Theory of Knowledge

May 2016 TOK Essay

Hey Everyone!

All students in the May 2016 session who are aiming to receive the full IB Diploma must complete a Theory of Knowledge Essay on one of the following prescribed essay titles: 

1. “In gaining knowledge, each area of knowledge uses a network of ways of knowing.” Discuss this statement with reference to two areas of Knowledge.
2. “Knowledge within a discipline develops according to the principles of natural selection.” How useful is this metaphor?
3. “The knower’s perspective is essential in the pursuit of knowledge.” To what extent do you agree?
4. “Without application in the world, the value of knowledge is greatly diminished.” Consider this claim with respect to two areas of knowledge.
5. To what extent do the concepts that we use shape the conclusions that we reach?
6. “In knowledge, there is always a trade-off between accuracy and simplicity.” Evaluate this statement in relation to two areas of knowledge.

I decided to do number 2 on the list! I'll be honest with you - up until about a week ago, I had NO idea how I was going to develop my essay. However, I recently completed my rough draft and thought  would share a section of my essay with you!

I liked question 2 since it gave me the liberty to discuss any Area of Knowledge of my choosing. I had researched through several examples that either proved the usefulness of the metaphor mentioned or showed why it was not useful. After narrowing down my examples, I developed the following structure for my essay:

1. Introduction and Thesis 

 - Make sure to address any key terms in your question at this point. In my situation, I explained what natural selection was in my own terms to get myself and the reader on the same page.

2. Development Example #1

 - Here I used an example using History. My example was to show that the metaphor was quite inaccurate and not useful at all!

3. Development Example #2

 - Here I used an example using natural sciences and human sciences. I talked about the debunked theory of telegony, and how in some cultures it is still followed in modern day! This example was to show that the metaphor had some levels of usefulness, but there were still holes in its overall accuracy.

4. Development Example #3

 - Here I used an example from mathematics. I discussed how the Pythagorean philosopher Hippasus falsified the general Pythagorean school of thought of that time, but now his discovery is the basis of our mathematics! This example showed that the metaphor had a high level of accuracy.

As much as I would like to insert  my rough draft on this blog, I know it's not a good idea in case someone decides to copy and paste my work. But, I will give you a little snippet of my essay! Earlier I mentioned that I had a historical example to show that the metaphor does not hold much value. Here's what I wrote to support this argument:

"Gustav Stresemann, former Chancellor of the Weimar Republic in 1923, kept a detailed record of his work as Foreign Minister in Germany. Following his death in 1929, Stresemann’s family saw it as appropriate to commemorate his work in the form of three massive volumes. Bernhardt, secretary to the late Foreign Minister, sifted through 300 boxes worth of Stresemann’s documentation and produced Stresemanns Vermächtnis. A short while after Bernhardt’s volumes were published, Hitler rose to power in the Weimar Republic. Almost immediately, Gustav Stresemann’s name became taboo and most copies of Stresemanns Vermächtnis were no longer in circulation. Nevertheless, Stresemann’s reputation in Western Europe remained strong. Come 1935 and an English publisher produced a condensed and translated version of Bernhardt’s Stresemanns Vermächtnis. At least one-third of the original information was omitted; yet, Stresemann’s work in Western politics remained reputable. Bernhardt’s volumes and their English interpretation were only few sources that depicted Stresemann’s work as Foreign Minister. As a result, the public eye highly regarded Stresemann for a matter of years. Luckily, Stresemann’s original documentation did not perish over time and instead fell into the hands of British and American governments in 1945. The Allied powers photographed Stresemann’s documents and filed it in London’s Public Records Office and in the National Archives in Washington DC. Naturally, scholars who were interested in European foreign policy of that time examined Stresemanns Vermächtnis and found discrepancies in Bernhardt’s work. In his volumes, Bernhardt overrepresented the successes of Stresemann’s career concerning Western Foreign Policy. This included deep insights into the successes of the Treaty of Locarno, admitting Germany into the League of Nations, the Dawes Plan, and much more. However, the scholars found that Bernhardt’s volumes severely lacked information of Stresemann’s Eastern policies. Had Bernhardt accurately represented Stresemann’s work as a whole, readers of Stresemanns Vermächtnis would understand that much of Stresemann’s Eastern policies with the Soviet Union yielded few rewarding results and added nothing to his reputation. Thus, further analyses of Gustav Stresemann’s documentation a decade or-so after the publication of Bernhardt’s volumes changed our knowledge of Stresemann’s work as a whole. However, the pre-existing knowledge on Stresemann’s foreign policies was not superseded – it was simply added to. This example shows that although historical evidence may be proven to be less accurate than previously thought, it must remain in circulation otherwise our knowledge of historical events may change forever. Therefore, the metaphor can be considered ineffective as pre-existing knowledge was not replaced by more accurate knowledge."

