This is a PERSUASIVE paper arguing that VIOLENCE ON TV AND IN MUSIC Essay

This is a PERSUASIVE paper arguing that VIOLENCE ON TV AND IN MUSIC causes individuals to perform physically aggressive behavior which can result in injury, and - Essay Example Now that television has spread out into the world in such a big way, there is obviously no way one can turn the clock back and wish it a perennial goodbye. It is a necessity, but it could also be a menace, depending on the way it is used. Psychologists and social activists have time and again, over the years, conclusively established that without proper parental guidance, children are being adversely affected by exposure to the wrong programs in TV. Tender, impressionable, and receptive, the mind of a child is eager and ready to accept thrilling encounters and heroic feats. Therefore, while watching violent encounters and high decibel music, not only he enjoys the pulsating effect but also begins to build a personal bond with the characters in the movie. Eventually, within a short period of time, the child has decided that these are the programs and characters that he is going to be relating with for the rest of his life. In Chicago, two boys, both outsiders, enter, a maths classroom, and are locked in a fight. When the students and teacher try to break it up, one of the students gets fatally stabbed by the outsiders who then flee. Two teenagers burst into their Colorado high school about one year ago and gunned down 13 people. Then they shot themselves. Though it had appeared to be a spur of the moment event, it emerged later that the two had the bloodshed meticulously planned "down to the last bullet and explosive" for nearly a year. It was a murder-cum-suicide mission. Their bigger plan had been to blow up the entire school with pipe bombs attached to their bodies. Society is benefiting in terms of gross national product with everyone, including women, working. However, Kevin Dwyer, president of the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) is not pleased. He is direct to the point, "Kids are growing up without the supports they had in the past." Due to the abysmal lack of parental care, the television has become the stalwart companion after school hours for children. A child spends about 2 minutes communicating with his or her parents on an average day as compared to 16 hours a day glued to the television, writes journalist George Howe Colt in his 1991 book, The Enigma of Suicide. Studies are noncommittal on how exposure to images of murders and assaults on the television affects children's behavior, though many psychologists are convinced that violent television shows, movies, and computer games inflame destructive tendencies. Tellingly, more than 86 percent of television shows and movies portray characters who have their interpersonal problems solved with violence, according to NASP. According to the Center for Media Education in Washington, by the time he completes his elementary

Philoshopy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Philoshopy - Essay Example Empiricists say that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge. Rationalists have developed their view in two ways. The first one is that "they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they constuct accounts of how reason in some form or other provides that additional information about the world" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/). Empiricists form lines of thought. "First, they develop accounts of how experience provides the information that rationalists cite, insofar as we have it in the first place. (Empiricists will at times opt for skepticism as an alternative to rationalism: if experience cannot provide the concepts or knowledge the rationalists cite, then we don't have them.) Second, empiricists attack the rationalists' accounts of how reason is a source of concepts or knowledge" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/). In order to be a rationalist you need to adopt one of three claims. The first one is"The Intuition/Deduction Thesis:" Some propositions in a particular subject area, S, are knowable by us by intuition alone; still others are knowable by being deduced from intuited propositions" The second thesis associated with rationalism is the Innate Knowledge thesis. "The Innate Knowledge Thesis:" We have knowledge of some truths in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature. The third important thesis of rationalism is the Innate Concept thesis. "The Innate Concept Thesis:" We have some of the concepts we employ in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/ ) In this same context, Descartes would have offered a brief description of his own experience with the proper approach to knowledge. Begin by renouncing any belief that can be doubted, including especially the testimony of the senses; then use the perfect certainty of one's own existence, which survives this doubt, as the foundation for a demonstration of the providential reliability of one's faculties generally. Significant knowledge of the world, Descartes supposed, can be achieved only by following this epistemological method, the rationalism involved in relying on a mathematical model and eliminating the distraction of sensory information in order to pursue the demonstrations of pure reason. Later sections of the Discourse (along with the supplementary scientific essays with which it was published) trace some of the more significant consequences of following the Cartesian method in philosophy. His entirely mechanistic inclinations would consistently emerge clearly in these sections, with frequent reminders of the success of physical explanations of complex phenomena. Non-human animals, within Descartes's view, are complex organic machines, all of whose actions can be fully explained without any reference to the operation of mind in thinking. In fact, Descartes declared, most of human behavior, like that of animals, is susceptible to simple mechanistic explanation. Cleverly designed automata could successfully mimic nearly all of what we do. Thus, Descartes argued, it is only the general ability to adapt to widely varying circumstances-and, in particular, the capacity to respond creatively in the use of language-that provides a sure test for the presence of an immaterial