Different Areas of Knowledge Essays

Different Areas of Knowledge Essays Different Areas of Knowledge Essay Different Areas of Knowledge Essay After reading the topic question, straight away a thought came to my mind. Are numbers, pictures, lines, dots, characters, images, music a form of language? That is the ultimate knowledge issue when it comes to language. What is language? What does it consist of? There is no way to define language so that our entire society can conform to it. This creates a situation where this knowledge issue is almost insoluble. People communicate using many tools and methods. They understand each other with sounds as well as pictures. But does this make one more of a language then the other? To be able to make a clear argument, I will define language as a tool of communicating ideas, objects and actions. Within the IB Program there are only a certain number of Areas of Knowledge. I for one am taking a full diploma with six subjects. One of my subjects is English. In English we mostly discuss literature, English and international, and there is a lot of analyzing that takes place. I think that language in a language course obviously plays a tremendously huge role. We need to read, write and share our opinions. A lot of the work I do in that class consists of personal response. I read passages, novels, plays, articles, journals and with every piece of information I gain, a form an opinion. This opinion then needs to be supported by using the work as back up. To do every single part and aspect of that class, language is required. Language in the sense of the communicating tool required to read, and write. A counterclaim to this argument would be that when we do personal responses and we write about what we feel, we are not necessarily sharing it with anyone else. Many times authors will write things and then he will have an audience that will read his work. What the audience understands might be completely different than what the author intended. He did not communicate anything with them in this case. According to my definition of language, if the author portrayed his ideas and it was misinterpreted, then there was limited communication that occurred. There might have been some form of exchange but the communication was frayed and broken. You could argue then that personal response papers and anything that is an interpretation of another work is therefore not language. It is more a method of keeping track of emotions. To counter that counterclaim however, I would argue that even though the author isnt communicating what he wanted to, to me, I am still getting information from what he has written. He might not be giving me what he intended, but he is giving me something. That sharing of information is considered communication. The whole point of writing novels and plays is for them to be shared. Regardless of what is passed on, something is transferred from one being to another through the work.