The above text in quotations were entirely my own words. However, I retrieved my facts from E.H. Carr's book, What is History? I hope this post helped any of you that were stumbling on ways to structure your essay, or what approach to take when explaining your examples!

Thanks for reading,

Sophie F.

Theory of Knowledge

Creating your TOK Presentation

Hello Everyone!

A few weeks ago, we wrapped our presentations for TOK. Since there were only 4 people in our TOK class, we split up into groups of two. Towards the brainstorming phase of our presentation, my partner and I were very confused on how to approach our presentation and how to get started. So, this blog post will focus on how the steps we took to complete our TOK presentation. There is by no means a specific way of approaching a TOK presentation - I just hope this post will give you some inspiration!

1. Find a Real Life Situation you are PASSIONATE about.

You will be spending countless hours researching this topic, so you have to be interested in what you're doing. My partner and I found an article published in the Huffington Post that outlined the case of Michelle Carter - a teenage girl who encouraged her then-boyfriend into committing suicide through a series of text messages. We had no idea why someone would want to harm anyone in this way, so we decided to investigate it!

Also, a hearty Real Life Situation often leads to a great Knowledge Question. For example, your neighbor's dog giving birth isn't exactly a good foundation for your presentation, unless there was something seriously controversial about it.

2. Discuss your Real Life Situation and pinpoint key elements that you would like to include in your presentation. For example, see if your Real Life Situation can relate back to a TOK Way of Knowing or Area of Knowledge. 

One of my mistakes was that my partner and I tried to brainstorm a Knowledge Question before we knew what we were dealing with. After taking a step back and discussing what questions arose from our Real Life Situation, we started to come up with ideas. Referring back to our Real Life Situation with Michelle Carter, we discussed the following: we wondered whether Michelle's action were carefully orchestrated as a result of her intense emotions, pure reason, or a combination of the two. We recognized that emotion and reason were two of the Ways of Knowing (WOK) in TOK. However, after referencing research conducted by Antonio Damasio on a brain-injury patient, we found that the two WOKs cannot be separated in a healthy human brain. Without evidence of Carter’s possible psychological imbalance, we can conclude that she, like all of us, used some combination of emotion and reason in her decision to harm her boyfriend. From this, we wanted to further explore the relationship between emotion and reason and decided to question the extent to which emotion helped or hindered the reasoning process.

3. Finalize the key elements you would like to include in your presentation and isolate a few Ways of Knowing or Areas of Knowledge that you would like to explore. Then, outline a Knowledge Question!

In Step 2, we found that we wanted to focus on emotion and reason in our presentation. Our main idea was to research whether emotions helped or hindered the reasoning process. From there, we developed the following Knowledge Question that served as the basis for our presentation: "Are emotions an enemy of, or necessary for, good reasoning?"

4. Begin researching specific TOK-related examples/claims that link to your Knowledge Question and organize them in a coherent manner.

