Skip to main content

Home/ TOK@ISPrague/ Group items tagged criticism

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
markfrankel18

3quarksdaily: Is Wine Tasting Nonsense? - 1 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...is-winetasting-nonsense.html

TOK wine perception arts taste

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • If there is such a thing as real expertise in identifying the properties of a wine, then it must be possible to get it wrong.  If tastes, in general, were entirely subjective there would be no right answer to the question of whether, for instance, chocolate ice cream tastes of chocolate.  No one really thinks that. The fact that expert wine tasters get it wrong so often is evidence that wine tasting is harder than identifying the presence of chocolate in ice cream—not that it is utterly capricious. So tastes are not so entirely subjective that our experiences of them have no relationship to an object.
  • Furthermore, tasters can strive to eliminate environmental factors that have been shown to influence judgments about wine such as conversations, the style of music being played, and changes in the weather, etc. These are all factors that wine tasters can control by adjusting the environment in which they taste. Wine tasters, if they are to maintain credibility, must taste under the appropriate conditions. But that is no different from any other normative judgment we make. Our ability to make ethical judgments, for instance, is similarly influenced by environmental factors. We know (or should know) better than to make ethical judgments when we are excessively angry, fearful, under the influence of powerful desires, etc. Yet, it does not follow from the fact that ethical judgments can be influenced by irrelevant factors that all ethical judgments are subjective.
  • So the taste of wine (or anything else) is partly dependent on objective features of the world and partly dependent on how our view of those features has been shaped by past experience. The crucial question then is how much of a distorting lens is that past experience.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What is puzzling about this whole debate about the objectivity of wine critics, however, is why people want objective descriptions of wine. We don't expect scientific objectivity from art critics, literary critics, or film reviewers. The disagreements among experts in these fields are as deep as the disagreements about wine. There is no reason to think a film critic would have the same judgment about a film if viewed in a different context, in comparison with a different set of films, or after conversing about the film with other experts. Our judgments are fluid and they should be if we are to make sense of our experience. When listening to music aren't we differently affected by a song depending upon whether we are at home, in a bar, going to the beach, listening with friends or alone? Why would wine be different? The judgment of any critic is simply a snapshot at a particular time and place of an object whose meaning can vary with context. Wine criticism cannot escape this limitation.
  • What we want from critics whether of music, art, or wine is a judgment made in light of their vast experience that can show us something about the object that we might have missed without their commentary. That can be accomplished independently of whether the critic is perfectly consistent or objective. We want the critic to have a certain kind of bias, born of her unique experience, because it is that bias that enables her to taste, see, or hear what she does.
Lawrence Hrubes

Young Minds in Critical Condition - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-minds-in-critical-condition

criticism critical thinking education intelligence TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 May 14 - No Cached
  • Of course critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is becoming an endangered species of cultural life, as our nonstop, increasingly fractured technological existence wears down our receptive capacities.
markfrankel18

Scientific Pride and Prejudice - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tific-pride-and-prejudice.html

TOK psychology bias science arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The natural sciences often offer themselves as a model to other disciplines. But this time science might look for help to the humanities, and to literary criticism in particular.A major root of the crisis is selective use of data. Scientists, eager to make striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions
  • Despite the popular belief that anything goes in literary criticism, the field has real standards of scholarly validity.
  • In his 1960 book “Truth and Method,” the influential German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that an interpreter of a text must first question “the validity — of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.” However, “this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self.” Rather, “the important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias.” To deal with the problem of selective use of data, the scientific community must become self-aware and realize that it has a problem. In literary criticism, the question of how one’s arguments are influenced by one’s prejudgments has been a central methodological issue for decades.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Perhaps because of its self-awareness about what Austen would call the “whims and caprices” of human reasoning, the field of psychology has been most aggressive in dealing with doubts about the validity of its research.
markfrankel18

We have the Woodrow Wilson/P.C. debate all backwards: Protesters are forcing a debate P... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...on_has_whitewashed_for_decades

