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Authors’ acknowledgements
Carolyn P Henly
Bhumika Davé Tharoor for information about the Hindu wedding ceremony. Rahul Mahajan for information about
the Hindu marriage ceremony. Audrey Le Mahajan for information about the Vietnamese marriage ceremony.
Farrukh Hussain for information about the Muslim marriage ceremony. Timothy Henly for assistance with
mathematical problem-solving procedures and questions about chemistry. Nancy Nelson and Kristina Green for
verification of my claims about the order of operations. Salman Parvaiz for insights into the holographic universe
hypothesis. Keith Hollowell for providing helpful articles on several topics. Vishaka Santosh, Jonathan Rice and
Rawda Fawaz for assistance in understanding attitudes toward evolution in non-Christian religious and atheist
communities. Miriam Gilbert for putting me onto the study of symptoms of PTSD in Shakespeare’s work. And last,
but not least, to my ever-patient husband, whose support allows me to take on a project of this magnitude. All errors
are, of course, my own.
John Sprague
I’d like to thank the TOK students with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work over my years of TOK teaching: your
conversations, arguments and questions have illuminated and deepened my own understanding of TOK. While each
student only wrestles with the TOK course for two years, collectively, you’ve guided me through my own 20-year
journey and helped me start to get my own head around it … finally.
Although every effort has been made to ensure that website addresses are correct at time of going to press, Hodder
Education cannot be held responsible for the content of any website mentioned in this book. It is sometimes possible
to find a relocated web page by typing in the address of the home page for a website in the URL window of your
browser.
Hachette UK’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood
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hour message answering service. Email: [email protected] You can also order through our website:
www.hoddereducation.com
© Carolyn P. Henly and John Sprague 2020
First edition published in 2003
Second edition published in 2006
Third edition published © Nicholas Alchin and Carolyn P. Henly published in 2014
This edition published in 2020 by
Hodder Education,
An Hachette UK Company
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www.hoddereducation.com
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Printed in Slovenia
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781510474314
eISBN: 9781510475427

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Contents
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Course Concepts

Core theme
CHAPTER 2 Core theme: Knowledge and the Knower

Optional themes
CHAPTER 3 Knowledge and Technology
CHAPTER 4 Knowledge and Language
CHAPTER 5 Knowledge and Indigenous Societies
CHAPTER 6 Knowledge and Religion
CHAPTER 7 Knowledge and Politics

Areas of knowledge
CHAPTER 8 Mathematics
CHAPTER 9 The Natural Sciences
CHAPTER 10 The Human Sciences
CHAPTER 11 History
CHAPTER 12 The Arts

Glossary

Index

Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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Thinking about the world around us
Thirty years ago, a college professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, told a
story about a young Indian man who, deeply impressed by his mentor’s assurance that the control of our destiny is
all in our minds, walked, unafraid, into the cage of a man-eating tiger, confident that he could control the tiger. You
will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the tiger killed the young man. The man made the mistake of taking a
metaphor to be literal truth. While it might fairly be said that our destiny can, indeed, be a reflection of our mental
states – confidence, courage, perseverance and open-mindedness, for example, are much more likely to bring us
success than are fear, a tendency to give up and closed-mindedness – we cannot literally control the world around us
with our minds. A literal man-eating tiger is a dangerous beast with a mind of his own who cannot be manipulated
by the power of thought.
The young man made the critical – indeed fatal – error of rejecting the fact that the world consists of all kinds of
things over which we have no control. He rejected reality. In a 1978 speech entitled ‘How to Build a Universe that
Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick told a story about how, in 1972, he had
defined reality this way: ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’ (Dick 1–12). The
definition has become famous, probably because it is both insightful and precise. When we talk about ‘reality’, we
mean the reality that exists independently of our imagination. (Our capacity to imagine is another reality, but it, too,
exists whether we wish it to or not.) Reality does, under certain circumstances, ‘go away’ all the time, but not simply
because humans don’t want to believe in it. Many aspects of physical reality change moment to moment: it might
have been raining outside half an hour ago but not be raining now. If a major earthquake occurs or a volcano erupts,
all the physical features of the landscape around those events change. The Earth moves in an orbit around the Sun,
and it is in a different position in space every moment.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Philip K. Dick

Equally true is the fact that humans have control over many realities and can change them at will: we build buildings
that didn’t exist and tear buildings down so that they no longer exist. We name our children, and our children can go
down to the local courthouse and legally change their names, once they come of age. We can define ‘planet’ in such
a way that it includes Pluto, and then, when many hundreds more objects like Pluto are discovered, we can redefine

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‘planet’ in such a way that it does not include Pluto. But we can’t just decide that the volcano did not erupt, or that
the destroyed building is still there, or that we won’t catch a disease just because we don’t want to. Those things
which we cannot change just by disbelieving in them constitute reality.

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The denial of reality
The story of the young Indian and the man-eating tiger thus illustrates an important concept upon which the Theory
of Knowledge (TOK) course is predicated: there is an external reality which exists independent of human existence
and control. The course rests upon the absolutely essential assumption that that reality exists and is, to a significant
degree, knowable. Throughout your TOK experience you will be examining all the mechanisms by which we figure
out what is real to the best of our ability, when and how reality changes, and how we know. We call what we are
able to figure out about reality knowledge. Failure to accept reality will eventually and inevitably result in some
negative consequence. Most of us have more sense than to walk into a tiger’s den thinking that we can control the
tiger’s behaviour with our beliefs, but, unfortunately, many people do in fact behave in ways which defy reality and
then regret it later. A person of our acquaintance, for example, kept driving too fast until she got so many speeding
tickets that her driving permit was taken away. When she decided to keep driving after that, she was arrested and
made to serve 30 days in jail. All the while she just couldn’t understand why she couldn’t do what she wanted. In
her mind, she needed to drive very fast because she was late to appointments or to work. Once she lost her permit,
she believed that she needed to keep driving because she had to get to work. The fact that she could have avoided all
these problems by leaving earlier and driving more slowly was irrelevant to her way of thinking; in her mind, the
real world was to conform itself to her wishes. The reality of speed limit laws and laws about driving without a
licence did not go away, however, just because she stopped believing in them.
Another serious and dangerous example is the anti-vaccination movement that began in the late twentieth century,
when a former British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, published a study that suggested that there was a correlation
between vaccines and autism. The movement gained momentum when a Hollywood celebrity began to campaign
against vaccination, claiming that her son became autistic after he was vaccinated. Supported by some other very
famous celebrities, she led a huge upsurge in ‘anti-vaxxers’, people who choose not to vaccinate their children
against common childhood diseases. This is despite the reality that those diseases can be very dangerous, even fatal,
and the health risk from getting the vaccine is vanishingly small. Those facts have not stopped the anti-vaxxer
movement and, according to the US National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, that refusal to
believe in the reality of the safety of vaccines and the dangers of the diseases that those vaccines prevent has led to a
return of diseases which had previously been, for all intents and purposes, eradicated.
The MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine has been the primary target of the anti-vaxxer movement, and
since the current anti-vaccination movement began, measles has been on the rise. In the UK in 1998, 56 people
contracted measles; in 2006, this number increased to 449 in the first five months of the year, with the first death
since 1992. In 2008, measles was declared endemic in the UK for the first time in 14 years. In Ireland, an outbreak
occurred in 2000 and 1 500 cases and three deaths were reported. The outbreak was reported to have occurred as a
direct result of a drop in vaccination rates following the MMR controversy (Hussain, et al).
In 2018, the United States experienced its second worst outbreak of measles ‘since measles was eliminated in the US
in 2000. (The greatest was 667 cases reported in 2014)’ (Fox). Almost none of those people who contracted measles
had been vaccinated. By the end of April 2019, there had been more than 700 reported cases of measles in the
United States – surpassing the 2014 number in only one-third of the year (Branswell). The widespread use of the
vaccine against measles has resulted in a massive drop in the number of deaths worldwide from measles. Prior to
2000, the year in which measles was declared as having been eradicated in the US, 2 million people died annually
from measles and complications arising from measles. By 2017, that number had dropped to about 110 000 (Scutti).
The deaths that do still occur are almost all in countries where poverty and lack of effective health care systems
result in too few people being vaccinated.

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Wakefield’s 1985 work has long since been discredited, and he has been struck off the British medical register,
which means he cannot practise medicine in the UK. He has been the subject of ethical inquiries, as he was working
for a group of people suing vaccine manufacturers when he did his research (Hussain, et al), which suggests that he
approached the work with a biased viewpoint that skewed the results. The reality is that there never was a
connection between vaccines and autism. The reality is that children are much more likely to get ill or die from
disease than they are from vaccines. Some of the people who chose to believe celebrities instead of scientists have
had to suffer the consequences that their children died from a vaccine-preventable disease. It would have been vastly
better for them – and for everyone – if these people had been able to discern which claims were true, and which
were not. They would have been better off had they been able to judge which people telling a particular version of
the vaccine story were the experts and which were the people with strong opinions but no actual knowledge.
One of the main aims of TOK is to help you learn how to make those kinds of powerful judgments effectively. If
you are able to know what is real, who to listen to under what circumstances and why, then you will have power
over your own life in ways that people who cannot make those judgments do not.

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The nature of knowledge
In TOK, we take the idea of knowledge seriously: we do not think that every idea we have is knowledge. In fact, we
have a whole vocabulary for thoughts and observations that are tentative and have not earned the title of
‘knowledge’: ‘opinion’, ‘hypothesis’, ‘guess’, ‘intuition’, ‘belief’, ‘assumption’ and ‘conjecture’ are some examples
of terms that identify findings or ideas which are preliminary. We do not think that opinions are knowledge. We
differentiate between beliefs and knowledge. We do not stop pursuing our knowledge-making processes at the level
of conjecture. Before we are willing to call something ‘knowledge’, we insist that it be checked carefully so that our
guesses, hypotheses, ideas and intuitions have been verified in a conscious and conscientious process of validation.
Sometimes, of course, even after we go through a careful process of checking and validating, and even after we have
agreed that something is, indeed, ‘knowledge’, we find out that we were wrong – in part or in full. Perhaps the most
common reason for this is that new technologies allow us to gather evidence that we did not have access to before.
In those cases, we have to be willing to revise our understanding. The reason that we must approach our knowledge-
generating efforts so carefully is that there are only a few circumstances under which we can claim to be absolutely
certain that we know the truth. To say that something is ‘absolutely certain’ is to say that there is no chance – not
even a tiny one – of its ever being found to be wrong. You can see that to declare that something is absolutely
certain is to make a bold claim. One must be very careful indeed, before making such a claim. There are,
nevertheless, situations in which we can make that claim. Those cases are, however, relatively rare, and so the vast
majority of our knowledge is accepted under less rigorous – but still, if we are honest and ethical, quite rigorous –
terms. An important idea for us to recognize here is that a claim does not have to be absolutely certain to be called
knowledge. Neither, however, can it be too tentative or sloppily formed.
So far, we have been considering knowledge about the world. Another kind of knowledge is the knowledge of how
to do things – how to play the piano, how to translate something from Russian to English, how to get a curling stone
to hit only the stone we want it to hit, how to make chocolate chip cookies, or how to get from home to school and
back again. Much of this kind of procedural knowledge is knowledge held by individuals, but sometimes we can
think of procedural knowledge on a cultural or social level as well: how to celebrate national holidays or how to
drive cars on busy roads are examples of knowledge that are shared communally. This kind of knowledge is also
subject to updating and revision as needed when new information, new interpretations or new laws or regulations
come along.
The TOK guide provides the metaphor of the map as a way of understanding the nature of knowledge. You may not
be familiar with paper maps, but you are probably familiar with maps from apps on your smartphone. Street maps
are diagrams which are intended to help anyone using the map to find their way from one place on the map to
another. Street maps include features which are useful for the purpose of finding one’s way: one-way streets are
indicated. High-speed roads are differentiated from streets through neighbourhoods. Distances between spots are
shown. Interactive maps, such as Google Maps or Waze, can also show potential obstacles such as car crashes or
construction and slow or stopped traffic. All of these features are useful to the driver who wants to get somewhere
by the most efficient route possible.
Street maps do not include features that are not relevant to getting from one place to the next, such as rainfall per
year, population density, elevation or the sites of former gold mines. Other maps, designed for different purposes, do
show these characteristics. All types of maps are carefully constructed based on real features at the time of the
making of the map. All types of maps can be updated periodically in order to reflect changes to the territory. Street
maps must be updated in order to add new roads that were built since the old map was made. Topological maps,
maps which show elevation, must be updated to reflect changes that occur due to such phenomena as earthquakes,
erosion or rising water levels due to global warming. Population density maps, which are useful, for instance, to
people who must plan how to deliver water and electricity to people in their cities, must be updated when a new
census provides updated data about where people live.

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The comparison of knowledge to a map, therefore, is a good one. A map is a picture of some specific aspect of the
world. It is based on solid knowledge about reality, but it is flexible enough to be updated when new facts come
along. A map does not try to contain everything there is to know about a particular part of the world; it is focused for
a specific purpose. A map is reliable enough so that we can make plans based on the information it contains. Maps
make a particular aspect of the world predictable. If we think about knowledge as being something that has all those
characteristics, we have a pretty good understanding of what knowledge is and what we can do with it. You will find
a more detailed discussion of the map as a metaphor for knowledge in Chapter 2.

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Elements of the TOK course

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Areas of knowledge
In TOK, some of the contexts for knowledge-making that you will study will be:
• Mathematics
• The Natural Sciences
• The Human Sciences
• History
• The Arts.
These are called the ‘areas of knowledge’, and they represent the work of professional practitioners who work to
break new ground in a particular area of knowledge. You will also study how individuals such as yourself make
knowledge. Students do not, as a rule, make the same kind of knowledge that professionals do within those areas of
knowledge. Students learning to do science, especially high school students, for example, very seldom, if ever, try to
answer questions which have not already been answered by professional scientists working at universities or in
commercial laboratories. Instead, the students are learning the techniques used by professional scientists so that they
understand the process and learn the foundational knowledge which they would need if they were to pursue science
as a career. The same is true of student mathematicians, psychologists and historians. In mathematics especially,
students do work which is dramatically different from what professional mathematicians do. Mathematicians at a
university do not sit in their offices and solve problems that they can check in the back of a book. They work to
figure out new mathematics that isn’t in any textbook yet, because it doesn’t exist, and they work to find ways to
apply known mathematics to solving problems in the real world.
Student artists may come the closest, in the areas of knowledge that we study in TOK, to doing what professionals
do. Student artists do often make their own original art, and students who interpret works of art (visual, literary or
any other kind) do the same type of work that professional critics do. Like student scientists, however, student critics
are following in the footsteps of the professionals. Students are not writing criticism of brand-new works, and, given
their level of expertise as interpreters of art, they are unlikely to discover anything in a given work of art which has
not been found before by other critics.
In TOK, you will learn how what you do to make your personal knowledge (both of academic content in the various
areas of knowledge and in your everyday dealings with the world) differs from and is similar to the ways that other
people make knowledge. This includes professionals working at the cutting edge of knowledge to try to solve
society’s problems and achieve society’s goals.

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Core theme
As well as thinking about the way knowledge is created in specific areas of knowledge, TOK students are required
to reflect on their own status as knowers, and to think about how the knowledge held by different individuals and
communities of knowers is shaped. This is the purpose of the core theme of the TOK course, ‘Knowledge and the
Knower’. This part of the course encourages you to evaluate the reliability of your different sources of knowledge
and to think about how your personal circumstances and the groups to which you belong inform what you know and
believe, and influence the way you navigate the world around you.

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Optional themes
In addition to the areas of knowledge and the core theme, your study will include some aspects of knowledge
development in everyday life and in elements of society which are not included in the formal areas of knowledge.
You will engage in a study of how individuals, such as yourself, make knowledge, and you will engage in a study of
at least two of the following themes:
• Knowledge and Technology
• Knowledge and Language
• Knowledge and Politics
• Knowledge and Religion
• Knowledge and Indigenous Societies.
As with the areas of knowledge mentioned above, in each of these other investigations you will consider what kind
of knowledge is generated and by whom. You will also consider the ways in which knowledge is developed and the
methods used in each situation.

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The knowledge framework
As you study the core theme, the optional theme and the areas of knowledge, you will consider four required
elements of it: Scope, Perspectives, Methods and tools, and Ethics.

Scope
When you examine the scope of a particular area, you will be exploring questions about what the content is of that
particular area. What makes something natural science rather than religion? What do we mean when we talk about
technology and knowledge? What is technology? When we are exploring scope, we are also exploring the effects of
that knowledge in the world – what role it plays in human experience and why it is valuable to us.

Perspectives
Perspectives is one of the 12 core course concepts, which you will read about in Chapter 1. You will find a detailed
discussion of what we mean by perspectives beginning on page 25. In general, however, your perspective is the way
in which you view something. It is shaped by all of your experience. Different people have different perspectives,
and throughout the course you will be exploring the ways in which different perspectives shape how knowledge is
made and how it is understood and valued.

Methods and tools

When we talk about the methods of making knowledge in each of the areas, we are talking about the means by
which we make, develop, discover or otherwise acquire and update knowledge. What tools, cognitive, physical and
procedural, do we use in each area?
Across all of these contexts, we seek knowledge – individually and in groups – for a wide variety of purposes. The
methods that we use must be suited to the different purposes. Several factors determine how knowledge is sought
and verified in each of those contexts. One factor is the material that is being studied. People who are trying to make
mathematical knowledge are working with completely different materials – numbers, shapes and other elements of
existing mathematics – than historians do. Among the methods and tools available to the historian are physical
artefacts, such as documents and artwork, from past events. Human scientists, such as psychologists, are studying
human beings. We can manipulate numbers in ways that we cannot manipulate shards of pottery or human beings.
Another important factor in determining the methods by which knowledge is sought in various different contexts is
the aim of the area of knowledge. Historians are trying to find out what happened in the past and why events
unfolded the way they did, whereas botanists are trying to make knowledge about how plants function. One can kill
plants and cut them up into pieces in order to find out how they work; historians cannot reasonably smash up the
artefacts that they find. Their efforts are aimed at preservation, so their tools for analysis are different from the tools
used by scientists.
Each context requires a particular set of methods and steps to be taken in order to figure out what is true, to validate
our knowledge and to update it when necessary. Each situation also requires a certain amount of justification before
calling something ‘knowledge’ is acceptable to the group.

Ethics
Finally, for each topic that you study over the course of your programme, you will consider the role that ethics plays
in the shaping and sharing of knowledge. To say that something is ethical is to say that it is the right thing to do,
according to some principle. The methods of each area, for example, are shaped by what is considered to be ethical
practice. Ethics is an important and extensive subject, so we have made available online a short ‘Introduction to
Ethical Theory’ to introduce to you what we mean when we talk about ethics, different systems of ethical decision
making and basic principles of ethics as they relate to knowledge. You can access this information using the QR
code in the margin.

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TOK and the ‘post-truth’ world
Recently, it has become common in the international news to claim that we live in a ‘post-truth world’. The phrase
‘post-something’ means ‘after something’. ‘Post-mortem’ means after death. ‘Postpartum’ means after birth. ‘Post-
secondary’ means after secondary school. In fact, therefore, there is no such thing as a post-truth world. The world
exists as it is, and our deciding that we aren’t going to accept or acknowledge that will not change the facts. When
people in the news talk about the ‘post-truth world’, they are talking about a world in which a good many people
have decided that the truth does not matter. Such a decision is pretty perplexing, however, as there is no point in
being so stubborn as to refuse to face facts. Sooner or later the facts will get in the way of the fantasies, and there
will be unpleasant consequences to face for having denied reality.
The pathway to finding out what reality is does not consist of simply accepting everything you are told – even when
you are told it by adults or people in roles of presumed authority. Some of what you are told is no doubt true. Some
of what you are told, however, is false. You need to be able to tell the difference. In order to have a life in which you
have the most control you can possibly have over your own destiny, you have to know the facts about what you can
and cannot change. You have to be able to recognize consequences that will come to you if you fail to behave in
ways which accord with reality. Before you can do that, of course, you have to know what reality is. Theory of
Knowledge is a course that has the potential to give you power over knowledge. TOK will show you how to know
what you can believe and, more importantly, why you can believe it. It will help you to know the difference between
science and pseudo-science, between history and fake history. It will help you to know the conditions under which
scientists, historians, mathematicians, doctors, celebrities or your friends and neighbours can be believed, because it
will teach you to understand how the knowledge they make and pass on to you is developed and tested – or if it has
not been tested, and is, in fact, nothing more than unsupported rumour. TOK will teach you to recognize the
difference between knowledge which is absolutely certain, knowledge which is well-founded, beliefs and downright
falsehoods.

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How to use this book
We have chosen to organize this book around the required and optional elements of the Theory of Knowledge
course. There are, however, many possible ways for a TOK course to be organized, and so the order in which the
chapters of this book are presented may not match the order in which you study those topics in your class. You will
need to follow your teacher’s instructions about which chapters to read and when. One important skill, particularly
in terms of preparing for your TOK essay, will be the ability to compare and contrast the way that knowledge is
made, tested, justified and revised in each area of knowledge or theme with all the others. Your course may be
organized in such a way as to explore the topics through those connections, rather than one after the other, as this
book is organized. We have many times pointed out connections among the different topics, but we cannot, of
course, in a book of this length, begin to explore them all. Even if we could, much of the pleasure from the course
will be from discovering those connections for yourself, so be alert, throughout the course, to the ways in which the
different topics are similar to, and different from, each other.
The first chapter delves into the important concepts around which the TOK course has been developed. You should
read that chapter first just to familiarize yourself with the concepts, but do not worry about trying to learn everything
in it all at once. The chapter will serve you as a reference: you will be able to return to it frequently as you encounter
those concepts over and over during your TOK Programme. Each chapter has some examples of how the discussion
in that chapter connects to some of the concepts.
We have provided definitions of key terms you might not be familiar with throughout the book in order to help you
understand all of the content of the course (you will have seen several examples of this already on the preceding
pages).
To help you successfully navigate the content in the remaining chapters, and to help you get the most out of your
TOK studies, the following features are also used throughout the book.

ACTIVITY
Each chapter contains activities to help you check your understanding of the chapter content and to
practise working with the ideas in that chapter. Remember that TOK thinking is a new kind of work for
most students. You may not be accustomed to exploring ideas which do not always have one clear ‘right’
answer. Over time, you will develop the skills needed in order to be able to differentiate ideas in a
complex and sophisticated way, as well as to notice and explain the nuances of a wide variety of
knowledge-making situations.

Learner profile
Questions relating the content to attributes of the IB Learner profile are included in the margins
throughout.

DEEPER THINKING
Sometimes TOK presents us with conceptual issues or dilemmas that need to be thought about in a bit
more depth. Deeper thinking boxes are devoted to working through some of these points in the detail
they require.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Concept connection boxes highlight the relevance of one or more of the 12 key concepts to the topic
being discussed. Similar boxes are used to highlight connections to the core theme.

CASE STUDY
Real-life examples are drawn on throughout the book to illustrate the issues raised by the TOK course.

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In-depth examples have been labelled Case studies.

TOK trap
The TOK course deals with a lot of potentially difficult ideas and many students make the same mistakes
in their approaches to these. We have tried to identify some of these, so that you can avoid them.

Assessment advice
Guidance relating to the two assessment components – the essay and the exhibition – is labelled
Assessment advice.

There are also a number of suggestions about how you could link your TOK studies to the other two core elements
of the Diploma Programme – creativity, activity, service (CAS) and the Extended essay (EE) – interspersed
throughout the book.

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Using QR codes
Extra reading is recommended via the QR codes throughout the book. They are placed in the margin alongside the
text for quick scanning, and look like the ones on the next page. Some of these will take you to Hodder Education’s
IB Extras, where you will need to navigate to the Theory of Knowledge section, before finding the relevant
document.
To use the QR codes to access the weblinks you will need a QR code reader for your smartphone/tablet. There are
many free readers available, depending on the device that you use. We have supplied some suggestions below, but
this is not an exhaustive list and you should only download software compatible with your device and operating
system. We do not endorse any of the third-party products listed below and downloading them is done at your own
risk.

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Knowledge questions
The Theory of Knowledge course is founded in the exploration of knowledge questions. Knowledge questions are
questions about knowledge, which might sound rather obvious, but it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference
between knowledge questions and regular questions about the world. Knowledge questions focus not on things that
happen, but rather on how we develop knowledge, test knowledge claims, justify knowledge claims and, when
necessary, revise knowledge claims. The following table gives you a few examples of real-world questions versus
knowledge questions. The text in bold highlights the language which makes the question a knowledge question:
Real-world Knowledge questions
questions
Which is the best What evidence could we use to support a claim about which is the best
curling rink in the curling rink in the world?
world? A more general knowledge question: How do we know that we have sufficient
evidence to support a knowledge claim?
What is your favourite Under what circumstances, if any, could there be any opposing claim about
ice cream? what a person’s favourite type of something is?
A more general knowledge question: Who has the right to determine what is
true in any given situation?
Are octopuses What are the standards for determining whether a particular biological
capable of using creature has reasoning capacity?
tools? A more general knowledge question: What are the methods by which
scientists come to a determination about how natural processes work?
An even more general knowledge question: What are the methods by which
people can develop accurate knowledge claims in a given context?
You may sometimes encounter different vocabulary for discussing knowledge questions: real-world questions will
be called ‘first-order questions’, and knowledge questions will be called ‘second-order questions’.
Throughout your course, you will be exploring answers to a wide variety of knowledge questions. Many knowledge
questions apply in many different situations, and you will be considering how a particular knowledge question might
be answered in different areas of knowledge or for different themes in the course. The questions in the chart above
which are labeled ‘more general knowledge questions’ are questions which expand the first knowledge question
such that it would apply in a wide variety of situations, rather than in the specific real-world situation that the
question in the first column identifies.
We have included some sample knowledge questions, like the one in the margin, at places where the discussion
pertains to the question. Your teacher, however, will set questions for you or guide you to choose an appropriate
question at an appropriate time. They may or may not select the questions that we included in the book, and you
must, of course, follow the guidance of your teacher. It will be useful for you to remember that many different
knowledge questions will apply to all the themes and areas of knowledge. We have also not provided any direct
answers to the knowledge questions in this book. That’s because there is no single answer to any knowledge
question; the answer will depend entirely upon the particular knowledge being sought, the particular methods and
tools being used and the particular circumstances under which the investigation is being undertaken. We have
therefore chosen not to provide answers which might be taken as the ‘right’ answer to a knowledge question. Your
teacher will also guide you through learning how to respond to knowledge questions in sophisticated ways.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What shapes my perspective as a knower?

When you come to write your TOK essay, you will find that the prescribed title you choose will be a knowledge
question. Your essay will be an exploration of how that question can be answered in different knowledge-generating
situations, so your ability to think about knowledge questions in a sophisticated way is a skill you need to develop
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throughout your course.
There is one set of knowledge questions for TOK which is intended for student use directly: these are the questions
from which you will choose when the time comes to prepare your TOK exhibition – the internal assessment (IA) for
the course. There is a list of 35 TOK IA prompts, and you will choose one of those as the basis for your exhibition.
The TOK curriculum guide recommends that you complete your TOK exhibition with reference to the core theme or
one of the optional themes. Therefore, we have included examples of those prompts, such as the one in the margin,
at various places in the relevant chapters of the book where the discussion relates to those questions. We have not
suggested any answers to those questions, for the same reason that we have not provided any responses to more
general knowledge questions: you will need to learn how to develop complex responses which approach the
question from different perspectives. The TOK skills book Theory of Knowledge: Skills for Success by John Sprague
and published by Hodder Education, offers more detailed advice about how to respond to knowledge questions, how
to prepare for the two assessments and how your study of the content in this book will help you complete those
assessments effectively.

IA prompt
32 What makes a good explanation?

A very important point for you to understand and remember is that the concept connections and the IA prompts that
you encounter in each chapter are examples only. You should understand that the concepts and prompts in any given
chapter are not the only concepts or prompts which could be explored through the content in that chapter. Indeed, it
is very possible that every one of the 12 concepts can be connected to every one of the themes and areas of
knowledge in the course – that is why they are considered to be core concepts. The same might be true of the 35 IA
prompts. Use the connections that you see in any given chapter to spur your thinking, but then challenge yourself to
explore how the concepts and prompts which are not included in that particular chapter might be relevant and
helpful in developing a sophisticated understanding of that part of the course.
The IB Theory of Knowledge course is unlike any other course you are likely to have taken. If you engage your full
energy and attention, you will be rewarded with an ability that every human being should have: the ability to control
your life, as much as is humanly possible. You will know which people and which sources of information you can
trust and which you cannot. People will not be able to deliberately mislead you with false information, you will not
be taken in by erroneous ‘facts’, and you will be able to make decisions about what to do for yourself and for your
community which will have real power, because they will be based in reality. No one can ask for more from any
schooling. Enjoy!