Of course, your Knowledge Question shouldn't have a straight forward answer. You should explore every aspect of your question that you find is relevant. This is the time when you should dig into your TOK notes from class and see if you can find any theories, claims, or examples that will help answer your Knowledge Question. For my presentation, we found 3 claims that were extremely relatable to our Knowledge Question. Under each claim, we found evidence to both prove and disprove it to make sure that we eliminated any bias. For example, one of our claims was the following: "Emotions serve as automatic biasing mechanisms that have positive effects on the reasoning process".  The example we used for this claim was the 'Deck of Cards' experiment conducted by the University of Iowa. In this experiment, test  subjects were asked to pick cards randomly from 4 decks. 2 decks contained safe outcomes, whereas 2 decks contained risky outcomes. After pulling 10 cards from random decks, the subjects experienced intuitive/emotional responses (sweaty palms, faster heart rate, distress, fear) but were not consciously aware of them. After 70 cards, the subjects were able to logically identify their intuitive/emotional response and they associated them with the riskier decks.

5. After organizing your examples/claims, create your PowerPoint!

Your PowerPoint should never be a collection of slides with tons of information on them. Make sure that your slides only contain important vocabulary words or an eye-catching picture. This way, your audience isn't too busy concentrating on your slide and will have no other choice but to listen to you. Also, I would suggest for you to include your Knowledge Question on every single slide. This will remind your audience what question you are trying to answer and will make your presentation easier to follow. 

6. Include interesting and exciting elements to you presentation!

TOK presentations can last as long as 30 minutes. That's a pretty long time for an audience to sit down and listen to you ramble on about complicated topics. Make sure that your tone of speaking is interesting enough to engage your audience, and even throw in some funny elements to keep your audience's attention. For example, there was a part of my presentation where we played a clip of a therapist describing the time his patient held a knife up to his neck. To help the audience visualize this scenario, my partner held an actual knife up to my neck while the audio clip was playing! 

I hope these tips will be helpful to you if you are about to embark on a TOK presentation of your own. I'm not going to lie - at first, I saw the task of creating a TOK presentation as an absolute drag! But, with hindsight, I am excited by all of the knowledge I gained and thoroughly enjoyed presenting my findings. 

 

Thanks for reading,

Sophie F. 

Theory of Knowledge

TOK History - Summarized

Hey Everyone!

     We are all IBDP Year 2's now, and the deadline for the Theory of Knowledge essay is creeping up on us. Some of the prescribed titles for our essay are great prompts to talk about History as a Ways of Knowing, so I thought I'd share some of the key points with you. Even if you're not in IBDP Year 2, read over these notes and impress your teachers when you see them next ;) We hope this helps:

 → Three important features of history:

• History is the study of the present traces of the past
• History is only concerned with significant events (ex. JFK assassination vs. What I ate for dinner on 06/19/02)
• History is concerned with explaining and understanding the past

→ Why do we study history since it has no immediate practical value? History can be justified on the grounds that it:

1. Gives us a sense of identity
2. Is a defense against propaganda
3. Enriches our understanding of human nature

1. History gives us a sense of identity:

• If you don’t know where you come from, you can’t make any sense of the present or what you should do in the future
• You must have a good background knowledge about a situation to have an informed opinion about it

2.            History is a defense against propaganda:

• Governments often exploit history to dictate a one-sided interpretation of the past to highlight achievements and overlook mistakes
• We know that the Stalinist era had mass propaganda so it is frowned upon today
• George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past”

3.            History enriches our understanding of human nature:

• History shows us what human beings have thought and done in a wide variety of circumstances
• History focuses on the concrete and particular and reminds us that human behaviour can never be fully explained in terms of neat and tidy models
• History causes beliefs to become self-realizing expectations - if you think something cannot be changed, you won’t even bother changing it (ex. War is inevitable)

    → How can the past be known?

