Was in a theory of knowledge lecture when this came up, and was curious to what you guys thought:
How do personal attributes affect ways of knowing?
These ways of knowing being: Language, Perception, Reason and Emotion
And personal attributes i.e. gender, characteristics such as creativity, empathy, confidence, curiousity etc.
Which personal attributes affect certain ways of knowing more than others?
is this a homework question?
i think this question ultimately asks where the line between the outside world as it is, aka reality, ends and the inside world and our subjectivity begins. this is an important question to ask in terms of self critique, no question about it. its a way of making sure that a person thinks twice about the difference between opinion and knowledge. Also, this is a helpful question for evaluating whether or not a person is being to egocentric. for example:
a person asks you whether or not christianity can be philosophical, or if christianity inevitably asks a person not to ask why and to just accept what they can’t understand.
you being a christian might get emotionally involved and react before really evaluating what you “know” about this through rational discourse.
obviously this is all hypothetical.
reason and language i think are most affectual. they structure our ability to think at all. who out there thinks without using words?
confidence is great one, it hits me close to home. when i was younger i let my insecurities lead me into some serious unknowing. its embarrassing in retrospect.
what do you think?
These are the four ways of knowing? That’s what they are teaching you? Hmmm. Well, if emotions are one way of knowing (is this a real philosophy course with a real philosophy professor?) then personal attributes do more than affect knowing - they define it.
It’s just blowin’ my mind that you are being taught this. It’s stuff like this that prevented me from going on to become a philosophy teacher. The field is just a big scam, now. Is this New Age University? I urge you to speak with someone about getting a tuition refund.
I am completely serious.
Hey Alex - cool avatar. I’ve never seen it before. Too bad you can’t get that in color. What exactly is it? I mean, it’s source. I mean, is it a traditional icon, or just something you whipped up yourself? In any event, it’s a nice one. Also completely serious.
Yes i would have to agree with what your saying.
I think perception has to be one of the most obvious. For example our own personal histories and backgrounds (could be thought of as personal attributes), inevitably affect the way we percieve and see the world. Every single human on this earth will percieve a certain situation differently, which is why it is so difficult to determine true knowledge.
Also if you want to look at personal attributes:
Curiosity is undoubtably instinctive in humans. We are born knowing absolutely nothing yet we acquire all this knowledge…and only through asking questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? These questions provoke us and in affect we acquire knowledge through this curiosity inbedded in our nature.
When it comes to Language there are many factors at work that affect it.
I’ll give a few examples:
If you speak japanese this could in fact limit your skills as interpreting and acquiring knowledge (if you think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) whereby our thoughts are limited by our language.
[i]"The following experiment attempted to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by interviewing bilingual Japanese women living in the U.S… The women spoke both languages with comparable regularity. A bilingual Japanese interviewer asked the same questions to the women in two separate interview sessions. In the first session, the only language spoken was Japanese. In the second, only English was spoken. At the two interviews, the women were asked to complete the same sentences:
“When my wishes conflict with my family’s. . .
. . . it is a time of great unhappiness.” (Japanese)
. . . I do what I want." (English)
“Real friends should. . .
. . . help each other.” (Japanese)
. . . be very frank." (English)"[/i]
This just shows how language has affcted their attitude, answers and thoughts completely.
Also, without certain aspects of language it seems impossible to learn and do certain skills (if someone was mute or didn’t have the creativity in their brain to learn new languages etc). To be more clear i’ll use an example:
If you take mathematics as a language (debtable i know…) imagine trying to do maths without the the complexity of the algebraic language. So not having certain skills required to know and learn a language, affects the way of knowing completely.
I totally agree with the confidence comment. I would have to say my lack of confidence (or shyness) has inevitably led to me not knowing as much as i would like to.
And hyperthetically if someone was very shy, and lets say not as courageous and strong-willed as someone with extreme confidence, then this can affect ways of knowing. From an early age, opinions, ideas and facts will be bombarded apon a person, without them having the courage to object. Now a confident strong-willed person (or you could say in this case a non-conformist) WILL object and come to their own conclusions, this could be interpreted in two ways, either that the conformist would gain more true knowledge as everyone thinks it and is in a sense more reliable OR the non-conformist could not be relieying on other people so much but be thinking for themselves and in fact acquiring new true knowledge more so than the conformist. But either way, the ways of knowing will be affected.
and faust…not quite sure what you’re trying to say… 
Charlieara,
Interesting post! I’ve been thinking about this myself - it’s interesting to note how genetic predispositions, and environmentally acquired traits, can really define so much of how you’re able to act, what you’re predisposed or even able to think, etc.