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Works cited
Branswell, Helen. ‘US Measles Cases Top 700 This Year as Health Officials Urge Vaccinations’. STAT Scientific
American Public Health. Scientific American. 29 Apr. 2019. Web. 1 May 2019.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-measles-cases-top-700-this-year-as-health-officials-urge-
vaccinations/.
Dick, Philip K. 1988. ‘How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’. I Hope I Shall Arrive
Soon. London. Grafton.
Fox, Maggie. ‘2018 Was the Second-Worst Year for Measles in the US since 2000’. NBCNews.com. NBCUniversal
News Group. 22 Jan. 2019. Web. 21 Apr. 2019. www.nbcnews.com/storyline/measles-outbreak/measles-
outbreaks-make-2018-near-record-year-u-s-n961276.
Hussain, A, et al. ‘The Anti-Vaccination Movement: A Regression in Modern Medicine’. Cureus. PMC. 3 Jul. 2018.
Web. 5 Feb. 2019. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122668.
Scutti, Susan. ‘Measles Rarely Kills in the US, But When It Does, Here’s How’. CNN. Cable News Network. 5 Feb.
2019. Web. 21 Apr. 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/05/health/how-measles-kills-explainer/index.html.

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1 Course Concepts
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will:
• know what the 12 course concepts are
• understand the definitions of the 12 course concepts
• recognize additional concepts which are related to the 12 course concepts
• understand the relationships between and among the concepts
• understand how these concepts will shape the study of knowledge-production processes over the
course of the Theory of Knowledge class.

Learner profile
Thinkers
How do the course concepts help us to identify and understand patterns of knowledge-making across
TOK topics?

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Introduction
There are a number of important vocabulary words – concepts – that we will return to again and again throughout
this book. These words have precise meanings and they all mean something different from each other, but they are
words which are, unfortunately, easily confused and often misused. We begin by giving thorough definitions here,
so that when you encounter them in later chapters as we explore them in context, you will have a better
understanding of how each one functions in each different area of knowledge or learning context.
Of particular importance are 12 vocabulary words which the IB has identified as being concepts that are central to
the development of the course content. You will need to be very familiar with these terms, as they will very often
form the basis of the knowledge questions that you will be investigating in each unit. One critical understanding that
you must have as you learn these concepts is that, for TOK, you need to know the formal, technical meanings of
these terms, as used by professionals. Very often there are colloquial versions of the terms, which people use in
their everyday speech, but which are not correct in the technical sense that we are using the terms here. Precision is
important if you are going to be successful at understanding TOK concepts. Throughout this book, we will highlight
connections between the content that we are discussing and these 12 concepts. They are:
• Certainty (page 3)
• Culture (page 8)
• Evidence (page 9)
• Explanation (page 13)
• Interpretation (page 16)
• Justification (page 19)
• Objectivity (page 21)
• Perspective (page 25)
• Power (page 29)
• Responsibility (page 31)
• Truth (page 33)
• Values (page 35)
Let’s consider these in depth. They appear here in alphabetical order, so you should not consider any one concept
more important than any other. As we work our way through these 12 concepts, you will see that they encompass a
number of other concepts. The more sophisticated your understanding of all of the concepts and their related sub-
concepts, the better student of TOK you will be!

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How to use this chapter
This chapter consists of detailed interpretations of the 12 core concepts for the Theory of Knowledge course. In that
regard, it is quite different from the other chapters, all of which focus on one central subject. It also means that this
chapter contains a lot of technical content that might be difficult to understand and absorb all at once. You may wish
to read through the whole chapter once to familiarize yourself with the ideas, but don’t worry about trying to learn
all the ideas here all in one go. You will likely find it more useful to refer to the various sections of this chapter
when you encounter these concepts in the context of the rest of your TOK studies. We suggest that you bookmark
the beginning of this chapter, where the short table of contents is listed above, so that you can return to the chapter
whenever you need to quickly find the particular concept that you wish to know more about.

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Certainty

Certainty is a term that we use to describe knowledge that has been established beyond any reasonable doubt.
Strictly speaking, when we say we ‘know’ something, we are saying that we are ‘certain’ that it is true. Calling
something ‘certain’ is not the same thing as saying that it is ‘absolutely certain’. To call something ‘absolute’ is to
say that there are no qualifications whatsoever, no exceptions, and not even the tiniest amount of uncertainty. The
standard for certainty is confidence beyond reasonable doubt, whereas the standard for absolute certainty is an
assertion that we know right now that no evidence can ever arise which would cause us to have to revise the claim.
One common error that people make is to think that if we don’t know something with absolute certainty, then we
don’t know it at all. In fact, most of what we know is beyond any reasonable dispute but is not absolutely certain.
One example of something that we know, that is, one thing we are certain about, is that all living things eventually
die. We cannot, however, claim that we know this with absolute certainty. The reason that we know that all living
things die eventually is that we have observed this fact over and over. We have evidence from thousands, if not
millions, of species spanning millions of years. We have scientific understanding of the nature of biological entities
and of what happens to them over time. There has never been a single instance of an immortal being. The conclusion
that all living things die is an inductive conclusion: that is, it is a conclusion based on observation of many
individual instances. From those instances, we develop a pattern which becomes the knowledge claim. We are
convinced beyond reasonable doubt by the massed evidence that all living things die. All living things have so far
died, and we expect that to continue in the future. Scientists are particular, however, and they never make claims that
are not precise. We do not say that it is absolutely certain that all living things will die because we cannot, with
absolute certainty, predict the future based on the past. This is called the problem of induction.
We can assert that all living things have died, and we expect that all living things in the future will die. However, we
cannot guarantee that that will happen to every living thing forever because we have not seen every living thing
forever, and we never will be able to see every living thing that ever exists. If something living sometime in the
future were to turn out to be immortal, we would have to adjust our thinking. Acknowledging that we are certain, but
not absolutely certain, is our way of acknowledging the remote possibility that future evidence could cause a change
in our knowledge. Notice, however, that if something immortal did show up one day, we would be unlikely to
suddenly throw out our whole idea about the mortal nature of all living things. Instead, we would begin studying the
question to try to determine what accounts for the apparently immortal being. Imagine that it were to transpire that a
creature which was apparently human was 600 years old. We would want to know how that was possible. Avenues
of study would include investigating the physical make-up of the ‘person’ to see if there were differences between
them and other humans. Perhaps we could identify a mutation. Perhaps the ‘person’ would turn out to be some other
species altogether, or a being from some other planet. We would also have the problem of establishing that it was, in
fact, immortal. Just because something is very old does not mean that it will never die. Trees have lived longer than
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9 500 years, for example (ScienceNews). One species of sponge, Monorhaphis chuni, has been known to have lived
11 000 years (Langley). Bowhead whales can live 200 years (Langley). Despite these impressive life spans, all of
these living creatures eventually die, so any newcomer of great age would initially be presumed to be mortal, and we
would try to explain the cause of the surprisingly long life.
In short, the likelihood that even new evidence would end up overthr owing our knowledge about the mortal nature
of living things is infinitesimally small.
Absolute certainty is much rarer and is only attainable under very particular circumstances. We can claim to know
something with absolute certainty if we (human beings) have power over the reality that the knowledge claim
describes. Naming things, in fact, is one of the most common of the many realities over which humans have
complete power. Famously, in 2006, Pluto lost its status as a planet (Library of Congress). We know, with absolute
certainty, that Pluto is not a planet because ‘planet’ is a term which describes astronomical bodies with certain
features. Human beings, specifically the members of the International Astronomical Union, determined that, based
on recent discoveries, Pluto no longer meets all three of the criteria for planets. The three criteria for what
constitutes a planet have been determined by the human beings in whose authority such matters lie. They could, if
they wished, change the criteria. If they did so, Pluto’s status might change again, because the reality which is
expressed by calling Pluto a dwarf planet, as it is now known, would have changed. We can be absolutely certain
because we create the reality.

Notice that this example shows us that although some knowledge is absolutely certain because it is created by
humans, it can change if humans decide to change it. Pluto used to be a planet, and we were absolutely certain about
that, because we defined ‘planet’. We are now absolutely certain that Pluto is a dwarf planet, because we define both
‘planet’ and ‘dwarf planet’. The change in what is absolutely certain comes about because of a change in the reality
of how we define and order things.
The other situation in which we can assert that our knowledge is absolutely certain is when the knowledge claim is
the result of deductive reasoning. A proof is a formal argument which establishes premises, which are statements of
fact which form the basis of the argument, and a conclusion, which is the logical extension of the premises. In other
words, a formal argument shows that if certain premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. A very
simple type of formal argument is a syllogism, an argument with two premises and a conclusion. In order to result in
absolute certainty, a syllogism, or any other more complicated proof, must meet two criteria: the premises must be
true, and the logic must be valid. To say that an argument is valid is to say that the logic makes sense so that if the
premises are true, then the argument is sound. Validity, in other words, refers to the logical relationship between the
premises and the conclusion. Soundness refers to an argument in which the logic is valid and the premises are true,
and so, therefore, the conclusion must also be true. This kind of reasoning – the drawing of an unavoidable
conclusion from true premises – is called deductive reasoning. The conclusion drawn is called a deduction.
A fairly well-known syllogism can be used to demonstrate:
All men are mortal.

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 Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
The first two statements are the premises. Notice that they are both true. The first is certain, as discussed above, and
the second is absolutely certain, as ‘man’ is a word that we invented to describe a male member of the species homo
sapiens. Since both of the first statements are true, the third statement, the conclusion, must necessarily be true.
Another example of a syllogism which is both true and valid, and which therefore results in an absolutely certain
conclusion, is this one:
Adding 1 to any odd number will result in an even number.
3 is an odd number.
Therefore: 3 + 1 results in an even number.
The mathematics in this syllogism is, of course, very simple. We offer it here because the rigorous proof, as you will
see in Chapter 8, is one of the most essential methods for generating mathematical knowledge.

Here is an example of a syllogism which does not result in an absolutely certain conclusion. See if you can spot the
problem or problems:
If an object is grey, then it is an elephant.
Sarah’s handbag is grey.
Therefore: Sarah’s handbag is an elephant.
The logic, in this case, is valid. That is to say: if the premises were both true, that conclusion would inevitably
follow; however, the first premise is not true. Without true premises and valid logic, the argument is not sound, and
we cannot generate a proof. Once we have a proof, our knowledge is absolutely certain and, in the case of deductive
knowledge, it can never change. It is very important to remember, however, that reason alone cannot lead to
absolute certainty. Our deductions are only as good as the premises that go into them. If the premises are not true,
then we cannot get knowledge out of a formal argument. If we find out at some future point that our premises were
actually false, then our former certainty must be abandoned.
A final point to be made about ‘certainty’ and ‘absolute certainty’ is that the colloquial use of these terms is usually
very different from the technical use. You may have heard people say things like ‘I am absolutely certain that I left
my keys in the kitchen’, or ‘I am absolutely certain that the longest-lived mammal is the Great Blue Whale’, or ‘I am

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certain my mother will let me go out to the movies on Friday night’, only to have it transpire that the statement is not
true. The ‘certainty’ expressed was not, in fact, certainty of the type that we have been investigating here. These uses
of ‘certain’ and ‘absolutely certain’ obviously do not indicate knowledge beyond reasonable doubt, or knowledge
which can never be upended; they mean something more like ‘I seem to remember very clearly that this is true’, or ‘I
have been told in the past’, or even ‘I hope that this is true’. People using language outside of any technical or
academic context use these terms much more casually and, indeed, may not even be aware that these terms have
precise technical meanings. Claiming to be certain that the longest-lived mammal is the Great Blue Whale may
represent poor memory, confusion between types of whales, misinformation or deliberate deceit. Professional
purveyors of knowledge are neither so casual nor so careless with language. If a professional scientist, for example,
tells us that something is certain, they mean that scientists have amassed enough evidence for the claim to ensure
that it will never be easily overturned, and that, in fact, it will likely never be overturned.
We have seen, now, that there are only two circumstances under which we can claim that something is absolutely
certain: proofs and situations over which we have the power and authority to create the relevant reality. Most of our
knowledge is not of this sort. Most of our knowledge has been developed over a long period of time and/or through
a very careful process of checking. Some of our knowledge cannot be established to the level of certain beyond
reasonable doubt, and so some knowledge claims remain contestable. You will see, over the course of this book,
how knowledge is developed and justified in different circumstances and for different purposes. That investigation
will help you to understand when and how we can be certain about a wide variety of knowledge claims.
We have spent a long time discussing the concept of certainty, because, as mentioned earlier, one of the most
common errors that students make is to think that absolute certainty is the standard for knowledge. You should now
understand why that idea is in fact erroneous. Absolute certainty does, indeed, ensure that we have knowledge;
however, since we have seen that absolute certainty is only achievable in two very particular kinds of circumstances,
we now know that only certain kinds of knowledge can possibly be absolutely certain. Other kinds of knowledge are
certain and no longer contestable. Some kinds of claims do not rise to the level of certainty. They are contestable
and open to change or reinterpretation. As we go through the course, we will see, for each area of knowledge and
each of the themes, what kind of knowledge claims can be generated and whether they rise to the level of certainty
or absolute certainty.

RELATED IDEAS
We have seen that the concept of certainty encompasses a number of additional concepts. These are:
• the difference between certainty and absolute certainty
• inductive reasoning vs deductive reasoning
• formal arguments, syllogisms and rigorous proofs, including the concepts of premises, conclusions,
valid arguments, true premises and sound arguments
• the problem of induction
• technical vs colloquial uses of the terms ‘certainty’ and ‘absolute certainty’.

IA prompt
8 To what extent is certainty attainable?

ACTIVITY
After you have completed parts A and B of this activity, you can check your answers using the QR code.

Part A
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Read each of the following knowledge claims and determine whether it is certain (that is, beyond
reasonable dispute) or absolutely certain (knowledge that cannot be overturned unless reality itself
actually changes).
1 The names of the days of the week in English are: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday and Saturday.
2 The Earth is essentially spherical.
3 If I am standing on Earth and I drop my pen, it will fall to the ground unless stopped by something in
its way.
4 The capital city of Malaysia is Kuala Lumpur.
5 In June 2016, citizens of the United Kingdom voted in favour of ‘Brexit’ – a referendum which
determined that the United Kingdom would withdraw from the European Union.
Part B
Read each of the following syllogisms and determine whether the conclusion (the statement in bold) is
absolutely certain or false. If the conclusion is false, identify the reason.
1 Only cows eat grass. My cat, Max, eats grass; therefore, my cat Max is a cow.
2 Wednesday is the day after Tuesday. Today is Wednesday; therefore, yesterday was Tuesday.
3 Iceland is in the northern hemisphere. Reykjavik is a city in Iceland; therefore, Reykjavik is in the
northern hemisphere.
4 Horses have four legs. My table has four legs; therefore, my table is a horse.
5 The agency responsible for the civilian space programme in the United States, NASA (National
Aeronautics and Space Administration), would like to send a manned spaceship to Mars. NASA has a
project to send a manned spaceship to Mars; therefore, NASA will send a manned spaceship to
Mars.

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Culture

Taken in its wide ethnographic sense, [culture] is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom,
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor

Learner profile
Caring
How does knowledge of culture help us to become caring people?

The concept of ‘culture’ is a familiar one to most of us but can be difficult to truly pin down in a sophisticated way.
The culture of any given society incorporates a great many elements of that society, including the arts, religion,
ceremonies, traditions and mores about a wide range of cultural practices, such as clothing, gender roles and food,
as well as a traditional understanding of the history of that society. Culture includes the ethical and moral values of
the people within it. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, an English anthropologist of the early twentieth century, described
culture this way: ‘Taken in its wide ethnographic sense, [culture] is that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’
(Tylor). The key idea from Tylor’s definition is that culture consists only of that which is man-made and of
everything that is man-made. All the practices of all the areas of knowledge that you will study during your TOK
course, in other words, are part of culture.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow created a diagram which represents how people, both individually and in groups,
develop from basic, simple lives to more complex ones. At the bottom of the pyramid are the most basic needs –
those which must be fulfilled in order for the person and species to survive. The idea that Maslow wanted to convey
is that we cannot fulfil the needs on any one level until the needs on all the levels below it have been met. They
must, in other words, be fulfilled in order.
The top four levels in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are those related to the development of complex culture.
Cognitive needs refer to our need to develop knowledge as a society and as individuals, as well as to use all of our
mental capabilities. Aesthetic needs are those related to the search for order and beauty and meaning in form (you
will learn more about this in Chapter 12 about the arts). Self-actualization needs relate to individuals’ desires to
maximize all their personal capacities, to feel fulfilled (McLeod). Transcendence needs are those which deal with a
person being ‘motivated by values which transcend beyond the personal self (eg, mystical experiences and certain
experiences with nature, aesthetic experiences, sexual experiences, service to others, the pursuit of science, religious
faith, etc)’ (McLeod).

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You can see that those associated with what we typically mean when we talk about culture – the arts, intellectual and
creative development and religion – appear in the upper levels of the pyramid. Most aspects of culture, in other
words, arise out of advanced needs achieved only as societies develop into more complex and sophisticated entities.
Because of this pattern, ‘cultured’ has also come to describe people or behaviour that is considered to be a sign of
advanced intellectual or aesthetic development. Cultured people are people we think of as having sophistication or
‘class’, which does not necessarily relate to how much money they have.
For our purposes, we want to know how culture relates to knowledge. There are two aspects to this question: how
does our culture shape what we can, as individuals and as groups, know, and how does what we know shape our
culture? You will explore these two aspects of culture as it relates to knowledge in the chapters that follow.

RELATED IDEAS
We have seen that the concept of culture encompasses a number of additional concepts. These are:
• beliefs about what is ethical and moral and the difference between ethics and morals
• the development of biological human nature vs the development of human-created social conventions
• the relationship between the stages of Maslow’s hierarchy and the development of culture
• the relationship between culture and beliefs
• the reciprocal relationship between knowledge and culture.

IA prompt
21 What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?

IA prompt
29 Who owns knowledge?

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Evidence

Evidence is any fact or claim that someone offers in support of another claim. Sometimes people will offer facts in
support of a claim and sometimes they will offer opinions, so we need to know the difference between those two
things.
A fact is a feature of reality. Facts exist whether we know about them or not, but a large part of what we do when we
try to make or discover or otherwise generate knowledge is to determine what the facts are. Over the course of this
book, we will delineate the kinds of facts that make up the reality of all the different areas of knowledge and
knowledge-making that TOK explores. For now, here are a few examples: the natural sciences deal with facts about
the physical nature of the universe, so we can say that it is a fact that the Earth travels a path around the Sun. This
fact was famously established by the sixteenth-century scientist Nicolaus Copernicus. It was not accepted readily,
especially by the leadership of the Catholic Church, but eventually it had to be accepted because it is in fact true.
You may not know that that same claim was made 1 800 years before Copernicus by a Greek astronomer,
Aristarchus of Stamos. His claim also offended religious leaders, who accused him of ‘impiety’ (Evans). Even
though many people were offended when first hearing about these facts, the facts about the relationship between the
Sun and the Earth are true. They accurately describe reality.
Another type of fact is one which arises from a reality that is under the control of humans. We have looked at some
of these facts already: that your name is what it is is a fact, because your parents are the people who had the legal
right to name you, and they did. If today is Tuesday, then it is a fact that today is Tuesday, because humans invented
the calendar and the organization of days into weeks, and the originators of English gave Tuesday its name. If you
are legally required to go to school until age 18, or to drive at or below a given speed limit, or if you are forbidden to
get married until a certain age, these are facts that were established by humans living together in society and making
agreements about what would constitute behaviour that allows the society to flourish.
Not every statement of ‘fact’ is actually a fact. People will sometimes claim as fact things which are either a matter
of opinion or belief, or which are simply untrue.
You might have heard some people defend a claim that they have made by declaring: ‘I am entitled to my own
opinion!’ or ‘I have a right to my own opinion!’ That claim is true, but only under very specific conditions. To say
that you are ‘entitled’ to something, or that you ‘have a right’ to something is a very strong statement. To be entitled
to something, or to have a right to something, means that it is owed to you, either by birth right, because you have
earned it, or because it is yours by law. We do, indeed, have many rights. We have legal rights which are granted to
us by our governments and by laws which govern our societies. Many people would agree that we are born with
certain rights. The Declaration of Independence, the document which declared Britain’s 13 colonies in North
America to be free and independent of the rule of King George III, contains the claim that we have certain
inalienable rights, including ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ (‘Declaration of Independence: A

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Transcription’). The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights details a number of rights to which they
believe all human beings are entitled, but a right to an opinion does not appear there either (United Nations). When
people claim, therefore, that ‘I have a right to my opinion’, or ‘I am entitled to my opinion’, they are trying to assert
that no one can argue against them because by some inalienable right, they are permitted to have whatever opinion
they want. Unfortunately, however, this claim is too often made in situations in which people do not have a right –
divine, earned or otherwise – to an opinion, because opinion is not the relevant knowledge-making method.
You are entitled to your own opinion, when opinion is the appropriate determining factor for what is real (Whyte 1–
10). Many times, opinion is a satisfactory means of deciding what reality is. If you are asked about your favourite
flavour of ice cream, for example, your opinion that, say, butter pecan ice cream is the best is the determining factor.
No one else can tell you that some other flavour is your favourite flavour, and no one else can make you change
your mind. That opinion could change. Someone might offer you a flavour you have never tried before – say Ben &
Jerry’s® Chunky Monkey – and you might find that you love it so much that it replaces butter pecan in your heart.
You were not previously wrong; when butter pecan was your favourite ice cream, then that was a fact. Having
discovered a new favourite, however, now there is a new reality and your opinion has changed so that the fact is that
Chunky Monkey is now your favourite ice cream. Opinion is the appropriate determining factor for questions such
as what the best restaurant in town is, what your favourite action movie is and whether cold weather sports are more
fun than warm weather sports. You can think of many more such instances. Opinion is not, however, the
determining factor when the subject at hand is a reality which is beyond our control or choosing.
In those cases, facts are the determining factor, and no one is entitled to make up their own personal facts which
apply only to them and not to everyone else. Opinions are attitudes toward facts; they are not facts in and of
themselves. That Indian gentleman we read about in the introduction could not make the man-eating tiger into a
tame house pet just because he had an opinion that he could. The anti-vaxxers cannot make the refusal to vaccinate
into a safe and sensible course of action just because they have an opinion which is not based on actual scientific
facts. They cannot change the reality of vaccines or potentially fatal diseases just because they feel like it. You can’t
have an opinion that falling off a 20-storey building won’t injure you and you can’t have an opinion that the Sun
revolves around the Earth. If you make such claims, you are mistaken. Asserting that they are your opinion and that
you are entitled to it does not make your opinion correct.

Notice, finally, that in those cases in which your opinion is, in fact, the appropriate determining factor of what
reality is, then your opinion becomes a fact, and you are entitled to it. These are very limited kinds of facts,
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however, and they do not extend to the world beyond your personal control!
Both facts and opinions might be offered as evidence for knowledge claims. If you claim that your mother will let
you go to the cinema with your friends on the weekend, you might support that claim with either facts (she already
told you that you could go) or with your opinion (she has let you go before, and so you think that she will let you go
this time, too).

A third kind of thing which might be offered as evidence for a claim is physical evidence. In the United States, the
fourth of July is a national holiday, which most people think celebrates the signing of the Declaration of
Independence. However, the Declaration of Independence was not signed on 4 July, but rather on 2 August (Sneff).
The evidence for that fact consists of several historical documents – primary sources from July and August 1776
which are now housed in the US government archives. Harvard doctoral student Emily Sneff details the documents
used to determine the actual date on which the official copy of the Declaration of Independence was signed, in a
fascinating blog post for the Declaration Resources Project. You can use the QR code in the margin on the right to
read it.
One of these supporting documents is Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress, 7 June
– 1 August 1776’. Another is the parchment declaration itself, which was ‘fairly engrossed’, that is, copied out in a
large clear handwriting, by a man named Timothy Matlack. That claim, in turn, has been established by handwriting
experts comparing the handwriting on the Declaration to documents which are known to have been written by
Matlack (Sneff). Another physical artefact which serves as relevant evidence in this investigation is a letter from
delegate Benjamin Rush from Pennsylvania to John Adams describing the solemnity of the ceremony of the signing
on 2 August (Sneff). Physical artefacts very commonly provide evidence of historical events.
Any knowledge claim requires some sort of evidence. Evidence, however, is not the same thing as proof. Consider
the examples above: in the case of your claim that your mother will let you go to the cinema, it will be correct so
long as she has indeed told you that you may go. If you are offering your opinion, based only on past experiences,
you might easily be shown to be wrong when the time comes. Perhaps your mother has other plans for you for
Friday night that you don’t know about. Perhaps your mother has taken a disliking to those friends or feels that the
movie you want to see is inappropriate. Perhaps your mother needs you to babysit your younger siblings because she
is going to be out that evening herself. Many facts of which you are unaware could easily contradict your belief that
you will be able to go to the cinema this weekend. Finally, although you would never lie to your friends about your
beliefs, some people do lie when they make claims about what is true.
The trip to the cinema example reveals one kind of problem: the problem of establishing the accuracy of claims
which are made on an individual’s word alone. The example of the signing of the Declaration of Independence
offers another reason that evidence alone does not constitute proof, because the facts are incomplete, and they
conflict with each other. Jefferson said that the document was signed on 4 July during the meeting of the Continental
Congress (Jefferson); however, if that document existed, it has disappeared. We do know that after 4 July, the
‘engrossed’ copy was made and signed on 2 August, according to the Journals of the Continental Congress (Sneff).
Despite many years’ study and the examination of a great many more primary source documents which are not
mentioned here, a few historians still do not accept the claim that the Declaration of Independence was signed on 2
August 1776. This digression from the norm reveals another aspect of the relationship between evidence and proof:
the evidence has to be convincing to the person to whom it is offered, or no agreement can be reached. In the study
of history, we seldom achieve universal agreement, for reasons that you will explore in much greater depth in the
chapter on history as an area of knowledge.
In order, therefore, to prove a knowledge claim, to establish that it is true, one must certainly have evidence, but the
simple offering of evidence alone is insufficient to demonstrate the validity of any claim. For evidence to become
convincing, several other elements must be present. Evidence must first be examined, tested and verified. There
must be sufficient evidence to be convincing. Similar to the way that premises are used in syllogisms or rigorous
proofs, evidence offered in less formally structured arguments must be believable and the explanation, as we shall
see in our exploration of the concepts of explanation and justification, must be logical enough to be convincing.
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Each kind of knowledge-generating undertaking has its own procedures for accomplishing all of these things, as you
will see in the following chapters.
A final concept related to evidence is the concept of belief. To say that ‘I believe’ something means that you accept
it as true (Corvino). You can have beliefs which apply to facts or to opinions. You can say that you believe your
mother will let you go to the cinema either because she has told you that you can or because she has allowed you to
go on past occasions and you have no reason to expect this week to be any different. Historians can say that they
believe that the evidence supporting the claim that the Declaration of Independence was signed on 2 August is
sufficient to demonstrate the truth of that claim, or they can say that they do not believe it. ‘Belief’, then, applies to
individuals and their relationship to knowledge claims. Someone can believe something which is not true (such as
the ‘flat-earther’ who believes that the Earth is flat) and someone else might refuse to believe something which is
true (such as the anti-vaxxer who refuses to believe that it is in her child’s best interest to be vaccinated).

Learner profile
Open-minded
How does being open-minded help us to refine and justify our beliefs?

The word ‘belief’ is nearly synonymous with the word ‘opinion’ in that both describe the relationship of an
individual mind to reality. Just as beliefs can be either correct or incorrect, so can opinions. We did, however, note
earlier in this section that there are times when opinion is the prevailing force for determining reality. In those cases
(‘chocolate swirl is the best ice cream’ or ‘Manchester United is my favourite soccer team’ or ‘there is nowhere
better to live in India than Delhi’), we would be more likely to use the word ‘opinion’ than the word ‘belief,’ but you
can see how similar they are. We do, however, use the word ‘belief’ in some cases in which we would not use the
word ‘opinion’. Some examples are ‘I believe you’, or ‘I believe in God’, or ‘I believe in the importance of giving
back to your community’. The idea of belief in these cases tends to convey an extra depth of emotional commitment
to an idea that ‘opinion’ does not imply.