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Too often in our debates about freedom of speech, we assume that it already exists and that it is campus activists, particularly over questions of race, who threaten it. But what Princeton’s students have shown is that, before they came along, there was in fact precious little speech about figures like Wilson, and what speech there was, was mostly bland PR for tourists and prospective students. Even more important, Princeton’s students have shown us that it is precisely the kinds of actions they have taken — which are uncivil, frequently illegal and always unruly — that produce speech.
  • While my general approach to history is one of modulation — past imperfect, always — I’m leery of those who would say, against the students, don’t erase the past. I’m leery of these critics’ timing: if there’s any erasing going on here, it’s in the daily practices of Princeton. In those campus tours, those campus addresses, the general celebration of the man. Why haven’t we heard criticism of how the past is being erased by Princeton’s celebration of Wilson?I’m also leery of these critics’ assumptions that removing a name from a building is about erasing the past. As if once the name is gone, all conversation stops, all memory disappears.
Lawrence Hrubes

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | Talk Video | TED - 0 views

new.ted.com/...e_the_danger_of_a_single_story

TOK arts literature storytelling culture stereotypes TEDTalk

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 14
     
    "Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice - and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Democrac... - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/b03969vt

TOK arts judgment

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13
     
    "In the first of four lectures, recorded in front of an audience at Tate Modern in London, the artist Grayson Perry reflects on the idea of quality and examines who and what defines what we see and value as art. He argues that there is no empirical way to judge quality in art. Instead the validation of quality rests in the hands of a tightknit group of people at the heart of the art world including curators, dealers, collectors and critics who decide in the end what ends up in galleries and museums."
markfrankel18

The Knoedler and Company Rothko Fake, and Why We Get Taken in by Forgeries : The New Yo... - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...r-and-company-rothko-fake.html

arts TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • “If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight,” the art critic Blake Gopnik wrote in an essay, “In Praise of Art Forgeries,” in the Times last Sunday. It’s a cute argument that I reject, but which gets me thinking.
  • Well, because it’s not a “work” at all but a pastiche whose one and only intention is to deceive. Its maker—reportedly, a guy in a garage on Long Island—wasn’t concerned with emulating the historical Rothko but, instead, with mirroring the taste of present-day Rothko fanciers. Fakes are contemporary portraits of past styles. No great talent is required, just a modicum of handiness and some art-critical acuity. A forger needn’t master the original artist’s skill, only the look of it. Indeed, especially in a freewheeling mode like Abstract Expressionism, a bit of awkwardness, incidental to the branded appearance, may impress a smitten chump as a marker of sincerity—even as something new and endearing about a beloved master. Time destroys fakes by revealing features of the era—the climate of taste—in which they were made.
Lawrence Hrubes

A Dig Through Old Files Reminds Me Why I'm So Critical of Science | Cross-Check, Scient... - 1 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...-why-im-so-critical-of-science

TOK science skepticism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Nov 13
     
    "Arguably the biggest meta-story in science over the last few years-and one that caught me by surprise-is that much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is rotten. A pioneer in exposing this vast problem is the Stanford statistician John Ioannidis, whose blockbuster 2005 paper in PLOS Medicine presented evidence that "most current published research findings are false." Discussing his findings in Scientific American two years ago, Ioannidis writes: "False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. The problem is rampant in economics, the social sciences and even the natural sciences, but it is particularly egregious in biomedicine.""
markfrankel18

The Right to Write - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-right-to-write

TOK literature ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I sat on a panel once with another novelist and a distinguished African-American critic, to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The critic said, “Of course, as a white woman, Stowe had no right to write the black experience.” The other novelist said lightly, “No, of course not. And I had no right to write about 14th-century Scandinavians. Which I did.”
  • Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?
Lawrence Hrubes

What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-change-whats-in-a-name.html

