Language

As we walked into Theory of Knowledge today, a very odd, yet interesting activity awaited us.

In front of us, there were exactly three sheets of blank paper, a couple of paper clips and some tape. Initially I was confused, but soon, the task as hand was explained to us.

With the materials in front of us, as a group of five, we were to build a tower in twenty minutes. We should strive for the tower to be as tall as possible, as there were multiple groups, and the group that constructed the tallest structure would win. The tower had to be freestanding, meaning it had to support its own weight.

Oh, and to make matters interesting, we could not verbally communicate with the members of our group.

In the picture to the right, we can see all the group members with our completed tower in the middle.

Reflection:

When we were told that we would the limitation of not being able to talk to our group members while building the tower, I was immediately very skeptical. Verbal communication is one of the most important things in our lives. We depend on it, and use it literally everyday. I had no idea how we could possibly build such a tower without talking, and planning our construction as it went on.

However, it was surprisingly not all that difficult. Almost immediately, we had a group leader arise (without talking of course). Rafa took the difficult challenge of leading the other four group members to accomplish something that seemed impossible. She pointed at the paper and started rolling them, creating pointed spheres that piled one on top of another. We immediately got the message and started doing the same. After constructing the tower for twenty minutes, we had a structure with a respectable height, which while tilted, was freestanding, and gave us second place in the competition of highest tower.

Activity Challenges:

The activity at hand came with a lot of challenges, that were not always easy to overcome.

For instance, as our tower got bigger, it started to tilt more and more to the right, up to the point that it nearly collapsed. When that happen, it took a fairly long time of us gesticulating to each other about, as we tried to come up with an idea to balance out the weight. After a while, one of us got a paper clip, and put it on the left side of the tower. That was a counterweight to the tower’s tilt to the right, and made it stand up straight again, solving this crisis.

Another challenge was that a lot of times, we did not understand each other’s gesticulations. Sometimes, the hand signals we gave each other were too broad or way too weird for everyone to understand, making this a severe handicap while building the tower. This was somewhat overcome as we decided to gesticulate less and show what we meant more by simpling doing it.

I also want to highlight the importance of gestures in language. I believe that gestures are a complement of language, and that while they are great combined with oral language to aid in communication, I believe that in today’s society, it is not useful to have communication solely based on gestures, and that type of communication would work better combined with language.

Three Knowledge Questions:

• In what ways do shared knowledge and reason work together in stressful situations?

• How do imagination and memory work together for putting abstract ideas into practice?

• In what ways can language adapt in situations where it’s traditional form is not available?