How Do We Know What We Think We Know Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

How Do We Know What We Think We Know - Essay ExampleMost of us get our daily news from a variety of sources. At peerless time, these sources were limited to perhaps one of three nightly news programs and/or one of a few available newspapers. Everyone essentially articulate or heard the same thing. Today, news is available everywhither, from serious news programs to satire comedy to net income web pages to Twitter text messages. What holds true for our general news also holds true for what we think of scientific news. New approaches, policies, and inventions are quickly reported on and then were off to a new topic. If theyve managed to arrogate our attention at all, we always reach the option of Googling for them during the commercial breaks and are then at the kindness of the search engine spiders, delivering ranked results based on the highest bidder or the most popular. What we know about the ball of science today is largely based on where we get our information from. This, in turn, strongly influences our decisions when select in elections, when choosing to support various non-profit or beginning businesses, and in shaping our overall view of the piece and where its heading. Yet how do we know that information is correct? What is it about the way that the news is conveyed that inclines us we have been given the truth? In order to resist naive belief and make better decisions for ourselves and the orb at large, we need to carefully examine the scientific stories we read, such as those which warn of globose warming, as a means of understanding the various ways journalists use words to shape our understanding. The problem of global warming has been written about since at least the 1970s, but it is starting to gain some grease in more recent years as evidence becomes harder to deny or refute. For example, an article in the New York Times published in March 2012 uses enclosures that make it clear the author is even so trying to convince his readers that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity and provided provide few options as to what else might be contributing to the evidence found. The evidence that the author is attempting to convince his audience is found in the second sentence of the article Warnings from the scientific community are comme il faut louder, as an increasing body of science points to rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gases - produced mainly by the electrocution of fossil fuels and forests. Not only does the author squarely place blame on human-related greenhouse gases, leaving no room for argument or other possibilities, the sources of these gases are specifically named, further removing any incident for argument. While it is possible that the author simply chose this form of expression as a means of presently identifying his topic in keeping with Grices (1975) maxim of quantity, to provide just as much information as necessary to make the meaning cle ar, it also reveals evidence of previous conversation. For example, it is not necessarily important that the term human-related be included in the above-quoted sentence to remain in accord with Grices maxim, yet the inclusion here suggests either recency (Garrod and Anderson, 1987), in that the author may have been recently discussing the issue.