TOK language science climate skepticism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • People who reject the findings of climate science are dismissed as “deniers” and “disinformers.” Those who accept the science are attacked as “alarmists” or “warmistas. ” The latter term, evoking the Sandinista revolutionaries of Nicaragua, is perhaps meant to suggest that the science is part of some socialist plot.
  • The petition asks the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, “skeptic,” and call them “climate deniers” instead. By Degrees A column by Justin Gillis about our changing climate. 3.6 Degrees of Uncertainty DEC 15 A Tricky Transition From Fossil Fuel NOV 10 Shining Star Power on a Crucial Subject SEP 22 In the Ocean, Clues to Change AUG 11 Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils JUL 7 See More » Climate scientists are among the most vocal critics of using the term “climate skeptic” to describe people who flatly reject their findings. They point out that skepticism is the very foundation of the scientific method. The modern consensus about the risks of climate change, they say, is based on evidence that has piled up over the course of decades and has been subjected to critical scrutiny every step of the way.
  • In other words, the climate scientists see themselves as the true skeptics, having arrived at a durable consensus about emissions simply because the evidence of risk has become overwhelming. And in this view, people who reject the evidence are phony skeptics, arguing their case by cherry-picking studies, manipulating data, and refusing to weigh the evidence as a whole.The petition asking the media to drop the “climate skeptic” label began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, he said, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - Selma and American Sniper: Is accuracy important? - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...6-do-films-need-to-be-accurate

TOK arts ethics history film narrative truth memory

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • One of the problems is that no narrative feature is going to be able to convey the absolute truth. Characters inevitably get conflated and information omitted.“I think if you have two hours to tell a story, you have to contract things, you have to make your point in ways that a documentary would make them differently,” says David Oyelowo, the British actor who portrays Martin Luther King Jr.
  • “We’re in the service of truth. Sometimes that obliges you to take shortcuts of poetic license. You’re obliged to do it. You can take too many liberties, you have to find a line between it all,” he says.
  • The other film caught up in all the mudslinging this year has been American Sniper, the story of US Navy Seal Chris Kyle, directed by Clint Eastwood. With this picture criticism has largely broken down along political lines, with liberals arguing that the movie glorifies killing, demeans Arabs and omits some less than flattering aspects of Kyle’s life. There has also been an effort by the film’s critics to point out that the Academy shouldn’t be celebrating a film about a soldier who reportedly described killing Iraqis as “fun”.The picture, which has been a huge box office success, has been strongly embraced by many conservatives who view it as a well-crafted and very moving portrait of a troubled but patriotic US soldier.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “I think it’s really a bit much to ask a film to 100% reproduce reality on screen when I think the average person in their own lives has a hard time remembering exactly how things happened even [about] lunch with someone a week ago,” says Foundas.
Lawrence Hrubes

Russian Artists Face a Choice: Censor Themselves, or Else - NYTimes.com - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...censor-themselves-or-else.html

arts ethics censorship

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • After a law went into effect last summer banning obscenities in public performances, the playwright and director Ivan Vyrypaev excised the curse words from one of his plays, “The Drunks,” for its Russian debut at the prestigious Moscow Art Theater. Some actors played the new version straight, he said, while others winked to make clear what was cut.
  • During Soviet times, “At least we knew the rules,” said Irina Prokhorova, a publisher and vocal critic of the government. “This is a little bit different, because there are no rules, no official censorship.” Ms. Prokhorova likened the climate to the 1930s, when the Nazis labeled art degenerate. “This is aesthetic fundamentalism,” she said. The law on religious believers is particularly slippery. “Who are those believers? What do they believe in? No one talks about this,” she added.
  • Unlike the average English-language expletive thrown into everyday conversation, in Russian, cursing resonates as extremely crude; it has its own grammar and is never used in polite conversation. It is not uncommon for some older theatergoers to gasp when curses are uttered onstage.
markfrankel18

Paul Bloom: The Case Against Empathy : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130520crat_atlarge_bloom

ToK Ethics psychology empathy

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 May 13 - Cached
  • Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an “affective revolution.” There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We’ve learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others. Other researchers are exploring how empathy emerges in chimpanzee and other primates, how it flowers in young children, and the sort of circumstances that trigger it.
  • Rifkin calls for us to make the leap to “global empathic consciousness.” He sees this as the last best hope for saving the world from environmental destruction, and concludes with the plaintive question “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avoid planetary collapse?”
  • This enthusiasm may be misplaced, however. Empathy has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an “affective revolution.” There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We’ve learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others. Other researchers are exploring how empathy emerges in chimpanzee and other primates, how it flowers in young children, and the sort of circumstances that trigger it.
  • This interest isn’t just theoretical. If we can figure out how empathy works, we might be able to produce more of it.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Jan 14
     
