Week 6: Summary

Welcome back after spring break! I took mine last week, as did most of you, and I ended up staying at home for the most part, it was definitely a relaxing week. I wanted to summarize the research I have done so far as well as my plans for the second half of the Senior Research Project. As you all know, I am looking into what kinds of knowledge are necessary and the different kinds of arguments that can justify why these pieces of knowledge should even be deemed necessary in the first place. I have limited this question to just democratic societies, as is relevant to the country we are living in, and the majority of countries around the world.
What I should make a distinction in, and I haven't yet done so, is that I have only researched into 'knowledge' so far, and within philosophy, this definition refers to information that is true or correct. Meaning I have only analyzed methods in which we can judge knowledge as opposed to actual false information. As such, my plan for the next few weeks is to analyze the different arguments for things such as 'hate speech' or false information to be deemed as necessary. Off the bat, we would think false information is unnecessary within a democratic society, but Mill is one example that seems to disagree with this, as seen through the harm principle, and I wish to explore this theory with other philosophers.
As for now, the primary acceptable theories to judge the relevance and need of certain types of knowledge are actionability, and happiness. These two differ, in that a piece of knowledge is relevant if it increases your overall happiness and vice versa. This is the same with actionability, in that the more actionable a type of knowledge is, the more relevant and possibly necessary it is. And these two theories will often not lead to the same answer. For example, if your spouse was cheating on you, and you didn't know, would you like to know or find out if you were in that situation? The actionability theory would suggest you should learn that piece of information, yet because this knowledge would decrease your overall happiness, the theory of happiness would deem this piece of information as unnecessary.
Anyways, that's all for this week! I hope you guys had an awesome break and see you next week!