How might the context in which knowledge is presented influence whether it is accepted or rejected?
When politics and knowledge intertwine, they tend to influence each other through narratives and ideology. Politics in knowledge aim to persuade the reader into subscribing to a narrative or viewpoint. For example, in Veric's Children of the Post Colony, Oliver Wolters and all of Reynaldo Ileto's cohorts scoff at Agoncillo's accounts of Philippine History. They claim that autonomous history is politically neutral and that historians should view events isolated from their context. However, when one examines Agoncillo's accounts further, they realise that his account recounts historical events from the view of a Filipino. Many of Cornell's historians gave this guideline to many other Southeast Asian students, according to Veric, who states that they send Southeast Asian students back home only for them to tell sanitized versions of their history. At the time Ileto was going to Cornell, around the 1970s, the Philippine government enacted martial law, the Vietnam War was ongoing, and before that he lived in the brand new post-colonial Philippines.
With this in mind, we glean so much, and without this information it is challenging to pinpoint why these narratives stifle communities. Context like this, when presented, influences acceptance and rejection by determining the narratives set out by people in the period. The documentation of power structures, their actions, historical events, motives, and other aspects of life indicate what was considered valuable and normal, and keeping the tactics used to perpetuate the norm hidden maintains the norm. Context educates us in how knowledge is used and spread, and what types of knowledge are accepted or shunned. We use context to understand why a certain thing is and why it could be that, and it also gives us a basis for our logic. Without the basis in context, it is harder to check for consistency and accuracy of a claim or an account. For example, when we take Langston Hughes' poetry out of context, ignoring the allusions to prominent civil rights movement leaders such as Booker T. or to the first civilizations recorded on Earth, it becomes more difficult to make sense of his poetry. Furthermore, Veric's account of Ileto's time in Cornell indicates that Ileto could not access the key artifacts which would allow him to further discuss Filipino perspectives on history, which in turn led to his work seeming flat and lacking to Veric.
He claims that the narratives Ileto explored were skewed by the condemnation of nationalistic writing. While Wolters and the environment of Cornell further set in the phenomenon he calls "the Ileto effect", describing the ignorance and forgetfulness towards our country's history, Veric mentions that our colonizers and existing power structures in the post colony conditioned us to think this way for a prolonged time. By way of ilustration, Reynato Constantino in "The Miseducation of the Filipino" (1970) states that the American government weaponized the education system and placed many military men in teaching positions. He quotes the 1903 census that states that General Otis demanded for schools to reopen and that he picked out the textbooks for the curricula at the time. The educational system in the Philippines was heavily dictated by the American military, and to this day it still operates much like an American curriculum, with English as the primary language of instruction. In Veric's writings he cites silence as an indicator of power. The ability to silence and work silently is powerful because you are able to hide information that can be used against you and your governance. If any truth or information against the establishment breaks silence, then there is a threat and the power structures topple down. The establishment never desires enlightment and self awareness, and erases that to prevent changes that may benefit the people. Unlike other post colonies, like countries in Africa, we cannot rise and gain independence because we are deeply conditioned to accept our status as a colony and subserviant to the West. Similar to Said in his analysis of Egypt's relationship to Britain, we only know what our colonizers know about us.
With the only context we have being context altered and provided by the centers like Britain and the US, making objective claims on historical events and finding knowledge that contradicts the status quo becomes a burden. Knowledge that contradicts the narrative provided by our centers is rejected, especially when it is depicted to be ugly or terrifying. For example, not many people accept the idea that there might be something wrong with them. We experience cognitive dissonance. However, when we are presented with knowledge that glorifies the center or our point of view, we accept with no questions. That is how ingrained our political narratives are within us: we cannot accept knowledge that does not match up to whay is given, and the power structures successfully keep us from changing.
Is bias inevitable in the production of knowledge?
In the production of knowledge, we place high value on being unbiased. Bias is the predisposition to views similar to our own, or any kind of faulty reasoning. Academia and science especially discourage heavy bias in knowledge production because bias prevents scholars from accepting results different from their hypothesis, predictions, and assumptions. The scientific community claims to be an institution that progresses as a living, changing body of knowledge that bases its rules on evidence and what is observed by the senses. Many people, including myself, have also assumed that scientific knowledge was produced without conflict of interest. We perceive unbiased information to be accurate and closer to the truth.
