First Week, Reflections

Theory

It was a very productive experience to have a chance to reread Russell's book and other philosophers works after a lecture on the subject of knowledge in the philosophical context.

It gave me time to read and think about the Plato's theory of Ideas and Aristotle's theory of Universals, as the only one work I could easily recall in my memory before this week, was Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'. Partly this was the reason to appreciate Bertrand Russell's views, as he mostly agrees with my favourite philosopher' ideas.

It is interesting to see the parallels between the Plato's school with his understanding of the difference between knowledge and true judgement and Russel's main concepts, such as knowledge of things and knowledge of truths,  knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.

I tried to get a better understanding of Russel's criticism of such theories as monism and monadism, which are partly based on the idea of universals, while the lecture on Tuesday reminded me of the Descartes' foundationalism, Hume's empiricism and scepticism. Still, I made a mistake trying to separate the ideas of proposition and statement of fact that appeared to be the same thing in Russel's theory, as we learned during the seminar.

It was good to get visual examples and entertaining discussions on Wednesday, talking about the source of sence-data as our cognitive activity, and different kinds of verbal impressions (and list all of them as follows: Questions, Conditions, Propositions, Performances, Believes, Imperatives).

Works of Ayer and Austin, mentioned during the seminar, were unknown to me, so now I am getting familiar with the common language philosophy.

Practice

The search for the journal and the paper was quite exciting and complicated at the same time, as I tried to understand the principle of impact factor.

It shows the relative importance of a journal within its field, and can be calculated as A/B, where A and B are:

A is the number of times the article was cited by indexed journals during the specific period of time;

B is the total number of "citable items" (articles, reviews, etc.) published by that journal during the specific period of time.  

It will help me to find the relevant high quality research material in the future, along with Google Academia and Web of Knowledge databases, and it has already helped us to find really interesting articles on the subject of media and social networks which we are going to discuss further on Blogger.

Theme 1

The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC) is one of the oldest web-based Internet studies scholarly journals. It publishes work by scholars in communication, political science, sociology, media studies etc. (http://jcmc.indiana.edu/)

I chose the research article 'The fifth estate emerging through the network of networks' (2009) written by William Dutton, in: Prometheus 27 (1): 1-15.
Dutton talks about the new institutions of the Network Society: new technologies and new media lead to the appearance of new forms of democracy, such as the 'fifth estate', a network community. Dutton's discussion of the role of the Internet and related technologies is distinguished into three stages:

- Internet as ephemeral technological innovation,

- Internet as a destruction of hierarchies, or a mean of a total control,

- Internet as a network of networks, which allows different combinations to establish links between individuals and groups.

The research is based on the various theoretical, philosophical and social works (from M. Castells to T. Blair) and a historical analysis. Its aims are the proposition of Dutton's hypothesis and the intoduction of a new term, which became quite popular among social media researchers nowadays.

Bertrand Russel - The Problems of Philosophy

1)

According to Russel, 'sense-data' means the things that are immediately known in sensation as an individual personal feeling. The object cannot be identical with the sense-datum, so, the facts that we know about the subjects are our personal feelings, not the ideal universal information.

Russel introduces this notion to give a better understanding of his philosophical structure, which separates 'knowledge of things' and 'knowledge of truths'. Knowledge of things is divided on knowledge by description which needs the basis of certain 'truth' knowledge, and knowledge by acquaintance which doesn't need logical conclusions and based on the sense-data.

2)

The proposition is an obvious but abstract fact, like 'two and two are four', something we know without sensual experience. All 'a priori' knowledge deals exclusively with the relations of universals.

The statement of fact mean statements about particular objects/facts, not the idea of them. The belief is true when corresponds to the fact, and false if it doesn't.

Facts are something that has been experienced in acquaintance. We can have knowledge by description of things which we have never experienced, but this would be propositions.

3)

'Definite description' is any phrase of the form 'the so-and-so', which is having a certain property and we do not have knowledge of the same object by acquaintance.

The phrase of the form 'the so-and-so' (in the singular) is called an a 'definite' description. The example of this as follows: 'a man' is an ambiguous description, and 'the man with the iron mask' is a definite description, or 'a man as any person' or 'this particular man'.

4)

Russell duscusses theories of a priori knowledge which is not purely or not purely 'analytic'. He disagrees with rationalists who state 'a priori' as a mental general knowledge, and partly agrees with Plato's 'theory of ideas' as an attempt to solve this problem, but criticizes the idea of universals, even when this complex idea is a basis of many theories, such as monism (Spinoza, Bradley), monadism (Leibniz).

He points out that the universals are represented by adjectives and substantives, and there must be relations which are not dependent upon thought, but belong to the independent world which the thought apprehends but does not create.

His conclusion is that while many different thoughts of particular sense have in common their object, this object itself is different from all of them.