Theme 1, pre-week insight

Let's keep this brief as possible: First, I have found a peer review journal with a decent impact factor called Media Psychology. This journal is devoted to research in the blend of psychology and media communication. Most importantly for the uses of this class it examines, "...the psychological antecedents and consequences of communicating via mass media (television), telecommunications media (computer networks), and personal media (multimedia)..."
Moving on: The article I dug up comes from a journal called International Political Sociology. This journal may not be geared toward our class topic, but the article is. Entitled, Graphic “Heart of Darkness”: Two Visions of Current Affairs Comics, this article presented a wonderful argument concerning the usefulness, controversy and impact of comic and graphic novel platforms in modern media and societal discourse nestled inside a metaphor of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. With notable examples like Art Spiegel's MAUS and Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, Marie Thorsten provides lucid and accurate evidence of this impactful and articulate art form and it's use and ability to provide information to the public in unique and meaningful ways.

On to Bertrand Russel:
by introducing "Sense Data" Russel begins his early argument to first discount our senses and understand them to be philosophically untrustworthy as they attempt to represent reality to our minds.  A proposition in essence is a hesitant statement of supposition, or one that relies on other factors for verification, where a "statement of fact," is a clear comment by an individual of a concise principle or observation which they believe to be accurate. These phrases differ from other forms of speech in that they refer to specific measured responses, in a graduated, measurable way.

To discuss "definite description:" this term, basically, relates a non-ambiguous description of some specific form idea. instead of "a something" it is "THE something." This method of description is essential to proper understanding and communication in both science and philosophy.

In closing a final note about Russel's main points when considering problems of epistemology: the relationship between derivative knowledge and intuitive knowledge, and how their reliability is effected by doubt. Methods of discovering self-evident truths can be relied upon yet this is also not completely reliable because of the complex natures of "facts." To greatly simplify things, Russel goes on to state the fragmentary nature of facts and our quest for true knowledge. Since modern science and philosophy can discount earlier models of the understood universe, we seem to be left with only pieces of reality to draw our conclusions from since a grand overarching view has been proven scientifically unreliable.  Logic can diverge from experience, as can our logical reasoning of it.