However, we notice conflicts of interests and biases in the things we consume and the knowledge we gain. You read a research paper, see an ad, or watch the news, and you may find some kind of political bias or affiliation to a large company or figure. The notion of being unbiased is a paradox: no matter how unbiased one strives to be, bias in the production of knowledge is inevitable because humans naturally act and chose to do things that are familiar to us., and the idea of being unbiased is biased towards empiricism and the misconceptions of the Enlightenment.
Humans tend to operate on habit and instinct: we can list several cognitive biases that we fall into. At least 40% of all human behavior can be attributed to habits and it is easy to fall into bad habits with just a cue, a behavior, and a reward for the behavior. For example, if we see a word count, we may be compelled to fill the empty spaces with words and assume that is the most effective way of constructing our essay. It becomes a habit after we write more and it is a difficult habit to break. Another example is addiction. When you are addicted, you are fully aware that the addiction is interfering with your life, but it is difficult to quit because your brain only gets dopamine from partaking in your addiction and goes into withdrawal otherwise.
We are also inclined to only support beliefs that align with our own. This is called confirmation bias. By way of illustration, a person on social media may only be recommended news related to their political views. This results in an echo chamber, where you are exposed to nothing but your own beliefs. Furthermore, when you step out of the echo chamber and discover beliefs that oppose yours, you may experience cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance may lead you to repress conflicting information, suppress your beliefs, or rationalize the differences in your view point despite the inconsistencies. The world becomes needlessly complicated, like the geocentric model proposed by Ptolemy.
To explore the inevitability of bias in the production of knowledge, I chose the example of the models of the solar system. The two different models of the solar system demonstrate the influence of bias in our abilities to accept and produce knowledge. It also demonstrates that our notion of being unbiased is based on the school of positivism, which combines rationalism and empiricism and asserts that you learn from objects you can know. NT Wright states that this view in obtaining accurate information originated from the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, around the same time the heliocentric model was formulated by Copernicus and Kepler. Although the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation were both responses to the medieval period and its emphasis on religion, people from both the scientific and religious communities initially rejected the heliocentric model because Ptolemy, the proponent of the geocentric model, was one of the most respected Ancient Greek astronomers, and because the geocentric model enforced the belief that people were separated from the divine. It was not until Galileo Galilei saw the phases of Venus and Jupiter’s moons that we finally accepted we were not at the center of the universe, which further reinforces the positivist attitude of the era. There was bias in supporting the geocentric model because of the influence of religion, the need to feel important , and the complexity of the model, and there was bias against the geocentric model in supporting the heliocentric model.
Even in fields where objectivity is required, there may be an ounce of bias still remaining because humans are susceptible to faulty reasoning and formulating their conclusions from familiar things, and because the value of objectivity was amplified by a group of thinkers like Bacon, Descartes, and Berkeley that valued sensory data to back up logical assumptions. External parties such as the businesses or community may also have their own agendas when conducting experiments and producing knowledge, like when food companies produce products for a mega corporation with government connections and funding. This is not to say we
should not strive for objectivity in academia, but to say that it is the closest to the truth and is truly objective is misleading.
Dobrijevic, D. (2021, December 17). Geocentric model: The Earth-centered view of the universe. Space.com.
https://www.space.com/geocentric-model The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2022, September 27). Geocentric Model | Definition, History, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/geocentric-model
What Is Cognitive Dissonance? (2022, November 7). Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012
What Is the Confirmation Bias? (2022, November 10). Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-2795024
Yagoda, B. (2018, August 7). Cognitive Biases and the Human Brain. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/cognitive-bias/565775/
What information is lost when a language dies?
When a language dies, you lose the main form of communication, as language is how we convey ideas. Think of languages as electricity or a circuit. Languages are how we transmit ideas, like how electricity is spread through a circuit. The electrons are like our ideas while the circuit is like our language, or the means which we spread ideas. When the electrons flow, they may flow in a closed circuit or within the earth. Like the circuit, language is passed around to create or instill power and may be limited to a select few people. For example, English is the dominant language used in our signs, symbols, education, healthcare, conversation, and in politics. While many people in the Philippines use it nowadays, proficiency in the language is still limited to the upper middle class of Filipinos. Filipino is currently in an open circuit of sorts. While it's a commonly used language amongst the majority of Filipinos, because it is not connected to the circuit of elites in the peripheral and the center, it does not have much power. A language would die in the case of a short circuit, like when it loses its major path for communication. When a language dies, you lose the ability to empower your people, and you lose control over social norms, culture, entertainment, economic, and political sectors. When a language dies, you subject yourself to domination and you lose your freedom and identity because you use the words of your oppressors to express yourself. The loss of your own language is our submission and connection to paths that aren't ours. Like electricity, should we lose our language, it would be akin to dipping a toaster in water or running electricity into the ocean: we would kill ourselves doing so.
