Evaluating and reflecting upon Theme 1

This week's topic was a nice change of mindset compared to the general coursework of KTH. Firstly, I appreciated the sections about knowledge and "truths". I believe academia, and business not to say the least, to often be quite black and white when it comes to knowledge. Knowledge is mostly taken for granted in an absolute fashion that is not often questioned. Reading through Russell's takes on the matter was like a puff of fresh air onto my otherwise quite absolute-truth-minded face. Before reading the text, I somewhat viewed science as some sort of collection of thruths based on the collection of some sort of evidence. I do now believe that you can illustrate the collected science more like a massive research project where smaller or bigger research contributions add to the total science consensus. 

My views have therefore not entirely changed, but I believe it is important to illustrate science more like a collection of evidence rather than a collection of truths. Evidence can always be referred to as evidence, and be argued for being so. A truth may however be relative, and even more "relatively absolute" to a person in question. I do therefore believe that there may emerge several issues when discussion truths rather than discussing evidence. I also think that you can more easily accept that evidence may change over time (as we discover new ways and numbers in research) rather than truth changes as well. With all this been said, I want to point out that the text did of course not change my belief in science - i believe it is the way to go in order to explain our environment and reality. Russell did however make me come to some epiphanies regarding terminology through his text.

To build further upon these thoughts, I also thought his takes on sense-data enriched the idea that the word "truth" is somewhat problematic. At least you have to know that a truth is relative to peoples perspective, values and so forth. That may be hard and irritating for us engineer students to take in, but it may be valuable. This is also a topic that I brought up in my last blog post.

I believe it was a good methodology to answer a couple of questions regarding key parts of the text. That certainly made me dig deeper into these parts and contemplate on topics that I otherwise would have probably just swept by. As known, we sadly did not have the chance to discuss these and other interesting topics in the seminar- since there wasn't any. But I read a couple of other blog posts and I actually got a bit inspired by several people who had made interesting parallels between Russells thoughts and our daily life. Mostly parallels with our daily life as university engineering students that is.