TOK trap
One final important point to make about beliefs is that all beliefs are based in evidence and argument,
although some beliefs ultimately turn out to be based in good evidence and valid arguments, while other
beliefs deny facts or fail to accept logical connections between them.
A common mistake that students make when writing their TOK essays is to assert that people who
believe in God, or a god, or some gods have no evidence for their beliefs. Such a claim is not true; no
one has beliefs without evidence. The evidence for the existence of a deity or deities consists of holy
texts and historical artefacts which are associated with the history of that religion. Believers also have
evidence in the form of testimony from other believers – family members and religious leaders, for
example. Many believers experience moments of personal revelation in which they feel themselves to be
connected to a deity in an emotional sense. All of these experiences are evidence. You will explore in
more detail the particular kind of belief that constitutes religious belief, as well as the role of faith as a
way of knowing in developing that belief, in Chapter 6 later in this book.

RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to evidence are:
• sufficiency of evidence
• belief
• facts
• proof
• opinions

IA prompt
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25 How can we distinguish between knowledge, belief and opinion?

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Explanation

An explanation in TOK terms is the same kind of explanation that you are used to in everyday life. An explanation
is a description of a thing, system or phenomenon. However, an explanation goes beyond simply describing, because
it accounts for why the thing is the way it is, or what it does, or what it is good for. ‘Explanation’ is included as an
important concept in TOK because so much of our knowledge functions to explain something.

Explanations are used by people who have knowledge (or facts, opinions or beliefs) in order to make those ideas
clear to someone else. Consider, for instance, an explanation from mathematics, the Pythagorean Theorem: a2 + b2 =
c2. The theorem is an explanation of the relationship between the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. An
explanation from the arts can be found in the article ‘In Dutch Still Lifes, Dark Secrets Hide Behind Exotic
Delicacies’, which provides an explanation of the meaning of Clara Peeters’ painting Still Life with Cheeses,
Artichoke, and Cherries (c. 1625). Consider how author Julia Fiore offers much more than a description of the
painting:
Indeed, the painting has a nationalistic flavor. The butter and huge cheese wheels that dominate the

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 composition evince cultural pride in Dutch agriculture (milk, called the ‘noble liquid’, has become such an
integral marker of Dutch heritage that Johannes Vermeer’s Milkmaid, 1657–58, seems almost a cliché). At
the same time, this still life’s humility reflects prevailing Calvinist sentiments. The crust of the hard
biscuit, symbolizing daily life, crumbles on the counter. The work is intensely realistic – every scrape of
the serrated knife is reflected in the butter, for instance. The flowering artichoke and beautiful red cherries
reflected on a silver plate punctuate the largely brown-hued composition. An eaten cherry at the edge of
the table, only the stem and pit remaining, is a gentle reminder of the impermanence of life. But paintings,
of course, were valued for their permanence. Here, the food never spoils. (Fiore)
Finally, an example from the human sciences and ethics can be found in ‘The Lady Vanishes’, an episode of
Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History. In the podcast, Gladwell explains the concept
of ‘moral licensing’ from the field of social psychology. Moral licensing is the idea that ‘[p]ast good deeds can
liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they
would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral’ (Merritt, et al 344–35). Gladwell uses the idea of
moral licensing to help explain why people who appear to be open-minded and supportive of change can turn around
and act in ways that appear to be hypocritical by behaving in ways that are bigoted or close-minded and which
block, rather than support, change. You can use the QR code on the right to listen to the podcast.

As with evidence and opinions and beliefs, explanations cannot in and of themselves make something true. There
are good explanations and bad explanations. An explanation in and of itself cannot ensure that the listener will
understand or accept the knowledge. Sometimes individuals refuse to accept even good explanations. Famously,
Copernicus’ explanation of the heliocentric universe (the idea that the Sun is assumed to lie at or near a central point
of the solar system while the Earth and other bodies revolve around it) was not accepted by the Roman Catholic
Church. However, you might not know that the church did initially accept the theory, rejecting it only in 1616, 73
years after Copernicus’ book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published, when a big push of Protestant
claims that the theory was heresy drove the Catholic Church to fall in line (Singham). Ironically, the Protestant
Church was then the first to accept the theory after new findings by such scientists as Galileo and Isaac Newton
supported it. The Catholic Church did not lift the ban on Copernicus’ book until 1835 (Solis). In this example, then,
a good explanation was initially accepted by the Catholic Church, then rejected by both the Protestant and Catholic
Churches, then accepted by the Protestant institutions, but not finally officially accepted by the Catholic leadership
until nearly 300 years after the original explanation was offered!

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An important concept that comes up in the example of the Copernican revolution is the concept of a theory. In the
natural sciences, ‘theory’ has a particular meaning which is significantly different from the way the word is used in
everyday speech. In colloquial speech, ‘theory’ is often used to mean something like ‘idea’ or ‘wild guess’. You
might have heard people say things such as, ‘I have a theory about why my friend is so easily fooled by lies’, or ‘I
have a theory about why the food in the school cafeteria is so bad’. In colloquial English, the idea of a ‘theory’ has
the connotation of something which is not proven, and which is not even necessarily supported by very much
evidence. ‘Theories’ in that context can be quite imaginative and are very likely to collapse when more information
is gathered. A theory in the natural sciences, however, is something very different.
A theory in the natural sciences is an explanation which accounts for a very large set of data, usually gathered by
many scientists over long periods – sometimes decades or even centuries. The theory of evolution, for example,
encompasses observations of huge numbers of living things as well as of fossils. It extends back to Darwin, who first
published the theory in 1859, but whose work in developing it began decades before that. An explanation which has
risen to the level of a theory in the sciences is an explanation which is as close to absolute certainty as it is possible
to get. It is called a theory because, as we have already seen, absolute certainty is not attainable in an inductive field
of study, and scientists care about being precise in their naming of things. Mathematicians can talk about proofs;
scientists talk, instead, about theories. A scientific theory, in contrast to the speculative theory of the everyday
speaker of English, is so well-established that the odds of its ever being overthrown are infinitesimally small.
Claiming that ‘evolution is just a theory’, therefore, is to miss the point entirely about what makes something a
theory in the sciences. You will read more about this theory in Chapter 9. New evidence might be expected to spur
some study, leading to minor adjustments in the details of the theory, but not to the essential nature of the
explanation. As you study the sciences in your TOK course, you will need to remember that the word ‘theory’ does
not suggest something tentative or unsupported by data; rather, it refers to something which is now certain, beyond
reasonable contention.
Throughout the TOK course, you will be considering the kinds of explanations which can be developed in all the
various knowledge-generating situations you study, and you will be working to understand what constitutes a good
explanation in each of those situations.

RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to explanation are:
• good explanations
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• belief
• bad explanations
• opinions.
• theory

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Interpretation

‘Interpretation’ means to examine the facts in a particular case and then to figure out what they mean. Usually,
interpretation is called for when we have a set of facts and we want to figure out what conclusions we can draw from
the whole set together. The simple existence of a rock is a fact that needs no interpretation. However, if we examine
the rock microscopically and discover that it has in it some elements which are not normally found on Earth, we
must then make an interpretation of what the presence of those elements suggests. In 1971, Apollo 14 brought a
sample of Moon rocks back to Earth (see image on page 17). In early 2019, scientists at the Center for Lunar
Science and Exploration, a department in NASA (the United States’ space exploration agency) published a paper
arguing that one of those rocks originated on Earth, was jettisoned off the Earth by something like the impact of a
meteor and, in its turn, landed on the Moon as space debris 4 billion years ago (Anderson). This conclusion was
based on the facts shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Interpretation of facts relating to samples of Moon rocks

Facts Interpretation
• The rock contains quartz, These three facts together suggest that the rock was much more likely
feldspar and zircon to have originated on Earth rather than on the Moon. It is not
• Quartz, feldspar and zircon impossible that the rock originated on the Moon, but the likelihood is
are common on Earth very small, while such rocks are common on Earth
• Quartz, feldspar and zircon
are extremely rare on the
Moon
• Crystallization on the Moon These two facts together also suggest that the rock was created on
occurs at higher temperatures Earth. These two facts make the interpretation above even more likely
than on Earth
• The rock crystallized under
cooler atmospheric
conditions, like those on
Earth, rather than like those
on the Moon
• Four billion years ago, the The nearer proximity of the Moon to the Earth at the time the rock was
Moon was much closer to the formed makes the possibility of the Earth rock travelling to and hitting
Earth the Moon as the result of an impact on Earth much more likely

We might be able to find some interpretations convincing even if there are some ambiguities or unanswered
questions because they account for what is known in a logical way. However, the more facts an interpretation can
account for, the more thoroughly convincing it is likely to be. The connection between the facts and the
interpretations also must be logical and they have to go together in a system that makes sense. The scientists’
explanation about the Earth rock on the Moon does both of these things. You should recognize these requirements

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by now: we saw them in the context of syllogisms, where we noted that in order for a syllogism to produce an
absolutely certain conclusion, the premises have to be true and the logic has to be valid. In the case of interpretations
– as with any other formal argument – the facts (like premises) have to be true and the logic has to be valid. The
reason that we cannot achieve absolute certainty in the case of the Earth rock on the Moon, is that, as with many
other knowledge claims, we don’t know that we have all the facts that are relevant. Maybe one day we’ll find
another source in the Universe of rocks which contain quartz, feldspar and zircon and which crystallizes rock at
Earth-like temperatures. Maybe we will one day discover evidence of some dramatic astronomical event which
resulted in rocks being spewed over long distances which could account for the presence of the rock on the Moon.
Many other findings are possible in the future, but for now, the interpretation, based on all the known facts, of the
rock known as Apollo sample 14321 (Bellucci, et al 173–85) is reasonable.

As you study the areas of knowledge and the knowledge-related themes throughout your TOK course, one of the
things you will be learning is how interpretation is done in each of those realms. The processes differ because the
conditions for knowledge-making and the availability and nature of facts differ. In the astronomy example we saw
above, the facts have to do with physical properties of the rock itself, all of which are observable today, regardless of
the fact that the rock itself is 4 billion years old and that it was brought back to Earth nearly 50 years ago. Historians,
on the other hand, though they do have access to some physical objects, do not have access to nearly the quantity of
physical evidence that natural scientists can study, nor are the physical objects themselves the only facts that
historians would like to have. They would like to know, for example, what was said between Copernicus and church
leaders at the time of the publication of his book about the heliocentric universe. They would like to know what was
said at the meeting during which it was decided to build the Great Wall of China. As it is, historians must content
themselves with whatever records are left, and we are always aware that what has survived is very likely to be only a
small fraction of what originally existed.
In the arts, the facts which are used for interpretation consist primarily of the features of the individual artwork. In
the earlier example of the Dutch still life, you can see the picture for yourself, so you can see that Julia Fiore’s
interpretation of the painting does take into account the facts of the painting: the cheeses, the biscuit, the marks of
the knife in the butter and the remnant of the eaten cherry. But that interpretation also required knowledge of a great
many other facts about the beliefs of what Fiore called ‘prevailing Calvinist sentiments’. Her interpretation was
based on the nature of the work of art, but also on a consideration of its having been created in a particular place at a
particular time. Because the culture of that time and place influenced the making of the painting, the interpreter of
the painting must know something about that culture in order to be able to interpret effectively.
Part of what you will be doing in TOK is to consider the ways in which interpretations are constructed, evaluating
the accuracy and relevance of the proposed facts and judging the validity of the argument presented. But part of
what you will be doing is developing and presenting interpretations of your own, which you will also have to do in
your other IB courses.

Assessment advice
In creating your TOK exhibition, you will have to be able to interpret the significance of objects in terms
of what they reveal about how knowledge functions in the real world. Imagine that you were creating an
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exhibition about the degree to which certainty is possible. You will have to choose objects which will
illustrate an answer or several different answers to that question. In order to choose objects that reveal
insight into this aspect of knowledge in the real world, you must interpret a variety of objects and choose
the best ones. So perhaps you would consider how a calculator functions in mathematics and what it
suggests about certainty. A calculator is used to perform calculations that humans cannot perform – or at
least cannot perform very rapidly. Say, for example, you wished to know the answer to the following
expression:

You can input the equation into the calculator and get the answer: 536.04. That answer is absolutely
certain. The calculator knows the order of operations, so it first calculates the (92 × 87) which is in
parentheses. It then divides that number, which is 8004, by 100 which gives a response of 80.04, to
which it adds 456, for a total of 536.04.
In this instance, the calculator is an example of an object which stands for the ability to achieve absolute
certainty. This statement is our interpretation of the significance of the calculator as an object which
reveals something about the initial question of the degree to which certainty is possible. For your
exhibition, you would then justify your choice of the calculator by explaining your interpretation of its
significance.
For your TOK essay, your interpretive job is somewhat different. For that assessment, you will choose
from a list of prescribed titles and then you will have to examine real-world situations to see what kind of
answers they suggest to the question. Imagine, for example, that you were writing an essay in response
to this potential prescribed title: ‘How does an individual knower gain from and contribute to the
knowledge of a community? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.’
The essential question here is: ‘In what way can shared knowledge shape personal knowledge?’
Suppose that you have just recently read about Stanford Bioengineer Manu Prakash who, in 2016, won
a MacArthur Genius grant for the invention of a $1 microscope made out of paper which the user folds,
like origami. Prakash’s microscope has been distributed to tens of thousands of children around the
world, and they have been able to contribute their scientific findings to a website for uses of the
Foldoscope. The express purpose of this invention was to engage people in scientific practice and to
inspire wonder about the natural world. Prakesh cites one 6-year-old girl who was inspired by the movie
Frozen to research crystals. ‘She researched over months and months all kinds of crystals she could
find, all the way to medicine cabinets, to ice cream, to maple taffy. It’s incredible to just watch her go and
you watch her progression of how she came to that experiment’ (Resnick).
Once you know the facts of the story, your job is to interpret its significance in terms of providing an
answer to the question in the prescribed title. For this real-world example, you might argue that shared
knowledge of how microscopes work, along with shared knowledge about origami, combined in Prakash
and his graduate students to produce the foldable microscope. The foldable microscope in turn reaches
outside of the professional scientific community to engage new participants in the knowledge-making
endeavour. We see a kind of cycle of individual and community knowledge influencing each other.
Knowledge of both microscopes and origami is widely known by many people, but perhaps there are not
very many people who have extensive knowledge of both, and certainly no one else had ever thought of
combining them before. So, Prakash took his personal knowledge from two very different fields to create
something totally new which was, initially anyway, a matter of his individual knowledge. He then shared
that new knowledge widely in order to inspire young people to develop their own individual knowledge of
scientific observation. The young people in turn can then share their individual knowledge through the
website, so that it can become community knowledge. So, our interpretation of this real-life situation is
that it shows in two different ways that community knowledge forms the essential basis for the
development of new individual knowledge, as well as two different ways in which individual knowledge
can become community knowledge. In your essay, you would explain your interpretation and justify its
effectiveness.
As you create your TOK assessments, you need to realize that the act of creating an interpretation is the
act of examining the facts and developing an explanation for why it is that they all coexist. It is an act of
finding the meaning in something. The act of presenting an interpretation to someone else is the act of
justifying your interpretation. ‘Justification’ is, in fact, our next course concept.
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RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to interpretation are:
• argument
• facts
• logic
• justification.

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Justification

A justification is a type of explanation; however, a justification includes an attempt to persuade the listener that the
actions taken were correct or at least understandable. Explanations don’t include any overt attempt to convince the
listener to believe what is being said, while justifications do. As we saw with explanations, there are, of course, good
justifications and bad justifications. A bad justification is one in which, rather than providing a rational and
compelling explanation, the person offering it is simply making excuses for herself or for someone else. Another
word for the kind of self-serving and inappropriate attempt at justification is rationalization. Rationalizations, despite
the fact that they sound like they must be logical, because the word contains the idea of reason, are weak
explanations which attempt to excuse behaviour that the person offering the rationalization knows was wrong. The
professor who falsifies data in a study and then tries to justify it by saying that there was a lot of pressure from the
pharmaceutical company paying for the research is offering a rationalization.
An effective justification, on the other hand, provides good reasons that explain a behaviour or decision without
necessarily exonerating the person who made the decision or took the action. For example, Orlando Patterson,
writing for the New York Times in 1999, discussed Hillary Clinton’s explanation for her husband’s having
committed adultery and then lying about it. She attributed his behaviour, which she called a sin of weakness, to his
dysfunctional family background. Patterson addresses the fact that Hillary Clinton drew a lot of criticism from
people who thought that she was trying to ‘justify’ her husband’s infidelity by saying it wasn’t really his fault.
Patterson disagreed, saying that he did not take what Mrs Clinton said to suggest in any way that she was absolving
her husband from responsibility for his actions.
Patterson’s suggestion is that Hillary Clinton was explaining her husband’s bad behaviour, but she was not justifying
it. In this sense of ‘justification’, the word implies making excuses for someone – in this case, President Clinton – so
that that person is not responsible for his bad deeds. Hillary Clinton was not doing that; she was simply explaining
the roots of her husband’s inability to choose well. She said elsewhere, quite bluntly, that President Clinton was a
grown man and therefore responsible for his own behaviour (Patterson).
Rationalization is a common understanding of the idea of justification in everyday speech, but we will use the term
more narrowly in TOK.

Assessment advice
In the context of Theory of Knowledge and, more generally, in the broader context of students in
education, justifications are not self-serving. Throughout the IB Diploma Programme, you will be asked
to justify the claims that you make, particularly on your IB assessments.
In TOK, you will complete an exhibition, for which you will choose several objects in the real world, and
you will have to justify your choices by explaining why those particular objects effectively represent an
idea about how knowledge works in the real world. For your TOK essay, you will have to choose some
real-life situations and make claims about what those situations reveal about the way knowledge works
with regard to a specific idea, which will be expressed in the prescribed title you choose to write about.
Here you will have to justify your interpretation of what that real-life example reveals with regard to that
title.
In both cases, what will make your work justifications rather than explanations is the fact that you must
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convince your examiner that your thinking and your ideas are effective. Your justifications will be
persuasive if they are accurate, rational, balanced and objective. Those qualities are all reflected in this
list of course concepts. Accuracy is an important component of the concept of truth (page 33). We saw
that rationality, which pertains to the effective use of reason, is an important element of the concept of
certainty (page 3). The idea of balance is an important component of perspective (page 25) and
objectivity is itself one of the main course concepts (page 2).

The reason that you are so often called to produce justifications, rather than explanations, over the course of your
educational career is that your work is so often being judged, either by teachers or by examiners. This kind of
justification does, however, also apply in the world outside of academia. Sometimes we are called upon to justify
our choices because they seem on the outside to have been misguided, but when explained, can be justified as
having resulted in a proper course of action. This is particularly true with regard to ethical knowledge-making. If
you must make a hard decision about whether the right thing to do is to turn your best friend in for cheating on one
of their IB assessments, you have to choose between competing ethical values: loyalty and support and honesty and
integrity. If you choose to turn in your friend, you will probably have to justify to them why you did it. Perhaps you
have several reasons: for instance, that the rules have to apply equally to everyone rather than privileging some; that
if your friend gets away with turning in work that wasn’t theirs, they not only cheated, but lost the opportunity to
learn and to show what they could actually do; that one instance of cheating tends to result in repeated instances, so
that ultimately, your friend’s education, as well as their ability to believe in their own talents, could be seriously
compromised. These are good reasons for a decision to turn your friend in, and they would comprise a proper
justification for your decision.

On the other hand, if you decide not to turn your friend in because you wish to be loyal to them no matter what, you
will have to justify that decision. Interestingly, you may find it harder to convince anyone but your friend. You
might argue that loyalty is more important than honesty, but if we delve into that claim, we have to start asking
ourselves whether covering up lies really constitutes loyalty, because doing so is not ultimately in the best interest of
the person we’re covering up for. In helping your friend cover up their misdeed, you become complicit in that
misdeed, and it is always harder to successfully justify a bad action. This is often the case with ethical dilemmas: we
are faced with a difficult decision, and sometimes the difficulty arises from the fact that both options result in
equally good and bad outcomes. Pretty frequently the difficulty comes from the fact that doing the right thing will
cost us something that we value. If, in those cases, we decide not to pay the price, we are likely to find that our
justification is of the everyday sort in which we are really only rationalizing a decision we know was not the right
one.
In Theory of Knowledge, when we examine the justifications people in the real world give for their courses of
action, we will evaluate those justifications using the same standards that your teachers and examiners use to
evaluate your justifications to them. This is because we want to be sure that the decisions that people make are
sound, rational and disinterested, rather than biased or self-serving. We need to determine whether the knowledge
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upon which people’s actions were based, or upon which conclusions were drawn, is sound, and that their
explanations for why they acted as they did are, therefore, true justifications rather than rationalizations.
One final note about justification: in our discussion of the concept of evidence, we examined the role of opinion in
knowledge development. In situations in which your opinion is the determining factor, such as the identification of
your favourite book or film, no justification is required. The justification is that you like it. You might give your
reasons for why you like rap music better than classical music or vice versa, but you do not need to persuade anyone
that your choice is ‘right’. Where opinion matters, opinion is the deciding factor.

RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to justification are:
• explanation
• disinterestedness
• rationalization
• exoneration.

IA prompt
19 What counts as a good justification for a claim?

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Objectivity

As we saw in the introduction to this book, this course takes as an ethical obligation the need to produce accurate
knowledge. We saw that we must strive to create knowledge which is accurate because the costs of disseminating
‘knowledge’ or ‘facts’ which are not true are so very high. Regardless of whether the knowledge being produced is
professional knowledge, such as that generated in the formal areas of knowledge, or whether it is personal
knowledge or the kinds of knowledge that we will examine in the optional themes sections of the course, for
knowledge to be functional it must be as accurate as we can possibly make it.
Objectivity, the ability to observe, to interpret, to analyse and to report such that we have not shaped our processes
or our findings by our personal wishes, is an important requirement necessary to the generation of accurate
knowledge. ‘Disinterestedness,’ which we discussed in the section on justification, is another word for objectivity.
The opposite of objectivity is subjectivity. The word ‘subjectivity’ means to take an intellectual stance in which
information is filtered through our expectations and so is coloured by those expectations.
One barrier to accuracy with which you may be familiar is cognitive bias. Cognitive bias is a generic term for a
variety of mechanisms that take place unconsciously in a knower’s brain and which keep that person from seeing the
world in a clear-minded, objective way. If a knower wants badly for something to be true, they might fall victim to
several kinds of problems. One very familiar type of cognitive bias is confirmation bias. ‘Confirmation bias’ is the
technical term for a person ignoring evidence which works against a desired outcome. The learner or researcher, in
other words, just looks for evidence which confirms their preconceptions. Psychologists and sociologists have
identified many other types of cognitive bias. The poster on page 23 shows 24 of these kinds of bias. To see the full-
size poster, use the QR code in the margin.

Notice that all of these kinds of bias are subconscious. The influence of these biases, then, on the production of
knowledge is quite different from the kind of deliberate obfuscation of facts, manufacturing of evidence or outright
lying that can result in ‘knowledge claims’ being made which are just not true. Researchers or learners who
deliberately engage in activities which they know will result in false claims are not demonstrating cognitive bias,
they are demonstrating unethical practice.
Other forces besides cognitive biases can keep us from being completely objective. We saw how culture, for
example, can shape what we know. The culture in which we were raised and the culture in which we live shapes our
thinking in significant ways. It affects what we believe is right and wrong and it affects what we believe is possible.
These values shape the way we approach everything we encounter. The effect of culture on knowledge is perhaps
most obviously seen in the area of ethical knowledge-making, but it is also a very powerful force in the making of
knowledge about religion or politics.
Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is well known
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for having identified foundational beliefs that are powerful predictors of people’s political affiliations. We will
explore these more in Chapter 7 (Knowledge and Politics), but as an example, he suggests that there is a
fundamental difference in worldview between self-identified liberals and self-identified conservatives. The liberals
care more about fairness and not causing harm than they do about loyalty to a group of like-minded people or
compliance with authority, while conservatives think the opposite values are most important.
You can see how these attitudes might shape what the different groups of people understand and know: someone
who cares about not causing harm will be more likely to believe that gun control laws need to be strict, while
someone who cares about in-group loyalty might believe that it’s much more important to be loyal to those people
who own guns for recreational purposes or for protection of their homes and families than it is to worry about
whether some people might be injured or killed by irresponsible gun use.

IA prompt
3 What features of knowledge have an impact on its reliability?

The respective knowledge of the opposing groups is shaped by the culture and by the values of the culture in which
the individuals formed their worldviews. Haidt notes that it’s not that either liberals or conservatives don’t share
values – liberal people do care about loyalty and authority and conservative people do care about fairness and harm
– it’s that they hold those values in different relationship in terms of their relative importance. You can use the QR
code on the right to watch Haidt’s TED talk on the subject. You will read more about Haidt’s work and what it
reveals about political knowledge in Chapter 7.

You can see that in the cases of knowledge which is founded on our moral values and ethical principles, the question
of whether we are capable of objectivity is much trickier than when the knowledge is founded in observations of
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facts in the world (though you will see in later chapters that sometimes identifying objective facts about the world is
also tricky and potentially influenced by subjectivity). Who could say whether it is more ‘objective’ to value one
principle, such as loyalty or adherence to authority, over others, such as fairness and the wish to do no harm? Pure
objectivity, therefore, is extremely difficult to attain, so what we look for is the willingness to be open-minded to
judge facts carefully and rationally and the ability to rethink conclusions when new evidence is discovered.
A final note about objectivity: some kinds of knowledge do not need to be objective. Knowledge which is conveyed
through the arts is highly subjective, and that is surely much of the point. Art is a medium through which we gain
insight into the artist’s view of the world. The artist’s subjectivity is not only not unethical, it is desirable. The point
of a work of art, from the artist’s perspective, is to reflect something about the artist’s view of the world. In
interpreting the artwork, however, we have to try to be much more objective than the artist had to be, as we are
trying to discover something outside of ourselves.
Subjectivity in viewing artwork, however, does not carry the same kind of catastrophic consequences that
subjectivity in choosing not to accept important scientific knowledge carries. If you don’t know, for instance, that
crumbling bread was a symbol of decay and that an eaten cherry was a sign of the impermanence of life in the Clara
Peeters’ still life on page 14, and you interpreted it through your subjective belief that a meal of bread and cheese
symbolizes poverty, you would have missed some ideas that you might have been able to get had you been more
objective and searched for ideas outside of yourself. However, you would not cause anyone harm in the way that
failure to be objective about vaccines can cause harm. And as we have seen several times now, some kinds of
knowledge are predicated on your own personal subjectivity. Those are the kinds of knowledge in which your
personal opinion is the deciding factor for what is true.

RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to objectivity are:
• disinterestedness
• cognitive bias
• confirmation bias
• preconceptions
• open-mindedness.

ACTIVITY
After you have completed this activity you can check your answers by using the first QR code.

As you should now be aware, there is a strong relationship between many of the concepts that we have
examined so far. The concepts are all related to how we determine whether or not a particular claim is
true, though each one describes a slightly different aspect of the process of demonstrating the truth of a
particular knowledge claim.

Examine the graph below, which is based on data from NASA (United States’ National Aeronautics and
Space Administration). It is one of many different representations of data which have been studied to
determine the cause of global climate change. If you wish to, use the second QR code on the right to
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read more about the graph on the NASA Global Climate Change website.
Answer the questions below the graph.

1 What phenomenon does the graph explain?

2 What evidence does the graph provide to support that explanation?
3 What interpretation is offered of the data on the graph?
4 What justification is there for that interpretation?
5 Does the data on the graph provide absolute certainty that global warming is caused by human
activity? Why or why not?
6 Does the data on the graph provide justification beyond reasonable doubt that there is a powerful
correlation between human activity and global warming? Why or why not?
7 Why can we say that this data is objective rather than subjective?

