Humanities Knowledge

           It's often hard to discuss the topic on "bad people," because what really is bad? Is it their past that makes them bad? Is it their actions? Intentions? Thoughts? In any way, there seems to always be an exception for why people are bad or do bad things. Just as discussed in class in correlation to the video of Breaking Bad with Walter White, I see that he does certain things that I do consider as bad. For example, he produces and sells meth in a partnership with a businessman in drug dealing and he lies about what he does by keeping it away from his wife and family. However, if we try to see it from his perspective and see that he is doing it to provide wealth to support his family when he dies and he's doing it to benefit the family, then it's not entirely "bad." In any case, there are always exceptions.

            Another topic we focused on this week was linguistics. Here, we see another version of how humans can be bad besides from merely physical action. Language is a very powerful thing and as we watched in class, Pulp Fiction, for example, Jules Winnfield used a great deal of swearing to get his point across and to emphasize his emotions. This leads to the question, does swearing make a person bad? What if it's a better way to express yourself? According to Bowers and Pleydell-Pearce in "Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity," there was a research where participants would read a curse word aloud and with electrodermal activity measuring their autonomic activity, they found that the swear words made their autonomic responses to those words were larger than to neutral stimuli. There was another study where eight words including euphemisms, were given to volunteers and their responses were recorded according to seconds of their reaction from seeing the actual curse word, than from "the-f word." It was noted that through those studies, the participants who saw the word "f-word" was less stressed than from seeing the actual curse word. Like discussed in class, the ones who saw the actual curse word felt angry and possessed negative emotions than from seeing "the f-word."
         

  Euphemisms, a similar and less harsh way of saying a word, has the affect on people where they can read it and be less angered by it. Some groups of people, however, prefer to use actual swearing words in their own group called, anti-society. Anti-societies are a group of people who emerged away from the original society to be different and have their own dominance and power-ground. This is the group that uses swearing as natural vocabulary and most of the time can be viewed as "bad." Those people who interact with one another in their anti-society can also be viewed as bad because they influence each other wit that negative language. The original society however isn't viewed as bad because they don't use that language and therefore have "good" people. As Montgomery mentioned in Chapter 5: "Anti-Language," "the anti-society has an antagonist relationship with society at large and their natural suspicion of outsiders make it difficult to study their language..."
         

"Introduction to Language and Society." Goodreads. Montgomery Martin, n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.

Knowledge Inventory and Reflection

           As discussed in class, the idea of knowledge is very much inquiry-based because there is no consensus on what knowledge actually is. According to Duncan Pritchard's article on "What is Knowledge," he explains that as something that is proven, a mere fact, and propositional. We've focused on two types of beliefs so far: mere true belief and true belief. Although very similar, they
differentiate in meaning where true belief requires actual proof and is in fact, true, and mere true belief is a result by chance. Secondhand knowledge, for example, is a mere true belief because it may be information not given from a reliable source and there is no experimental evidence. For instance, if I hear from a friend that there is a sale at my favorite shop at the mall, it could be false fact because there is no actual documentation or proof that there is in fact a sale at the mall. Another example of mere true belief is a personal opinion. For instance, if I believe that the cake my mom made is good, it may not be good for others. Often times people base their knowledge off of personal opinion and close off the opinions of others because they think only what they know themselves.
            This brings us to the topic of a theme-based knowledge that we discussed in class, which is 'what makes humans bad'? If someone thinks different from another person, they're likely to believe only what they know and naturally think that the other person is wrong simply because it isn't what they think. So we come to wonder, does that make a person bad? This is a question that can go both ways, whether a person perceives that as a trait of being bad or not. Much of our knowledge comes from perception and we do that by using our senses. The way we experience the world is not just by influences of the objects and experience around us, but is also developed by our own perceptive process and how we take things in. And this makes us wonder, do we as humans actually know anything at all. Can everything be filled with illusions and philosophical skepticism or do we actually know? The truth is, we don't actually have the answers to these questions, however, epistemology's varying theories can help explain the sources of knowledge and the veracity of what we consider truth.

            During class discussions, we focused our minds on thinking whether humans are good or bad (nature vs. nurture) and expanded our perceptions on how we view this topic. Based off of personal knowledge from experience, I believe that a human being is bad when they go out of their way to hurt someone else or affect them in a negative way either physically or emotionally. In other words, I believe that a human becomes bad when their actions or intentions are. In agreement to John Locke's essay, I believe that a human is naturally born like a white paper- blank and without any ideas. However, I think that as humans start to grow up, they grow up with very selfish tendencies such as not sharing with others because they only focus on self need. As children, they naturally want all the candies to themselves and not want to share with any one of their siblings. In this way, others may be affected or hurt because someone else is acting completely selfish and only focusing on benefitting themselves. Selfishness to me, is a form of what makes humans bad.

Pritchard, Duncan. "Some Preliminaries." What Is This Thing Called Knowledge?London: Routledge, 2006. N. pag. Print.