Theme 1 Reflection

As a personal summary of our first theme, I could easily make the statement, "I now know more than I did before," but this may be a bit simplistic. Since our first meeting we have now had two seminars and one lecture, and these events have begun what I believe to be our slow awakening to improved theoretical writing and understanding.
Concerning theoretical writing, there is no better place to begin than philosophy, and so we began our course literature with Bertrand Russel. When first we wrote about our adventure into his text, we reflected on several questions posed by our presenter, and have now had time and help to reflect on these questions. As this is a reflection, I must draw attention to some important distinctions made in our seminar which we misunderstood originally: assignment question 2 asks about "proposition" and "Statement of fact." In our small seminar group we had understood this question as requiring us to differentiate between these two concepts. Professor Dahlberg however corrected us and described these two concepts as being the same thing. Our group had agreed that a proposition was, "a unique fact, based upon knowledge by description without personal experience," where a statement of fact is, "based upon knowledge by direct experience and concerns precise information." It may be important now to amend these definitions and try and produce one solid concept, but where is the error, or, difference we had created? I believe that the error enters in the definition of a proposition, that it is knowledge by description without personal experience. I will now assume I could make a definition of them both: proposition and statement of fact can be thought of as the same form of information, a unique fact based upon knowledge either of experience or direct experience, concerning precise information.
This modest definition can also be imagined in the category of  a new piece of information Professor Dahlberg presented for us in our seminar yesterday, that, "In order to have knowledge you must first have mediation to describe what is in your mind, you must have a statement..." (I hope this paraphrase does justice to the idea). So I have just described, through mediation what is in my mind using a statement, in an attempt to produce or spread knowledge. Philosophy in action! And guess what: by writing this I have just changed reality in a very slight way. Needless to say, our first Theme in DM 2572 has been deep as we traveled back 2000 years to the roots of modern analytic philosophy, in our attempt to properly consider the question, "what is knowledge?" At least we have a start, and even though we may never reach the end of this argument in our studies, at least we have a foundational idea of it we can utilize in our own research.