Week 1

Welcome back guys, it's been an interesting first week! I was able to meet with my professor this week and we started to grasp what concepts I am attempting to research and planned on how to make my question more concrete and direct. We addressed a lot of the problems that have surfaced as a result of the Senior Project starting, and are attempting to deal with them by narrowing down my interests and by identifying a few texts that might help me along this journey.
As a brief summary of what I have done this week, I am going to give a few examples of the things Mr. Nair (My On-Site Mentor) and I discussed, as well as a couple things that I noticed while performing research. For one, we talked about one the most popular justifications for what makes certain types of knowledge more important than other types, and this is through actionability. Simply put, this justification claims that knowledge is more important if you can derive an important action from it. For example, knowledge is actionable if you can bring it up in a conversation, or integrate it into your livelihood. Therefore, knowing how much money someone else has is not as actionable as knowing how to cook a variety of dishes, which would make knowing how to cook a more valuable piece of knowledge, according to this theory. I will continue to explore this idea in the coming weeks to determine whether this is a valid method of determining the importance of certain types of knowledge.
Another topic that came up during this week was the similarity between desires and knowledge. Many of us value certain desires over others the same as we value certain types of knowledge over others. As such, I will be exploring this analogy further next week in the hopes that it will shed some light into other ways of determining how valuable certain types of knowledge can be over each other.
That concludes my first week's blog post! Unfortunately, it wasn't as insightful as I'd hoped but that's because a lot of the hours this week were used to plan and address the problems that have come about as a result of how abstract and open my question is. I hope to see you guys next week and look forward to reading your comments!