Philosophy 303 - Principles of Inquiry: Ways of Knowing
Assignment #3:
Knowledge, Belief and Evidence
Reading for this assignment:
- Chapters 5 and 6 of How to Think About Weird
Things (pp.94-158); also the appendix on “Informal Fallacies” (pp.
298-304)
- “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.
- “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
- 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:
- 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…”)
- 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.
- 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.]