8. What knowledge claims can you make about what you just saw?
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Hinweis der Redaktion
These activities should take about 45 minutes - 1 hour. The aim of the tasks is to get students to think about what they know and how they know it, 2. Start to understand what a Justified True Belief is. 3. Start using the term “knowledge claim” 4.start to understand the “problems of knowledge”
Students can do this exercise in groups of 3-4 Students can recount what they see and what they hear, (Sensory Perception is ONE of the WOK). If they make knowldege claims like “terrorists hijacked the planes” - ask how they know? They CAN’T know just from seeing and hearing the film clip.
If they make knowldege claims like “terrorists hijacked the planes” - ask how they know? They CAN’T know just from seeing and hearing the film clip. The class should come up with a range of things, e.g. It is a scene from a bad movie. It is a computer animation It is a news report of and accident. The idea is to make them really think about what they CAN know just from looking at the clip. We assume a lot of knowledge, based on surrounding information, but this is not always reliable.
This might include: Seeing Hearing. It cannot include prior knowledge, etc. This should engender a discussion about how hard it is to make decisions or be confident of the accuracy of a knowledge claim when we only have limited ways of gathering information. What are the dangers of this?
This should provide more answers (hopefully), although there will probably be some variations from group to group. Share and compare. Discuss students’ responses.
This should provide a much longer list. E.g. I read about it (knowldeg by authority - but some newspapers might be a more reliable authority than others!) Everyone says that… (urban legend - not necessarily true, but a claim that is widespread - often spread by internet these days) My teacher told me … (knowldeg by authority - but be careful of authority worship!) Group consensus - but is this a guarantee Intuition - I just feel that I’m right (but is this a guarantee either?)
In contrast to the first clip, students can provide any knowledge they believe they have (knowledge claims) There should be some variation, including those who might doubt that the moon landing ever took place - well can we be sure?
How can we be sure? Was anyone else there? Did anyone collect evidence? How do we know the “footprint” wasn’t made in a tray of dust in a Holywood studio? What methods, if any, do we have for verifying Armstrong’s claim that he walked on the moon? Should we believe film / photos? Did anyone have anyhtign to gain by being “the first on the moon”? - if so, wouldn’t that encourage them to falsify the evidence to support their claims? In which subjects might the manipulation of evidence be a particular problem? (actually any, really, although it is probably harder to do it in maths than history, for example.) Classic case for the sciences - the Korean doctor who claimed he had cloned human babies…
Try doing a JTB with a fairly sound claim to start with: e.g. Boiling water burns human skin. Most will believe it! You can justify it with examples of burns victims etc It is true beyond reasonable doubt because you can use “scientific method” to demonstrate it. Alternatively, choose a student from the class (or students) and make a claim about them - e.g. X is taller than Y. *****Students need to copy the steps of the JTB into their journals as they will need to come back to this idea frequently in the future.*****
Get students to do this in groups, then each group can share one JTB that they worked on, whether it is a JTB or not a JTB is worht discussing. This should lead on to looking at the differences between Information, Knowledge and Belief.