2007-01-26
How commerce and fashion influence our understanding?
First of all, I would like to say that fallacies are very closely related with our own lives. I think that one of the most frequent fallacies of nowadays is how we pay attention to all fashionable and new things. The idea that new things are better than older ones is closely related with commerce. If you look to advertisements, you will hear everybody saying that you must have these new clothes, furniture, electronics or food products. It’s natural to buy the newest, the most fashionable clothes every season or to buy new Nokia just because it’s newly designed. And I don’t see anything wrong when novelty is related with quality, but I think that nowadays our society is just crazy about buying all new staff and trying to do everything that is new and fashionable.
2007-02-05
The more you read history, the more opinions you find out.
During history lessons we are supposed to read from two or sometimes more different books. The teacher says that studying from various sources would let us form our personal opinion about historical events.
Meanwhile, I thought that studying from different books would just give me more facts, more events, which I will be able to use while making my own generalisation. I thought that main evaluation should be the same in these sources, because they represent the nowadays view to history. But while preparing for my present history essay I found very different opinions about some things. They were not just small evaluation of some tiny events or facts, but whole evaluation of historical personality. I didn’t think that one book was right and other wrong. I just found that it is very important to keep your own opinion in history and to know how to support it with facts. It’s good to find different points of view, because you can compare them and than make your own generalization.
It’s hard to evaluate history, you always have to find strong evidence to your statements. I believe there is one big difference between history and such as Areas of Knowledge like mathematics or natural sciences. In mathematics we can prove things, whereas in history we can have our own opinion.
2007-02-15
Commercials nowadays
While I was thinking what to write for my TOK journal I saw a television commercial about “PZU Lietuva”. Jasikevicius says that one way to achieve something is working hard and being devoted, he claims that you must take care of lots of things and you shouldn’t be afraid of taking responsibility of yourself and your team at the right time. But how an insurance company is related with a basketball player and these kind of words? We can see that nowadays everything is being done in order to attract more people. It is obvious that Jasikevicius achieved everything not because he chose “PZU Lietuva”, because when he was already playing basketball there was no such company, but in the commercial it is said like this. So we can see that there are illogical situations in the television. However, people believe or they don’t even try to think if it is true or not.