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Perspective

‘Perspective’ is the word that we use to describe the particular viewpoint from which an individual takes in
information and decides what is important or what something means. We saw, in our consideration of objectivity,
that sometimes one’s personal perspective can be problematic for the production of accurate knowledge. It can
certainly be problematic in terms of our ability to come to an agreement with others who see the world from
perspectives which are fundamentally different to our own. Because of this difficulty, the IB mission statement
contains a direct acknowledgment in the belief of the value of being able to accept different perspectives. The
mission statement expresses the idea that students who complete IB programmes become people who ‘understand
that other people, with their differences, can also be right’. An important part of what we are trying to do in TOK is
to understand how we develop our own perspectives – the habits of mind which shape what we can and do know.
Once we understand our own, we are much better positioned to recognize that other people have formed their
perspectives in logical, reasonable ways as well, and to be able to move toward understanding others.
Perspective is a particularly thorny concept when it comes to the making of religious or ethical knowledge. Wars
have been fought for centuries over the differences in perspectives about which religion has the ‘right’
understanding of mankind’s place in the Universe. Religious knowledge tends to be presented as a matter of
absolutes – there is one God or there is not; Jesus Christ came to Earth as the messiah or he did not; people who
accept Jesus Christ as their saviour will go to heaven when they die and those who do not will go to hell; or there is
no heaven or hell. These different positions are, for many people dichotomous. That is, they do not lend themselves
to compromise. If I believe that there is no god and no such thing as heaven or hell, I am not going to find it easy to
believe that other people, with their viewpoint that I am going to go to hell for my atheism, can also be right.
Many of the ethical dilemmas that we face individually or as communities or countries arise from situations, perhaps
similar to the one above, in which we hold a perspective which is not only fundamentally irreconcilable with the
perspective of someone else, but in which we also believe that our perspective is morally right. As a result of this,
we are brought to the point of having to decide whether to interfere with someone else’s way of doing things.
Clearly this kind of situation ought to be approached very cautiously. We have seen the negative consequences –
sometimes truly horrific consequences – of the decisions of one people to interfere with the culture and lives of
another people throughout history. Probably you know some of the many stories of invasion and conquest that
resulted in the complete, or nearly complete, destruction of the way of life of the Indigenous people of the Americas,
Africa or Alaska and the far north. You probably know about the millions of people who died in the Holocaust, the
Russian pogroms and the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda. All of these, and many others, are
extreme examples of people who had one perspective about how life ought to be lived, and particularly about which
god ought to be worshipped, and who took it as their responsibility to impose that perspective on others. All of these
examples suggest that the IB mission statement is correct, and those millions of people ought to have been left alone
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to live their lives as they saw fit.
The mission statement says, however, that ‘others with their differences can also be right’; it does not say ‘are also
right’. The mission statement, does, therefore, allow for the kind of situation in which we have to make the moral
judgments required of us to stand up for what is right and to step in when wrongs are being done. The difficulty,
then, is knowing when that time has come. Most people would agree that when we see someone – individually or in
a group – being bullied mercilessly by someone else, we should not respect the perspective of the bullies, but we
should rather step in and help the person or people who are being victimized. Many countries have been founded on
the principle of religious freedom which means (or ought to mean) that they have codified a value of respecting the
religious practices of others, whether those practices are like ours or not. In practice, that value has proven time and
again to be an extremely difficult one to live up to. Many people feel so strongly that they have the one and only
correct religion that they feel compelled to try to force it onto others. Even in situations in which people desire to
respect religious practices that are different from their own, some people may feel compelled to interfere because of
a perception that some of the practices are inhumane or restrict the personal freedoms of others, often women. The
difficulty, then, becomes how to know when such interference is a matter of moral justice and when it is a matter of
unwarranted and inexcusable meddling. Just because these questions are difficult to resolve, however, does not
mean that we should not try.
Perspective is not always a problem for the production of knowledge, however; sometimes it is a vitally important
contributing factor. That charge from the International Baccalaureate Organization is easier and more relevant in
some areas of knowledge and in some knowledge-making situations than in others. In the generation of historical
knowledge, multiple perspectives are extremely important to our ability to create a full understanding of past events.
We can understand this claim better by examining a case in which only one perspective of a historical period was
provided.
You may have heard the claim that ‘history is written by the victors’, which is so commonly offered as an
explanation for how historical knowledge gets made that it has become a cliché. It is true, too, that our knowledge of
past events has led to the mischaracterization of many historical events because only one perspective was offered. In
the Soviet Union, Stalin went so far as to produce a textbook, the Short Course on the History of the USSR, for
school children which Stalin himself edited by hand. Professor David Brandenberger of the University of Richmond
in Virginia in the US has written a book about that textbook. Brandenberger identifies a number of ways in which
Stalin altered the history of the Soviet Union so that those school children, from 1959 to 1986, grew up learning a
certain version of Soviet history which later turned out not to be true. Among numerous other observations,
Brandenberger says this about Stalin’s input to the text:
First, Stalin consistently strengthened etatist aspects of this historical narrative, enhancing aspects of
Russian history connected to the consolidation of central political authority. This put the communist leader
in the awkward position of defending the historical legacies of not only the tsars and their servitors, but the
Russian Orthodox Church as well. (Brandenberger)
Since the whole point of the Russian Revolution in 1919 was to overthrow the tsars, who were believed to be
running the country in ways that were detrimental to the working class, a textbook which presents the Soviet Union
as somehow being derived from the legacy of those same tsars and which, therefore, defends the royal family, is
surprisingly misleading. Stalin’s remaking of the past of the Soviet movement is an extreme example of what can
happen when only one perspective – that of the people in power – is recorded and disseminated. Many other
examples of strongly biased history were reported through less deliberately obfuscatory means.
Whether it is done deliberately, or indirectly due to lack of care, the presentation of history through only one
perspective leaves us with a very narrow kind of knowledge. In the present day, historical practices have changed a
good deal, and now multiple perspectives on historical events are commonly sought out so that they can be included
on the historical record. Once we can learn about a particular event from multiple perspectives, we can start to
understand how different people experience the world differently.
Historian Jon Wiener, writing for Slate Magazine, described a potential high school study unit on ‘Reconstruction
following the American Civil War’, and advocated having students consider the Reconstruction from three different
perspectives: the northerners who wanted to bring the southern black population into the national economy, the
white plantation owners of the south who wanted to keep as much of their pre-war lifestyle as they could, despite
having lost their slaves, and the former slaves, for whom freedom meant, among other things, the right to work for
themselves. Wiener suggests that students who study the Reconstruction from different perspectives learn to see that

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the history we know was formed from the actions of different groups, rather than just one. That experience can then
be extrapolated into an understanding of not only what happened during the years after the end of the civil war and
the reconstruction of the nation, but also of how history itself is constructed – or reconstructed.

One reason that it has been historically true that only winners write history is that winners of any conflict were the
ones who took control of the systems for recording and disseminating information. Poor people and people who
were not in positions of influence had no means of getting their version of events out to the world. Modern
technology has added considerably to the ability of the less wealthy, less well-armed, less powerful people to get
their side of a story out to the rest of the world. During the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt in 2011, for example,
video and audio recordings as well as written information was sent out of Egypt to the western world via social
media. We now have on record those primary sources rather than just having the story as told by the Egyptian
government.
In Chapter 3 (Knowledge and Technology), we will explore the many problems for knowledge that arise with
extremely widespread technology which allows anyone to post anything at all, whether true or false, on the internet
to be read, potentially by millions of people.
‘Perspectives’ is one of the four headings which guide the study of all the course components in TOK. As you study
the various systems in which knowledge is made, you will be considering whether we have access to multiple
perspectives or not, and if not, whether we can say that we have managed to create maps which reflect sound
understanding of what actually happened.
A final note about perspective: in some kinds of knowledge, differing perspectives are not helpful or relevant. There
can be no different perspective on the fact that your favourite dinner is your mother’s homemade lasagne. There can
be no different perspectives on the laws of physics. The physical properties of the Universe are what they are; they
are not subject to different interpretations by people from different cultures.
Different perspectives can be helpful in many circumstances in the development of scientific or mathematical
knowledge – someone else might give you a new perspective on how to solve a problem or design an experiment.
However, the knowledge that is ultimately constructed is not going to be subject to reinterpretation from people who
see things differently. In fact, the idea that there can be different perspectives on reality is one of the problems for
knowledge in the world today. We saw in the introduction that people cannot stop their children from getting
measles and potentially dying because they have a personal perspective on vaccines. Similarly, we cannot stop the
ocean from continuing to rise as fast or faster than it did in the last 25 years (more than 3 inches), causing significant
changes to coastal land and affecting both land use and weather patterns (Nunez), just because we have a different
perspective on the question. We can certainly benefit from different perspectives on how to solve the problem and
how to deal with the consequences, but what happens as a result of the rising temperatures of the oceans is not a
matter of perspective; it is a matter of the physical nature of the oceans. As you work through your TOK course, you
will need to attend to those situations in which different perspectives can enrich our knowledge, as opposed to those
in which perspective is simply not relevant.

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RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to perspective are:
• multiple perspectives vs single perspectives
• the role of technology
• falsified history vs enriched multi-perspective historical knowledge.

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Power

You may have noticed the many times that the word ‘power’ has appeared in the discussion of the concepts so far.
‘Knowledge is power’ has become a well-known cliché, and, indeed, there are obvious ways in which it is true.
Movies and television shows by the dozen are based on unscrupulous people exploiting their knowledge for
wicked purposes. Blackmailers, thieves and other ne’er-do-wells use their knowledge as a tool in order to benefit
themselves. Clearly this is not the sort of power we are interested in with regard to knowledge in TOK. Knowledge
is, nevertheless, a source of power.
There are two ways in which we want to consider the concept of power in relation to knowledge:
• the way in which knowledge gives us power
• the way in which those who have power in a particular society or group control the knowledge that gets made and
distributed.
Knowledge from the various areas of knowledge gives us a particular kind of power over our lives. Knowledge of
the natural sciences, for example, gives us, individually and in communities, power over our environment and
allows us to improve the quality of our lives. Knowledge put men on the Moon. Knowledge put your mobile phone
in your hand and allows us to fly from one side of the world to another. Knowledge, as we have seen, has allowed us
to eradicate diseases, and lack of knowledge has caused some people to bring those vanquished diseases down on
the heads of their children. Knowledge of other people allows us to communicate, to form alliances and to solve
problems. As we saw from Josef Stalin’s attempt to completely rewrite the history of his country in order to convey
a whole set of assumptions and values that fit his plan for controlling the nation, knowledge of history gives us the
power that comes with understanding the values our countries are founded upon and why. It provides us with
guidance about how to behave if we are to live up to the ideals that have shaped our current social and governmental
practices. Knowledge tells us when the time has come to rise up against injustice and help to steer a community or
nation or the world toward a better course.
One other important way in which the concept of power is related to our understanding of how knowledge works in
the world is the question of who has the power to make and distribute knowledge. We mentioned an example of this
earlier in the discussion of the concept of perspective as it relates to making knowledge in history. The idea that
history has long been written by winners is a way to express the fact that the winners have had the power over how
the stories of many historical events have been told. The people with the power to disseminate their version have the
power to shape the knowledge that others will have.
Power over the knowledge-making process is not limited to the field of history, of course. We also saw how
scientific research into the connection between vaccines and autism was misrepresented due to the power of some
companies who were funding the research. In that case, the power of a commercial interest led to findings which
were inaccurate, and which have proven to be extremely difficult to correct – even after nearly 30 years – and which
have had serious consequences for people around the world.

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As you study the themes and areas of knowledge throughout this course, consider who has the power to make and
disseminate knowledge and what recourse we have, as individuals and groups, to check whether the findings that
are presented to us are balanced and whether they reflect multiple perspectives, or just the perspectives of those in a
position to make claims.
The Theory of Knowledge course is one in which you will develop knowledge about knowledge. When you have a
rich understanding of how knowledge is developed, tested, justified and updated, you have the power of being able
to determine what is real and what is not, who is lying to you and who is not. That knowledge gives you power over
your own life. When you know how to judge for yourself whether what you are being told is true or not, you are free
from the manipulation of others who would exploit you for their own purposes. You are free from the consequences
of accepting erroneous claims made by those who, though not deliberately malicious, are themselves labouring
under the burden of not knowing what is real and what is not.
‘Power’ is perhaps one of the easier concepts to understand, but it is one of the most important ones, because it lies
at the heart of why we study Theory of Knowledge in the first place. One of the stated aims of the course is: ‘to
equip students to be able to effectively navigate and make sense of the world and help prepare them to encounter
novel and complex situations’ (TOK Guide). In other words: one of the aims of the course is to give you power over
your own future. As you work your way through this course, then, attend to the ways in which the different kinds of
knowledge give us power over our own lives. When you study the scope of each of the different kinds of
knowledge, pursue an understanding of why that knowledge is valuable in the world – of what it allows us to do that
we could not do before we had that knowledge.

RELATED IDEAS
A concept related to power is freedom.

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Responsibility

With freedom comes responsibility.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Although the concepts in this chapter appear in alphabetical order, ‘responsibility’ is a very appropriate concept to
follow immediately after power. Maybe you have heard another common saying: ‘with freedom comes
responsibility’. This cliché has become so common because it gets at an almost universal ethical belief: that when
one has enough power to free oneself from the control of other people or of nature, one has an obligation to use it
wisely.
Most people would say that when one has power, one has an obligation to use it for the good of all, not just for the
good of oneself. It follows then, that most people would concur with the idea that, since our knowledge confers
power upon us, our knowledge should be used wisely – for the good of everyone.
All the professional areas of knowledge, in fact, have formal codes of ethics that guide the generation of knowledge
within that area so that the responsibility for making accurate knowledge is formalized and the practices which will
lead to that accurate knowledge are identified and mandated. Practitioners in all the areas of knowledge who are
caught violating those codes of ethics are censured and, very often, stripped of the right to continue to work in that
field, as Andrew Wakefield was for his unethical work in claiming a non-existent tie between vaccines and autism.
In fact, much of our knowledge is used to ensure good for everyone:
• Technologies are developed in order to make people’s lives easier or better.
• Medical knowledge allows people to live longer, healthier lives.
• Knowledge of history and law has helped many people get the justice they deserve.
• Knowledge of psychology has helped people to overcome mental illness.
• Knowledge of biology and ecology has helped provide drinking water to people around the globe – even in areas
of extreme desert.
• Knowledge of mathematics has helped to build skyscrapers and bridges.
Not all knowledge is used for good, however, and not all good has extended to all people:
• Many people are wrongly incarcerated despite our having knowledge about how to interpret evidence such as that
obtained from DNA.
• Many people do not have the food, water or medical supplies that they need.
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• Despite widespread availability of cellular technology and the internet, many people – even in developed countries
such as the US – do not have access to those services.
• Knowledge led to the atomic bomb and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens at the end of the
Second World War.
• Many individuals do what is ethically wrong, even though they know what is ethically right.

All of these circumstances lead to questions that you will pursue throughout your TOK studies:
• Who must be responsible for the knowledge we have?
• Are the people who make or discover the knowledge more responsible than the people who use that knowledge?
• Do we have a responsibility to ensure that the benefits of knowledge reach everyone, rather than just a privileged
few?
• What do you, as an individual, have responsibility for with regard to the knowledge that you seek or the claims
with which you are presented?
As you study the themes and areas of knowledge, consider what the concept of responsibility reveals about why the
methods that are used have been developed.
A final note about power and responsibility: neither of these concepts seems to be very complicated, but they both
reveal a very important idea about Theory of Knowledge – the course content is very serious. Sometimes in school
we wonder why we have to study what we have to study or when we will ever use our knowledge of how to solve a
problem in mathematics or our knowledge of the importance of structure in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or our knowledge
of the history of China under the rule of Mao Tse Tung. Theory of Knowledge offers you two important
opportunities:
• By understanding the power that different kinds of knowledge confer on people in the world, you will be able to
answer those questions about why you have been required to study the things you study in school.
• Theory of Knowledge itself, because it is, in part, about how you as an individual can gain power over your life –
true independence – and about what responsibilities you will incur because of that power, is a course with direct
application in your life and throughout your life.

RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to responsibility are:
• power
• freedom
• independence.

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IA prompt
27 Does all knowledge impose ethical obligations on those who know it?

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Truth

The concept of truth sometimes seems to be a scary one for Theory of Knowledge, because the nature of truth is a
massive question in the formal study of philosophy, and can be both complicated and distancing. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, describes one aspect of the philosophical question of truth this way:
These theories all attempt to directly answer the nature question: what is the nature of truth? They take this
question at face value: there are truths, and the question to be answered concerns their nature. In
answering this question, each theory makes the notion of truth part of a more thoroughgoing metaphysics
or epistemology. Explaining the nature of truth becomes an application of some metaphysical system, and
truth inherits significant metaphysical presuppositions along the way. (Glanzberg)
You can see that trying to tangle with concepts such as ‘thoroughgoing metaphysics’ or ‘epistemology’ and
‘metaphysical presuppositions’ would be enough to make most people run for cover. Fortunately for us, however,
these extremely abstract notions surrounding the nature of truth are not relevant to the role of truth in the specific
context of knowledge in TOK. In TOK, we are concerned with a much more direct concept of truth, which we have
already described in the introduction to this book. The Theory of Knowledge course is predicated on an essential
assumption that reality exists outside of our minds. That is to say: TOK rejects the philosophy of solipsism, which
is the idea that there is no external reality, and that since it’s impossible to experience anything at all that doesn’t
pass through our minds, we cannot say with any degree of certainty that anything exists at all except our minds.
We acknowledge that our acceptance of the existence of an external reality is an assumption, but we also accept that
that assumption accords with experience. If, for example, we assume that the wall ahead of us is really there, and is
not just a figment of our imagination, we will not run headlong into it, smashing our forehead and giving ourselves a
concussion. If, on the other hand, we assume that the wall is not real, and we therefore run into it, we will suffer the
pain of our assumption. Would running headlong into the wall prove with absolute certainty that the wall is there
and not simply an artefact in our minds? No, it will not. One could make a fairly complicated argument that the pain
is also a creation of our solipsistic mind, and that it is, therefore, no more ‘real’ than the wall is, but such an
argument seems pretty frivolous. If all the consequences of our behaviours are exactly the same in a solipsistic
universe as they are in a universe which is real, then there is no difference between them, and we might as well
behave as if the Universe is, in fact, real.
We have thousands of years’ worth of experience as a species which tells us that when we have solid knowledge –
when we are certain or absolutely certain – we have power over our environment, ourselves and our lives. We also
have experience that tells us when we are wrong, when we only think we know or when we believe in things which
are not real, we do not have that control, and we suffer consequences that are not at all desirable. Remember the man
who thought that the man-eating tiger’s behaviour was all a matter of his mental control? He did not survive his
delusion long enough to realize the error of his ways.
For the purposes of Theory of Knowledge, then, we know the truth when we understand, and are able to explain,
reality accurately.
All of the various areas of knowledge and themes of the course focus on different aspects of that reality: the physical
Universe, the quantification of relationships among objects, of speed and motion, of politics and language, of human
behaviour and past events, and so on. In each different area, we will be examining the effort to know the truth about
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those different elements of human life and experience, as well as about physical reality. People working in each of
those areas will study different materials and use different procedures in order to do the studying. Our efforts to
know in each area will be guided by ethical concerns, and many of those areas will look different, or be approached
differently, by people with different perspectives. By considering the generation of knowledge in all these different
domains, we will be looking at the ways in which truth is identified – and the degree to which it is possible to
actually recognize and describe any meaningful truths.
Much of your TOK course will reveal to you the problems that we face in trying to know, but that does not mean
that knowledge is not achievable. The fact that truth is a central course concept is a reminder to you that our journey
through the problems we face as a species, in trying to make knowledge in many different contexts, do not
ultimately stop us from knowing. Our understanding of the obstacles and the means by which we overcome them is
a primary means of helping us understand how we know, when we know and why we know.

RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to truth are:
• assumption
• reality
• solipsism
• accuracy
• certainty
• absolute certainty
• methods
• ethics
• perspectives.

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Values

The twelfth and final central course concept is values. By now, we have already touched on a good many values that
are relevant to our exploration of knowledge in this course. We have seen how the IB mission statement embodies
the value of respecting other people’s perspectives and how that value relates to our understanding of how to use our
knowledge. We have also seen how values shape our knowledge through the culture in which we live and in which
we seek and apply our knowledge.
We have also seen some of the values that underlie the Theory of Knowledge as a course: the value of independence
and the ability to have power over one’s life and environment, as well as the value of gaining and using our
knowledge wisely and ethically. We have seen that while we value absolute certainty, we do not value it as the
primary goal for determining whether we know something or not. Finally, with regard to values that have shaped the
course, we have raised questions about the value of knowledge itself. You will continue to explore all of these
aspects of the relationship between values and knowledge as you proceed.
There are also values inherent to each of the knowledge domains that we will examine in the course. We have seen
that each professional area of knowledge has a code of ethics, which reveals that they all value accuracy and
responsibility. As you study each area of knowledge and each of the required and optional themes, you will also
consider what it reveals about what we value as humans. The scope of each area implies something about what we
value about our lives and experiences. The methods imply something about what we value about accuracy and
precision. Our investigation into perspectives will imply something about our valuing of different ways of seeing the
world and different ways of doing things, and our exploration of the ethical ramifications within each domain will
imply things about what we think of as fundamentally right and wrong. In short, all the aspects of each of the areas
you will study in your Theory of Knowledge course reveal what we value in our communities, be they groups as
small as a family or as large as the entire population of the world.
Perhaps the value with the biggest implications for knowledge is the value we place on truth, on having knowledge
that is accurate enough to be functional. If you understand that, then you understand that serious practitioners in all
areas take their responsibilities seriously. When that happens, we can trust the knowledge that is generated and
shared.

RELATED IDEAS
Concepts related to values are:
• certainty

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• culture
• evidence
• explanation
• interpretation
• justification
• objectivity
• perspective
• power
• responsibility
• truth.

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Conclusion
We have spent a long time considering the nature of the 12 concepts which IB has designated as being central to
your study of Theory of Knowledge. We hope that this initial journey through the concepts has helped give you a
foundation for understanding these ideas which you will visit time and again throughout your TOK experience, and,
in particular, the relationships among them. You may wish to return to this chapter often as you work through your
course for a refresher of what these concepts are all about. We have provided page numbers on the initial list of
concepts on page 2 at the beginning of the chapter, so if you bookmark that list, you can use the page numbers there
to move quickly to the discussion of the particular concept you wish to review. As you become more familiar with
these concepts and how they relate to the processes of producing, testing, validating and updating knowledge, you
will also gain a richer understanding of the processes themselves.

Learner profile
Knowledgeable
How does studying TOK through concepts help us to become more knowledgeable about how
knowledge is constructed in all the themes and areas of knowledge?

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Works cited
‘24 Biases Stuffing up Your Thinking’. 24 Cognitive Biases stuffing up your thinking. The School of Thought. N.d.
Web. 21 Apr. 2019. https://yourbias.is/.
Anderson, Paul Scott. ‘Is This Ancient Moon Rock from Earth?’ EarthSky. EarthSky Communications, Inc. 3 Feb.
2019. Web. 21 Apr. 2019. https://earthsky.org/space/is-this-ancient-moon-rock-from-earth.
Bellucci, JJ, et al. 2019. ‘Terrestrial-like Zircon in a Clast from an Apollo 14 Breccia’. Earth and Planetary Science
Letters. Vol 510.
Brandenberger, David. ‘Stalin’s History of the Soviet Union: A Critical Edition of Shestakov’s 1937 Short Course
on the History of the USSR’. Stalin’s History of the Soviet Union Summary. University of Richmond. N.d. Web.
21 Apr. 2019. https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~dbranden/Stalin’s History of the Soviet Union
Summary.pdf.
‘Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?’ NASA. NASA. 26 Mar. 2019. Web.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.
Corvino, John. ‘The Fact/Opinion Distinction’. The Philosophers’ Magazine. The Philosophers’ Magazine. 4 Mar.
2015. Web. 17 Apr. 2019. www.philosophersmag.com/essays/26-the-fact-opinion-distinction.
‘Declaration of Independence: A Transcription’. National Archives and Records Administration. United States
Federal Government. Web. 21 Apr. 2019. www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.
Evans, James. ‘Aristarchus of Samos’. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 1 Feb. 2017. Web.
21 Apr. 2019. www.britannica.com/biography/Aristarchus-of-Samos.
Fiore, Julia. ‘In Dutch Still Lifes, Dark Secrets Hide behind Exotic Delicacies’. Artsy. Artsy. 4 Sep. 2018. Web. 17
Apr. 2019. www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-dutch-lifes-dark-secrets-hide-exotic-delicacies.
Gladwell, Malcolm. ‘Revisionist History Episode 01’. Revisionist History. Panoply Media. N.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2019.
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/01-the-lady-vanishes.
Glanzberg, Michael. ‘Truth’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. 16 Aug. 2018. Web. 22
Apr. 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/.
Haidt, Jonathan. ‘The moral roots of liberals and conservatives’. TED2008. Mar. 2008. Web. 22 Apr. 2019.
www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?language=en#t-511240.
International Baccalaureate Organization. ‘Mission’. International Baccalaureate®. International Baccalaureate
Organization. N.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2019. www.ibo.org/about-the-ib/mission/.
Jefferson, Thomas. ‘Founders Online: Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress, 7 June–1 August 1776’.
National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration. N.d. Web. 17
Apr. 2019. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0160.
Langley, Liz. ‘Meet the Animal That Lives for 11,000 Years’. National Geographic. National Geographic Society.
23 Jul. 2016. Web. 29 Mar. 2019. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/07/animals-oldest-sponges-
whales-fish/.
‘Manu Prakash’. MacArthur Fellows Program. MacArthur Foundation. N.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2019.
www.macfound.org/fellows/965/.
McLeod, Saul. ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’. Simply Psychology. Simply Psychology. 21 May 2018. Web. 2 Apr.
2019. www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html.
Merritt, Anna C, et al. 2010. ‘Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad’. Social and Personality
Psychology Compass. Vol 4.5. Pp 344–357. Web. 17 Apr. 2019.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00263.x.
Nunez, Christina. ‘Sea Level Rise, Explained’. National Geographic. National Geographic Society. 27 Feb. 2019.
Web. 21 Apr. 2019. www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise/.
Oxford University Press. ‘Culture | Definition of Culture in English by Oxford Dictionaries’. Oxford Dictionaries |
English. Oxford Dictionaries. N.d. Web. 4 Oct. 2019. www.lexico.com/en/definition/culture.
Patterson, Orlando. ‘The Lost Distinction Between “Explain” and “Justify”’. The New York Times. The New York
Times. 8 Aug. 1999. Web. 21 Apr. 2019. www.nytimes.com/1999/08/08/opinion/the-lost-distinction-between-
explain-and-justify.html.
Resnick, Brian. ‘How to Change the World with a $1 Microscope’. Vox. Vox. 28 Sep. 2016. Web. 21 Apr. 2019.
www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/26/13028856/manu-prakash-genius-foldscope.
Science News. ‘World’s Oldest Living Tree – 9550 Years Old – Discovered In Sweden’. ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily. 16 Apr. 2008. Web. 29 Mar. 2019. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080416104320.htm.
Singham, Mano. 2007. ‘The Copernican Myths’. Physics Today. Vol 60.12. P 48. Web. 19 Feb. 2019.

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 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2825071.
Sneff, Emily. ‘Unsullied by Falsehood: The Signing’. Declaration Resources Project. Harvard University. 27 Jul.
2016. Web. 16 Apr. 2019. https://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/blog/signing.
Solis, Steph. ‘Copernicus and the Church: What the History Books Don’t Say’. The Christian Science Monitor. The
Christian Science Monitor. 19 Feb. 2013. Web. 17 Apr. 2019.
www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-and-the-Church-What-the-history-books-don-t-
say.
Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion,
Language, Art, and Custom. London. John Murray.
United Nations. ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
United Nations. N.d. Web. 22 Apr. 2019. www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.
‘Why Is Pluto No Longer a Planet?’ Library of Congress Web Site. Library of Congress. 21 Jul. 2017. Web. 29 Mar.
2019. www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/pluto.html.
Whyte, Jamie. 2003. ‘The Right to Your Opinion’. Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of
Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. Corvo Books Ltd.
Wiener, Jon. ‘Multiple Perspectives Aren’t So Hard To Deal With’. Slate Magazine. Slate. 18 May 2005. Web. 21
Apr. 2019. https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/05/multiple-perspectives-aren-t-so-hard-to-deal-
with.html.

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2 Core theme: Knowledge and the Knower
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will:
• be able to define knowledge and truth, as opposed to beliefs and opinions
• understand the notion of communities of knowers
• be able to identify the individuals and institutions that have shaped their perspectives
• recognize different sources of knowledge and cognitive tools
• understand how different perspectives inform our responses to ethical dilemmas.

Learner profile
Reflective
What shapes my perspective as a knower?

