Critical Thinking and Correct Information
IB TOK ESSAY
As a critical thinker, you may want to distinguish between correct information, misinformation, biased reporting, and deliberate persuasion in your everyday news and articles of the word. To do so one must have a vast knowledge of language and know its many uses. Language may be used to understand, predict, and control the world around us so that we can survive and prosper, to maintain and improve our relationships with those around us to that we have more friends, fewer enemies, and can love and be loved, and to have pleasant rather than unpleasant experiences and to enjoy as much of our lives as we possibly can. Language is the primary way to distinguish between facts and false information in everyday news in this era.
First and foremost, there are many ways to detect correct information when reading articles of the world. Correct information will use language properly and will maintain a connectedness throughout it. It will create strings of words and sentences to help make connections to make the article clear and concise. Correct information will contain warranted statements to support other assertions. These statements will be factual and relevant to the topic at hand. Although, to be sure these statements are true or false or not we must look into our own knowledge, or, web of belief. These web is a web we have constructed and continue to construct in order to link together the statements which express our beliefs. The center of this web is occupied by our most entrenched belief statements, those it would be hardest to give up. We warrant our belief statements to ourselves by fitting them into our web. If statements stated in news does not mesh with any of our belief statements in our webs of belief than that statement is most unlikely to be regarded as unfactual and therefore will be thrown out. This is done consciously in our minds and helps us determine whether information is correct or not.
To identify misinformation in today’s society, one must comprehensively read the document and obey their web of belief. Misinformation in the...