. Later, when Perry assessed the women's development with the aid of his map, the women were found to conform to the patterns that had been observed in the male data. While this strategy enabled the researchers to see what women might have in common with men, it was poorly designed to uncover those themes that might be more prominent among women. Our work focuses on what else women might have to say about the development of their minds and on alternative routes that are sketchy or missing in Perry's version.

In his book Perry depicts a passage through a sequence of epistemological perspectives that he calls positions. It is through these coherent interpretative frameworks that students give meaning to their educational experience. Perry traces a progression from an initial position that he calls basic dualism, where the student views the world in polarities of right/ wrong, black/white, we/they, and good/bad. Here passive learners are dependent on authorities to hand down the truth, teaching them "right from wrong." Gradually the student becomes increasingly aware of the diversity of opinion and the multiple perspectives that others hold, and the dualistic faith in absolute authority and truth is shaken. Dualism gives way to multiplicity as the student comes to understand that authorities may not have the right answers, at least in some areas, such as the humanities, which seem to be more a matter of opinion and taste than fact. The student begins to grow beyond a dependency and trust in external authorities and carves out his own territory of personal freedom: "Everyone has a right to his own opinion and mine is as good as any other." As the student's personal opinion is challenged by a teacher's insistence on evidence and support for opinion, multiplicity yields to relativism subordinate, where an analytical, evaluative approach to knowledge is consciously and actively cultivated at least in the academic disciplines one is being tutored in, if not in the rest of one's life. It is only with the shift into full relativism that the student completely comprehends that truth is relative, that the Meaning of an event depends on the context in which that event occurs and on the framework that the knower uses to understand that event, and that relativism pervades all aspects of life, not just the academic world. Only then is the student able to understand that knowledge is constructed, not given; contextual, not absolute; mutable, not fixed. It is within relativism that Perry believes the affirmation of personal identity and commitment evolves.

Since the introduction of the Perry scheme in the early 1970s, educators and researchers have used it as a way of understanding intellectual development in young adults in academic settings and as a developmental framework to guide educational practice. The Perry scheme was very important in our work as it stimulated our interest in modes of knowing and provided us with our first images of the paths women might take as they developed an understanding of their intellectual potential, as well as providing a description of the routes most often taken by men.

There are no agreed upon techniques for assessing the Perry positions, although a spectrum of techniques has been developed from paper and pencil tests (Knefelkamp 1978) to self-report questionnaires (Criffith and Chapman 1982) to extensive interviews (Clinchy and Zimmerman 1975; Coldberger 1978, 1981). Perry himself preferred an approach that is built around an open and leisurely interview that establishes rapport and allows presuppositions and frames of reference of the interviewee to emerge. We share Perry's commitment to this phenomenological approach.

The Women and the Interview

Our wish to explore with the women their experience and problems as learners and knowers as well as to review their past histories for changing concepts of the self and relationships with others limited the number of women we could interview in depth to a total of 135.

The initial interviews and any subsequent interviews were tape recorded and transcribed and were from two to five hours in length, resulting in over five thousand pages of text. We adopted an intensive interview/ case study approach because we wanted to hear what the women had to say in their own terms rather than test our own preconceived hypotheses, particularly since we included a number of disadvantaged and forgotten women whose ways of knowing and learning, identity transformations, and moral outlook have seldom been examined by academic researchers. We proceeded inductively, opening our ears to the voices and perspectives of women so that we might begin to hear the unheard and unimagined.

Before asking a woman to participate, we told her that we were interested in her experience - and in women's experience - because it had so often been excluded as people sought to understand human development. We told her that we wanted to hear what was important about life and learning from her point of view. When possible, we let the woman choose where the interview was to take place - at her home, office, dorm, or in our office or home. Each interview began with the question, "Looking back, what stands out for you over the past few years?" and proceeded gradually at the woman's own pace to questions concerning self-image, relationships of importance, education and learning, real-life decision making and moral dilemmas, accounts of personal changes and growth, perceived catalysts for change and impediments to growth, and visions of the future. We tried to pose questions that were broad but understandable on many levels, hoping that all - even the less articulate and reflective women - would respond in their own terms without feeling inadequate to the task.

