User:JREverest/sandbox/Approaches to Knowledge/Seminar group 1/Possible Chapter Titles

Disciplinary Categories

The Development of the School Curricula

Advantages and disadvantages of the classification within the library

Evidence

Manipulation of evidence and its effects within different disciplines

Qualitative evidence and its uses within the disciplines

Truth

Subjective vs. Objective Truth

Subjective Truth

Subjective truth is a belief with passionate or personal perception. It is different from objective truth which is often regarded as scientific. However, it is not equal to irrationality or superstition. Alternatively some positivists indicate that the subjective truth is a commitment with the absence of 'objective uncertainty'. For example, the belief in God is a subjective truth. Subjective truth is also individual experience. One of the classical cases is the colour vision. People can tell the what colour the object is, but cannot be accurate, as colour is a media between subjective perception and the knowledge of the outside world. Subjective truth is not limited to religion. It is an indispensable component of knowledge in different disciplines such as psychology and economics.

Objective Truth

Objective truth refers to the impartiality, neutrality and rationality in forming conclusions. Often universally accepted, it is based vastly upon critical thinking, scientific and mathematical evidence, where such truth is indisputable and there is only one true answer.

It is challenged by the idea of relativism which suggests context alters truth, however the notion of universal knowledge is not dependent on the context, e.g. 'Water boils at 100°C'. In theory, an objective truth always exists, especially in maths, science and philosophy, as errors and progress synchronously work toward the end goal of truth discovery.

Objective Truth in AI

The current paramount significance of AI is not to be neglected. Neural Networking Machine Learning

Issues and Contradictions

Considering both the objective and subjective truth within AI it should be noted that the two are interconnected. REF. Whilst AI is mathematical and based entirely in logic, some ethical decisions cannot be boiled down to one thing or another, or a 1 and a 0. REF. In these cases, events where AI would need to make a decision that could be considered ethical, it cannot truly be objective. REF.

For example, in recruitment AI could be seen to make a more objective decision REF, as it would have none of the unconscious bias' that traditional interviewers or selection processes have. REF. However, it has been seen that AI can predict characteristics or illness before the interviewee even knows about them REF. This knowledge can then affect the decision as to whether to hire or not - based on how likely they are to get pregnant, be off ill etc. REF. Obviously these features can be accounted for and turned off/coded out but if a business was looking to optimise it's work force, AI could be used to justify have a skewed workforce in favour particularly of men and physically and mentally healthy people ie. that it is all cost saving - despite there being research to suggest that a diverse and balanced workforce can lead to more productivity. REF.

Additionally, AI can have biases coded into it. The most notable example is facial recognition software recognising images of black women. REF. In the majority of cases black women are identified as men and there is a strong suggestion that this is down to unconscious bias from the majority of engineers and computer scientists being male and white REF.

As has been discussed, AI struggles to be truly objective when presented with problems that have ethical questions tied to them REF. From an interdisciplinary point of view, when facing ethical issues with AI it is important to be methodical and mathematical to avoid unconscious bias but it is also important to consider the wider implications of having AI make certain decisions, particularly ones involving human lives, either literally through self-driving cars and the trolley problem REF or through the social impact of the decision, like selection criteria for a job.

Economics

Apart from the urging desire of territorial expansion, there was also an economic rivalry that existed between the Great Powers before World War I. In Britain, many discussed about the threat which German firms represented to the traditional British primacy in Europe. Amongst them, the author Ernest Edwin Williams published a book called ‘Made in Germany’ in 1986, in which he warned that England’s industrial supremacy was staggering to its fall, and according to him, this was largely due to the challenge which German competition represented to British business. In fact, after World War I, some historians had even suggested that Britain had seized the opportunity represented by the July crisis in 1914, only to precipitate a war against its chief economic rival in Europe, and thus to remove a threat to its own commercial primacy. While on the one hand, businessmen whose profits were directly threatened by German firms sounded like the most alarming, on the other hand, those who profited from dealings with Germany showed a lot of enthusiasm and eagerly pointed out the benefits of mutual trade. After all, the economic relation between these two nations was not a zero-sum game in which, for one to prosper, the other had to lose. As a matter of fact, Britain relied on Germany as much as it was threatened by it. German customers represented Britain’s second largest export market after the United States. But while businessmen were worried at the prospect of foreign competition, they were even more afraid about the general collapse in trade that the war would bring about. This was the case for the so-called ‘Merchants of death’, with arms manufacturers such as Schneider Creusot in France or Škoda in Austro-Hungary. These firms made considerable amounts of money through contracts with their governments to produce battleships, guns and other weapons of war. But they also prospered by selling armaments to foreign powers. Moreover, they were well-aware that whatever short-term profits would be made by war time, contracts would be more than offset by the loss of overseas markets due to the general disruption in trade caused by war. There was then, little enthusiasm amongst businessmen for war in 1914. Indeed, when for the first time since it had been established in 1801, the British government closed the London stock exchange on July the 31st 1914, there was panic among investors who were worried that they would be ruined by a general collapse of the world financial system. A delegation of investors even went to see David Lloyd Judge, the British treasury minister, imploring him to keep the United Kingdom out of any continental conflict. After the war, Loyd Judge wrote in his memoirs ‘There are those who pretend to believe that this was a war intrigued, organized and dictated by financiers who ascribed our actions in 1914 to the irritation produced by a growing jealousy of Germany's strength and prosperity. It is a foolish and ignorant libel to call this a financiers war’. In fact, money was a frightened and trembling thing. Money suffered the prospect of war.