What are the implications for bilingual and multilingual people?
The loss of language and the existing hierarchy established with language make the representation of bilingual people difficult, because you exist as an inter-state actor: the inter-state actor is privy to the biases of the dominant culture relative to their language. As an inter-state actor you are expected to speak the language that the dominant culture uses, which in our case is English. Filipino is underrepresented in academia and in more general knowledge sharing because of the appeals to hegemonic culture we have to make to have our findings taken seriously by the rest of the international community. As a bilingual person your efforts in understanding the nuances of both or multiple languages are only appreciated when they are the languages accepted by the world.
What kind of knowledge does a language convey?
Language is like a cultural cornerstone, or a structure with a foundation. Language is a home, more specifically like housing and home in a literal sense. Homes are often the starting point for developing values and culture: what parents do for their children first is establish the mother tongue, the counting numbers in the mother tongue, and the related social normal established in the culture where the mother tongue originates. The mother tongue and all the technicalities such as grammar, alphabet, and basic conversational questions and answers create the foundation of the house. The larger social context that the language is used in creates the rest of the house. For example, floral and poetic language could be like the wallpaper of the house, but it still conveys what the homeowner finds valuable. A house also has people that live there, which represents the culture and people the language is used in. For example, your friend may use Filipino with you, making you a part of a community of Filipino speakers. The environment of a home also influences behavior and what kind of knowledge is useful to you. For example, if you grew up in a house of girls, perhaps specific terms related to women's anatomy may be more prevelant in your vocabulary. Ultimately, a home represents the values and culture of a family, like language does for our community and country, and the way a home is arranged can influence the knowledge conveyed by language.
If a language dies, what kind of information is lost?
If a language dies, knowledge specific to the culture and people using that knowledge could be lost. Language can communicate things like gender and societal roles for the culture, how the culture estimates and perceives numerical value and multiple objects, and can determine the perception of events and categories of objects and information. Losing a home means losing the structure of the home, meaning losing unique roles, categorization of information, and altering the perception of events. For example, in the hypothetical situation where we lose a language like Spanish, we may continue to enact harsher punishments on things like accidents, or the culture may shift their value on finding the perpetrator of an accident. Losing Filipino would be like losing the values of Bayanihan or the expressions of love key to fighting the oppressive rule of the Spaniards and the Americans. When a language dies, we lose a key part of history, our values and morals, and our identity. Hence, like children in a home, we must ensure that it is safeguarded and protected from danger.
can all knowledge be expressed in words or symbols?
The answers to both the questions specified here depend on your definitions of knowledge, words, and symbols. Some of the definitions here are derived from my schema and others from the Merriam Webster's dictionary. Here, knowledge is a set of principles and truths that one is aware of, and it can be discovered, created, learned, discussed, observed, and applied. A symbol for our purposes is a simplified image or representation of an idea, while a word is a string of symbols, letters, characters, and sounds that convey an idea. I do not think all knowledge can be expressed in symbols and words, because symbols and words are often defined through auditory and visual cues that do not encompass all communication and sensory input/output. Other types of knowledge, like knowledge based on taste, touch, smell, and a variety of ways of processing the world, exist, and it is said that there may be multiple types of intelligence. Examples of these include bodily kinsthetic knowledge which involves muscle memory and the ability to move your body. It allows you to perform well in sports. These things are difficult to assign to symbols, because they are cemented in our subconcious and are mainly seen or done to fully comprehend them. Therefore, because every person has a unique way of sensing and gathering info, and because there are multiple types of intelligence that do not rely on symbols or words and rely on application and demonstration, I think that not all knowledge can be summed up with words or symbols.
is it possible to think or know without language?