(para edited)

The women included in this study were drawn from nine different academic institutions and "invisible colleges." Of the 135 women we interviewed, 90 were students enrolled in one of six academic institutions. These colleges and schools differ markedly among themselves in educational philosophy and in the composition of their student bodies. They include a prestigious women's college with a curriculum fashioned after the male Ivy League college; a long-established progressive college with a coeducational adult education program serving a rural population widely diversified in terms of social class; a private, coeducational, liberal arts college known for its arts program; an inner-city community college serving a mixed ethnic and less advantaged student body; an innovative "early college" that provides a baccalaureate program to girls and boys who have completed two years of high school; and an alternative urban public high school that serves minority students who are the same age as the "early college" students but are considered at risk for dropping out of school.

(paragraph edited)

In addition to the women interviewed in formal academic settings, we interviewed forty-five women from the family agencies that deal with clients seeking information about or assistance with parenting (the "invisible colleges"). Formal educational programs take relatively little interest in preparing students for parenting and other social roles traditionally occupied by women. By exploring how women learn and think about learning in the invisible college, we hoped to cast light on less well known strategies for promoting women's education and development that are practiced in out-of-school settings.

(edited)

We had yet another motive for including women from the programs for parents. Since mothering - the traditional role for women - has at its center the teaching of the next generation, we were particularly interested in how maternal practice might shape women's thinking about human development and the teaching relationship. We expected that by listening to women talk about mothers and mothering, we might hear themes that were especially distinctive in the woman's voice. We also anticipated that the wisdom women gained through maternal practice and "maternal thinking" as philosopher Sara Ruddick calls it (1980), might be particularly illuminating to those educators and human service providers interested in promoting human development.

We located these women in three different family agencies. One agency, in one of the nation's most isolated, impoverished rural areas, works with needy teenage mothers by providing mentors who are close to their own age and are also mothers. The second is a network of self-help groups for parents who are working to overcome a history of child abuse and family violence. The third is a children's health program with a preventive emphasis that serves rural families by keeping the mothers' needs and perspectives in mind while delivering medical and other services to their infants and small children. We were able to obtain second interviews with fifteen of the original forty-five women a year after the first interview was completed.

(paragraph edited) The diversity of the population we studied provided us with an unusual opportunity to see the common ground that women share, regardless of background. Including women from different ethnic backgrounds and a broad range of social classes enabled us to begin to examine and see beyond our own prejudices. It also allowed us to examine the injustices of the society by comparing women who were challenged and stimulated by the most elaborate of educations with women who were essentially uneducated, having attended schools that only confirmed their fears that they had no intelligence to cultivate. We heard something of the powerlessness and voicelessness experienced by women struggling to grow up at the edges of the society where families are buffeted by such uncontrollable forces as irregular, stultifying, and demeaning work; chronic violence; widespread addiction to drugs and alcohol; and inadequate and unsupportive institutions of all varieties. We talked with many women who endeavoured to gain a sense of voice and the power of their own minds against great odds.

(methods section edited)

Outcomes:

Building on Perry's scheme, we grouped women's perspectives on knowing into five major epistemological categories: silence, a position in which women experience themselves as mindless and voiceless and subject to the whims of external authority; received knowledge, a perspective from which women conceive of themselves as capable of receiving, even reproducing, knowledge from the all-knowing external authorities but not capable of creating knowledge on their ownsubjective knowledge, a perspective from which truth and knowledge are conceived of as personal, private, and subjectively known or intuited; procedural knowledge, a position in which women are invested in learning and applying objective procedures for obtaining and communicating knowledge; and constructed knowledge, a position in which women view all knowledge as contextual, experience themselves as creators of knowledge, and value both subjective and objective strategies for knowing.

