Philosophy 303 - Principles of Inquiry: Ways of Knowing

 

Assignment #3:  Knowledge, Belief and Evidence

 

Reading for this assignment:

 

  1. Chapters 5 and 6 of How to Think About Weird Things (pp.94-158); also the appendix on “Informal Fallacies” (pp. 298-304)
  2. “Recognizing Propaganda” available online at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/Recognizing_Propaganda.html and/or the somewhat more extensive presentation of the same material at http://www.propagandacritic.com. 
  3. “How To Identify Liberal Media Bias” at http://secure.mediaresearch.org/news/identifybias.html  and the introduction to “What Liberal Media” by Eric Alterman at http://www.whatliberalmedia.com/intro.pdf
  4. Added since my e-mail:  “Media/Political Bias” by Andrew R. Cline at http://rhetorica.net/bias.htm and “A Propaganda Model” from Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html

 

 

 

Writing Assignment:

 

  1. Write out brief answers to the study questions for Chapters 5 and 6 of How to Think About Weird Things. (Again, I do not mean to include the “discussion questions” or the exercises headed “Evaluate these claims…”)
  2. The authors of How to Think About Weird Things argue that faith is not a legitimate source of knowledge.  Discuss and evaluate their argument. Are they right to dismiss faith in the way that they do?   (Write a page or two.) If you are particularly interested in this question you might want to read the essay by William James that they discuss.  It is called “The Will To Believe” and is online at http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/pages/docs/willtobelieve.doc.
  3. The other readings for this assignment (all on-line) are intended to begin our investigation of “citizen’s epistemology.”  As I explained in my June 4 blog post, I think of citizen’s epistemology as the effort to address the practical problems that citizens have in learning what they need to know to be good citizens.  The readings address two concepts important to this subject: ‘propaganda’ and ‘media bias’.  All of them, in one way or another, attempt to identify forms of bias or distortion.  But there is disagreement about what sort of bias, if any, is present in the mainstream US media.  Conservatives (like those at the Media Research Council) see a liberal bias.  Liberals (Like Eric Alterman) and those even farther to the left (like Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman) see a conservative bias – or perhaps it would be better to say: a bias in favor of the existing power structures. Mainstream journalists themselves and some academic students of the media (like Andrew Cline) tend not to see a consistent political bias, but do see biases that arise from the nature of the news business – like the bias in favor of stories with conflict and drama.  (“If it bleeds, it leads.”)  So, after you have read these materials, pay attention to some media source (or sources) for a week.  If you regularly watch the evening news on a particular network or read a daily newspaper, that’s enough.  If you don’t normally pay much attention to the news, then (at least for this week) find some source to follow.  Virtually every newspaper and broadcast news service in the world is on line now, so it’s easy to follow one or more from your computer.  So pick (at least) one and spend (at least) 20 minutes every day for a week seeing what it tells you about what’s going on in the world.  Look for examples of any of the sorts of bias and/or propaganda identified in the reading.  Write a page or two about what you find.

[ I’ll post some of my own observations on the blog.  Perhaps you’d like to post your ‘findings’ there as well.  If we could get some conversations going about some concrete examples that would be great.]