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Introduction
Take a look around you at this moment and consider all the things that you can see, hear and touch right now. All of
them are the products of knowledge or knowing. The buildings require knowledge of engineering, and knowledge of
how to create the materials that make up the building. The roads and vehicles needed to transport these materials to
the site required further knowledge about materials and machines. Someone had the knowledge needed to organize
the builders who put it all together; others had the knowledge of how to organize the money required to buy the land
and materials and how to pay the builders. Someone else knew how to feed electricity into the building, others knew
how to build whatever machines are in that building and then you have the knowledge of how to use those machines.
Nearly everything around us is the result of the intentions, desires and activities of other human beings who were
applying what they knew in order to create the world we see. Even many of the natural elements we see, from the
trees and parks around us, the animals we see and pets we love are all impacted at some level by human knowledge.
Consider the cats and dogs we have as pets; they are the result of centuries of selective breeding, again the product
of human thought. In an entirely natural environment, many of our pets would have no chance of survival because
we have bred away their basic abilities to look after themselves.
Interestingly, we as individuals know very little in relation to all the knowledge surrounding us. Rather, we hold this
knowledge as a culture. It would be wrong to say that we hold this knowledge as a species because knowing these
things doesn’t really have anything to do with our biological make-up. It is something that we have developed in the
context of culture and have passed on through the generations. This knowledge held by a group or a culture is
sometimes referred to in TOK circles as ‘shared knowledge’ because the methods by which it was discovered and
‘approved’ included groups of people working together. For example, you might know what the chemical equation
for photosynthesis is, but you had nothing to do with finding it. The community of biologists and chemists worked it
out and you then learned it in school.

ACTIVITY
Select one item that you can see from where you are sitting right now. Try to list all the different knowers
responsible for the fact that the item currently sits in the room where you are.

In this chapter, we will think about the individual in relation to all this knowledge held by the culture and by
communities. As individuals, we all hold knowledge and, hopefully (especially as you are a student), you are
gaining more and more knowledge each day. The culture which has this knowledge has developed systems and
processes which pass some of it on to individual knowers. In many cases, the individuals will then take on this
knowledge and add to it, change it, develop it or even overturn it. This type of knowledge held by an individual is
often referred to as ‘personal knowledge’ because it relates to those things which you can say that you know. You
know how to do things, for instance, that others might not. This might extend from knowing how to juggle to
knowing how to solve quadratic equations. You might know facts as well, for instance the chemical equation for
photosynthesis; this knowledge might have been developed or discovered by other individuals and accepted by
communities, but you have it now. You might also know things that no one else can know. This could be knowledge
of how you feel right now (tired, grumpy, worried, confident), or knowledge of your opinion about certain events or
facts. We might agree on certain facts, say, about the amount of waste a city produces (an example of shared
knowledge), but differ on our opinions on what, if anything, should be done about it (an example of personal
knowledge).
We will explore our understanding of ourselves as individual knowers. The TOK subject guide calls this section ‘the
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core theme’, meaning it should play a significant part in your thinking about knowledge during the course. The idea
is that in all situations you act as both a member of some community of knowers, but also as an individual who
accepts knowledge from that community, and also contributes to it. Throughout the course, when you are thinking
about the role of technology, language and politics, when you are thinking of the knowledge held by Indigenous and
religious communities (the optional themes) and when you are thinking about the knowledge held by the more
formal communities of mathematicians, scientists (natural and human), historians and artists, you should be thinking
about what the role of the individual in that community is. You should also think about what your role is in those
contexts too. This course is not only about knowledge ‘out there in the world’; you and your knowledge are at the
‘core’ of the whole experience.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do individual experts in an AOK manage to have their knowledge accepted by other experts in that
AOK?

In the Scope section we’ll explore what knowledge is thought to be and why it is different from belief or opinion.
There we will also explore the idea that knowledge is often developed in the context of a community and how our
individual knowledge is often best seen as being in relation to such communities. The Perspectives section builds on
this in thinking about how our individual perspective is constructed by a network of different factors and
communities. The Methods and tools section explores the various ways that individuals gain their knowledge.
Finally, in the Ethics section we’ll look at the sort of knowledge we call ‘ethical knowledge’ and consider how that
is developed and what its impact might be.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the knowledge or experience of an individual have the same relevance in the construction of
knowledge in different AOKs?

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Scope
Just what are we referring to when we talk about knowledge, as opposed to beliefs or opinions? Each of these
categories are up for discussion in TOK and different contexts or areas of knowledge might treat these terms slightly
differently. For the purposes of TOK, we often use the term ‘knowledge’ to refer to any claims that are the product
of various processes used by people when trying to understand or make sense of the world. In some cases, we
recognize that some of these claims are quite different than others in terms of certainty, reliability, objectivity or
changeability. We might use ‘knowledge’, ‘belief’ or ‘opinion’ differently in these circumstances. Let’s take a
moment and see if we can find some differences between these concepts so we can use them later in analyses of
what we think we ‘know’.

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Knowledge, belief and opinion

Throughout this section we will be using a number of terms which are helpful in describing knowledge and how
knowledge relates to the world.
• Facts are how the world is, or how things actually are, whether you know it or not. There is, for instance, a fact
about the number of people in Thailand surfing at this moment in time, but there’s no practical way of finding that
fact out. But there is a fact of the matter and the truth of any guess I made would be true only if it corresponds to
that fact.
• Claims or propositions are statements made by people stating what they think might be a fact. I might claim or
propose that ‘there are 1 357 people surfing in Thailand right now’. Claims and propositions can be true or false.
If I claim that the Earth is flat, I’d be saying something that is false because there is no fact in the world that this
claim corresponds to (no matter what YouTube tells you!). Much of what this course is about is under what
conditions claims can be considered as knowledge.
• A truth is another name for a claim or proposition which has been shown to be or is accepted as true. ‘The Moon
orbits the Earth’ is a truth, as is, ‘The internal angles of all triangles are equivalent to two right angles’. We’re
differentiating ‘a truth’ from ‘true’ because we have seen throughout history that many times what we called ‘a
truth’ turned out not to be true at all. ‘The body is made up of four humours’ was once considered a truth but it
was never true: it was merely a claim that people thought was true but wasn’t.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What criteria can we use to distinguish between knowledge, belief and opinion? Are these criteria the
same in different AOKs or in different communities of knowers?

IA prompt
1 What counts as knowledge?

The vast majority of creatures on the planet demonstrate no interest in knowledge about the world; they just get on
with the business of living in it. Bats, banana slugs and Bengal tigers simply carry on what they do without any
thought about what knowledge is, or how it is constructed. Their approach to reality is simply to live in it, try to find
food in it and try not to be someone else’s food in it.

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Most humans, however, do spend a fair bit of time wondering what is true about the world. They make claims about
the world and then try to work out which ones are correct. That you spend a large proportion of your day in a
building with a bunch of other people whose job it is to teach you things you should know is pretty unique in the
animal kingdom. While this might seem odd, it is utterly unavoidable that we need to know things. Look around you
and consider all the objects and practices that you can see from where you’re sitting that would be impossible
without ‘knowledge’ about the world, for example:
• knowing what electricity is and how it can be harnessed to power your computer
• knowing about air pressure and the shapes of wings is necessary to produce aircraft that fly
• knowing how to organize other human beings and how to coordinate their behaviour is necessary if you are going
to have anything like a business or an economy
• knowing facts about the growth of bacteria is necessary if you are going to effectively store food for long periods
of time, and so on.
Traditionally claims about the world have been broken into three categories: opinions, beliefs and knowledge. What
are these and how are they different? Before continuing complete the activity below.

ACTIVITY
Draw three columns on a piece of paper and label them ‘Opinion’, ‘Belief’ and ‘Knowledge’.
1 Think of five examples of claims that you would place under each category.
2 Compare them with a partner and discuss any ways in which your partner would have categorized
your choices differently.
3 Can you create some principles which you can use to identify unique characteristics or which would
differentiate the three from one another?

You might have found that there was some disagreement, but that there was a lot of agreement as well. All three are
forms of ‘belief’; that is, they are claims about something which we in some sense ‘believe’. They might also all be
seen on a sort of spectrum where knowledge is the stuff that is in some sense ‘truest’.
You might have found that they are different in the degree to which they can be thought of as ‘subjective’ or
whether or not different people might think differently about them. ‘I like 90s indie pop’, for instance, while an
objective fact about an individual’s musical tastes, doesn’t really mean that others should feel the same way. ‘90s
indie pop is good music’, could be just another way of saying ‘I like it’ and is an opinion. Opinions are thought of as
‘subjective’ in that what makes the claim true or false depends on an individual’s taste (although, inevitably, some
opinions are closer to knowledge than others, hence the phrase ‘expert opinion’). In a sense, then, opinions state
truths about an individual. When we investigate an opinion, we don’t really have to look much further than the
person saying it as it is their holding that opinion that is important.
Examples of these sorts of claims might include:
Set 1:
• Peanut butter is good.
• Paris is beautiful in the spring.
• Hot chocolate is best served with buttered toast.
• Watching the sunrise over Ankor Wat is overrated.
• Euler’s Identity is a thing of beauty.
• Chemistry is hard.
But there are other examples of claims which don’t fit easily into this category.
Set 2:
• The events of 9/11 changed the world.
• Religious belief and practice bring out the best in people.
• Religious belief and practice bring out the worst in people.
• Liverpool FC deserves the praise it receives.
• The US Union Army’s Siege of Petersburg was the beginning of the Confederate defeat.
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• Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was simply a diversion for their attack on the Malay Peninsula.
• Acupuncture works for back pain.
• Abortion should be legal.
These claims might simply refer to an individual’s taste, but they also could be thought of as making a claim about
the world, and, in this regard, they are quite distinct from opinion. They might be true, and this wouldn’t necessarily
depend on whether I happen to think the claims are true. ‘Belief’ and ‘knowledge’ are similar in this way, and
different from ‘opinion’. These claims can be supported or challenged by evidence and we might argue about them
in the hopes that we might convince others that we are right and that they should believe it as well. Similarly, we
might find that the weight of evidence against a claim such as those above might mean that we give it up, or don’t
accept it anymore. These claims might be thought of as ‘objective’ in that what makes them true or false might be
found in the world, and not simply in my own subjective tastes.
So, what about the list below? Do they represent another kind of belief? Identify what you think might be different
about Set 2 and Set 3.
Set 3:
• The force on an object is equal to its mass multiplied by its acceleration.
• Mitochondria provide cells with energy needed to function.
• India became independent from Britain in 1947.
• The quantity of a wanted good is inversely proportional to its price.
• The Dharma are the fundamental teachings of Buddha.
• Dick Fosbury represents a huge shift in the high jump community.
• Nico Rosberg won the Formula 1 World Championship in 2016.
•
• Hobbits have hairy feet.
The beliefs in this set seem less open to debate in the way that those in Set 2 are, though they still might have been
contentious. Many of the same things we said about the second set of claims can be said of this third set: that they
are evidence based; that we might convince others that they are true, but there is a sense in which the debate about
whether they are true or false has been completed – we accept these as true. Some are the outcome of a lot of
experiment and discovery and some are definitions, but they all represent truths about the world that some group of
people can be said to ‘know’ or might reasonably be called ‘knowledge’. We might characterize the claims in Set 2
as ‘beliefs’ which have yet to be decided (indeed, if it is even possible to decide once and for all) and the claims in
Set 3 are examples of what we might call ‘knowledge’.
But what exactly is the difference between ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’? This is a question that has challenged scientists
and philosophers for thousands of years, but it is pretty well accepted that it has something to do with two things:
truth and justification.
The suggestion is that some beliefs can be promoted to ‘knowledge’ provided particular criteria are met – they need
to be true and they need to be justified. What makes some claim or another true and justified, however, can be a very
tricky issue. As individual knowers we find ourselves caught between what appear to be competing claims for
knowledge. In some communities, claims might be considered true and justified, but another community might not
accept that the claim is either true or justified. Different communities often set up different criteria for what makes a
claim true, or what makes a claim justified. The same claim might be accepted as true by individuals in one group
but not accepted by individuals in other groups.
Investigating and analysing these criteria are partly what the Theory of Knowledge course is about.

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Knowledge claims are true
One way in which beliefs are contrasted with knowledge, is to suggest that knowledge is known to be ‘true’, that is
to say that knowledge claims capture some fact about reality or the way the world actually is. What makes
something ‘true’ and how this is established, however, are highly contentious and generally depend on the way that
some community of knowers or an AOK has decided the criteria for what ‘truth’ amounts to.
Calling a claim a ‘belief’, or saying ‘I believe that …’ means something like, ‘I think it’s true and I might have some
reasons for thinking this is true, but I’m not sure or certain’, or it might mean ‘I am absolutely certain this is true,
but don’t have a method by which I can make you as certain as I am’ (see Chapter 1 for a more in-depth discussion
of the concept of certainty).

Correspondence theory
In some cases, a claim can be said to be true if it corresponds with facts about the world. So were I to claim that the
statement ‘Mitochondria provide cells with the energy needed to function is true’, what I mean is that there really
are mitochondria in cells and they really do provide the energy needed to function. There is a fact about
mitochondria and cells and my claim captures and describes that fact, and this is what it means for that claim to be
true. The claims you find in biology, chemistry, physics or other sciences generally follow this sort of understanding
of truth. An important part of this is that it doesn’t matter what I think about the world, or what I think about the
claim, some claims are just true or false depending on how the world actually is. People who claim that ‘the Earth is
flat’, for instance, are simply mistaken, because there is a fact about the world’s shape, regardless of what they think
about it. The actual shape of the Earth simply does not correspond with the claim ‘the Earth is flat’.

Coherence theory
Some of the other claims in Set 3 above are less clearly associated with a fact in the world. These claims cannot
really correspond to the world in the same way as the others, as it is not entirely clear what in the world they’d apply
to. The trigonometry identity or the claim about hobbits’ feet don’t obviously correspond to the actual world, but
we’d still want to say that they are true and that we know them.
Another way to think about truth is to say that some claim is ‘true’ when it is coherent with all the other true claims
in a system. When investigating whether hobbits have hairy feet, we might see what else is true in the world of
Middle Earth. We would find that, indeed, ‘Hobbits are little human-like creatures with oddly hairy feet’ and that
this fact is consistent with other truths in that world. So the claim that ‘hobbits have hairy feet’ is true. Were I also to
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say that ‘Gandalf is the name of the King of the Elves’, this claim contradicts all that we know about Middle Earth,
so we’d say that this claim is false, even though there is no fact in this world which would ever show it to be true or
false (unless you consider the book The Lord of the Rings as the object which shows it to be false).

Mathematics is generally accepted to be true in this sense; it’s hard to see just what is being described by
mathematical equations. We don’t bump up against numbers and sine and cosine in the world, but we know that
certain mathematical truths are still available. What makes the quadratic formula equivalent to quadratic equations
isn’t some fact about the world around us, but rather facts about the system of mathematics (see Chapter 8 for a more
sophisticated examination of knowledge claims in mathematics).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do we distinguish claims that are contestable from claims that are not?

Some claims seem to occupy a middle ground. Measuring the supply and demand of goods and relating them to
price, for instance, isn’t as straight forward as getting out a microscope and tape measure. ‘Supply’ and ‘demand’
are concepts that relate to general behaviours of groups of people. Although we might measure and tally particular
instances of people wanting to buy particular items, this isn’t quite the same as measuring the ‘demand’ in the
market for that good. These concepts, while they build on individual instances of real-world actions, are also truths
about concepts which exist as ideas, not objects.

ACTIVITY
1 Compile a number of knowledge claims that you find in your various IB Diploma Programme subjects.
2 Try to identify exactly what corresponds with the world in terms of observing their truth.
3 What knowledge do you already need to have to make sense of the new knowledge you are learning
or constructing in your classes?
4 Can you identify which theory of truth (correspondence or coherence) adequately captures your
different subjects? What are the implications for the ‘reliability’ of the AOK if a clear type of truth can’t
be found?

In summary, knowledge isn’t just whatever you want it to be. We all have a number of thoughts about the external
world in our head and only some of them really deserve to be called ‘knowledge’. I might really like peanut butter,
but that doesn’t mean that I ‘know’ that peanut butter is good. At best this means nothing more than ‘I like peanut
butter’. Some facts like these are best thought of as opinions. The distinction between what we can know or what we
believe or have opinions about, however, isn’t always clear.

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Knowledge claims are justified
Aside from truth there is another important criterion which any statement of ‘knowledge’ should have. It should be
justified in the sense that there must be evidence for the claim, and the evidence must be part of the reason why we
believe it. Again, like truth, what constitutes ‘justification’, or ‘having evidence’, is not always obvious since a
claim that is justified to some, might not be justified to others. The fact that this is sometimes a thorny issue doesn’t
mean that we shouldn’t be considering it carefully.

IA prompt
19 What counts as a good justification for a claim?

Why is justification necessary? Why not just accept that when a belief is true then we should accept it as
knowledge? Simply believing something that is true cannot be considered ‘knowledge’ for a number of reasons.

Justification helps distinguish knowledge from lucky guesses

Firstly, requiring that our knowledge be justified in some way helps us distinguish genuine knowledge from lucky
guesses. As a paleontologist studying dinosaurs, or an archaeologist studying very early humans, you might find
some bone and simply guess what the species of dinosaur it is, or simply guess at what this ancient human ancestor
was like. Suppose that years later other evidence is found, and it turns out that you were right (so far as the evidence
suggests). We would not want to say that you knew this, when you in fact simply stumbled on a lucky guess.
Imagine a mathematics quiz where you simply jotted down a random number as a solution to an algebra question.
You’d never claim to ‘know’ the answer, you simply guessed it. That you were simply guessing is easily worked out
when it becomes clear to the teacher that you don’t know how to formulate the correct response. Understanding or
knowing a subject means more than simply naming a correct answer to a question – it also means knowing how to
answer the question.

Justification helps us decide what we want to accept

Secondly, being able to find justification for a claim means that you can decide what you wish to accept as true.
Without reasons for a claim you have nothing by which to judge which claims are better or worse, or which claims
you should hold. Thinking critically means, among other things, reflecting on the reasons why you hold a belief and
making choices about which beliefs you wish to hold. As we mentioned before, the interesting thing isn’t which
beliefs you do hold, but why you hold them and knowing about a subject means knowing which beliefs we should
hold.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Why are the criteria for what counts as knowledge not obvious?

What reasons do you have for believing the sorts of things you believe? Sometimes these reasons can be a challenge
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to articulate. Sometimes they can be a challenge to even identify. At the level of the individual we can explore the
reasons why people accept beliefs through a number of cognitive tools. These cognitive tools are psychological
processes which individuals might appeal to as reasons for knowing some claim or another. Here are some possible
sources for an individual’s knowledge (we’ll explore these in more detail later):
• memory
• reason
• imagination
• language
• sense perception
• faith
• emotion
• intuition.
All of these sources (and perhaps many others) help us explain why we think we know what it is that we claim to
know. In some cases, one of these might take precedence while others are less important. When deriving the
quadratic formula from a quadratic equation, for instance, my emotions play a lesser role to the deductive processes
of reason. Emotions, however, might play a more prominent role when exploring the arts. Empathy or some forms
of imagination might play a larger role in constructing claims in the study of history, as it is important to consider
the thoughts, motives and feelings of the historical figures we’re studying.
At the individual level, however, these sources may lead us astray. Memory, for instance, is a notoriously unreliable
source of knowledge: we might be utterly convinced that we remember some event correctly, but there are all sorts
of reasons why our memories lead us astray.
We might use these cognitive tools together in order to help establish when one is leading us away from knowledge
that we can properly justify.

Justification helps us convince others

Thirdly, justification helps knowers make arguments about what sorts of beliefs we should hold. Suppose that you
are utterly convinced that you have come to a belief that is true and that you have critically reflected on why you
accept this belief as true and have identified and articulated these reasons. The fact that you have accepted this
belief, however, is no reason why other people should also accept it. One of the uses of justification is to create
arguments designed to convince others that they should believe it too.
This contrasts with opinion, which is not the sort of thing generally thought of as transferable to others. If someone
offers a belief and suggests that ‘this is just my opinion’ this is often taken to mean that there is nothing to be
decided or defended or offered for others to believe. If my opinion that ‘The Truman Show is a good film’ is merely
an opinion, then it is equivalent to ‘I like The Truman Show’ and that’s the end of it. People are free to have their
own opinions.
However, while we can accept that others have different opinions, we also generally accept that some opinions are
better than others. This is where justification comes in.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do different AOKs or communities of knowers have different ideas about what makes a good
justification?

If, for example, I said that ‘The Truman Show is a good film because of Peter Weir’s direction’ then my claim now
has a justification, one that I might use in explaining why you should also think that The Truman Show is a good
film. This sort of discussion will be familiar with students taking the arts as their IB Group 6 subject and the sort of
analysis you use when analysing novels and poems from your Group 1 language course. There, you are making
arguments about the quality of works of literature and justifying those arguments with reference to features of the
works themselves.
In other words, if I use justifications as reasons why I think some claim is true, I might use those same justifications
to give you reasons why you should believe the claim as well. To do this effectively, however, you and I need to

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agree on just what sorts of things make good justifications. In other words, for me to use the fact that a film is well-
directed in my argument that it is a ‘good’ film, you would also have to think that good direction is one of the
criteria of a good film. You and I would have entered into a sort of ‘community’ where we both agree to some extent
on which standards are good reasons for accepting certain claims about good films. These commonly held standards
can be used to evaluate the justifications presented by individuals making claims.
In the field of the arts these standards might be relatively broad. In the natural sciences, however, the standards by
which the beliefs of an individual are transferred to the community through justification are more rigorous. In the
sciences, the reasons individuals give to others for their beliefs are meticulously reviewed, and only the justifications
that withstand critical scrutiny are accepted by the community.

CASE STUDY
The OPERA experiment at CERN
In a 2010 experiment called OPERA, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
laboratories were investigating the nature of neutrinos when they appeared to have found evidence that
some of these neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. This contradicted the established
‘rules’ of physics, partly put in place by Albert Einstein in the early twentieth century. Einstein claimed
that no object with mass can travel faster than the speed of light. The data from the CERN laboratory
was therefore very contentious.
This finding, however, didn’t mean that Einstein and all the accepted theories were suddenly called into
question. The community of physicists have well-established methods and rules which govern whether
the claims and findings of an individual scientist (or laboratory) are accepted by the community. Before
any surprising result can be accepted, the surprising claims must undergo careful review by other
scientists; this is the bedrock of what is called ‘the scientific method’, which is designed to mitigate the
inaccuracies which can sometimes work their way into the experiments of individual scientists. The
OPERA team, accepting these rules of how to do science, made their processes and data public in the
expectation that other scientists would repeat the experiments and would compare the new data with the
OPERA team’s initial findings. If the work of other scientists was consistent with the results of the
OPERA experiment, then this would be further justification that OPERA’s claims corresponded to facts in
the world and might give reasons why Einstein’s rules about objects not travelling faster than the speed
of light might be flawed.

What this process of reviewing showed, however, was that there were issues with the initial experiment.
When another set of scientists tried to replicate their findings, their new data showed that the
measurements of the speed of the neutrinos were, in fact, consistent with Einstein’s initial principle. In
the end, in the face of these new data and findings, the original OPERA scientists accepted that their
data was flawed and backed down from their claims that the neutrinos might have broken the
established laws of physics.
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What this example shows is that even if an individual has justification and reasons for their knowledge,
there are rules around whether a community should accept that knowledge. The OPERA team accepted
these rules and conventions and followed them even though they are designed directly to challenge their
findings.
For a more in-depth discussion of the scientific method, see Chapter 9 (The Natural Sciences).

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Knowing ‘how’ versus knowing ‘that’

In addition to thinking about what constitutes knowledge, it is also useful to think about the different forms that
knowledge takes.

Propositional knowledge
As students, you are spending a lot of time in school learning theories and facts. Each subject has a ‘body of
knowledge’ that, as a student in that field, you are expected to know. Knowledge of facts, knowledge that is ‘true’ in
that it corresponds to some fact in the world is often called ‘propositional knowledge’, because claiming to know
something is to propose that something is true or real. In other words, people could agree with you about something.
This form of knowledge can usually be translated as ‘I know that …’ followed by a claim.
Here are some examples of propositional knowledge:
• ‘I know that California became a state in 1850.’
• ‘I know that Braham is the fundamental creative principle in Hinduism.’
• ‘I know that quadratic equations have two solutions.’
• ‘I know that a water molecule has two hydrogen atoms.’
• ‘I know that the population of China is around 1.4 billion.’
• ‘I know that The Police released their album ‘Zenyatta Mondatta’ in 1980.’

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do the different communities of knowers that you belong to have different types of propositional
knowledge?

Much of what you are doing in your classes day by day is learning propositional knowledge, and much of what you
will be assessed on in the next exam session is your ability to recall that information In addition, you might belong
to different groups or communities of knowers that focus on particular facts which others might not know or care
about.
Propositional knowledge is often the result of a process or a method of deriving such truths. The methodologies of
the various AOKs are designed to create this knowledge. In each of these cases I have a belief that can then be tested
using the various methodologies and can finally be justified through some sort of evidence. The form of justification
might be unique to the particular AOK, but in each of the cases there can be a consensus reached through some sort
of public analysis.

Ability knowledge
Claims to know something might take another form, however. Ability knowledge refers to abilities or skills that I

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have learned or that I have some instinctual ability to do. Here are some examples:
• ‘I know how to swim.’
• ‘I know how to read.’
• ‘I know how to find my way through the Singapore MRT system.’
• ‘I know how to book a flight online.’
• ‘I know how to set up a reliable experiment in biology.’
• ‘I know how to balance a chemical equation.’
• ‘I know how to speak a foreign language.’
• ‘I know how to tie a figure-of-eight knot.’
• ‘I know how to perform a frontside 180 on a skateboard.’

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What do the various communities of knowers that you belong to expect you to know how to do?

In addition to the propositional knowledge that you are learning in your classes, you are also (perhaps more
importantly) learning a range of skills. Take learning a language for instance: to be able to speak a language, you
will need to know a lot of facts about the language. To be able to speak Portuguese, for instance, you will need to
know that Onde está Pedro? translates to ‘where is Pedro?’ in English but knowing this isn’t (yet) speaking
Portuguese. Genuinely knowing how to speak a foreign language requires a lot of this sort of propositional
knowledge, and you will need to have the ability to use this vocabulary nearly instinctively.
Knowing how to do something and being skilled at it are also quite different. I might know how to play Gaelic
football, but I am certainly not skilled at it. I may be able to explain some of the rules (‘I know that you must kick or
hand pass the ball after four steps’ – which is an example of propositional knowledge), and I might know enough of
these rules to be able to enact a few basic drills or play casually with a group of friends. I would not, however,
pretend to be skilled enough to play in a genuine match. I simply do not have the skills and I would undoubtedly end
up hurt.
The fact that ability knowledge is required is clear when it comes to communities of sportsmen and women, but
what about other more formal knowledge communities?

ACTIVITY
1 With a friend from another class, think of your most recent IB assessment. Make a list identifying both
the propositional knowledge and the ability knowledge that was being assessed.
2 Which type of knowledge do you think is most important in terms of ‘being skilled’ in the subject?

In each of the AOKs and in each of the individual disciplines within those AOKs, there is of course a ‘body of
knowledge’ that you will be expected to know in order to do well on your exams or to be part of that AOK-
community. However, there are a lot of other skills and abilities that you’ll need to know in order to genuinely excel.
In philosophy, knowing that a philosopher developed a theory is good, but to be a good philosopher you’ll have to
know how to use that information in the service of your own argument. Knowing the net worth of a company might
be important in a business management case study, but you will also have to be able to use that information in an
analysis to show top-level skills in your assessment.

Is knowing how more or less important than knowing that?

So which form of knowledge is more important? First, you will have already guessed that each form of knowledge
will depend to a large extent on the other. Being a member of a community of knowers requires some level of both
propositional and ability knowledge. They are intimately related, though we can think about them separately. This is
clear in sporting communities where you must know the rules (propositional knowledge) but then also have the
ability to play. It is no less clear that in your academic subjects they are related as well. One of the big changes in
your own education is that you are being taught to shift from emphasizing propositional knowledge in the lower
grades, to developing more and more skills and abilities.

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Are there certain types of activities which are more focused on ability knowledge? In some disciplines in the arts for
instance, impromptu, free-styling activity is sometimes the norm. From hip-hop rap battles, to improvisational jazz,
to some spoken word competitions, the level of ability knowledge required seems to exceed propositional
knowledge. Simply being able to draw well seems, at first, to be a basic talent that you either have or don’t have and
you didn’t have to know anything to get good at; repeated practice will help your natural talent to grow.
On closer consideration, however, the experts in these fields will admit to having a wealth of propositional
knowledge as well as an amazing ability that allows them to create in a coherent and meaningful way.
Improvisational poets and spoken word artists will use their knowledge of rhythm and rhyme to create a structure for
their word choice. Musicians will know and exploit their knowledge of scale, harmony and key to constrain and
develop their musical phrasing and melody. Visual artists and sculptors will need to have a wealth of knowledge
about the nature of their medium and knowledge about form, composition, structure and effect. Their expertise is
that they are able to take the facts about the field in which they are working (propositional knowledge) and build on
them to create something unique, effective and meaningful (ability knowledge).