We recognize

(1) That these five ways of knowing are not necessarily fixed, exhaustive, or universal categories,

(2) That they are abstract or pure categories that cannot adequately capture the complexities and uniqueness of an individual woman's thought and life,

(3) That similar categories can be found in men's thinking, and

(4) That other people might organize their observations differently. Furthermore, the small number of women in our sample who fell into the position of silence makes these observations particularly tentative and underscores the need for continued efforts to understand the developmental consequences of severe violence and social isolation. Our intention is to share not prove our observations.

Emotions
and
Rationality

EMOTIONS AND RATIONALITY

This section contains:

(a) Emotional Introspection Exercises (Do this BEFORE the class session!)
(b) A Reading and Questions on Emotions and Knowledge and Emotional Intelligence
(c) Online EQ exercises

EXERCISE 1

INTROSPECTION ON EMOTIONS


Prepare for the TOK class session by doing the following exercises.

We use logic to pursue, acquire, create knowledge and that is commonly classified as objective knowledge, but we do also use emotions, feelings and intuition and that is commonly classified as subjective knowledge.

Let us do an EXPERIMENT with a subjective knowledge!

(The objective here is to be subjective).

You will not be able to find the answers to the following in any books, so you will have to turn "inwards" to do these tasks. Be honestly subjective! The depth to which you are willing to explore is up to you.

IMPORTANT: Do not discuss this task with anyone before you have done it yourself.

There are no wrong answers!!! Suggestion: do it in an environment where you can concentrate and are not likely to be distracted for a while.

1. Contemplate and try to re-feel the following randomly listed emotions (and/or moods). It may be helpful to recall a certain situation when you experienced that kind of emotion/mood:

Content, Sorrow, Anger, Enthusiasm, Apathy,
Attraction, Fear, Happiness, Boredom

2. Write down which of those emotions/moods feel good (are "positive") and which donít feel good (are "negative") and also those that feel neither good nor bad ("neutral").

3. Make your own definition/description of what is a "positive" and what is a "negative" emotion/mood..

4. Now, draw a long vertical scale with a zero in the middle, and +4 and -4 at the opposite ends. Thinking of specified emotions, place each one on this scale according to the degree of its "positiveness" or "negativeness". Choose one emotion, which is neither positive nor clearly negative and put it at zero, the most positive emotion on +4 of the scale and most negative on -4 of the scale.

4. Contemplate about and try to re-feel some of the following more subtle emotions/feelings/moods. Try to fit those on your scale too. Link these emotions with the ones already on your scale (so that you put the similar category of emotions close to each other on the scale).:

Resentment, Eagerness, Pain, Merryness, Jealousy, Hate, Frustration, Anxiety, Pity, Self-Pity, Sadness, Love, Guilt,Envy, Pleasure, Passion, Covert Hostility, Appreciation,Shame, Annoyance, Cynicism, Interest, Aesthetic Feeling,Love for a Partner, Love For a Pet or A Landscape.

5. Only when you have completely finished, you may compare and discuss your scale of emotions with those of others.

Are there any patterns emerging or any significant similarities between your scale and the scale of the others? Take into a consideration the fact that what we understand by each of these words labeling an emotion may be different from person to person and from culture to culture.

It may be interesting to notice who seems to be more interested and intrigued by this task: men or women (if any)?

E mail me your scale alex@alexmorgan.com

WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
Source: Solomon et al. What is an Emotion: Classic Readings in Philosophical
Psychology Oxford University Press, 1984. (Abridged and edited by Joni)

Psychological and Philosophical Understanding of Emotions

One hundred years ago, the American philosopher and psychologist William James asked that question in the title of an essay in the British journal Mind Both philosophers and psychologists have been debating, refuting, and revising his answer ever since.

