Emotions

Are your emotions innate or rather a product of the knowledge community you belong too?
Your emotions are a product of the knowledge community you belong to as you are born within a community. For example: if a child performs an action that is wrong, then the parents will imply this by making the child feel ashamed. You can say that it was the way you were nurtured, that results in the emotional responses you have towards something. In general, people use logic to evaluate their decisions but with emotions you use feelings. These feelings are the bi-product of your emotions, meaning that it's more predominate towards your parents as you have more emotional responses. In other words, you have an emotional attachment towards your family, hence when a child does something wrong that their parents disapprove of, they tend to become more emotional than if a teacher told them off.

How do other ways of knowing influence our emotions and vice versa?
Faith (trust) is an influence towards our emotions as you need to have trust in someone to have an emotional attachment to. For example, your parents, you have faith and trust in your parents no matter what happens during your life because they are always there for you. This shows that your emotions will be stronger towards someone if you have trust in them.
Memory has an influence on our emotions because memories bring back the emotions we have experienced during events. For example, at a wedding,  you are likely to make memories on such an important date. And because this day is a sentimental day, people who are connected to the family are going be express their emotions of happiness in regards to the couple. These emotions will stick as memories on the day because it is what was expressed in regards to the bride and groom.

" To what degree might different languages shape in their speakers different concepts of themselves and the world? What are the implications of such difference for knowledge? "

" To what degree might different languages shape in their speaker's different concepts of themselves and the world? What are the implications of such difference for knowledge? "

Different languages shape their national speaker's concepts of themselves and the world as languages shape their culture. Meaning that when a new culture is forming, language is needed to complete the idea of a whole culture as language is the base of all cultures. Different languages shape their citizens within their culture, this could be within different cultural beliefs. this means that their cultural beliefs may shapes their concepts of themselves as a person as well as their ideas towards other cultures and people around them. Their cultural beliefs may be their beginning point in which they begin to understand as see what is different. The difference in areas of knowledge is that because there is such a wide variety of languages and cultures, philosophy will be based on that language. Meaning that each language has its version of knowledge. It could conclude that there is a more valuable meaning in Arabic than what it means in English. The consequence of having such difference for knowledge is that there might be areas in which cannot be translated due to the fact that some words "are lost in translation" therefore there can be a wall in which we can discover and understand.

Quotes on Sense and Perception

"We live on the leash of our senses."

Diane Ackerman

When viewing this quote, you can interpret that leash can be a representation of how we are limited to knowledge like language barriers or even misconceptions. Diane Ackerman is famous for her poetic explorations of the world through it's nature. We believe that our sense of perception is an important feature that plays an important role regarding our knowledge as it allows us to gain knowledge of our surroundings through our senses. We begin to understand things, and this quote explains that we are tied up where we believe in our senses, we never seem to explore beyond our sense as we believe what we can feel, hear etc. We don't know if the sounds we hear are what other's are hearing, we can know that whether these sounds we hear are natural sounds or if it is our minds playing games. This cannot really be determined whether it is our minds through the studies that are being processed, but we still believe that what we hear around us is natura

"The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the sense and the mind"
Napoleon Bonaparte


 The second quote that is presented above explains that the power that is produced by a "strong man" is not the physical power, but its the idea that Napoleon is trying to portray the message as humans need to have an equal balance between our sense of perception and reasoning. Meaning that our sense of perception has a lot to do with our knowledge as we discover knowledge through our senses, we still must continue to have a logical reason behind what we gain through our senses. In other words when we discover new information, we still need to still maintain our logical reasons. For example: We believe the sounds we hear are the true sounds that are being produced by our surroundings, although scientists tend to believe that other animals in the surroundings hear the same sound differently. meaning that we have to figure out if we support the theory or not. Therefore we can't conclude that we hear the truth just because we are gathering the information through our senses.

Balances between Personal and Shared Knowledge

"A balance between shared and personal knowledge is extremely important in the quest for truth (Oxford, p.38)"

In my opinion, I believe that this TOK nugget is stating that balancing personal and shared knowledge is important as you can discover and use one another's knowledge to understand your surroundings. The surroundings can relate to real-life examples. For example, when people believed that the world was flat, there were many people who had doubts about this theory, thus they made their own knowledge claim, believing that the world was round. Shared knowledge is the base of knowledge, meaning that personal knowledge came from your own opinions based on shared knowledge. In other words, shared knowledge is the base of knowledge as you create a personal knowledge claim to understand and unravel the theories that you believe are irrelevant or doesn't fit in. You can say that Personal Knowledge can also be the "filter", meaning that you can use your personal knowledge to filter out all of the knowledge that you feel that has a different theory. Using your personal knowledge, it would be considered using your intuition or back up your theories based on personal experiences. Although this statement is referring to the fact that you need both personal and shared knowledge to be idealistic and truthful, as you cannot have your theories be considered the truth. For example in Psychology, you have specific areas in your book that illustrates all the facts and information need for the course, although how do you know what they're saying it true? A psychologist has in fact used their theories and investigated them through specific studies. You can see that the they have linked their personal knowledge with shared knowledge as there are many trials based on the same idea that each individual psychologist has studied.

The Problem With Knowledge

"Knowledge" itself is a term of which can be interpreted in many ways. Knowledge allows individuals to understand the world we live in. You can think about knowledge in different ways, it's a broad term. 

The term Knowledge can be useful to define how we understand events that have happened in the past, it can also be useful to understand the rights from the wrongs. 

Having knowledge can have values and limitations, in this case, the problem with knowledge could be the way people use it or how some people interpret things differently. Knowledge is commonly thought as a positive due to the fact that a person is shown to understand certain topics or areas. Although if knowledge were to be used for negative purposes instead of positives like discovering a cure for a medical disease. In other words, it depends on the way people use and portrays knowledge, therefore produces problems. The problem with knowledge is that it never ends and there are many individuals who have gained knowledge on specific topics.

"Ignorance is bliss and knowledge is power" you don't fear the outcome because you don't understand it whereas knowledge mean you can foresee different possible outcomes to your decision, meaning it could be good or bad.