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Communities of knowers
When we normally think of ‘communities’ we think of groups of people living next to one another, or in specific
locations. Another way to think about communities, however, is to focus on a group of people who have
characteristics in common, but which don’t necessarily refer to physical location. We might, for example, refer to a
community based on ethnicity or culture as the ‘Hispanic community’ or the ‘Indian community’, or define a
community by other traits, such as sexual orientation or shared interest in issues to do with gender and sexuality, like
the ‘LGBTQ+ community’. These groupings are not set in stone; they are simply ways of quickly identifying a
group of people who have some sort of shared experience and interest.

IA prompt
14 Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?

A ‘community of knowers’ would be one way of describing such communities. Again, the terms are quite broad, but
they refer to groups of people who share beliefs, theories, experiences and ideas. We might, for example, speak of a
city’s ‘Spanish-speaking community’ or its ‘English-speaking community’ in cities where those languages are not
the primary language. (It would be odd to speak of Trondheim’s ‘Norwegian-speaking community’ since that would
include nearly everyone in the city.) In identifying these ‘communities’, we are grouping people together in relation
to their linguistic knowledge.
The other communities mentioned above might also be characterized in terms of knowledge, beliefs, ideas or
theories. The LBGTQ+ community of knowers would share much by way of experience and interest and while this
might not be knowledge per se, that experience and interest would lead the community members to share much that
is related to knowledge. This could include beliefs and values, political positions, culture and society and perhaps a
knowledge and understanding of a shared history.

DEEPER THINKING
Generalization and stereotyping

Knowledge about the world, and people in the world, is often generalized; that is, the claims are about
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groups rather than individuals. When economists talk about ‘the market’ or when psychologists talk
about behavioural trends across populations, they are not talking about individuals. Similarly, when
talking about ‘communities of knowers’ we are talking about general features which can be used to
group people together. What might be the dangers of this sort of generalization? How might our thinking
about individuals be influenced knowing that they identify, or we identify them, as part of a group?
Whether justified or not, people might have certain beliefs about these communities, and it might be
unfair to use these beliefs about the community to describe someone in that community. This is the root
of the injustice of ‘stereotyping’, where we place an individual into a community and then unfairly pre-
judge that individual based on what we think is true about that community.

Communities of knowers might also refer to groups that are linked through knowing how to do certain things.
Netball and baseball players, skateboarders, gymnasts and bassists all know how to do specific things and have skills
which bring them into a community. The notion of communities of knowers can also be used to make sense of more
traditional or more formal academic disciplines such as those in the AOKs: historians, mathematicians, biologists
and psychologists all form communities of sorts. In each of these cases, a group of people share propositional and
ability knowledge and can meaningfully engage with one another in relation to that knowledge. There might not be a
single set of knowledge they all share, and they might even disagree on certain claims within their community, but
there are important overlapping beliefs and skills which bring them into a close relationship which they do not share
with others. Not having that knowledge is a way of showing that you do not belong to a community or only stand on
the edge of it. I know that I am not a central member of a community of knowers if I cannot participate meaningfully
in that knowledge.
By way of a loose definition, therefore, we might say that a community of knowers is a group of people who share
similar relationships to a body of knowledge, beliefs, assumptions or opinions. They also share knowledge of
methods about how to build knowledge in the field and are able to collaborate meaningfully in the practice of that
knowledge.

ACTIVITY
Consider the groups that you are part of. They might be social, religious, academic or related to sports or
other skills or interests.
1 Compile a list of knowledge or beliefs that are common or which overlap in that community.
2 What disagreements are there in the community?
3 Are there ways of managing those disagreements?

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Individuals and communities
Having established the notion of a ‘community of knowers’, how can it help us understand ourselves as individual
knowers?

We, as knowers, are related to a community of knowers

Our individual knowledge and perspectives are often defined by being related to a community of knowers.
Individuals generally (perhaps not always) are part of larger groups. In terms of TOK, the idea is that we, as
knowers, stand within communities of knowers. Knowledge is deeply embedded and networked, meaning that the
methods we use to construct knowledge, the claims that we arrive at and the perspectives we take as individuals are
connected and take their meaning from the wider community.
Being an English speaker, for instance, means that you are able to effectively use a language which has been
developed by other people. The meanings of the terms you use and the rules for the proper use of them have already
been decided upon before you started using them. Even when thinking, you might find that ‘the little voice’ in your
head uses proper grammar. It is certainly true that you might create a new word or phrase, but for it to genuinely be
part of the language, others would have to use it with you. You can also use language in new and exciting ways
which might never have been done before: literature and poetry are perfect examples of this. Even here, however,
using words to convey personal or new thoughts, even when breaking established rules, still makes use of publicly
accepted meanings and conventions.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are there types of knowledge that are specifically linked to particular communities of knowers?

Being an individual knower in a community of knowers associated with an area of knowledge requires you to make
use of established conventions and knowledge. Think of your teachers. They are individuals who are part of their
discipline’s community of knowers. Being a mathematician or a psychologist or a philosopher means accepting the
knowledge (or at least important aspects of it) of the community. It also means that you have accepted the general
conventions of knowledge construction in that community. Being an astronomer, for example, means accepting that
the data given through spectroscopy is reliable, more reliable, for instance than merely peering into the night sky.
Even in the arts, where you might think the knowledge gained is personal and subjective, the knowledge of
techniques, the history of the medium and the concepts used in the discussion of the quality of art are all shared
among the community. As is the case with language, these conventions might be used to share deeply personal
emotional responses and experiences, but they nevertheless are recognized by others in the community.

Membership criteria
Another way of thinking about individuals and communities is by thinking about what an individual must know or
be able to do to consider themselves a member of a community.
Consider being a member of a religious community. Being Jewish or Hindu or Jain means, among other things, that
you understand certain concepts and accept certain types of knowledge as true. Being part of these communities
means that you know how to participate in certain rituals or that you are able to participate in certain traditions and
activities. To be a full member of a community requires an individual to take part in learning how to do these sorts
of things.

ACTIVITY
1 What communities would you consider yourself a ‘member’ of?
2 What knowledge (propositional and ability) have you gained that makes you a member of this
community?

Likewise, you might know the basic rules of chess and play regularly with friends, in which case you might consider
yourself broadly to be a part of a community of chess players. You might not be an expert, or a particularly good
player, but you would have the knowledge to meaningfully engage to some degree with other members of this
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community. Considering your knowledge and skills as a whole, you can probably think of all sorts of different
communities of knowers of which you are broadly a part. Think of all the things that you enjoy doing – in each case
you might consider yourself a part of that community of knowers in that you know enough facts and have enough
skill to participate. You might be better at some (closer to ‘expert’) and worse at others (closer to ‘novice’) but you
can be said to be part of that community at some level.

Experts and apprentices

Using this notion of ‘community of knowers’ also gives us the opportunity to explore a central concept in the world
of TOK: experts. If TOK is about knowledge and knowing, then it is crucial to be able to discuss and evaluate just
what it means to be an ‘expert’ or to have more expertise in something, or what makes an individual more or less
reliable than others in relation to that community.

ACTIVITY
What makes an expert more or less reliable? Interview someone who you would consider being in the
same ‘community of knowers’ as you but whom you think is more of an expert than you.
1 Try to identify what makes them more of an expert.
2 Is there anything which they have that you don’t have yet?
3 Is there anything which they have which you cannot have?

Members of communities don’t necessarily all have a similar standing. In many cases, but not all, we easily
recognize when someone is an expert in the group. We have an intuitive understanding that some individuals will be
a more or less reliable voice in that community. Many of us, however, do have quite a bit of knowledge and
experience in a field and would be reliable sources of knowledge when it comes to those fields. Your guitar teacher
(presumably) has a good deal of both knowledge and skill which make them a reliable source of knowledge about
guitar playing. They will know facts about scales and where certain notes are and how they make up chords. They
will know certain skills and techniques, from how to hold the guitar to how and where to place which fingers to
make chords. This is not to say that every guitar teacher is an expert, but simply to suggest that some individuals
have more expertise than others. There is no best guitar player in the world, just like there is no best map of the
world, though we might happily recognize that some players are better in certain respects.
Your subject teachers are another example of people with more expertise than others. In relation to their subject,
your teachers have knowledge of the facts and skills needed to succeed in the context of the IB. This is not, of
course, to say that they are ‘experts’, though of course they might be. Their job is about, among other things, helping
you get through the IB, so their level of expertise needs to be tailored to that task.

IA prompt
22 What role do experts play in influencing our consumption or acquisition of knowledge?

DEEPER THINKING
Privilege and perspective

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When thinking about what makes one person more of an expert than others, you might have come
across certain experiences or traits that make someone more reliable than others in terms of their
sophisticated understanding of certain claims. When thinking about the debate about a woman’s right to
choose what happens to her own body and a fetus’ ‘right to life’, one might reasonably think that being a
woman gives an individual a certain experience that makes her point of view more reliable. When
thinking about racism and the power structures that privilege a racial majority, one might reasonably
think that being part of a minority might give one a certain insight into the issues that someone in the
power majority might not be sensitive to.
In the discussion of race and racism there is the concept of ‘privilege’ which captures this intuition: being
part of the majority in a society might make it harder to see how social structures and conventions make
life easier for that majority. For example, there might be a whole series of issues around race, gender
and economics that a white middle class male, for example, might not be naturally sensitive to. We need
to be attentive to any non-conscious biases that might result from our potentially privileged status.
Ignoring that others might have life experiences which give weight to their perspectives is to pretend that
‘knowing’ about the world has nothing to do with our place in that world.

How does this discussion of experts or expertise help? We’ve suggested that experts are reliable sources of
knowledge, but we must take care when taking advice from those with more expertise, because we should only
accept advice from those who have expertise in the areas we want to know about. If you needed help with your
physics coursework, for instance, you would go to a physics teacher, but not your English literature teacher.
This is because being part of a community of knowers means that you understand the skills and knowledge needed
in that community to excel in that community. Each community will have established rules or conventions which
identify good or excellent knowledge in that community. Becoming part of that community means gaining the
understanding and techniques to produce this quality knowledge. The training your English teacher has received has
not been aimed at producing excellent knowledge in physics.
Similarly, when trying to educate ourselves on particularly contentious issues, like abortion or climate change, we
need to make sure that our sources of knowledge are themselves experts in the field. For example, whatever training
a politician receives when learning to be a good politician isn’t designed for understanding science, so when trying
to understand the science, politicians would do well to ask the experts.

Individual learners are apprentices in communities of knowers

A helpful way to think of your journey as a ‘knower’ is to consider yourself as a sort of apprentice into these
community of knowers. In many professions and jobs, the way you become a member is through a system called
‘apprenticeship’. It is a term referring to young people who begin working with an expert. They learn the trade by
first acting as simply a helper, but then are given more and more knowledge and are allowed to begin actually
practising the trade. Apprenticeship schemes are still common, and many students choose to join one as a way of
learning a trade on the job, rather than perhaps reading about it in a book or learning about it at university. Work
experience or internships can be thought of as a type of short-term apprenticeship. Studying a subject at university
can also be thought of as part of a long-term apprenticeship, in that you are learning the basic knowledge and
academic skills required for success in that field.

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Apprenticeships provide knowledge of facts and skills that help individual knowers shift from being outside the
community to being a novice in the community and then move continually towards being an expert in the
community. Members of these communities build on the overall knowledge and techniques to help the knowledge
base of that community grow and develop as they find new techniques and discover new facts in their fields.
The overall philosophy of the International Baccalaureate is similar to this process in terms of the ‘academic’
subjects you take (including TOK). While there is a lot of learning involved, the subject guides for each of your
subjects encourage and assess the actual doing of the subject. Consider your Internal Assessments for instance: in
each of them you are expected to complete a piece of genuine research in the field or your own personal
interpretation. Instead of just writing a report on what others in the field have said, you are asking a question and
then demonstrating the subject-based skills that you’ve developed by researching, interpreting, thinking and
presenting your response in a way that is appropriate to that subject.
However, this is just the process you’re undergoing in the IB. You will not go on to become an expert in all of your
subjects; you may go on to become an expert in something else entirely. For now, though, you are an apprentice or
an intern in the various disciplines you are taking in the IB. If you are a full DP candidate, you are becoming a
mathematician and you are becoming a fluent language speaker through Language A or B or ab initio. Through your
Language A, you are becoming a literary critic. If you take Group 6 Art, you’re learning the processes and reflective
processes needed to become an artist. Group 4 teaches you some of the facts, rules and methods that you will need to
know if you become a scientist. For each subject you take, there is a group of professionals in that field, and the
work you do during your IB years makes up the early stages of an apprenticeship for that field, should you decide to
continue in that direction after the IB.
This process is very much like an apprentice’s journey: first you watch and learn, then you begin to take up the tools
on smaller projects or essays, then you shift into larger projects taking increasing responsibility, until finally you can
complete the job in a way that is similar to the way experts in the field do it. This process is also how the body of
knowledge and skills developed by that community of knowers is transferred to you as an individual. Though of
course, it might take many years before you’re considered an expert.
The use of this metaphor of ‘apprentice’ as a way of thinking of yourself as a knower is helpful when exploring the
dynamic between not-knowing and knowing, or between being outside a community of knowers and being inside a
community of knowers, or the dynamic between the individual knower and the group of which the individual is a
part. Much of what TOK is about is thinking about that dynamic: what are the core facts and methods needed in a
community of knowers? How does that community accept new members? In what ways do these communities shape
how their members think or behave in the world? How do communities manage the inclusion of new knowledge
from its individuals?

ACTIVITY
1 For each of your subjects, make a list of the knowledge and the skills required to be a successful
‘practitioner’ in that field. Think about what your teachers have asked you to do, what information they
have given you and what skills and knowledge you have developed through your own research.
2 Show this list to your subject teachers and see what they think: are there elements that you have
missed out? Have your teachers ever considered themselves ‘masters’ teaching a trade to
apprentices before?

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Perspectives
How do individuals develop the knowledge that we have? What is their relationship to the knowledge of others? In
this section we explore ways in which we might unpack the various influences on our knowledge and explore how
we might analyse the impact of these influences.
Every individual will have a unique experience in relation to the world and how they have gained their knowledge,
so there’s no way we can exactly describe your personal experience. But it remains true for everyone that we have
developed our knowledge or our own ‘perspectives’ in the context of other knowledge and other knowers. In some
cases, we consciously accept that knowledge (perhaps through learning), in some cases we challenge it, and in some
cases we are unaware that we have taken on certain beliefs in a non-conscious or non-reflective way.
The goal here is not to describe for every individual just how their knowledge has been developed or what has
influenced them, but rather to provide some conceptual tools which might be used to uncover what is the case in
your own experience as a knower. This unit relates to a core theme of the Theory of Knowledge course, meaning
that a critical reflection of your own knowledge in the world is the point of this course. These concepts might help
you to reflect on your knowledge and identify and describe the ways that what you know about the world has been
influenced, and give you tools to think about how to respond to this new awareness.

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Puppet masters
First, a story.
Imagine yourself a prisoner in a dark cave where you’ve been trapped since birth. You’re chained so you can only
face the wall in front of you. To your right and left are other prisoners in the same position as you. In front of you
are flickering and indistinct images bouncing about on the wall and you hear vague echoes coming from them. Other
than you and your co-prisoners, this is all there is in your world – the images and sounds have always been there,
you’ve never really questioned them, and they have become your ‘reality’; this is what you think the world is like.
You and your fellow prisoners have even developed a sort of language, one that allows you to name the images in
front of you, and you play games trying to recall the names of the images before anyone else can. It’s a pretty
shallow form of ‘fun’ but it is all that is available to you.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What shapes my perspective as a knower?

But there’s more. Behind you there is a roaring fire and in front of the fire is a walkway where people with variously
shaped objects pass between you and the fire and their objects cast shadows on the wall in front of you, as if they
were shadow-puppets. You have never experienced the people, nor do you even have the idea that there are people
other than your prisoner-friends, or the idea of a whole other existence beyond your own wall, images and chains.
Your reality is what is real, there it is thrown on the wall in front of you; these images are not the whole story – but
you’re entirely unaware that there’s more to what you see.
This story comes from an ancient Greek text written by a philosopher named Plato who died in Athens about the
year 347 BCE. In his most famous work The Republic, Plato offers this story in what is called ‘The Allegory of the
Cave’. This allegory is used by Plato to make all sorts of points, but at the heart of all the various interpretations is
this dilemma: the prisoners believe that the shifting and vague images dancing about on the wall in front of them is
what is ‘real’ and they are deeply mistaken.
Plato’s point is that we are, in all sorts of ways, very much like these prisoners. We happily accept what is presented
to us as our reality. But, consider for a moment which beliefs, opinions or ‘knowledge’ we have that might be no
more real than the flickering shadows of the cave? If you have ever had the experience of seeing a situation in a new
light and realized that you had previously been mistaken, then you might have a sense of what it must be like for
Plato’s prisoners. For the rest of our beliefs, are we sure that we have it right?
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Now the story continues:
Imagine that one day you are released from your chains and you turn to climb out of the cave. You see the fire
behind you and the people milling about. With a shock you recognize that the fire and these objects are what created
the shadows you previously mistook for reality. The shadows are not real objects at all! You then rise and continue
out of the cave and find yourself in the harsh light of the day. You see the bright Sun above you illuminating the
world around you, even brighter than the fire below. You realize that all this time you’d been living in an illusion;
none of what you thought was real is actually real at all. This is a revelation indeed!
You remember your friends still chained in the darkness below, so you run back into the cave and call down to them.
They hear you but your voice has now become one among the many indistinct voices they hear coming from the
wall in front of them. Perhaps they see your shadow, but they only think that this image is just another of the images
they’ve always seen; the reality of the situation is so far beyond what they even could know that they barely give
you a second thought. Since they are not responding to your calls, you run back down to them and stand before them
and attempt to convince them of what they cannot understand: there is no reality to the shadows in front of them;
what they see is they are an illusion, a vague and pale reflection of the reality of the world outside the cave. Your
presence is a surprise to them, your words of this other reality simply confuses them. They don’t believe you. In
fact, they cannot believe you because they have no ideas or concepts to help them understand this reality beyond
anything they know. They actually think it is you who has lost touch with reality. In order to give you the chance to
prove that you suddenly have not lost your mind, they challenge you to a game of ‘name that image’, the favoured
game from before you left. However, because your eyes are no longer accustomed to the darkness of the cave, and
because you no longer can see the point in this game, you struggle to make sense of the images as well as you used
to and they consider you a miserable failure, thereby making you even less reliable. They are now convinced of your
madness and dismiss you. You have no choice but to leave them to their illusions.

ACTIVITY
Consider some of the beliefs that you once had, but which have changed since you’ve gotten older.
1 Can you identify why your views changed? Was it because of a new experience? New challenges?
New learning?
2 Perhaps the ideas you chose are not ideas that conflict with what you knew before, but simply reflect
a deeper understanding. Try to characterize your thinking in the following terms: ‘I used to think …, but
now I think …’

This story has occupied scholars for the last 2000 years and there are layers and layers of meaning waiting to be
uncovered. In one sense, it is an allegory for the journey of the life-long learner. We are born into a world of existing
facts and beliefs not of our making, utterly convinced by the vague and imprecise notions we learn in our childhood.
As we learn about and see more of the world, we recognize that we have always had so much to learn. Our learning
is genuine – we move on from our childish understandings of the world and replace them with more reliable facts
and beliefs. In some cases, we experience so much and learn so much about the world that we simply cannot return
to our relative ignorance. Imagine finding tales of Father Christmas (Santa Claus) or the Tooth Fairy as convincing
today as you once did. This can be troubling and painful. In the original story, the prisoner’s transition to the harsh
light of day is uncomfortable. He staggers about in the bright light, shading his eyes, but he does become
accustomed to the new environment. It is then that his past environment becomes what is odd and unknowable.
Let us now consider those individuals in the Allegory of the Cave that are wandering about in front of the fire with
various objects whose shadows are cast on to the wall in front of the prisoners. Plato likens them to ‘puppet masters’
because the objects they carry, some of which take the shape of various animals and other people, are like puppets
whose shadows being cast on the wall are being judged as real by the prisoners. In Plato’s story they are nameless,
but who are these puppet masters? If we are like the prisoners in the story, then perhaps there are people, groups,
institutions and processes that cast their own shadows which we accept as ‘real’. Much of what we think – many of
our beliefs – are the result of other people casting their truths into our world, which we often accept without much
reflection. They are, in a sense, responsible for our understanding of the world around us. Who are these puppet
masters casting their shadows?

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ACTIVITY
1 Consider for a moment your own ‘puppet masters’. Who is responsible for your understanding of the
world? These might be individuals or groups of people. Brainstorm a list of people, groups or
institutions that have played a role in developing your views on the world. When thinking about certain
people, try to be specific. Rather than the generic ‘teachers’, try ‘Mr Moore’. Institutions might be more
general but try to identify specific institutions.
2 Consider what makes them a source for your understanding of the world. Why are they in the position
of casting their knowledge onto you?
3 Now see if you can rank them according to who you think is most reliable in that creation of your
reality. Who should you be listening to? Can you make an argument about who is most reliable on
your list? What is it about them that makes them most reliable?
4 For each of the puppet masters that you identified, try to identify a genuine belief that you hold and
that you can directly link to this puppet master. The belief might be religious or political or ethical.

We find ourselves in the middle of a highly interconnected web of people from whom we learn and who are sources
for our knowledge. Schools are a great example. They are designed to pass on knowledge and information which has
already been discovered and which you simply don’t have time to learn yourself. If you have any hope of learning
what your school leaders have decided you need to learn before leaving school, then you have to accept much of
what you are told and move on. Imagine if you were asked to develop, by yourself, all the knowledge you’ve learned
even this week. Of course, during your IB Diploma Programme experience you will conduct a number of science
experiments, you’ll read a good few novels and write reflective essays on them and you might develop proofs for a
handful of mathematical theorems. However, these exercises are largely so you know how those processes work, not
so that you develop new knowledge. Most of the time you’re being given information that others, sometimes long
ago, have developed and which, hopefully, you can move beyond as your education becomes more specialized.
But who chose which knowledge to pass on to you? Your parents are part of the decision in that the choices they
make have led you to the school you’re in, your curriculum writers at the IB have made choices about what is
essential for DP candidates to know in their subjects, teachers have made choices about what and how to present
those concepts in the classroom and your textbook writers have made choices about what to discuss in the books you
read. You might consider them as similar to the ‘puppet masters’ in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, who construct the
reality that we happily accept.
Not all is mere illusion of course. Some of the information offered by your puppet masters is true and it would be
right to accept what they pass on to you. For example, it is very useful to have good medical information: knowing
how to treat or prevent dangerous diseases is good to know, especially if you have that disease. However, some of
the other images of reality presented by your puppet masters might not be as helpful, or they might be limiting.

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Leafing through a fashion magazine and looking at the models depicted might give a false impression of what
‘beauty’ should look like. An examination of the racial and gender profiles of the boards of governors of many
major companies might give a false impression of the types of people needed to successfully run a company. These
shadows cast on your knowledge do need reflecting on, and in some cases, they need to be challenged or replaced
with better ideas.

ACTIVITY
From your list of puppet masters, choose a source of knowledge that you think might offer an unreliable,
unhelpful or misleading view of reality.
1 How effective has that image of reality been for your thinking?
2 What learning or experience has made it possible for you to identify that information as unreliable?

Assessment advice
Choose one of your puppet masters and think of a human-made object which is linked to them or it. You
might want to use this object as one of your exhibits in your internal assessment. Perhaps it is something
that this person uses or has created. Think about how that object illustrates something particular about
how that puppet master constructs knowledge.

The idea is that we, as knowers, do not stand in isolation from others around us. Thinking about who or what has
influenced us is very much at the heart of the TOK Programme. As children, we find ourselves living in a world
where there are already many ideas about how the world works, about what is real, about how people should behave
and about what is important or valuable. The point of living in families and societies is so that we can learn from
these groups. It is therefore the responsibility of these groups to pass their understanding and approaches on to the
young in their groups. As we become older, we begin to develop a certain distance from those groups and to think
about which of the beliefs provided to us we want to believe and why. Many of those beliefs are not worth thinking
about, but some are very much worth believing, for a variety of reasons, and we must decide which is which. The
TOK course is one way in which we can understand the importance of this task and develop the skills and processes
to make these decisions.

ACTIVITY
Interview one of your chosen puppet masters.
1 Explain to them the concept of puppet master and why you think this person is one of yours.
2 Explain in what way they have helped shape your reality.
3 Ask them whether they know about the impact they have had on your understanding of the world.
4 Did they reflect on how best to influence you?
5 Do they think they are a reliable influence on your understanding of the world around you?
6 Where do they think they may be less reliable, or may have misled you?

Having thought about your own puppet masters, you might have realized that each of us has many different sources
of knowledge – different puppet masters casting their shadows in various ways. As individual ‘knowers’ we stand in
relation to a number of these sources. In another way of thinking about it, we might find that we are parts of many
different ‘communities of knowers’: groups of people of shared interest, skills and knowledge.
So how can we think about what these puppet masters provide? They give us different maps, different ways of
navigating the world.

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Knowledge as a map
One of the central metaphors we use in TOK and one which you will find scattered through the subject guide is the
notion of knowledge as a map. The idea behind this map metaphor is to think of the construction of knowledge as a
way of ‘navigating’ the world around us. Earlier we made a distinction between ‘facts’ (the way the world is
whether we ‘know’ it or not) and ‘knowledge’ (a set of beliefs we think accurately represent those facts). The ‘map’
of the world in this case is our knowledge about the world. What we say we know about the world and how the
world really is are distinct: our attempts at constructing knowledge is like trying to develop a map which tells us
what is out there and how to get around in that world.
As individuals we find ourselves lost in a world of knowledge. Everyone seems to know something we don’t know.
Everywhere there is something more to know. Some things we need to know (such as how to keep ourselves
healthy, how to find our way home, the facts that we need to pass an exam or to do our job). Some things we’d like
to know (how to play the drums, what people are really thinking about us, or more about the subjects in school we’re
really interested in). But as the discussion of the puppet masters shows, there are also a whole range of people trying
to pass their knowledge on to us or to get us to know certain things rather than others.
Navigating this world of knowledge is just as much of a challenge as navigating the real world around us. To help us
get around the real world – the world of mountains, rivers, cities and roads – we use maps. These maps pick out
certain features of the world and we use them as guides to help us get around. In navigating the world of knowledge,
we might also think about the maps that we create. In this section we will explore this way of thinking about how we
create and use maps to navigate the world of knowledge.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, let’s just play with some maps. Which of the maps shown do you think
is most accurate? Each map presents the globe in a slightly different way and it is important to identify the
differences between the maps.

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ACTIVITY
1 Consider the six maps. Look at Map 1. Identify what you think is accurate about it. Now consider Map
2. Is it more or less accurate than Map 1? Repeat for Maps 3, 4, 5 and 6 and rank all the maps in
order from most to least accurate.
2 In small groups, discuss how each person ranked the various maps. Which maps were generally
thought of as ‘accurate’ and why? Which maps were generally less accurate and why?
3 What general claims can you make about the question ‘Which is more accurate?’ based on this
exercise?
4 Were the maps more or less accurate for the same reasons? You might have suggested Map 1 was
accurate for one reason, but that Map 3 was equally as accurate, but for a different reason.