• Things that happened long ago seem unrealistic, makes it hard to believe it really happened
• It can be argued that since the past no longer exists, it cannot be changed and is therefore completely objective
• Clear distinction between the past and our knowledge of the past
• the past is objective
• We cannot abandon objectivity or ele we cannot distinguish history and fiction/propaganda
• our knowledge of the past is subjective because memory is fallible, evidence is ambiguous, and prejudice is common

→ The nature of historical evidence

• Primary source - “the bedrock of history”
• Written by someone who was there at the time
• Secondary source
• Written at a later time, second-hand account of what happened
• Primary sources are already contaminated:
• Fallible eyewitness - no two individuals see an event the same way
• Perjury = crime defined as knowingly making a false statement
• Memory bias - Memory is affected by retelling stories, which causes bias to creep in (to exaggerate certain events, etc)
• Social bias - reflects the interests of one particular social group rather than society as a whole
• Deliberate manipulation - photo on page 304 where Trotsky was photoshopped out of picture of Stalin

→ History is a selection of a selection

• Historians make a selection from available evidence
• Knowledge is already filtered through the eyes of those who witnessed/experienced it
• Surveying all secondary sources of an event is impossible - historians must select what they think is most important (ex. History textbooks in Texas only select the information they want to teach students/Amount of words in textbooks reflect importance)
• Heroification - removes unfavorable characteristics of historical figures of the past (ex. Woodrow Wilson - not much mention of segregating government, vetoing equality clauses, etc.)
• Proselytizing - making people believe

→ The advantages of hindsight

• Historian holds an advantage because he knows how things turned out
• Terms like “the Renaissance” are retrospective ways of trying to capture the spirit of a particular historical era (ie. people during the Renaissance period did not call it that)
• Writing of history is influenced by era in which it is written
• As an event recedes into the past, it is usually easier to see it in historical context

→ The disadvantages of hindsight

• Distorts our understanding of the past
• When you look back on an event that you lived through, you tend to feel that it was inevitable and could not have turned out any other way
• It is easy to be wise after an event (ie. It is easy to see Hitler as being bound to lose WWII from the beginning, because we know what happened)

→ The problem of bias

• History is more prone to bias than natural sciences
• Topic choice bias
• Historians choice of topic may be influenced by current preoccupations
• Questions he asks and doesn’t ask may influence what he finds

• Confirmation Bias
• Historian might be tempted to appeal only to evidence that supports his own case and to ignore counter-evidence
• National Bias
• Since people come to history with a range of pre-existing cultural and political prejudices, they may find it difficult to deal objectively with sensitive issues

→ The pluralistic approach

• History should reflect all perspectives (women, poor, ethnic minorities, etc)
• Cubist history:
• Speak of history as a plural ( histories) in order to look at multiple perspectives

→ The theories of history

• There is rarely one cause of an event
• “The human universe is so enormously complicated that to speak of the cause of any event is absurdity”
• Multiple factors make the difference:
• Geographical conditions
• Social/economic conditions
• Individual motives
• Chance occurrences

→ The ‘great person’ theory of history

• If a certain great individual had not existed, the course of history would be different

→ The history of thought

• All history is the history of thought
• We can understand one’s actions only be delving in to their minds and trying to make a sense of their motives
• Important to be empathetic when viewing history

→ Economic determinism

• History is determined by economic factors
• Karl Marx:
• Technological and economic factors are the engines of historical change
• Changes in technology determine how society is organized, thus determining how individuals think
• By analyzing these changes, you could predict future events
• Karl Popper:
• If you could predict the details of such events/discoveries, you would have discovered them by now and not in the future

→ The role of chance

• No meaning in history; it is all controlled by chance
• ie. What if Hitler died in a car accident in the 1930s

• Historian without facts is rootless and futile
• Facts without historia are dead and meaningless
• History = continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, and unending dialogue between the past and the present

- Sophie F.

