Monday, October 29, 2007

Descriptive vs Acquaintence

Does Descriptive Knowledge always turn into Acquaintence Knowledge? For example, anti-drug ads. (My internet's down, so I'm using Katie's login).

Elizabeth

8 comments:

Dani said...

Maybe its because I just woke up, but can you explain the anti-drug ad connection?

katrina337 said...

I was wondering about that as well, actually. An explanation would be helpful :)

Anna said...

I think that descriptive knowledge usually does turn into acquaintance knowledge, as we are constantly influenced by the ideas and viewpoints presented around us. With an anti-drug advertisement, the commercial brings up knowledge typically justified by consensus and authority. Once we've digested the information in the advertisement, we are familiar with its claims and are more likely to accept these opinions as our own, matching our beliefs with those held by the society around us.

katrina337 said...

That would depend on how open you are to peer pressure though, wouldn't it? I mean, for someone who doesn't feel any (or very little) peer pressure, they wouldn't care about the authority and consensus of such ads. And with the anti-drug ads, it seems that there are an increasing number of them around, but isn't there also an increasing number of drug addicts? Especially with people who have un-diagnosed mental disorders who turn to drugs to cope?

shilpa said...

Going off what Katrina said, I do see the connection between peer pressure and the anti-drug commercials. I also think that the anti-drug commercials might indirectly encourage some people to do drugs because, in a way, the more you are told to not do something, the more you will want to do it. Although this doesn't apply to everyone, some people do fall under this category.

shilpa said...

Now, going back to Elizabeth's question, I do think that whether or not descriptive knowledge turns into acquaintance knowledge is totally dependent upon the situation. For instance, in India there are occassionally movements which take place to protest against certain political agendas. The groups which conduct these protests are fairly large and so there is a lot of consensus to back up the protest. However, the descriptive knowledge, which in this case is the group's justification for protesting, takes a while for me to accept as acquaintance knowledge until I see properly justified reasons for why the group is protesting. If the group doesn't provide enough explanation for their reasoning, the descriptive knowledge usually doesn't turn into acquaintance knowledge. Therefore, the situtation determines whether or not descriptive knowledge can be acquaintance knowledge.

shilpa said...

One way to look at this is that in order for descriptive knowledge to become acquaintance knowledge, the individual obtaining the acquaintance knowledge has to perceive the descriptive knowledge through experience. What I mean by this is, for example, someone might hear that alcohol is bad for them. However, until they try it and they get a hangover or something, can they really testify that it is bad for them? This doesn't ntecessarily have to be the case though, if research is involved. If you're going off of the alcohol example, saying something like "alcohol is bad for my liver because I read this article from a credible database" then I would think this knowledge can thus be classified as acquaintance.
Brooke (on Shilpa's account because her computer hates her)

Rebecca said...

I'm going to try and make your brains hurt, now. Can we really consider our acquaintance knowledge as really being ours? When we're raised from birth we're brought up on a combination of the acquaintance knowledge of our parents and the descriptive knowledge of the society (roughly speaking). Then eventally we get to a point where we siphon through all this noise we're taking in from outside, pick out the stuff we like, and then form our own acquaintance knowledge. Does any of that really come from us or are we just buckets full of knowledge that others have already decided for us? That probably made more sense in my head than it will to you guys, but we'll see how it goes.