The question was not original with James, of course. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato and Aristotle debated the nature of emotions, and Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, developed a strikingly modern theory of emotion that stands up to the most contemporary criticism and provides an important alternative to the still dominant Jamesian theory.

The Jamesian theory, simply stated, is that an emotion is a physiological reaction, essentially, its familiar sensory accompaniment - a "feeling." The Aristotelean view, by way of contrast, involves a conception of emotion as a more or less intelligent way of conceiving of a certain situation, dominated by a desire (for example, in anger, the desire for revenge). Between these two theories much of the modern debate continues. These two sets of considerations, the physical and the conceptual, are both essential to any adequate answer to the question "What is an emotion?"

In psychology,an emotion is a physiological reaction, but it is also the cognitive activity of "labeling," that is, identifying the emotion as an emotion of a certain sort. In philosophy, more attention has been paid to the "cognitive" side of the analysis: What is the connection between an emotion and certain beliefs? If a person is embarrassed, he or she must believe that the situation is awkward, for example; if a person is in love, he or she must believe that the loved one has at least some virtues or attractions.

Belief and Emotions

Recent work in philosophy has concentrated on the role of belief in emotion and the precise connection between a belief or beliefs and the emotion. For example, it has been suggested that certain beliefs are antecedent conditions for particular emotions; it has also been suggested that beliefs are a logically essential component of emotion, that certain beliefs are identical to emotion and that emotions simply tend to cause certain kinds of beliefs (for instance, jealousy causes a person to be suspicious or love causes a person to think the best of the person loved). Determining the precise connection between emotion and belief has become one of the focal points of current controversies.

Expression of Emotions

Although we often speak of emotions as being "inside" us, it is clear that the analysis of emotion cannot be limited to the "inner" aspects of physiology and psychology, to visceral disturbances, sensations, desires, and beliefs. Emotions almost always have an "outward" aspect as well, most obviously, their "expression" in behavior. How important is behavior in this analysis? Many philosophers and psychologists have come to identify, even to define, emotions as distinctive patterns of behavior.

EXERCISE 1

Briefly explain how emotions could be affected by (a) our beliefs and (b) circumstances. If possible take examples from your own life.

THE RATIONALITY OF EMOTIONS

It is too often suggested that emotions are essentially "irrational," without attempting to explain what this means. First of all, if emotions involve beliefs, it is clear that they are not non-rational, like a simple headache or painful hangnail. Because they are, in part, "cognitive" and "evaluative" phenomena, emotions presuppose rationality in the psychological sense - the ability to use concepts and have reasons for what one does or feels. Whether these reasons are good reasons, however, is another matter.

To say that emotions are irrational, in one sense, is to admit that they are rational (in the above psychological sense), but also to deny that they have good reasons behind them. For instance, it might be suggested that emotions involve evaluations, but that these evaluations are almost always mistaken and shortsighted, and occasionally correct only by accident. But this view has little plausibility, given the perceptiveness of many emotions. As Pascal stated metaphorically, "the heart has its reasons" too. Our emotions are sometimes more insightful than the more detached and impersonal deliberations of reason. A spontaneous burst of anger or affection may be far more significant and faithful to our needs and principles than too-protracted internal debates and "rationalizations," which give too much credence to other people's advice and to principles we do not really believe in. Indeed, it is sometimes irrational to be detached and impersonal, and it is here that the rationality of emotions is most in evidence.

Emotions as such are neither rational nor irrational. Some emotions are incredibly stupid, others insightful. The German philosopher Nietzsche suggests that "all passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity," but he then goes on to argue that this is no reason to reject the passions; it is rather a reason to educate them. Becoming angry at one's boss over a trifling comment may be stupid in the extreme, but getting angry at a certain point in a political meeting may be a stroke of genius. Falling in love may be the smartest, or the dumbest, thing a particular person ever does, and fear in the proper context, Aristotle argued in his Ethics, may be far more rational and essential to courage than mere foolhardiness, the absence of appropriate fear.

