HELP -- tok prescribed title 7 ib 2011/2012

The vocabulary we have does more than communicate our knowledge; its shapes what we can know.
i have a couple of ideas but not enough to make me completely understand the question i feel like what im writing is just, not right...
i'm wondering what your thoughts are on this
so please if anyone has ideas to help me understand this better, that'll will really be helpful . Thanks

Reply 1

Mathsman4Life

This is how I understood the question:

Your vocabulary can limit what you learn in that it's hard to understand something if the terminology eludes you. For example, if you were to look at a maths problem asking you to take the derivative of a function, but did not know what "taking the derivative" means, then you won't be able to do the problem. This is a totally different issue than knowing what it means and just not grasping the concept.

Reply 2

The Man of the Hour

I'd read about different conceptions of language. Look up Ludwig Wittgenstein's works, maybe a bit of Rousseau in On the Origin of Inequality , maybe a bit of Foucault.

Think about physics and mathematical language as well. How is it different from say, the English language?

But also think about what language means to you. How do you use it in your IB CAS activities or in your coursework? Is it a limitation? Or is it just the rules that enable "the fun"...almost like a board game? IE: if there was no Jail in Monopoly, would the game be as fun? Let your own evaluations on language come clear while you take in mind the views of other philosophers.

Now for undermining the question...the question assumes that language actually COMMUNICATES knowledge in the slightest. To me, that's a very rock solid claim so undermine it with EXTREME caution. I guess I would say that the wording itself is not correct...language is a representation. For example, Edward Said would say that we REPRESENT the Orient, for as Marx would put it "they cannot represent themselves!" Language is not truth in terms of knowledge-- it is a DESCRIPTION of events that we isolate into "human beings" and different points of action. Think of physics problems-- we assume one velocity at the beginning, one at the end and find out the distance. We make ASSUMPTIONS so we can solve the question. Think about the English language-- "The lightning flashes." This presupposes, to Nietzsche, that there is a separate entity called the lightning that THEN flashes. He would claim the doer and doing are intimately bound together. In other word, language is part of a more complex array of representations, not TRUTH itself. You should limit this to maybe two paragraphs at the end, and include references to how your everyday life experiences contradict the question in mention.

To me, that's not a bad question at all. I would restrict it to a couple of areas of knowledge and explicitly state the knowledge issues that the question brings up.

Reply 3

FiniteMr

Look into specialty fields - you will have no chance of learning a medical specialty if you don't know the medical words. However you can understand a layman's explanation of medical ideas. Two levels/ways of learning in one area of knowledge - YOU'RE WELCOME.