I think the two biggest factors that enable or destroy someone’s potential as a philosopher are intelligence, and the ability for precise thought. (I was stunned when I first realized that someone can be very smart, and be a very poor thinker!)
The usefulness of intelligence is obvious - without it, you can follow certain arguments well, but you can’t create your own, and won’t be able to develop your own arguments nearly as well.
But I think precision of thought - something more environmental than raw intelligence - is the more important of the two. It’s something that so many modern philosophers lack (and ancient, too, to be fair), but I really think that no trait is more important to philosophy. The ability to, without bias, create and follow an argument based on its logical validity alone - that’s the essence of how philosophy should be done. And it’s painful to see philosophers that clearly lack this skill, and to see the consequences, the fact that so many mathematicians and scientists look down on Philosophy as an academic field, because of the intellectually limited way in which much philosophy is done.
Faust,
I entirely agree with your objection about “emotions being one way of knowing”. Because of teachings like this, I have a very strong love-hate relationship with Philosophy. I love what it could be, but I hate many things about what it is. Is this the case for you, at all?
Twiffy. I have no real objection to philosophy itself. Some of it is tripe, but that doesn’t bother me. It’s the way it is often taught that bothers me. I had one, and only one, prof who was trained at a catholic school (Boston College). He taught an intro Philo of Human Nature. He called anyone who didn’t believe in God a “consummate ass”. Repeatedly. He was a joke.
But the rest were fine, including a Congregationalist minister who taught a course on the Old Testament - which was technically in the Religious Studies department, but which course I considered an important part of my studies.
This here, that Charlie describes, is not what I consider a legitimate technique of teaching philosophy. This might be some sort of post-structuralist propaganda. Not that P-Sism shouldn’t be taught. It’s just that there seems to be a big fat unaddressed assumption here. Assumptions are fine, too, essential, even. But I do not see, in this limited example, how it is being consciously addressed. These factore are just being treated as “ways of knowing”. Sounds like an epistemic pronouncement, unconscious of the fact that the very premise is controversial, to say the least.
I remember once, on another board, having a debate about morality with someone who claimed to be a prof at some bigtime English school. He was a rationalist, and proceeded to give a typically long and convoluted argument. There were a couple of blaring, glaring logical inconsistencies in it. When I pointed this out, he said something like “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Back to the drawing board”. He never responded to that thread again, despite promising that he could straighten everything out by the weekend. He couldn’t, is the truth. He didn’t even know where to start. But these errors were so basic, so fundamental that your average undergrad would not have made them, yet he was a full prof. Makes you wonder.
faust: my avator is a shamanic symbol from a northwestern tribe of the US (i’m embarrased to say i forget which one). its a raven.
thanks!
it looks like Macaw
-Imp
Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 5:59 pm Post subject: Personal attributes affect ways of knowing…?
Was in a theory of knowledge lecture when this came up, and was curious to what you guys thought:
How do personal attributes affect ways of knowing?
–What is the “person”? Persons can be human or gods–as in the trinity of the christian religion. What is the human person? Who is doing the knowing?
These ways of knowing being: Language, Perception, Reason and Emotion
And personal attributes i.e. gender, characteristics such as creativity, empathy, confidence, curiousity etc.
Which personal attributes affect certain ways of knowing more than others?
–But do we primarily know? What if all that is listed above is not a way of knowing being—but of being----each one of those above mention qualities might reveal itself in a different “horizon”–and yet be unified–and if they are–the unity must be interpreted–and knowing flies out the window–
but of course we know things–we’re smart people–things…yes.
–The real answer: those attributes have no affect on knowing: knowing is a psycyic process with its own laws that have long ago worked out the relation to sensation, relations to others, self-relation, consciousness, linguistic capabilities–so what you would have is a doctrine of “difference”–or whatever its called in postermodernism.
–To say that knowing is a psychic process is to demand a clarification of what process is in general, how it pertains to our psyche, and the question of inner psychological states–and then—the last comment: by the time you even try to approach knowing, it will have vanished into some dialectical hell. But it was fun to respond and I mean no disrespect. 