EXERCISE 2

Could it be rational to trust your emotions? Can you think of an example in which you trusted your emotions and concluded afterwards that it was ìsmartî thing to do?

EMOTIONS AND KNOWLEDGE

Among the various ways we have of controlling or eliciting our emotions (taking drugs, avoiding or looking for certain situations), by far the most philosophical, and sometimes the most effective, is self understanding. A further knowledge of our emotions and ourselves may be the first step to changing our emotions, and gaining a new fact or two may be a sure way of getting rid of, or adding, an emotion. In the simplest possible case, finding out that the belief upon which one's emotion is based is false immediately changes the emotion. For instance, Joe is angry at Harry for stealing his car; then he finds that Harry did not, in fact, steal the car so he is no longer angry, since there is no longer anything to be angry "about." If beliefs are essential components of emotion, then a change in the belief will typically (although not always) alter the emotion, and knowledge must be considered as contributing to, not opposing, our emotions. Of course, there are irrational emotions, based upon demonstrably false beliefs. And it is also true that, even with a radical change in knowledge, the emotion may still remain. (For example, Joe may find out that Harry did not steal his car, but he is still furious with Harry for making him think that he had stolen the car.) But even if changing beliefs does not always change an emotion, knowledge is nevertheless a critical determinant of emotion, and often the test of its rationality as well.

The beliefs that are essential to our emotions, however, are not always so readily apparent or so easily changed. Emotion and self-understanding are often more complexly related than our simple example above would suggest; in clinical psychology, they are even more complex. What one thinks is the object of an emotion (Joe's anger at Harry for stealing the car, for example) is not always the real object of emotion, which one might not want to admit to oneself (in our example, the fact that Harry had just made a fool of Joe). Moreover, sometimes the set of beliefs, and thus the nature of emotion, is not recognized. Thus, resentment, a particularly degrading emotion, often gets interpreted as hatred or anger; romantic love, a notoriously dangerous emotion, frequently appears in life as well as in fiction under the guise of any number of other, even opposed emotions (notably, hatred). In either case, whether it is the object of the emotion or the emotion itself that is not known, we might say, following Freud, that the emotion is "unconscious." Nothing particularly mysterious is thus asserted about the nature of the mind; it is only to say that, because of the complexity of the beliefs that constitute our emotions, and because of our own not infrequent interest in believing what we would like to believe about ourselves instead of what is true or more plausible, we do not always recognize our emotions for what they are, and we are not always willing (nor is it always reasonable) to consider the beliefs that make them up in the detached and impersonal way that usually passes for "rationality."

Nevertheless, self-knowledge makes changing our emotions pos‚sible. "Where there is id, let ego be," said Freud; the more we know about ourselves, the more we can control our emotions. This is, of course, the most practical reason for studying emotions, whether on an individual and personal basis in ourselves or on a more abstract level, such as the attempts to answer the question "What is an emotion?" collected in this volume. Indeed, coming to recognize the true nature of emotions may help us change our emotions. Suppose that I come to realize that I am angry not because I have been wronged, but rather because I am desperately trying to defend myself in a peculiarly embarrassing position. Or suppose that I come to recognize that I am jealous not because I actually love so-and-so, but rather because I am resentful that anyone should take away something that "belongs" to me. With such a simple self-understanding, my jealousy disappears. Indeed, so powerful is this ability of self-understanding to change our emotions that Freud, early in his career, came to believe in "the talking cure," in which simply com‚ing to understand our emotions, "bringing them to consciousness," would be sufficient to "defuse" them and to give us control over them.

Freud's rationalist optimism was in error; many emotions proved to be far too intractable to be easily susceptible to "the talking cure." Furthermore, Freud, in his emphasis on eliminating harmful irrational emotions, failed to pay as much attention to the emotions that are positive and rational. In a case of righteous anger, for instance, the more self-understanding one gains - including an understanding of how deeply one has been offended - the angrier one becomes. Similarly, the more a lover dwells on and comes to understand the virtues of his or her loved one, the more love grows (a process the French novelist Stendhal creatively identified as "crystallization," the multiplication of a lover's virtues the more one comes to see).

