We started our day with some presentations about the books we read over the summer break.

They were all related to knowledge but focused on a variety of aspects (from the different areas of our brain to bad science and logical works of art) and served as a basis for the topics we discussed later on.

Then we learned to differentiate between ability and propositional knowledge as well as between shared and personal knowledge.

By solving quizzes and taking IAT-tests we realised that our perspective has a big influence on how we perceive reality and we became aware of how biased we sadly are.

It was amazing to see how the notion of knowledge changed depending on the so-called communities of knowers. Besides, when it came to ethics, the “most ethically justifiable decision” varied depending on the “map” we used to make our decision. This greatly illustrated the fluidity of knowledge and the absence of an absolute truth.

The next question we asked ourselves was “(How) can we be sure about what we know?” and we explored the notion of knowledge with the help of the 12 concepts. Out of these we picked the concept of reasoning and looked at it in more detail. Interestingly, reasoning inductively and deductively is one of the many things we do naturally without even realizing it. Hypothetical reasoning in turn is a method widely used in scientific processes. Then, in order to apply our creative reasoning, we were given some riddles to solve, which was quite fun.

Finally, we had a look at false reasoning, which can lead to funny fallacies and occurs more often in everyday life than we would have expected.
 

Léna & Carolina, 5i