Theme 1 - reflections

In this blog post I am supposed to post my reflections on theme 1. We have had two seminars and one lecture.

I have learned about the term Impact Factor, and I can see now why this can be useful in the future to find relevant journals with relevant papers. I have learned that there are a lot of different journals out there, and most of them have an impact factor of 1 or above.

We had a lecture by Leif which was supposed to be a kind of crash course in philosophy. I don’t really know if I know more now or before the lecture. The lecture started with the question “what is knowledge?”. Leif brought up the term “justification” and “justified true belief”. I have studied some logic, but this kind of made me more confused. It might have to do with that the lecture was held at three in the afternoon and I was tired. I think it will be a good idea for me to look at the lecture slides again.

We read the book The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel. It was interesting but a but hard to read for me as an engineering student I think. It is impressive that it was written 100 years ago. On Wednesday's seminar we discussed the book. Leif started by talking a bit about the book and about Bertrand. He mentioned a scene from Monty Python where philosophers are playing football. He said something like “to make philosophers try to learn playing football is as hard as to make engineers try to learn philosophy”. I agree to that in a way.

Theme 1

I have chosen the research paper “Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, Not Self-Idealization”. The paper was published in the journal “Psychological Science”, which has an impact factor of 4.431, in 2010. The paper is about a research on how people present themselves on online social networking sites (OSNs) such as Facebook. There are two main theories discussed in the paper. The first one is that people use OSN profiles to create and communicate idealized selves. According to this idealized virtual-identity hypothesis, profile owners display idealized characteristics that do not reflect their actual personalities. The second theory discussed is that OSNs may constitute an extended social context in which to express one’s actual personality characteristics, thus fostering accurate interpersonal perceptions. The results of the research suggest that people are not using their OSN profiles to promote an idealized virtual identity. Instead, OSNs might be an efficient medium for expressing and communicating real personality, which may help explain their popularity.

The journal i have chosen is JASIST, or Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. JASIST has an impact factor of 2.317. It has a monthly frequency of issues and the first issue was published in 1950. The journal publishes original research and rapid communications generally falling in these categories:

• Theory of Information Science
• Communications
• Management, Economics, and Marketing
• Applied Information Science
• Social and Legal Aspects of Information

Answers to the questions about Bertrand Russels text The Problems of Philosophy:

Sense-data are the things that are immediately known in sensation: such things as colours, sounds, smells, hardnesses, roughnesses, and so on. He introduces sense-data to distinguish between appearances and reality.

Proposition is a claim that is based on sense data about an object without knowing the said object in person. A proposition can be either true or false. The statement of fact is statements about particular objects/facts, not the idea of them. The belief is true when it corresponds to the fact, and it is false if it doesn't.

A phrase of the form 'a so-and-so' Russell shall call an 'ambiguous' description; a phrase of the form 'the so-and-so' (in the singular) Russell shall call a 'definite' description. Thus 'a man' is an ambiguous description, and 'the man with the iron mask' is a definite description.

Some of the main points in Russell’s presentation are that true beliefs can’t be identified as knowledge when they are reasoned from false beliefs. Another point is that knowledge isn’t a particular notion, it’s more likely a possible opinion. You can also say that coherent opinions are more likely to be true than anyone of them would be separately.