Ways of Knowing Are a Check on Our Instinctive Judgments - Essay Example

Ways of knowing are a check on our instinctive judgments.” To what extent do you agree with this ment? Candi Daniel Rumpf Candi Number: 0047 Testing Session: May 2015-02-04 Word Count: 1589 For one to claim that he or she has knowledge about something, his or her mind must have interacted with the world using different ways of knowing (WOK). When people use instincts as a basis of knowledge, they get a subjective view of their surroundings. However, the use of WOKs leads to an objective knowledge. This essay explores whether WOKs are a check on our instinctive judgments. To do this, it is necessary to look at how ‘Areas of knowledge’ or AOK’s work in order to decipher how they are related in terms of instinctive judgment. In exploring the above discussion, the paper uses the definition of instinctive judgment from Biology Online, which states, “The term instinctive belief or judgment characterises a cognition resulting in no anterior consciousness.”1 The AOKs that will be fundamental in this essay are Arts, Ethics and Mathematics. The WOKs that are most important to the cognition of this essay are intuition, language and reason.  George Dickie defines a work of art as “an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an art world public”.2 Anatole France once said that, “In art as in love, instinct is enough”.3 Dickie’s definition and France’s description of art gives credence to the topic that ways of knowing are indeed a check on our instinctive judgments. Here, Dickie defines art as an AOK that is created to influence the thinking or knowledge of individuals understood as an art world public. An art is a piece of creation that is presented to individuals to make them believe or understand a particular concept. This means that such when an individual is exposed to a creation of art, he or she is likely to develop instincts whenever he or she is exposed to that piece. In France’s description of art as love, he depicts it as something that a person only needs instincts to feel or experience it or know that it exists. This shows that AOKs such as art influence WOKs, thereby determining what instinctive judgments people place on different things. When looking at pieces of art, people judge them based on what they see and what they think based on what they see. However, this is not to say that people do not use reason when judging pieces of art because to differentiate a piece of art from another, one must use reason. However, this shows that in most cases, people use intuition more than reason in judging Art. Reason is based on the use of logic and deductive processes. However, Daniel Kahneman states that people reach conclusions before they are aware than they are even thinking. Intuition is unconscious thinking. Intuitive judgments are reached as a coherent interpretation of an occurrence or state and a potential response to it. Therefore, when considering the role that intuition and reason play in understanding art, it is clear that WOKs are a check on our instinctive judgments because they determine our interpretation of arts. On the Theory of Knowledge website, intuition is defined as “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning”.4 This statement is related to the definition of instinct, emphasizes on “cognition, with no anterior consciousness”.5 However, while intuition involves understanding things instinctively, instincts are patterns of behaviour in response to particular stimuli. Intuition does not involve relating things to others because it is unconscious. Instincts, on the other hand involve some form of consciousness because of the relation to stimuli. Therefore, intuition as a WOK is a check on our instinctive judgement because we make most decisions based on what we feel or the emotion we have to a particular thing and this is the work of intuition. When looking at ethics, it is interesting to explore its relationship to language. As language is a main primary area of our cognitive processes, we must understand that we perceive a large part of the world around us by implementing the building blocks of language. We discuss, negotiate and learn new ideas through this medium, making it an incredibly powerful WOK. In regards to ethics, Jane Rule said that, “morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering”.6 By likening the acquisition of the AOK of ethics with the acquisition of the WOK of language, we are able to see how they are connected and that language may well be a check on our instinctive judgments. This is because we have an internal monologue, which we can hear in our own native language that we are able to use to internalise concepts and negotiate our position on ethical issues.  