Knowledge and self-understanding help to control or to elicit our emotions, but we also gain knowledge and self-understanding through our emotions. Although it is often said that emotions are "blind," the fact is that, through our emotions, we often perceive certain details and situations (pertaining to the emotion) far more sharply and insightfully than we would otherwise. We can often learn far more about our values and morals by paying attention to our emotions than by listening to the more abstract deliberations of 44 practical reason," and moral theorists, of whom Hume is perhaps the most representative, are right, at least in part, when they insist that we "know" what is right and wrong from our "sentiments" rather than from arguments. Without emotion, there would be no values, rather only rules and methods without inspiration. It is emotion, not reflection, that most endows the world with meaning.

Emotion and knowledge are far more personal than the traditional emphasis on reason and understanding - as opposed to the passions - would suggest. Indeed, some emotions, for example, scientific curiosity and a love of the truth, are essential to the advancement of knowledge. For too long we have emphasized the impersonal demands of knowledge instead of the passion to know, and both knowledge and passion have suffered. So, too, much of the impetus behind the new wave of interest in emotions is the desire to learn how to elicit those much valued emotions that have too long been left to the random contingencies of childhood - not only curiosity and the passion for truth, but also the passion for justice and compassion, life-long love, and even, at the right times and to a degree, righteous indignation. These are not momentary intrusions in our lives, but their very core, and the source of our ideals. Once we begin thinking of emotions in this way, as well as through the more traditional concern for those emotions that seem to be a form of madness or an irrational obsession, the importance of studying the emotions should become all the more apparent, not just as an intellectual curiosity, but also as a practical and personal necessity. "The unexamined life is not worth living," said Socrates. That is the spirit of this collection of essays, as we recognize that emotions, though often neglected in philosophy, have always been essential to life.

EXERCISE 3

What kinds of ìknowledgeî can emotions give us? Can you think of an example in which you have learned something important because of your emotional reaction?

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?

A broad definition of intelligence ability to learn or to understand. In psychology, intelligence is somewhat narrowly defined as the ability to acquire knowledge or understanding and to use it in new situations. In recent years a number of theorists have proposed the existence of emotional intelligence that is complementary to the type of intelligence measured by IQ tests. American psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who together introduced the concept in 1990, define emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive, understand, express, and regulate emotions. Emotionally intelligent people can use their emotions to guide thoughts and behavior and can accurately read othersí emotions. Daniel Goleman, an American author and journalist, popularized the concept in his book Emotional Intelligence (1995). He expanded the concept to include general social competence.

EXERCISE 4

Take one of the following Emotional Intelligence (EQ) tests and see how you score. However, donít take results too seriously since proper

psychological tests are much more thorough. ;-)

TOK
Essays

TOK ESSAYS

In this session we go through the TOK essay topics. You will get ideas how to acquire information, how to structure your essay and how your essay will be assessed.

EXERCISE 1

(a) BEFORE the classes choose one of the TOK essay topics you would want to write an essay on.
(b) BEFORE the classes think of a possible outline for your essay.

Come prepared - this way you can profit most of this session. You can find important information related to essay topics from

http://w3.rcnuwc.uwc.org/academics/tok/useful_links.htm

EXERCISE 2: Read the following text

How to Write TOK Essays?

1. Choose a topic (one of 10 prescribed topics)
2. Write down some of your initial ideas
3. Research the topic (Library and at http://w3.rcnuwc.uwc.org/academics/tok/useful_links.htm www.google.com)
4. Read http://w3.rcnuwc.uwc.org/academics/tok/ASSESSMENT%20CRITERIA

And take a look at the TOK diagram

Sample Structure of Essay

TOK Practice Essays are DUE
______________________________________________________

Essay must be send as email attachment to alex@alexmorgan.com

Title your email like this Your Candidate Number, Full Name, The version of your essay.

