Question 6: Faced with a vast amount of information, how do we select what is significant for the acquisition of knowledge? Discuss with reference to the natural sciences and one other area of knowledge
Guiding Questions
Where do we get our information from?
Textbooks? The internet? Other people?
“Significant”
What stands out to us? What is correct?
How would we know what to choose and what to ignore?
What is the risk of only taking select few sources?
If we wanted to could we even go through every source? Might this even be necessary?
Might having so much information mean we can get closer to the truth, or just confuse us?
What are the ways we use to check our sources? In the age of the internet, false information can be so powerful, could it drown out the truth?
If we are trapped by our own biases in certain silos of the internet and the information we consume, could we ever even know what other perspectives there might have been.
AOKs: 1 must be the natural sciences, and the other could be the human sciences, history, art
Question Analysis
Once again this is a question on the acquisition of knowledge so it might be easier to discuss more on the aspects of the users of knowledge rather than the producers.
For the question, a quick start would be to look into all the sources of information that we have access to and consume (e.g., the internet, textbooks, other people). Next we should try to dissect the meaning of significance. It could potentially mean something that stands out (maybe even different from the rest) or something that is correct.
For your points, you will be discussing the selection process. You should look into how one chooses certain sources and ignores others (e.g. we usually would trust a textbook over a random website - is this a situation of credibility?). Other things to consider would be the risk of using fewer sources and how we know that what we have ignored is actually wrong. Perhaps one might then think that going through every source is safer, but then is this even necessary or possible in this day and age of the internet? (Imagine you have a million search results on a topic, would it be possible to go through everything? Would you just look at the top few results?)
This question would lead you to think about whether having more information allows us to get closer to the truth or whether it actually just re-emphasises our biases (e.g. algorithms on social media). Finally, now that we have so much information, does it make us more knowledgeable, or because there are so many possibilities, we end up being more confused?
AOKs: 1 must be the natural sciences, and the other could be the human sciences, history, art