Theory of Knowledge

How Architecture is Related to Art

Hey y'all,

     So recently in our TOK class (right before our mock exams) we gave presentations to conclude the Arts unit. My presentation was about "how architecture is art".  To begin my presentation, I defined the two key terms: architecture and art. 

Moreover, I discussed the perception that most people have of architecture when comparing it to art.

I then dug deeper to show how architecture can also be art by giving examples of architectural structures.

     To conclude my presentation, I answered the question posed earlier, "How is architecture art?" I stated that architecture is usually visually satisfying and beautiful. The study of architecture is mostly centered around design (unless you decide to go overseas where it is most likely to be more math based, like in Italy) and with this fact it means that the architect basically has to take the role of an artist to create something attractive and innovative. In addition, with the modern world we live in today, art and design are quickly entering into advanced forms of architecture, not just paintings and textiles. 

I hope that opened changed your perspective of how architecture relates to art!

- Felicinda J.

Theory of Knowledge

Universal Standards of Beauty

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder.

Hi Everyone!

     Last week in our TOK class we have been presenting on various topics. The instructions for this project was to pick a particular topic and create a informative and interesting presentation about it. I chose to center my presentation around universal standards of beauty. The question I was to answer was: Is there a universal standard of beauty or does it vary from country to country? Here's what I found out: 

     Around the world people's brains are wired the same way to determine someone's level of attractiveness. In most cases, we find people attractive if they have average, traditional, or common features. That's why when we see someone that has different features than we're used to, we do not immediately acknowledge their beauty. But, that's not to say that they're not beautiful. All the time people disagree on whether an individual is beautiful or not. That's why we seem to agree to disagree by following this quote: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This means that someone you may find beautiful may not seem beautiful to someone else. Based on this, I concluded that there is a universal standard of beauty, but only when it comes to determining beauty at first sight.

      However, each individual country have their own ideas of what represents beauty. For example, the Karo tribe in Ethiopia practice scarification for females. This means that they burn or cut intricate designs into the skin of a female when she has hit puberty. Once this process is complete the female is considered to be mature or of age. That is just one example of a beauty standard that can be found in a specific country . There was also a Photoshop Project that I included in my presentation to show which facial features each country finds desirable. Here's what the project was all about: a journalist sent a raw, make up free photo of herself to photo editors around the world. She asked them to make her beautiful based upon what their perception of beauty was. Below you will find the link of the video on YouTube so you can see for yourself what the results were. While the video is loading you can ask yourself what beauty means to you. Let me know in the comments what you come up with!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT9FmDBrewA

See you soon!

- Sophie F.

Theory of Knowledge

How Art Made the World

Hey people!

     For the past few classes in TOK, we've been watching a documentary titled "How Art Made the World". In case y'all wanted to look into watching it, here's the link:

http://www.pbs.org/howartmadetheworld/

     I sincerely suggest it! Even though it happens to be three hours long, it's worth every minute of it. Firstly, we learned why modern art looks the way it does. The answer (spoiler alert): the human brain it wired to exaggerate parts of the human body and utterly ignore others. For example, take the 4-inch tall Venus of Willendorf made in 28,000 BCE: 

The Venus of Willendorf

      She has a nonexistent face and arms while having a large midsection. Even in more recent years, this trend is recognized. Impressionists exaggerated colors while surrealists exaggerated shapes. In the present era, caricatures are warped into inhuman forms and models are covered in makeup and inventive clothing. 

      On the other hand, the documentary also explains how a culture can override the brain's natural tendency to do this. For example, have you ever noticed how even and systematic the Egyptian art style is? As it turns out, each human/god drawn has the exact same proportions as the next. The Greeks also had a fixation on creating a the most lifelike representations of humans as statues. However, once they had accomplished this feat, they weren't satisfied with the results. Instead, they began to over-exaggerate the muscles and curves of the men they carved. All in all, the Greeks found themselves doing what their ancestors had done when sculpting the Venus of Willendorf figurine: literally stretching the truth.

- Giselle D.