Example:

To: alex@alexmorgan.com
Subject: 0858 099 Nicholas Martin TOK1

Essays handed in late are not assessed

Natural Sciences

NATURAL SCIENCE

Sections:

1. What is Science
2. Is There Scientific Method
3. What is the Role of Social Context in Science
4. What Does Science Tell About Reality

Introduction

Having considered so far the Ways of Knowing - Reason, Language, Perception and Emotion, we shall now look at the first Area of Knowledge: natural sciences.There is a widespread, though usually unspoken, belief that science is a source of reliable, objective knowledge about reality, or even the only such source; and that scientific knowledge is certain and has been 'proved' in some sense. In this section we shall critically examine this belief. The basic questions we will be asking are "What is science?" "Is there a scientific method?", "What is progress in science?", "What is the role of social context in science?", "What does science tell about reality?" All these questions will be addressed in the context of natural sciences.

1. What is Science?

Ancient and medieval thinkers called any systematic body of knowledge a ëscienceí (from Latin scientia 'knowledge'). One may say that natural sciences are bodies of knowledge (organised sets of understandings) about how the natural world works. This body of knowledge is the result of the co-operation of scientists that form the scientific community that critically evaluates new theories. Thus, in the broadest sense science is a self-correcting endeavor tounderstand (explain) the natural world.

2. Is there a Scientific Method?

(a) Inductivism

According to a commonly held view of scientific method (Bacon, J S Mill),practicing scientists proceed roughly along the following lines:

As a result of careful observation of the world scientists may become aware of something to be explained. A tentative guess or suggestion, called a hypothesis, is then put forward as a possible solution. The hypothesis is then verified or confirmed by means of appropriate experiments and thereby qualifies for the status of a theory and provides the backing for scientific laws. The essential criterion by which the adequacy of a theory is judged is its power of prediction that is the extent to which it can enable us to say in advance that certain sorts of events will occur if the theory is true.

This view of science is mistaken. There are three fundamental problems with this view. The first one is that it assumes it would be possible to make 'pure observations'. However, as we have noticed in the early part of the course this is not true. We realised for example that our visual experiences are not determined by the images on the retina but by how our mind works. From this and other similar experiences we can conclude that observation seems to betheory laden - or, to put it in other words, theory precedes observation. Consequently observation cannot be the starting point for science.

Even if we did not have the problem of theory dependency of observation we face another problem - how to turn observations into sentences that report what has been observed. Putting aside the problem that natural languages have different kind of metaphysical assumptions depending on their 'grammars' (for example the descriptions of Indo-European languages are about 'things' whereas Chinese language describes mostly in terms of 'events/relations'), we still face the problem of making even simple observation statements. Assume that I hold book in my hand and ask, "how many 'things' do I have in my hand?" You may answer "one" referring to the book, or "two" referring to the covers and the pages, or "three" referring the covers, binding and pages. You could carry on this exercise up till the atomic level if you like but the pointis that reporting observations is not straightforward but depend on the concepts used. (See, Quaine: Word and Object, 1960).

Another problem with the above view of science is that according to it science is based on induction - meaning that scientific laws would be generalizations based on observations and experiments (This view of science is called inductivism). However we know that inductive reasoning (Example: "if all swans I've seen have been white, I can conclude that swans are white") is not valid no matter how large the number of observations or however different kinds of circumstances these observations are made in. The idea that science is based on induction cannot be salvaged even if we think in terms of probability ("large number of observations of A have property B, then all A's probably have property B").

One solution to this problem is to claim that even if inductivism does not give us certainty it has worked in the past and therefore it is a trustworthy method. But this is a form of circular thinking - it is justifying inductivism by inducitivism. David Human called this 'the problem of inductivism'. These three reasons have lead us to search for an alternative explanation to what science is based on.

(b) Falsificationism