Theme 1 – Theory of science - Reflection

 This week we were supposed to have a seminar to discuss the theme of the week. The seminar got cancelled and instead I read a few of my classmates blogposts to fill the gap, since I’m supposed to learn something every week that I can reflect over.

It feels like everyone answered the questions more or less the same. Most of us wrote similar answers to the first question What does Russell mean by "sense data" and why does he introduce this notion? So that didn’t give me any new information that I didn’t know of from before. It just made me surer of that I understood the question and the text I read last week. When it came to the second question What is the meaning of the terms "proposition" and "statement of fact"? How does propositions and statement of facts differ from other kinds of verbal expressions? I realized that many of us interpreted the text differently than some other, and some also gave examples of how a proposition could go from being a proposition to a statement of fact. A negative thing by reading other blog posts and not having a seminar is that I feel like many of the posts haven’t been though through before handing it in. Other blog posts are really good too. In a seminar everyone has the opportunity to argue why they wrote things and can give explanations straight away and other peers can share their point of view and together we can all learn from each other. I feel like it’s hard to learn something from the other blog posts since I feel like I can’t trust the sources (haha!).

I can connect this with chapter 5 Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description in Russell’s book. Knowledge by Acquaintance in this case can be seen as when I read the book last week since I got the information straight from the source, which was Russell’s book. This week when I read the other classmates’ blog posts that gave me Knowledge by Description, since it’s all descriptions. But maybe I should also question if I should see reading the book as Knowledge by Acquaintance, since the book already is a description.

I don’t really have that much to reflect about since I feel like I didn’t learn that much since I wrote the last blog post. But I’m looking forward to get the chance to have a seminar next week, to get some feedback and discussion about next week’s theme.