You might have found that there was some agreement and some disagreement. The accuracy of the maps depends
mostly on what you mean by ‘accurate’ and this depends largely on what sort of information you want to know. If
you are wondering where countries are in relation to one another, then Maps 3, 4 and 5 will do that job well. If,
however, you are wondering what geographical features you might expect to find in certain places (mountains,
deserts, oceans, jungles) then perhaps Maps 1, 2 and 6 would be more useful. All the maps could tell you what was
directly north or south or east or west of some point, but some present their information in a way that makes this
more easy than others: Map 6 uses these directions but it makes this information hard to read. Map 3 has exactly the
same information as maps we’re used to seeing, but it simply places south at the top as opposed to the normal
convention of placing south at the bottom.
In order to read or follow any map, we must be aware of how the map works and what conventions and assumptions
are written into the creation of the map. There are a number of these assumptions and conventions in the maps on
page 61. The cartographer (map maker) would have made a decision about how to lay out the map and this required
them to decide both how to represent the world and what to represent. Maps 1, 2 and 6 ignore the human and
political features of the world (cities and countries) and instead opt only to tell the reader what the world looks like.
Maps 3, 4 and 5 decide to show only the human and political features. Each map also makes a decision to orientate
itself in a certain direction. This decision is most obvious in Map 3, given that it offers an orientation (the south is at
the top) which we normally don’t see. This decision, however, doesn’t mean that the map is any less accurate in its
depiction of the facts; it’s simply that we don’t normally see south at the top. The point is that we cannot read a map
effectively – we cannot see how it tells us anything about reality – unless we understand and accept these
conventions.
Much of this understanding and acceptance happens non-consciously – when we see maps with north at the top, we
don’t even think about it. When we see maps with south at the top, we can quickly change our understanding and get
on with the task of reading it in the same way as other maps we’re more used to. What we often don’t think carefully
about, however, is what these conventions and assumptions written into the maps lead us to think. Consider the
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differences between Maps 1 and 2: the physical shapes of the continents are very different, particularly as you look
at the land masses furthest from the equator. Consider Map 1. This is called the Mercator Projection and is what
happens when you take a spherical globe and try to translate it onto a flat page – this results in a stretching effect
where the land masses get distorted to fill in the spaces furthest from the equator; the relative area of the far north
and south land masses become disproportionally large compared to the land masses at the equator. If you are not
using the map to think about the relative land mass, then this poses no problem. But not being aware of this
distortion might lead you into certain false conclusions. You might, for instance, uncritically accept that Greenland
is about the same size as the continent of Africa. However, in terms of land mass, Africa is about 14 times the size
of Greenland. While overemphasizing the size of Greenland, the flip side of this is that the size of Africa is
underemphasized. Africa is an impressively large land mass. The entirety of the USA, China, most of Europe and
India could fit within the area of Africa, yet much of the world treats Africa and its huge countries, people,
traditions, cultures and practices as if it were a homogenous whole. It’s not unreasonable to think this might be
because many maps underestimate its size (The Economist). You can use the QR code to read the article in The
Economist.

Map 2 is a response to this dilemma. This projection, called the Galls-Peters projection, is an attempt to capture the
same information as Map 1 (where the land masses are in relation to one another, and what they look like) but with
the added information of how big the land masses are. However, it’s easy to see how the choice to capture this added
fact of relative land size has created its own distortions; the details of the land masses at the north and south
extremes become nearly impossible to read. So, the choice to prioritize one set of facts has distorted another set of
facts.
Another consequence of the choices made in building these maps is to consider what we think of as important or
valuable. The presentation of the world in Maps 1 and 2 is traditional in Europe, while students growing up in the
United States might recognize Map 4 and students from the Pacific Island nations might recognize Map 5. In other
words, the decision to place one part of the world at the centre of the map suggests that the map values certain areas
over others. This might simply be because the map is intended for one audience and not another. Looking at Map 3
however, it might be jarring because it makes it something of a challenge to find your own country.
There’s nothing bad at work here, but it does lead to some interesting conclusions about how these values get
written into the values we hold today. ‘The Middle East’ and the ‘Far East’, for instance, are phrases that make sense
if we consider ourselves to be starting from Europe. Calling the areas around the Arabian Peninsula the ‘Middle
East’ suggests that they have an identity in relation to Europe, but why should that be the case? Similarly, with the
Far East. We might ask ‘far from what?’ Why should the peoples and countries at the eastern edge of the Asian
continent be far from anywhere? Again, this suggests that Europe is at the centre of it all, but why should this be the
case? By looking at Maps 1 and 2 you might uncritically think that Europe really does sit at the top and centre of the
world. The east Asian countries are pushed off to the edges. Australia ends up ‘down under’ the globe, but it’s not
under anything or down from anything unless you accept that the northern hemisphere should be at the top.
Considering the choices of Maps 3, 4 and 5 is more interesting. The top or the centre of these maps lead their readers
into thinking about what is important.
Many maps use latitude and longitude to divide the world up and help make navigating easier, and here again we
might find hidden assumptions about what is important coded into how we describe the world. The starting point for
longitude is the ‘Prime Meridian’ and this runs through a place called Greenwich in southeast London in the United
Kingdom. That this starting point runs through the UK is not an accident. At the time this feature of maps was being
developed, Britain was home to the best maritime knowledge. It was also the greatest military and colonial power.
The strength and knowledge of Britain at the time gave it the ability to decide that the foundations of the system
used to measure the world begin in Britain. This starting point then has been coded into every navigational map on
the planet today. The Prime Meridian could have been anywhere, except for the particular strengths of a little
country on a little island off the coast of the European continent.

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IA prompt
33 How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?

Map 6 is called an ‘Azimuthal Equidistant Projection’ which shows the relative distances from one point on the
Earth. Map 6 has chosen the North Pole as this point, but it could have been any other point on the surface of the
globe. Interestingly, this projection seems to be the favourite with the Flat Earth Society and serves as the model for
the UN logo. The knowledge expressed in this map is different in significant ways from the knowledge expressed in
the other maps. Understanding what is being represented in each of these maps is important so you don’t mistake
what you think is being represented with what is actually being represented.
Another feature of how maps might distort our understanding of the world is illustrated by the old saying ‘the
shortest distance between two points is a straight line’. When looking at any of the maps, were we to try to calculate
how to cover a great distance in the most direct way possible we might apply that basic truth of geometry and simply
draw a straight line. Applying this principle to a sphere, however, will not result in the shortest distance.

Anyone who has taken a long-haul flight from east to west will recognize this immediately when thinking about the
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maps that most airline TV consoles provide. When travelling from Abu Dhabi in the UAE westward to Los Angeles
on the west coast of the USA, rather than travelling west at all, the flight path takes you directly north over central
Asia, through Russia, clipping the North Pole, then directly south down the west coast of North America to Los
Angeles. This would be something you’d never consider from looking at any of the maps we presented here. In other
words, trying to navigate the real world, simply by applying the map of the world, would have led you to use
rational processes that are misleading. Sure, travelling directly west from Abu Dhabi would eventually get me to Los
Angeles, but the journey would be something like 3 300 km longer in a ‘direct’ path to the west.
Clearly there is no one way to represent the world, it depends precisely on what you have chosen to represent. Any
attempt to create a map must begin with making a whole range of choices. The world that maps represent is
infinitely complex even though maps are necessarily simple: they translate the infinite complexities of the ‘real’
world into a simplified representation of it, highlighting certain aspects and ignoring or possibly distorting others.
In summary we might recognize the following points about maps:
• They require the individual to accept assumptions about how that map works.
• Maps distort reality to some degree and therefore can lead us to false conclusions about the world.
• In choosing what features to include, certain values are written into maps.
• Maps guide our thinking processes in ways that we may not be aware of.

ACTIVITY
1 Draw a timeline of your life. This is a ‘map’ of the time you have been alive. Since you cannot choose
every event of your life to represent, what sorts of events will you choose? What type of story does
your timeline tell a stranger?
2 Now draw a timeline of your life that represents your journey as a ‘knower’. What do you ‘know’ now
and where have you learnt it? What events in your life are relevant to you as a knower? Perhaps you
will include when you started school and when you began the IB Programme. What other important
knowledge have you gained and when did you learn it? Compare your timeline of your journey as a
knower with a fellow student. Note the differences: even though you are both ‘IB students’ (and so
might be similar in terms of what you know), you might have identified quite different moments to
record on your map. Discuss why that might be. Is it possible for two students ever to create the same
map?
3 If you have a social media account like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, what events are on your feed
and what is not on your feed? What effect would the choices you’ve made have on a stranger’s
impression of you? What kind of person would they think you are? What values and beliefs do you
think are illustrated by the choices you’ve made?

ACTIVITY
1 Individually, create a map of your school, thinking carefully about which information you want to
represent and how you will represent it.
2 Compare your finished map with a partner’s map. What are the similarities and differences? How do
those similarities and differences reflect your respective experiences of the school?
3 How can you decide which is a better map of the school?

Individual maps
We are now in a position to think about these maps in relation to ourselves as individual knowers. Go back to the
timeline you created above and consider the story that map tells about you. What are the main features of that
landscape? What have you included and what have you not included? What other maps can you create which will
still tell us about you? At what point would your map become fiction? What maps do you use to make sense of your
world and what use can we make of this metaphor?
These ‘maps’ will be influenced by the experiences you’ve had growing up, the people you are spending your life
with and the beliefs and expectations of your family, friends, religion and school. None of us use only one map; the
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maps we use will change depending on the situations we find ourselves in. You might, for example, use a map
provided by the scientific method (see Chapter 9) when working with your lab partner in science while trying to
discover or explain some feature of the world. You will, however, switch to a different map when discussing the
world and your place in it with your religious leader. You might be discussing the same phenomenon, but these
different maps might be looking at completely different things. Perhaps you are thinking about global warming
using an economic map, while your friend looks at it with a biological map, or you might be thinking about abortion
using a women’s rights map while your friend thinks about it using a religious map.
Our approaches to the decisions and actions we make every day are part of a wide variety of goals, desires and
needs. At times you are acting as a sportsperson, other times you are a friend, a son or daughter, a leader or a
follower. In each case you are using a set of principles which help you navigate that moment. Who influences what
features you include on your maps and are those maps reliable?
Think back to the key concepts presented in Chapter 1. How can those concepts help you make decisions about
which maps you want to use? Being a reflective and critical thinker means that you must take responsibility for the
choice of maps that you use. If you want, for instance, to join the community of ‘anti-vaxxers’, then one
consequence of that choice is that you are using a map which tries to make scientific claims about the causes of
autism, but which actually turns its back on years of study by world experts on autism and vaccinations. You can, of
course, interpret the world however you wish (it is your ‘right’ to have an opinion, or in this case ‘use a particular
map’), but this does not by itself make that opinion or map a good opinion or map. To use a map which denies well
established and reliable scientific methods in order to make claims that are exactly opposite to what is real, is like
looking at the Mercator Projection map on page 61 and deciding that Greenland and Africa are the same size. It is
just not true. The map has led you away from reality, rather than helped you navigate reliably through it.

AOKs as maps
The metaphor of knowledge as map is a helpful one which the TOK subject guide uses and which this book will
apply at various points. Knowing the world or creating knowledge about the world is a lot like creating maps of the
world. Various maps will highlight certain information, ignore other information, guide our thinking and possibly
distort our understanding of the world. The knowledge we construct about the world will do these things, too. As
mathematicians construct mathematical knowledge, they will highlight concepts like number and logical deduction,
but might ignore other concepts like culture. A historian, however, will consider culture and its influence on the
individual as important, so will discuss as they construct their historical narratives, but will perhaps ignore the nature
of basic mathematical axioms. Similarly, the artist or philosopher might emphasize the individual experiences of
singular human beings, while the economist might accept they are part of an economic analysis but limit that effect
in favour of developing generalizations about how groups of people tend to behave. Likewise, an artist might
highlight the notion of inspiration and intuition in the artist, while the natural scientist might accept that individual
scientists have moments of inspiration, but make sure that this inspiration has been tested against repeatable and
publicly observable experiments. In other words, each area of knowledge will emphasize and prioritize some aspects
of reality and try to describe those elements, while perhaps leaving other aspects to some other field of knowledge.
The task of the TOK student is to become sensitive to and evaluate those different approaches and maps.

ACTIVITY
1 Consider your IB Diploma Programme subjects. For each, try to develop a set of questions that are
unique to that subject. What types of questions does that subject ask that others might not?
2 What rules do the various approaches follow? Are they similar to or different from the approaches of
the other subjects?
3 Are there better or worse approaches or does it only matter what you’re trying to achieve? What are
the appropriate ways of acting or constructing knowledge in this AOK, and what responsibilities does
an individual have in that AOK?

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Background beliefs
We’ve considered two metaphors (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the map metaphor) to help frame our thinking
about knowledge, arriving at two outcomes:
• Our knowledge is heavily impacted by those individuals and institutions around us.
• The models and maps we choose to use in interpreting the world around us will distort reality and guide our
thinking in ways we might not be aware of.

Learner profile
Reflective
How do my own background beliefs influence the way I engage with the world?

These discussions are a way of exploring what might be called ‘background beliefs’ – beliefs which we hold and use
to make sense of what we see around us. They are in the ‘background’ in the sense that we often are not consciously
thinking of them when we investigate the world, though the beliefs themselves may or may not have been
consciously arrived at.
None of us approach a situation as a blank canvas; we make sense of everything around us through the beliefs and
ideas that we have already formed. People who tend to believe in conspiracy theories are an obvious and extreme
example of this. From fake Moon landings, to the 9/11 attacks in New York City in 2001, many people refuse to
take events at face value and instead see them as masking some deeper truth which most of us are unaware of. These
people are interpreting the world through the lens of their pre-existing beliefs about the way the world is. Often in
conspiracy theories, these beliefs are about secret and powerful groups who want to harm us in some way or another
(whether it be simply ‘keeping us in the dark’ or hiding their true evil intentions). The Flat Earth Society, for
instance, suggests that:
The purpose of NASA is to fake the concept of space travel to further America’s militaristic dominance of
space. That was the purpose of NASA’s creation from the very start: To put ICBMs and other weapons
into space (or at least appear to). The motto ‘Scientific exploration of new frontiers for all mankind’ was
nothing more than a front. (‘The Conspiracy’)
The Flat Earth Society then suggests that NASA scientists cannot know that the Earth is round because ‘They are not
running a real space programme, so they wouldn’t know what shape the Earth truly takes’. What appears to be
happening here is that those responsible for these claims are working with a map or a set of background beliefs
about the nature of the US Government that involve ideas that contradict all available evidence and which will
require further buttressing and intellectual gymnastics when actually presented with facts. The map, in this case, is
not representing the reality common to us all and so is more misleading than reliable.
There are more mainstream examples of the impact of background beliefs. Studies in ‘unconscious bias’, which we
touched on in Chapter 1, are an interesting (and controversial) example of this. The basic idea here is that our
interactions with others are filtered through pre-existing biases which then impact our interactions with people.
These biases usually have the biggest impact in ‘quick thinking’ situations, where people are making fast, non-
reflective judgments in the immediacy of a situation. However, they also have an impact in situations where people
are meant to be reflective.
In 2013, the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU), a group that helps universities in the UK and around the world develop
programmes that promote and protect diversity, explored unconscious bias in relation to hiring practices at
universities (Equality in Higher Education Statistical Report 2013). This was in response to worries identified by the
ECU that the majority of full-time academic positions were held by a disproportionately high number of white staff,
which was inconsistent with the proportions of ethnicities in the student bodies. One reason suggested by ECU for
why the proportion of white academics is inconsistent with the proportion of black and minority ethnic students is
that universities’ hiring practices are influenced by unconscious bias. The suggestion is that hiring committees, even
when they are being reflective and making attempts to be aware of any conscious bias, may nevertheless allow their
unreflective background bias to impact their decisions in reviewing applications, short-listing candidates,
interpreting interview responses and ultimately making job offers. The claim that unconscious biases exist is not the

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same as claiming that individuals are ‘racist and don’t know it’. Rather, in forming our understanding of the world
and the people around us, we form non-conscious ‘short-cuts’ to thinking that are sometimes hard to identify and
challenge, even when we think carefully about them.

DEEPER THINKING
Background beliefs and intuition
While these considerations show that in some instances people use their background beliefs to interpret
the world around them, a full TOK analysis would take this a step further. Even if you are not a
conspiracy theorist or involved in university hiring, it is important to consider what background beliefs
you have which have impacted the way that you see the world around you.
What are your own background beliefs? Thinking about who your puppet masters are and what maps
you use to navigate the world are ways to identify and describe these influences. If you are a student at
one of the universities described in the ECU study, for instance, what impact does seeing one ethnic
group over-represented around you have? Does it seem to be ‘normal’ and does this ‘normal’ lead you to
think differently about what is outside this ‘norm’? Another example might be to consider how different
your social, religious, political or economic beliefs and expectations are from those of your parents and
your friends.

Malcom Gladwell’s Blink is an excellent introduction into an implication of how these background beliefs
work in our claiming to know about the world. Gladwell describes a process he calls ‘thin-slicing’, which
refers to making quick, seemingly non-conscious judgments about situations in which people find
themselves. He describes a case in which the art community had accepted a statue, the ‘Getty kouros’
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as being an authentic statue from the sixth century BC. However, many scholars just weren’t sure –
initially their intuitions were leading them to question the authenticity, but they couldn’t quite justify why
or articulate their misgivings. It turns out that having taken these doubts of a few experts seriously, the
community has arrived at a position where the authenticity of the statue cannot be clearly established.
After some critical reflection and further research it appears that the initial intuitions of the doubters and
their subsequent investigations were warranted. Even today the J Paul Getty Museum suggests that the
statue is from ‘… about 530 BC or modern forgery’ and claims that ‘… the anomalies of the Getty kouros
may be due more to our limited knowledge of Greek sculpture in this period rather than to mistakes on
the part of a forger’ (Getty Museum).
What this suggests is that intuition, even though it is non-reflective or non-rational, can actually be better.
The intuitions of art history experts, for example, can be better than the intuitions of other people and the
reason for this is background beliefs and knowledge. The expert’s wealth of experience, knowledge and
ability means that their non-reflective intuitions about things in their realm of expertise are more finely
tuned. So even when they are not thinking explicitly about a problem, their intuitions should be relied
upon and listened to as authorities in their field.

In this section we’ve explored the sources from which individuals develop their own perspectives on the world and
the conditions under which they do so. We’ve also explored how we can selectively choose how we want to engage
with the world of knowledge, depending on what models and maps we wish to apply to the confusing and
ambiguous reality that we find ourselves confronted with. As we discussed in the introduction, however, these
perspectives and maps do require some connection with the facts of the world around us. There are, in other words,
better and more useful perspectives and maps. A perspective or theory that starts with the assumption that the Earth
is flat, for instance, will not be able to explain all sorts of features of our experience of the world with any precision
or succinctness.

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Methods and tools

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Cognitive tools
In considering the methods of individual knowers, we might consider the sources through which information is
presented to the individual. External sources of knowledge, like books, websites and authority figures, might shape
our knowledge to a great extent, but the internal cognitive processes and tools that we use to gather and interpret
information into knowledge might also shape that knowledge in ways we are unaware of. These are inherently
individual and so an analysis of these sources is best understood as an analysis of an individual’s thought or thinking
process. This is an important discussion because we often show an appropriate amount of healthy scepticism when
other people tell us things, but we might not be considering how our own processes are also sometimes unreliable.

For example, our construction of knowledge about the world might follow this process:
• First, we might experience the world through our senses (sense perception).
• We might then categorize what we are experiencing using memory and language (memory and language).
• From this description we might consider whether it is consistent with what we’ve already experienced in the world
(reason).
• We might even have an emotional reaction to this experience based on what has happened to us before or what we
know about what is happening to us (emotion).
• If we have a question about the reasons for our experience, we might consider and test a number of explanations
(imagination and reason).
• We might even have a ‘hunch’ about what the right explanation is, or a hunch that someone else’s explanation
might be mistaken (intuition).
• There might be some explanations that we inherently trust because they come from a trusted authority in the field
(faith as trust), or because they come from a source to whom we’ve committed ourselves (religious faith).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do we acquire knowledge?

There are all sorts of ways to characterize the cognitive processes by which individuals make claims about the
world. In each case, however, the following should be kept in mind:
• The cognitive tools are intermingled. None of the tools outlined in the diagram above or any others that you
wish to consider, work in isolation. Trying to isolate, for instance, reason and emotion in the consideration of how
we know the world would be like trying to isolate different types of plants in a forest or isolate one single part of
your body when thinking about ‘digestion’. No part works in isolation, all parts work together.
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 Learner profile
Inquirers
What shapes our personal experience of the world?

• Cognitive tools are influenced by our experience and culture. Even though some of these words refer to
biological processes in humans (sense perception, for instance), this does not mean that they operate the same way
for each of us. What we believe to be ‘reasonable’ might differ dramatically between cultures. When discussing
earthquakes in the Himalayas, for instance, some local cultures will use an explanation which includes mythical
beasts battling it out underground and consider this perfectly ‘reasonable’, because the language concepts they are
using are entirely consistent with their basic understandings (or map) of the world. Similarly, religious devotees
may use certain premises to explain the world that will be unavailable to an atheist.

IA prompt
30 What role does imagination play in producing knowledge about the world?

• Sometimes our cognitive tools are trustworthy, but sometimes they are misleading. Like any map, our
cognitive processes, when not used reflectively, can lead us astray, even if most of the time they are reliable.
Optical illusions are a clear example of this, as is the fact that the way we describe our sense impressions might be
heavily influenced by the concepts that our language provides. One of my favourite illusions that demonstrates
this point, isn’t really an ‘illusion’ at all, except that our mind makes it so. What is intriguing about the impossible
trident illusion, shown right, is that it is simply lines on a surface, but our mind tries to create out of that design a
three-dimensional object which cannot exist in reality. It is not the image on the page that is the illusion, but your
mind trying to impose an interpretation on it and that interpretation cannot exist. We don’t experience any of this
interpretation – we see the image, our minds try to interpret it as 3D, we do a double take and get confused.

That sense perception and interpretation are so closely related is also brought out by another more obvious point:
none of the oddly shaped lines (the text) on this page have presented themselves as odd; you have seen the lines
and squiggles and immediately understood only the ‘concept’ behind them. The interpretation and the sense-
experience are the same. Only when we visit a new country – the native language of which we do not speak – are
we confronted with a disconnect between the squiggly lines and the meaning. When a native English speaker sees
Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese or Vietnamese, they see only the lines because they do not have the right background
knowledge. But when it comes to English, they will not even be aware of the lines; they only see the words and
‘see’ their meaning.
The point here is that while we might be experiencing the world through these cognitive processes, they are
experienced through the lens of our interpretations and background beliefs. If we are not careful, those
interpretations might lead us into the dangerous territory of mistaken interpretation or outright prejudice.

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• Our cognitive tools are managed by communities of knowers. No matter how much thinking about or analysis
of our cognitive processes we do, they really only become interesting in terms of TOK when we consider their
role in the formation of knowledge. That we are sometimes deceived by sense perception, or that reason can lead
us into falsehoods, or that intuition can give us nudges in the right direction, is less interesting in TOK than how
the sources are managed by the community of knowers. This is the step that all considerations of cognitive tools
should take. For instance, that our senses can sometimes lead us astray is interesting, but it’s a real problem for a
community of knowers like scientists because the whole ‘method’ that science uses is based on observations of the
world as the primary data. The question, then, isn’t whether the senses can sometimes lead us astray but, more
importantly, how scientists manage this problem.

Learner profile
Open-minded
How can I remain open to the fact that my own views might not be fully reliable?

Memory and language can be quite faulty for an individual in developing knowledge, but the real question is how
does the community of historians overcome this or take this into consideration when developing historical
knowledge that often uses first person testimony of events as evidence? Each AOK brings with it a ‘method’
which will be discussed in the following chapters and the point of these methods is to take advantage of the
strengths of these cognitive tools and manage the weaknesses of them in relation to the scope of that community.
• Simply discussing the tools is not an adequate Theory of Knowledge analysis. The sum of this discussion is a
relatively straightforward but crucial point in relation to an effective and successful TOK experience. Simply
outlining the weaknesses of the cognitive tools for individuals isn’t yet a full analysis of knowledge. A successful
TOK analysis will consider how those weaknesses relate to the construction of knowledge, whether it be at the
individual level (‘Should I trust my memory?’ or ‘How does my imagination help me understand the knowledge
of others?’), or the shared level of the community (‘What role does intuition play in the construction of
mathematical knowledge?’ or ‘How does technology influence the reliability of our political knowledge?’ or
‘How does the scientific method protect against the unconscious bias of individual scientists?’).
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Ethics

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How do we identify relevant facts when considering an ethical
dilemma?
In ethical dilemmas, we can develop a solid TOK analysis of the principles by:
• exploring which facts or knowledge about the situation are relevant to the decision
• considering where this knowledge comes from
• asking why we have chosen some facts over others in making a decision.
Another way of saying this is to consider which features you would place on the map that helps you make sense of
the ethical dilemma.

CASE STUDY
Mapping an ethical dilemma
In the year 2000, a couple from Malta (an island in the Mediterranean Sea) travelled to Manchester in
the United Kingdom. The wife was pregnant with conjoined twins and, knowing that it would be a very
difficult birth and that the babies would need intensive care, the UK had invited the couple to St Mary’s
Hospital in order to look after the mother and babies. The babies were born in August, but one of the
twins, Mary, was very sick and her heart and lungs stopped working immediately after birth. Being
conjoined, this meant that the other baby, Jodie, provided blood and oxygen for both of them.
Unfortunately, this placed a huge burden on Jodie’s heart and lungs and the doctors did not expect Jodie
to survive for long as she was doing so much work for both twins.
The doctors wanted to separate the twins, believing that Jodie had a very good chance of survival,
though they knew that because Mary’s heart and lungs were not functioning, she would not survive any
attempt at separation. The babies’ parents understood the medical facts and the likely outcomes, but did
not consent to the operation, arguing that they could not willingly consent to an operation that would kill
one of their children.
The hospital, believing that it had a duty to protect life where it could, went to the courts to ask
permission to separate the babies. The first court (Crown Court) allowed the separation against the
parents’ wishes, but the parents appealed to the High Court to stop the operation. The High Court also
allowed the operation, but for different reasons. The operation was successfully conducted, Mary died,
and the family returned to Malta with Jodie, who grew up healthily and happily (BBC News).
There are all sorts of ways to explore this example, which is full of ethical and legal dilemmas as well as
deep human tragedy and triumph. One way is to analyse and evaluate the reasons the judges gave for
their decisions to separate the twins and the different approaches they used. These different approaches
can be thought of as different ‘maps’: the reality of the situation was about babies, biology and law, but
the ethical dilemma was hard to describe. The first Crown Court judge, Lord Johnson, described the
situation using the language of ‘life support machines’, arguing that Mary ‘lives only because of her
physical attachment to Jodie. The blood and the oxygen that maintain her life come from Jodie. In the
words of one of the doctors, Jodie is her life support machine’ (A (Children)). Think back to what we said
about maps earlier. Lord Johnson takes the reality and translates it into a different set of circumstances
which provide a method of thinking through the dilemma.
The map Lord Johnson used to think through the situation emphasized Mary and her well-being. He
asked the traditional questions one asks when faced with someone who is on life support and who is not
expected to survive. In those cases, the tools available (the elements of the ‘life support map’) are things
like quality of life and questions such as, ‘is it right to end a life of unending suffering with no hope of
long-term survival?’ Characterizing the situation in this way and using this sort of reasoning led to a
relatively straight forward answer – it was in Mary’s best interests to allow Mary to die and end her
suffering.
The High Court decision, while advocating for the same result, used an entirely different map to navigate
the complexities of the issue. In their decision, one of the judges, Justice Ward suggested that Mary
‘sucks the lifeblood of Jodie and her parasitic living will soon be the cause of Jodie ceasing to live’ (A

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(Children)). While the first map emphasized Mary’s health, this map decidedly prioritizes Jodie’s health
and uses a map normally applied to biology and medicine. This map characterizes the issue as a
medical health issue, suggesting that Jodie’s life is being threatened by something that will quickly kill
her and it draws on the duty of the doctors to protect that life.
The maps therefore drew on quite different principles, and each distorted the reality of the situation, but
in so doing, made it possible to navigate the very sad and challenging decisions that had to be made. In
each case, the application of the maps gave the doctors a clear choice (‘when to remove a patient from
life support’ and ‘what needs to be done in order to protect a patient from a dangerous parasite’) and a
clear set of principles to make an ethical decision.
The parents felt that their faith in God and their beliefs about God meant that the situation was somehow
part of God’s plan. As parents, they felt that a course of action which resulted in the death of one of their
children was never an option. These are certainly reasonable things to consider in making this decision,
even if you wouldn’t choose them yourself. However, the doctors involved used a different map to see
their way through the dilemma, emphasizing instead the chance of a successful medical intervention in
keeping one of the children alive. The judges also then identified relevant facts and used them to
develop analogies, saying that the situation was sufficiently similar to when a patient is on a life support
machine, or when a patient is suffering from the effects of a parasite. These models could then be used
to guide their decisions on what would be the ‘right’ thing to do.

ACTIVITY
Consider the two positions offered by the Justices in the case study about the conjoined twins.
1 What are the various strengths of the two maps being applied to the situation?
2 Is one way of understanding the dilemma better than the other? How are you measuring this?
3 What other maps might have been applied to the case? Try to develop a different way of unpacking
the various elements of the dilemma.
4 What is different about your map of the situation from others?
5 What are the different priorities in the various approaches?
6 Are there better and worse approaches to dilemmas like this? How can we decide which are better or
worse?