    "Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an "affective revolution." There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We've learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others."
Lawrence Hrubes

What is history? A critical review of E. H. Carr | DIBAJ - 0 views

uloom.com/131110501

history bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 02 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • E. H. Carr in 1961 delivered a series of six lectures at Cambridge University examining the question “What is history?”
  • He, however, argues that historians are susceptible to bias since every person is born into a society and invariably they are moulded by it through its environment and language as such their interpretation of history will be subjective to meet the criteria of their own culture; hence, Carr describes the historian as “the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the society to which he belongs.” Consequently, it is argued history is perceived through the environment in which the historian lives.
  • However, Carr differs from his predecessors in his definition of what constitutes as historical facts. He claims in his book that facts only become historical facts when the historian selects it to be as such.
markfrankel18

Poland vs. History by Timothy Snyder | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...oland-vs-history-museum-gdansk

TOK history bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 May 16 - No Cached
  • Most seriously of all, the effects of suppressing national memory could be of critical importance to Poles in coming decades, and to a global audience that has yet to fully absorb the complicated lessons of World War II. In some measure at least, how rising generations of Poles see themselves, democracy, and Europe will depend on whether they can have ready access to their country’s complicated experience in World War II. The collapse of democracy, the museum’s first theme, could hardly be more salient than it is right now. And the presentation of the conflict as a global tragedy could hardly be more instructive. The preemptive liquidation of the museum is nothing less than a violent blow to the world’s cultural heritage.
markfrankel18

Malcolm Gladwell: Do Genetic Advantages Make Sports Unfair? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130909crat_atlarge_gladwell

ToK gladwell ethics sports

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Sep 13 - Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 03 Sep 13
     
    "Eyesight can be improved-in some cases dramatically-through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete's body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self. But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball-like most sports-draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that-like testosterone-is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world."
markfrankel18

Adam Gopnik: What Galileo Saw : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130211crat_atlarge_gopnik

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Sep 13 - Cached
  • It may be no accident that so many of the great scientists really have followed Galileo, in ducking and avoiding the consequences of what they discovered. In the roster of genius, evasion of worldly responsibility seems practically a fixed theme. Newton escaped the world through nuttiness, Darwin through elaborate evasive courtesies and by farming out the politics to Huxley. Heisenberg’s uncertainty was political—he did nuclear-fission research for Hitler—as well as quantum-mechanical. Science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals. It’s one of the things that make it move. ♦
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13
     
    "Kepler encouraged Galileo to announce publicly his agreement with the sun-centered cosmology of the Polish astronomer monk Copernik, better known to history by the far less euphonious, Latinized name of Copernicus. His system, which greatly eased astronomical calculation, had been published in 1543, to little ideological agitation. It was only half a century later, as the consequences of pushing the earth out into plebeian orbit dawned on the priests, that it became too hot to handle, or even touch."
markfrankel18

Policy: Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...ting-scientific-claims-1.14183

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • To this end, we suggest 20 concepts that should be part of the education of civil servants, politicians, policy advisers and journalists — and anyone else who may have to interact with science or scientists. Politicians with a healthy scepticism of scientific advocates might simply prefer to arm themselves with this critical set of knowledge. We are not so naive as to believe that improved policy decisions will automatically follow. We are fully aware that scientific judgement itself is value-laden, and that bias and context are integral to how data are collected and interpreted. What we offer is a simple list of ideas that could help decision-makers to parse how evidence can contribute to a decision, and potentially to avoid undue influence by those with vested interests. The harder part — the social acceptability of different policies — remains in the hands of politicians and the broader political process. Of course, others will have slightly different lists. Our point is that a wider understanding of these 20 concepts by society would be a marked step forward.
1 - 20 of 41 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page