For example, if we take a case such as whether or not a person believes it is ethical to eat meat, we can look at how language may negotiate our reasons for the decision to eat meat. A person may have an instinctive dislike of the idea of killing animals and thus decline to eat meat. However, it can become commonplace and instinctive to separate the dislike of killing animals with the enjoyment of eating meat. A person may read an article in the language he understands that describes how sweet meat is and use words such as culled instead of killed in the process of getting meat. This could change one’s judgment of eating meat. In ethics, the initial judgement that one has could be altered when he or she is provided with additional information on that particular matter. Here, language plays a significant role in terms of how such information is relayed. For example, one may judge abortion as bad because he or she lost a relative because of it. However, when he is told that abortion could be used to save a life of a mother because of health complications, the person is likely to change his judgment and see the importance of abortion in particular circumstances. The language used to relay this information then becomes important in checking the instinctive judgment that the individual has on abortion. Mathematics is an AOK that relies largely on the use of deductive reason. We use the building blocks of numbers and manipulate them in mathematical calculation to provide a definitive answer to a problem. Mathematics provides us with ‘exacts’ that are not negotiable or able to be projected upon by emotion or instinct.7 To this end, it may be possible to quantify and measure our instinctive judgments by using mathematics. For example, we may instinctively believe we can calculate the length of a minute with our eyes closed, mathematics provides us with a definitive answer to whether or not we are able to complete the task, as well as providing us with a tangible margin of error. On the other hand, mathematics has been argued to have its own sense of innate beauty. Oliver Kim states in his article Of Science, Math and Beauty that “symmetry may be an important factor in defining beauty”8. Interestingly, this may be the case for an actual mathematical problem but also in terms of theories such as divine proportion whereby ‘phi’ is used to quantify what humans define and objectify a person, building or any other matter, to be beautiful. Pythagoras is known for his dislike of irrational numbers, proclaiming them ugly with their infinite number of non-repeating decimal places9. Therefore, it seems that reason may not be the only WOK that is important for our understanding of mathematics. Furthermore, in terms of our instinctive judgments, we may be able to reason that a mathematical problem has an answer that is either closer to 1 or 12.3379. However, we may be more drawn to the number one due to its simplistic beauty. This means that although reason may allow us to check our instinctive judgments, it may not always be entirely reliable. In conclusion, this essay has demonstrated that ‘Ways of Knowing’ do allow us to check our instinctive judgments in most ‘Areas of Knowledge’. In Art, it is clear that intuition plays an essential role in interpreting the piece of art. However, intuition and instinct are inextricably very closely linked and could lead to cognitive bias. There may also be merit in using mathematical reason to determine whether the intuition we use to determine what we enjoy as art is merely a mathematical preference. The essay has also shown that ethical issues can be massively negotiated by language. Despite reason or intuition, the ideas we encounter must be negotiated and explained using words, which we understand and then make sense of. Although the extent of which Ways of Knowing are a check on our instinctive judgments can be seen to be quite positively proven to exist, the relevance and productivity of this process is ultimately intangible; dependant on circumstance, external influences, cultural and social demographic and much more. Bibliography Books: Dickie, George. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1974. Print. Lagemoot, Richard. Mathematics. Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma. N.P.: N.P., n.d. 187-89. Print Stuart, Tony. Regarding the world: a primer for ToK. New York: Tony Stuart. 2000. Print. Web Pages: 1. Biology Online, 2005. Instinctive. [Online] 3rd October 2005, Available at: http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Instinctive [accessed 3rd Jan 2015] 2. Oxford Dictionaries: Language Matters, 2015. [Online] Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/art?q=arts#art__7 [accessed 3rd Jan 2015] 3. Theory of Knowledge, 2014. Ethics. [Online] Available at: http://www.theoryofknowledge.net/areas-of-knowledge/ethics/quotes-on-ethics/ [accessed 3rd Jan 2015] 4. Oxford Dictionaries: Language Matters, 2015. [online] Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/art?q=arts#art__7 [accessed 3rd Jan 2015] 5. TokTalk, 2009. [Online] 15th December 2009, Available at: http://www.toktalk.net/tag/mathematics/ [accessed 3rd Jan] Read More