On the other hand, whether or not it is possible to think or know without language varies more strongly by definition. In this case, it depends on whether or not symbols are merely just visual or metaphorical ways of conveying ideals, or if they include other non verbal communication like body language. If symbols are the latter, then knowing without language would be difficult if not impossible. This would contradict my answer to the first question. However, if symbols are the former, then you can think and know without language.
References: Definition of language. (n.d.). In Dictionary by Merriam-Webster: America's most-trusted online dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/language
Mehta, K. (2021, March 3). A Harvard psychologist says humans have 8 types of intelligence. Which ones do you score the highest in? CNBC. Retrieved September 26, 2022, from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/10/harvard-psychologist-types-of-intelligence-where-do-you-score-highest-in.html
why should we care about acquiring knowledge?
Knowledge is a tool you can use to discover or create things. It is like a set of swiss army knives made for the function of self preservation in a survival situation. The knives each correspond to a different purpose and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The variety of knives is like the different areas of knowledge. They may be shaped differently but they are all used to create, carve, or gather food and resources. Acquiring knowledge also has the endgoal of helping us understand the world and use what perspectives and viewpoints it gives us to help other peoples.
Knowledge acquistion provides us with the avenue to sympathize with other people because we can see from a a galaxy's worth of perspectives, and it also provides us with a means to find the truth by providing a credible, expansive verification system. If something is inconsistent with our existing knowledge bank, we can either discern if it is true or not, or determine if we have discovered new knowledge to add to our ever growing database. Therefore, knowledge acquistion is important if you want to create, discover, evaluate information, and sympathize with others. Growing as a person requires you to know more about the world and the people who live in it.
what shapes my perspective as a knower?
As a knower, my perspective is shaped by a variety of things: my biases, my prior knowledge and experiences,and other external factors like family, religion, culture, schooling, friends, and the media I consume on a daily basis. My biases inform my ability to receive new information and the ideas that align with my values. My values are then influenced and originate from what I have learned about the world in the past, the people around me, and the media I surround myself with. Past experiences give me knowledge of situations that I would like to experience again, or experiences that I thought were entertaining, informative, or enriching, and experiences that were challenging and difficult for me. They determine what I avoid and what I gravitate towards. The people around me influence my values by providing me with a community that has a purpose, and the community serves as a place where my family, friends, religious leaders, and teachers can help me determine what information is accurate. Finally, the media I surround myself with also shapes my values to a certain degree. Ultimately, there are internal and external factors that inform each other in my perspective as a knower.
how do we acquire knowledge?
Every waking moment we spend in a world that is constantly turning, so with the fast rotation and revolution of the earth, we produce a seemingly endless stream of information. The invention of mass communication and the internet has made receiving information so easy, yet so difficult to evaluate for its quality. Examples of information we receive everyday include snippets of conversations, street signs, slogans and images on billboards, comments on message boards, videos on social media, hellos and check in texts from friends, daily news, and much more information. Everything we see conveys some kind of message.
Through the use of messaging and authorial choices in most objects we see in daily life, we can acquire knowledge passively. When we acquire knowledge passively, our brain is like a sponge, soaking up and processing all the information through our neural networks. However, when we actively seek out new knowledge, our brain also makes new connections with synapses. Like chains linking to each other, to learn and cement new information, we must connect the new info to our schema, or prior knowledge. Ultimately, in a fast paced world, we mostly acquire knowledge passively, but making information relevant to our personal lives, prior knowledge, and experiences helps us permanently cement it in our brain.
are there responsibilities that necessarily come with knowing something or knowing how to do something?
Acquiring knowledge and knowing how to do something comes with the responsibility of verifying and sharing the information with other people. The responsibility of verifying is like a spell check, a memory card, or a review. Spellcheckers verify spelling by pointing out and underlining a mistake with spelling, then they provide a list of possible correct spellings. Like a spellcheck, people who hold knowledge have the power to correct mistakes in other people's understanding and in order to do so, they must provide possibilities and present options for the correct knowledge. A memory card can also be useful for verification because with memory cards there are often words or visuals that match up to the same words or visuals, or even a descriptor. Seeing if your knowledge is consistent with similar data can help those with knowledge verify their knowledge. Responsibilities can also include expanding or specifying the knowledge further. The responsibility is similar to a magnifying glass. When you use a magnifying glass, you can put emphasis on a specific part of an object, and enlarge your image of it so you can examine it further. Likewise, with knowledge, you can gain deeper understanding by narrowing down your subject area and specializing in that specific area of knowledge. For example, as a marine biologist, you could focus on marine life on the continental shelf.
