Philosophy 303 - Principles of Inquiry: Ways of Knowing
Assignment #3: Tools
for inquiry: evidence, reasoning, bias, propaganda
Reading for this assignment:
1)
Chapters 5 and 6 of How to Think About Weird
Things (pp. 114-174).
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)
a set of readings on ‘media bias’
a)
“Media Bias Basics” at http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/biasbasics1.asp
b)
the introduction to “What Liberal Media” by Eric Alterman at http://www.whatliberalmedia.com/intro.pdf
c)
“Media/Political Bias” by Andrew R. Cline
at http://rhetorica.net/bias.htm
d)
“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…” or “Field Problem” or “Critical Reading and
Writing”.)
- 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://falcon.jmu.edu/~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html.
- For Chapter 6 only, write out answers to the even
numbered exercises headed “Evaluate these claims. Are They Reasonable or Not?” on pp.
171-2. (To be hyper-clear: just the
even numbered ones, so five out of the ten.) Don’t neglect to explain (briefly) why you think the claim (or
argument) is reasonable or not.
- The other readings for this assignment (all on-line)
are intended to begin our investigation of “citizen’s epistemology.” 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 mainstream 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. Look also for examples
of fallacious reasoning. Write two
or three pages 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.]