origins
My knowledge originated from a variety of points, including my family, Philippine culture, Christianity, schooling, and the internet.
family
Knowledge I have shared to me by my family came primarily from my mom and my grandmother. My mom and my grandmother served as my parental figures growing up. The knowledge they imparted to me was usually passed on by word of mouth at the dinner table, or through articles and midnight talks about a variety of topics. Most of the information my mom gave me was about developing confidence in myself, emotional health, and the kind of commitment and grit necessary to succeed in life. My grandmother often discussed physical and spiritual health, along with practical housekeeping tips and recipes. She also had plenty of stories of her times in business and politics. Every so often my tita would also impart knowledge on science and music on me, taking me to gigs and once a programming workshop.
philippine culture
In Philippine culture people are often heavily tied to their families, religion, and even some older historical events and colonial mentality. Family ties are often extended outside of the immediate family, so outside of a mom, dad, and sibling, you would be closely involved with all your uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins. Further on, families in the Philippines often have traditions like Noche Buena and a strong urge to remain together throughout hardships. Philippine culture is also heavily influenced by religion and our colonizers. Our colonizers, such as the Spanish, American, and Japanese colonial government, brought us many of the social customs in our society now. For example, many of our words in Filipino are borrowed from Spanish, and our primary religion, Christianity and its denominations, were brought from Spain. Other customs, such as fashion and gender roles were brought from Spain as well. The Americans also brought our modern form of government and the English language to the forefront of the education system. They also gave us their ideals, like the desire for light skin, the conflation of the English language with intelligence, and the desire for a job outside of the country.
Most of my knowledge growing up was based around the colonial mentality: I studied with English as my language of instruction and was resentful of my identity as a Filipino, constantly sleeping and becoming anxious in Filipino classes throughout elementary school. I wanted to be an island or a man with no country. I idealized the thought of moving to another country and thought it would be better, until I found out about events like this and this. They show that discrimination is still rampant in the countries we idealise, and even though I am still guilty of succumbing to colonial mentality, I make it a point to remind myself I am Filipino and that part of me will never be taken away.
religion
Religion is a complicated area of knowledge because it has always been personal to me, and not always in a positive way. Growing up, I went to church at Every Nation or Victory. Every Nation and Victory are protestant, born again Christian churches. They state that God is the only god and that He is a trinity consisting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They also believe in salvation through the forgiveness of Christ and that Christianity is more of a personal relationship with God. Knowledge in churches is primarily expressed through personal anecdotes of God's healing and miracles, through the doctrine of the Bible, through sermons and group huddle, and praise and worship. Knowledge from church was constantly reassuring in hard times, but I hope one day I can read through the Bible to fully understand the truth of God, because so many conflicting views on what constitutes the Bible and Christianity are presented.
school
I have been attending private school in the Philippines for my entire life, currently following the K-12 system. Going to the same school, knowledge is often provided in a classroom setting with a set class and several teachers with differing styles of teaching coming in to the classroom to provide lessons and activities. Activities often ensured students were not bored on their desks and developed our social and project management skills as these activities often involved interacting and creating tangible outputs with other people. These activities, along with performance tasks, tests, and individual homeworks, seatworks, and recitation were the means in which knowledge was reinforced in class. School also put me in a weird paradox where learning was high stakes, but also comfortably paced at times, because while grades were not the focus we were always told to strive for excellence and that a good grade can help substantially with college or getting into prestigious schools. When I joined IB, the learning process became more stressful, but more rewarding because we are encouraged to think critically.
internet
Finally, the internet, or the endless tunnel of wires and hotlinks. The wires of the internet are all tangled and I believe the internet is the most unpredictable knowledge source. The internet is a scramble of wires with high current, with electrons flowing everywhere the wires lead. The internet is like a mailing service without a spam filter, and while I learned a lot from browsing the internet, from scuba diving, to sharks, to how to deal with emotional problems, I also fell into a lot of situations I should not have been through while trying to learn. The internet is a powerful, but dangerous tool and the abundance of information must be dealt with critically.