ACTIVITY
Consider an ethical dilemma.
1 Choose a stance to take on the dilemma and decide which facts pertaining to the case you would
choose in order to develop an argument for your position.
2 Now choose a different position on the case. Are there different facts you would choose to explore in
relation to the dilemma?
3 How can you overcome the challenges of deciding which factors are most relevant?

Different people may disagree fundamentally on what the right facts to consider are in an ethical dilemma, and this
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will undoubtedly be the result of a whole range of factors. An individual’s religion will have an influence, as will
their background knowledge and which community of knowers they are part of. The parents of the conjoined twins,
being religious, imposed that element onto the situation; the doctors at St Mary’s Hospital had a particular skill set,
so naturally thought of the dilemma in terms of what their medical abilities could do in the situation to make things
better. The judges chose different maps again: given that their task was to decide, they needed to look to models that
were helpful for decision making and applied maps which have been helpful in the past. Whether to withdraw
someone from life support or to protect someone from a threat are situations for which answers, and methods to find
answers, have already been developed. Finding similarities with the case of the conjoined twins and applying these
models provided clear methods to find answers in this case too.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
If moral claims conflict, does it follow that all views are equally acceptable?

The reasons why you’ve been encouraged to consider who your puppet masters are or which communities of
knowers you belong to is another way of exploring what tools you can use to explore challenging ethical dilemmas
such as those described above.

DEEPER THINKING
Ethics, objectivity and reason
Does this discussion about the challenges we face in identifying relevant facts to use in our exploration
of ethical dilemmas mean that there can be no agreement on what those facts are? Does this mean, in
other words, that ethical principles are purely relative or that there are not ‘objective’ relative principles?
The answer to this question depends on a number of factors. Just because there may be some
disagreement over which map, or which ethical principles we should use, to help us make ethical
decisions, does not mean that there are not better or worse maps and principles. Making this distinction,
however, requires debate and argument and this is not simply a process of emotions. This debate
requires logic, reason, justification and evidence. Agreement in this sort of inquiry is possible, but it might
take time, critical reflection, debate and compromise to arrive at it. This, interestingly, is the same in any
community of knowers or AOK.
Another important point is that our question about the relativity of ethical principles is a question we’ve
arrived at through an analysis of how ethical dilemmas work. We have not assumed that ethical
questions are inherently relative from the outset. Too often, TOK students, when thinking about ethical
dilemmas, assume from the beginning that ethics is entirely relative in a way that other questions like
science or mathematics is not. There might be some truth in this position, but it is a position that should
never be blindly assumed and applied.

Individual knowers hold an incredible amount of power in relation to the community of which they are a part. The
knowledge of a community is in a constant state of flux: our understanding of the world changes with new evidence
and new experiences; new beliefs and theories replace older ones; individuals add to existing ‘bodies of knowledge’.
Individual knowers play a central role in this process in that individuals are the ones having the new experiences,
finding the new evidence and developing the new theories and beliefs based on them. Our history books are full of
stories of these individuals who happened to be in the right place at the right time to see what needed to be seen, or
to offer a new interpretation, which shifts the established view of how we see things. Who knows? You might be
one of these people who are in the right place at the right time and with the right knowledge and skills to see
something new in the world.
If the knowledge we have about the world is indeed shifting and changing all the time, then what responsibility does
that confer upon the individual? If individuals didn’t question, challenge or test what is ‘accepted’ by the
community, then knowledge would never change. In the western world, we would not have effective medicines if
individuals didn’t test the medieval views of the ‘humours’ (the idea that the human body consisted of four different
types of liquids, which, in different ratios, would produce our outward ‘health’) and challenged the view that
‘bleeding’ sick patients would make them better.

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With the responsibility to challenge, however, comes the duty to challenge appropriately. There are rules which
must be followed – developed by the community – which are useful to manage the contributions of the individuals
to that community. The rules themselves can be challenged, but they exist in order to help establish what new claims
are reliable, especially if they challenge existing knowledge. Andrew Wakefield failed to meet this duty when he
broke the rules of scientific research by falsifying data when investigating whether the MMR vaccine was
dangerous.
The individual knower, then, faces a precipitous challenge: they must first learn and follow the rules of their
community in order to be a meaningful contributor to that community, but they must also remain reasonably
sceptical of the positions offered by that community. Too sceptical and they refuse to accept any claims of the
community as ‘knowledge’; not sceptical enough and they end up falling prey to irrational or poorly justified claims
trumped up as reliable.

IA prompt
30 What role does imagination play in producing knowledge about the world?

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What is the point of ethical theory?
We spend a lot of time thinking about what we should do and a lot of time developing theories to determine what we
should do. This process assumes that the theory somehow comes before our actions, but it is not clear that this is
actually the case. We consider ourselves lucky when we have the time to make ethical decisions; in many cases we
do not have this time – we must decide and act quickly. In such cases, it is hard to imagine that there is some
rational process at work which has considered all the things that need considering and then quickly ‘tells you’ what
the right action should be. Very often, we see something that demands action and rather than think about what the
right thing to do is, we simply act.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
In what ways do ethical judgments differ from other kinds of judgments?

In 2018, the internet was flooded with praise for a Malian refugee living in Paris, who, without any sense of worry
for his own safety, scaled four flights of balconies to save a four-year-old child (France 24). The child had managed
to climb out over the railing of his apartment’s balcony and was hanging four stories over the street. The man,
Mamoudou Gassama, did not spend any time thinking about what was ‘right’ or ‘good’. He simply saw a situation
that demanded his action and he acted to save the child.
Suppose, however, like in the case of the conjoined twins, we do have the time to consider what is right. After
weighing up and applying different theories, how do we decide that we’ve stumbled across the ‘right’ theory?
Suppose we conclude that the continued use of relatively cheap coal power in a developing country provides
financial benefits to its people that outweighs damage to the environment. Another person, however, disagrees with
this view, suggesting that long-term damage to the planet leaves everyone worse off. We might agree with them on
those facts, but we might seriously disagree with them on just what those facts amount to in terms of what we should
do. Ethical theories are how we link facts to what should be done, but accepting which theory best captures that
relationship might have more to do with what we already want.
David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher suggested something like this when he argued that reason
(constructing and applying ethical theory) cannot tell us how to act – any decision to act is motivated by some desire
or ‘passion’ already motivating us. The suggestion is that we fish around for a theory until we find one that we can
use to defend a course of action that we already want.
These cases raise the question about the point of ethical theory. If we are already prepared to act in many cases, and
if in others we only accept a theory as providing the ‘correct’ ethical outcome if it supports what we already believe,
then perhaps this type of knowledge is useless. This, however, goes too far. We generally agree with the philosopher
Immanuel Kant that emotions and desires are not very good as sources of behaviour. In the moment when we’re
unable to think through issues, emotions and desires may be useful tools to use, but in our more reflective moments
we have the opportunity to choose how we want to be. What sort of actions would we want to commit? What sorts
of people do we want to be? This is the role of ethical theory. We develop ethical principles so we can, when we are
free of the immediate needs of the moment, test ideas and make decisions about how we would want to respond to a
situation. Use the QR code in the margin to read an ‘Introduction to Ethical Theory’, which contains information
about different approaches to ethical considerations.

Learner profile
Principled
What role do our own moral principles play in knowing about and acting in the world?

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One might also argue that even in the moment our immediate reactions and emotional responses are themselves the
effect of a whole set of background beliefs, knowledge, habits and experiences. In 2004, it was revealed that a
number of US soldiers were systematically torturing and humiliating Iraqi soldiers who had been captured during
the Iraq War. When this was discussed in a TOK class, most of the students were suitably disgusted by the
behaviour, but one student quietly raised his hand and said, ‘but what if the prisoners deserved it?’ This conversation
stopper was a real shock, but it became apparent that there were a lot of different beliefs working in the background
of students who responded differently to the situation.
At the individual or personal level, some students were themselves minorities and had been the victims of
humiliation or derision by a majority. Some of the students had personal experience of the Middle Eastern
communities, others had personal experience of the US military culture. At the community level or the level of
knowledge shared by a community of knowers, some students had knowledge of the history of the Middle East and
an in-depth knowledge of the current situation there. Others had both personal experience and understood the facts
of the religious nuances at work in the political tensions in the area. The differences in background knowledge,
beliefs and personal experiences all led to quite different immediate emotional and ethical responses to the situation.

ACTIVITY
Identify a significant ethical dilemma facing your community or the world today. Try to identify the types
of beliefs at work in the various perspectives on the dilemma being taken.
1 Try to categorize them in terms of ‘personal knowledge’, that is, the types of knowledge and
experiences that are unique to individuals. This might include the experiences that individuals have
had, their culture, religion, economic position or other general political beliefs. It might also include
relevant procedural knowledge that they have.
2 Then try to identify the relevant ‘shared knowledge’, that is, those beliefs they have that have been
developed by some community of knowers. This might include their understanding of the relevant
historical or scientific facts, or other propositional knowledge relevant to the case.
3 Now imagine that you wanted to develop a debate between these perspectives. How would you
engage the various categories of knowledge? Would knowing different facts about the situation lead to
a different perspective? Would providing different types of experiences lead to a shift in perspective?
In cases such as these, ethical theory can provide a framework to explore the impact of those different
perspectives and experiences.

The elements you identified in the activity might fit into different theories in different ways, but they will
nevertheless help you think through the various perspectives and choices that are available in the debate. While it is
not clear what is the right answer to many of the ethical dilemmas we face as individuals, it nevertheless is true that
ethical theory gives us the opportunity to provide justification and support for our beliefs. More importantly, it will
help us train our responses to situations in a way that we can exercise choice and purpose in our behaviour.

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Conclusion
The Theory of Knowledge course is about knowledge and all knowledge begins, or began, with the experience and
knowledge of individuals. Few of us are at the cutting edge of the construction of knowledge in the context of the
areas of knowledge, but, as individuals, we certainly do create knowledge for ourselves every day. How we
experience the world and the knowledge we create, though, is heavily influenced by the circumstances we find
ourselves in, whether that be our educational, ethnic, national, social or any number of other circumstances. These
circumstances may help us become more sensitive to certain types of knowledge or might lead us to apply certain
concepts and ideas in unreliable ways. In other words, the choice of perspective or map that we apply to our
experience matters. The challenges facing the individual knower and their role in relation to communities of
knowers should always be on the mind of TOK students as they explore the forms and contexts of knowledge in the
other parts of the course.

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Works cited
A (Children). Neutral Citation Number: [2000] EWCA Civ 254. 22 September 2000. Web. 28 Apr. 2019.
www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2000/254.html.
‘Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Report 2013’. Equality Challenge Unit. N.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2019.
www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-in-higher-education-statistical-report-2013/.
Gladwell, Malcolm. 2005. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York. Little, Brown and Co.
‘“Hero” Malian Migrant Saves Child from Paris Balcony’. France 24. N.p. 28 May 2018. Web. 28 Apr. 2019.
www.france24.com/en/20180528-hero-mali-migrant-saves-child-paris-balcony-france.
‘Jodie and Mary: The Medical Facts’. BBC News. BBC. 7 Dec. 2000. Web. 28 Apr. 2019.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/920487.stm.
‘Kouros’. The J. Paul Getty Museum. N.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2019.
www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/10930/unknown-maker-kouros-greek-about-530-bc-or-modern-
forgery/.
‘The Conspiracy’. The Flat Earth Wiki. N.p. 27 Jan. 2019. Web. 28 Apr. 2019.
https://wiki.tfes.org/The_Conspiracy.
‘The True True Size of Africa’. The Economist. The Economist Newspaper. 10 Nov. 2010. Web. 28 Apr. 2019.
www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2010/11/10/the-true-true-size-of-africa.

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3 Knowledge and Technology
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will:
• understand the differences between data, information and knowledge
• be able to reflect on the nature of knowledge and consider whether computers can have it
• appreciate the fact that existing biases, prejudices and values are often built into the technology we
develop
• understand what big data is and how it represents new and potentially problematic possibilities for the
creation of knowledge
• be able to critically reflect on how technology is used in the creation, storage and dissemination of
knowledge
• be aware of some of the ethical issues we face in relation to the development and use of new
technologies.

Learner profile
Risk-takers
What risks are involved in using new forms of technology to create knowledge?

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Introduction

Look around. Are you surrounded by ‘technology’? Have you ever been without ‘technology’? At the beginning of
Chapter 2, we asked you to look around and consider the different objects in the world and consider the knowledge
that went into making them. Objects themselves are not knowledge, but without some pre-existing knowing, these
objects could not have been created.
In this chapter we will consider the first of the course’s optional themes and ask about the nature and role of
technology in the construction, management and dissemination of knowledge. But we must first think a bit about
what we think technology is. Rather than racing off to a dictionary, we’ve asked you to uncover some intuitions by
imagining a world without technology. What does the landscape look like? What are people doing in this world?

ACTIVITY
Take a moment to consider with a partner just what a world without technology would look like.
1 What would be missing?
2 hat would have to be added to the world to take the place of technology?
3 How are people living?
4 How are they communicating?
Now narrow your imagining to the question of technology in the context of constructing knowledge:
5 What would it be like for scientists if there was no technology available?
6 Could an artist construct knowledge?
7 Would an expert historian be able to develop the types of historical claims that you’re used to?
8 How much mathematical knowledge would be available if there was no technology?

Learner profile
Risk-takers
How comfortable would you be living without your technology?

TOK trap
What are dictionaries? One answer to this can be found by considering the updates to the Oxford
English Dictionary (OED), the online version of which is updated quarterly. In June 2019, 1400 new
words were added, including bae and yeesh (‘Updates to the OED’). Why does it need ‘updating’? The
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OED, like any dictionary, captures the meaning of a term, rather than officially creating the definition. In
other words, the words are already commonly in use before a dictionary then adds them. In this case,
people were already using the term ‘bae’, the people at the OED noticed this, and once the term was
common enough, they added it to the dictionary. Furthermore, sometimes the usage of terms will shift
and change over time. Consider the term ‘wicked’. It used to describe something morally bad or evil, but
has now, in American English, also come to mean something excellent, or as an ‘adverb intensifier’
synonymous with ‘extremely’.
What this means is that a ‘dictionary definition’ should never be considered the final form of a set-in-
stone definition, especially in TOK, where the whole point of the course is to critically reflect on the
sources of our knowledge. By appealing to a dictionary to say that ‘this is the only way to use this term’,
you are limiting how knowledge works. Dictionaries only indicate common usage of a term, so by limiting
your use of a word only to that means you might miss out on a term’s nuances.
It is almost always a bad idea to use dictionary definitions in your TOK work unless you are going to
challenge the definition. You might do this by suggesting that a definition is limiting (thereby exploring
the limitations of language, or the role of culture in shaping our knowledge). Of course, you can use a
dictionary in your thinking (sometimes you have to if you don’t know what a word means), but these
definitions do not always need to be part of your final product (such as in-class essays or presentations,
the Essay on a prescribed title or TOK exhibition). Including a definition in an essay is a choice, not an
obligation.
In the case of the ‘definition’ of technology, for example, rather than running to a dictionary we have
modelled a way of coming to an understanding of the term, rather than simply swallowing a definition
imposed by someone else. This shows critical thinking.

In the world without technology you imagined, computers and smartphones were probably missing. Imagine a world
where mothers and fathers are no longer badgering young people to ‘get off your computer!’ or teachers are not
confiscating your phones until the end of the day. Cars, airplanes and household appliances were probably missing
too. Surely anything requiring electricity was absent. What about houses – were there any types of shelter in your
world? Are people reading books in your technologically empty world? Are people only writing letters to one
another? What are they using to write?
Our first assumptions of just what ‘technology’ refers to might be limited to thinking about machines and computers
and smartphones, or things that eat up electricity. However, we might also consider technology more broadly,
especially when we think of it in relation to Theory of Knowledge. It is obvious to say that the vast majority of
objects we interact with every day are not ‘natural’ objects, in the sense that mother nature didn’t create them. Rocks
and bushes are ‘natural’ in this sense, but roads and ball-point pens are not. This is an obvious point but one which
might help us unpack what we mean by ‘technology’. Did the technology-less world you imagined include roads?
Books? Pencils? These are certainly not ‘natural’, but would we want to include them under the category of
‘technology’ and what effect would this have on our thinking about knowledge more generally?
Think back to the introduction to Chapter 2 when we considered the types of objects for which some sort of
knowledge was required to exist. Clearly this applies to computers and smartphones, but it could also apply to things
like microscopes. Think of the technological know-how required to create the lenses, or the slide plates, or the
housing of the lenses or the stand. Even the simplest magnifying glass requires an impressive amount of skill and
ability to construct. Microscopes, then, should be thought of as a form of technology. It is an object which a lot of
technological know-how was required to create. We’d happily accept a scanning electron microscope as technology
(not least because we have to plug it in to get it to work!), but perhaps the simple microscope you used in your
middle school science class isn’t as obviously considered ‘technology’. It should be.
Beyond just the knowledge required to create the object, however, think of how the purpose of an object fits within
a purpose or goal. We might consider a house or a shelter to be a sort of tool by which we live more safe and healthy
lives. It took a lot of technological know-how to build it, but the reasons we built it are relevant to its status as
technology: it serves a wider purpose and its creation was an attempt to meet that purpose. If someone needs to be
protected from the elements and have a safe place to sleep and store their stuff, they will build this object (the house
or shelter) to perform that function.

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DEEPER THINKING
Epistêmê, phrónēsis and technê
Aristotle (384–322 BC) distinguished between three types of knowledge, epistêmê, phrónēsis and technê.
• Epistêmê relates to the unchanging universal claims that have nothing to do with context. This
knowledge would include claims like mathematical principles. Our modern term ‘epistemology’,
referring to the philosophical discipline focused on analysing the conceptual and metaphysical nature
of knowledge, comes from this term.
• Phrónēsis refers to ‘practical wisdom’. This type of knowledge is involved in deliberations related to
how we should enact our ethical principles, or how we should behave. Wondering about what makes
an action right or wrong, or the right way to do things would be examples. Aristotle felt that we could
get increasingly better at this sort of thinking with practice and education, and this idea was central to
his ethical theory, which is now called ‘virtue ethics’.
• Technê, the word from which we get the term ‘technology’, refers to the knowledge that goes along
with crafting something or making an object with some purpose in mind. This form of knowing is highly
practical and context dependent.
The difference between the philosophical study of knowledge (‘epistemology’) and the IB Theory of
Knowledge course might be unpacked by the differences here between epistêmê on the one hand and
both phrónēsis and technê on the other. The IB’s TOK course is an examination of the practical issues
faced by experts when they construct knowledge. A genuine TOK analysis of ‘what is knowledge’ would
be incomplete were we only to sit around and scratch our chins and wonder, ‘No, really, what does
knowledge mean?’ The TOK student must conduct something like an empirical investigation into the
ways that experts actually do construct knowledge, rather than merely an analysis of the concepts
involved. An analysis of those concepts is certainly crucial, and we do this in TOK when we ask
questions about the scope of an AOK. For instance, we need to have a view of exactly what ‘science’ is
meant to be or meant to do, before we can work out techniques which will help us achieve that kind of

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knowledge. We might also find that by examining carefully how experts construct knowledge, we are
able to understand just what the nature of the subject is.

Thinking of technology as being linked to the practical actions involved in making knowledge, then,
allows us to think of experts in the AOKs as a bit like craftspeople. As ‘experts’ in these communities of
knowers, they have the required understanding of the nature of the subject and an understanding of
what truths have been developed in the subject, the rules related to the construction of further
knowledge, and the practical knowledge required to apply those rules in the actual construction of further
knowledge. Students, then, are like apprentices into these communities who are learning the craft of
knowledge construction (an idea we discussed briefly in Chapter 2). This is necessary, as part of this
process is the ability to understand and use the relevant technology in that field.

With this new sense of technology as being, roughly, a tool created for a purpose, we might now narrow down this
purpose to knowledge-related activities. These activities might include the creation, preservation, dissemination and
communication of knowledge. With this in mind, we might now consider things like books, pens, paper, email,
social media, online databases, telescopes, the Large Hadron Collider or the internet as a whole, as being types of
technology which we can discuss under the broad heading of ‘knowledge and technology’.
This chapter, then, is an attempt to do just this: explore the impact of technology on knowledge and reflect on that
impact. The role it has played in the development of knowledge cannot be understated: one could argue that
technology has created the conditions under which any knowledge could be developed or constructed. However,
there have always been deep questions about the impact of the technological tools we use to construct knowledge:
• Does the use of books to record knowledge unfairly limit knowledge only to those who know how to read?
• Does the fact that the technologies used in science have a pre-set expectation about the sort of information to be
measured mean that other information is lost or ignored or not recognized?
More recently, we have found that access to information (particularly in the construction of our political beliefs) has
grown exponentially, but with unfettered access to knowledge provided by the internet we lose the ability to filter
out false claims. Anyone now has the ability to disseminate their own understanding of the world. We are
bombarded with claims and might struggle to weed out those not worth listening to. At the same time, however, we
find ourselves at the whim of the people who manage the internet platforms; they have a lot of control over the
content we see, or the content that is recommended to us.

IA prompt
23 How important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge?

One thing we will not be doing much of in this chapter is talking about technology in terms of knowledge about
technology. Rather we’ll always be focused on how technology affects how we develop knowledge, store
knowledge, provide knowledge and how we (as apprentices or students) inherit knowledge from experts.

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What is the difference between ‘data’, ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’?

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Scope

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Data, information and knowledge
We use terms like data, information and knowledge pretty freely, but in the academic discipline of information
technology these are fundamental concepts, in the way that ‘cause and effect’ might be a fundamental concept in the
sciences, or ‘number’ or ‘proof’ might be fundamental concepts in mathematics. Defining and differentiating
between these terms can help us understand the role that technology plays in creating knowledge.
One method of breaking down the concepts of data, information and knowledge is to explore their relationships.
Commonly, this relationship is thought to be hierarchical (meaning that the level of complexity goes up as you move
through the concepts) and a relationship of dependence (meaning that each upper level depends on the lower levels
to exist). In this model, therefore, knowledge depends on information and information depends on data. Data is
thought to be basic, in the sense that it is like a foundation – there is nothing below it and there are no other facts
from which it is derived. The diagram on the right illustrates this idea.
So, what exactly do we mean by data, information and knowledge?

Data
Data refers to basic observations and facts in the world, or at least a representation of those facts. In neurobiology,
for example, we might count the number of synapses in a section of the brain and those numbers might become the
data representing the synapses. By counting and finding a number, we have represented a fact in the world. We
might then gather more data by counting the number of synapses in the brains of people of different ages. All those
numbers representing the synapses are the data.

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Information
Information is the processed data. The data is not about anything other than the facts it represents. For data to be
informative, some process must be applied to it and information is the result of that processing. That process might
be instigated by asking questions and then searching the data for answers. In the case of the number of synapses of
various samples of brains we might ask about which kinds of brains have more or fewer synapses. After processing
or interpreting or simply just looking up the data we would find that there are more synapses in young people than in
older people (Blakemore). Information can be ‘read off’ the data, but it might also be inferred from the data,
especially when seeking information about averages. The average number of synapses, of course, cannot be
observed in a brain, because an average is a mathematical statistic which requires statistical processing. The key idea
here is that ‘information’ is about the world, it is a description of the world.

ACTIVITY

After you have completed this activity you can check your answers by using the QR code. State whether
each of the examples below represents data or information. Give reasons, using your understanding of
the differences between data and information.

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Knowledge
Knowledge refers to that information which has been applied or can be applied or put into action in the future. It
requires a forward glance and serves as the basis for further processing or action. I might, for example, be informed
that there are more synapses in a young person’s brain than an adult’s brain. Knowing that means that I have
accepted the information as part of a wider framework of understanding (in this case, a framework of understanding
the human brain) and I might now use that information to develop further questions or to act on it (by perhaps
developing a research project to explore what happens to all those synapses as a human being gets older). That
knowledge is about fitting information into a wider framework of understanding suggests that it is prone to all sorts
of influence by other elements of the framework.
We might consider the climate crisis as a way of exploring these connections and relationships. Scientists continue
to gather quantifiable data regarding all sorts of related phenomena, including the size of glaciers and the rate at
which they melt, air temperatures from around the world, the temperature of the ocean and the number of severe
storms in a year. By asking questions of this data and analysing it to produce a response, information is produced.
How does the temperature data compare year by year? How does the average temperature relate to the size of the
northern ice caps? This might be information about the rates of glacial melting (they are increasing), or averages of
ocean or air temperatures over the years (also increasing), or the cause-and-effect relationships between, for
instance, the warmer temperatures of the ocean and the number of fish, and the effect of this on animals in the Arctic
(warmer waters ultimately means less prey for polar bears).
This information is considered knowledge when it becomes significant or meaningful to individuals or communities
of knowers. Knowledge is held by people and is a feature of people, whereas information is a feature of the world.
Knowledge in this view might be defined as information that is organized and processed in order to promote
understanding of a particular phenomenon. The focus is on information being used to solve problems and questions,
requiring human processing, justification, skill and expertise (Allen).
‘The polar ice caps are melting’ is information when understood as a simple fact of the world. ‘The polar ice caps
are melting’ is knowledge when it is accepted as truth by individuals or communities of knowers by being fitted into
a wider system of values and meaning and when it then implies action. For example, one might accept this
information as true but then think about it in terms of the natural cycles of polar ice caps growing and shrinking over
time. The same information, however, might instead find itself being used to highlight the effects of human action
(industrialization and pollution) on the environment. Both frameworks might accept the data and information but
treat the knowing of that information in fundamentally different ways. The knowledge about the climate crisis might
find itself in a community of expert climate scientists, in which case the expert consensus would link that knowledge
to other data, information and knowledge about the detrimental effects of human waste and pollution on the
environment. The information about the climate, however, might find itself in other communities of knowers where
the focus and expertise is not scientific. A political community might link this information to other knowledge about
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maintaining political power or loyalty to political donors, which would override any loyalty to scientific knowledge.

The challenge, then, is to remain reflective when applying various frameworks. Which framework is better: one
which considers the information about the ice caps as part of a natural process, or one which sees it as a
consequence of human behaviour? Once you start asking these questions (about which frameworks are more
reliable), then you start doing the genuinely important work in Theory of Knowledge. Considering the different
frameworks and the different communities of knowers which use them can help enrich a discussion or debate
beyond simply disagreeing and argument.

ACTIVITY

Use the QR code to visit the ‘Vital Signs’ website at NASA. Review the following sub-pages:
• Evidence
• Causes
• Effects
• Scientific Consensus
• Vital Signs.
See if you can apply this discussion of data, information and knowledge by identifying discrete elements
where each is being presented. Can you explain what makes it ‘data’ as opposed to ‘information’? What
is it about the presentation that suggests that ‘knowledge’ is being presented as opposed to
‘information’?

ACTIVITY
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1 Copy the table below and complete it to indicate what you think would constitute data, information and
knowledge in the areas of knowledge shown.

2 Review the cognitive tools we looked at in Chapter 2 (pages 69–71). What effect do they have on the
collection of data, the processing of information and the construction of knowledge?
3 In what ways might the conventions and fundamental values of different communities of knowers (not
just AOK communities, but also religious, political or other social communities) influence the gathering
and collection of data, the processing of information and the construction of knowledge?

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Artificial intelligence
This discussion of the traditional distinctions between data, information and knowledge posits technology as
something which allows us to gather raw data, which subsequently requires human involvement to be processed into
knowledge. But developments in artificial intelligence prompt us to ask whether machines can themselves possess,
and be responsible for the creation of, knowledge.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term we hear on a regular basis these days, and it is used to talk about everything
from the killer robots of the Terminator films, to the computers analysing the massive amounts of ‘big data’
collected on us every day, to the systems which power our cars and tell us where to go. In what ways can it be said
that these technologies are ‘intelligent’? (The ‘artificial’ adjective is less problematic: it generally just signifies a
system of knowing that is not human.)

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
In what sense, if any, can a machine be said to know something?

AI refers to systems, generally computerized systems, which are designed to solve problems by taking data in,
processing it and providing an outcome for its users. Examples include:
• speech and face recognition
• analysing large amounts of data and finding patterns
• monitoring external systems (like road conditions)
• adjusting how a machine responds to changing conditions (by altering how much power is transferred to the
wheels of a car, for example)
• learning (often called ‘machine learning’).
The machines perform these functions through the use of clever programming and complex algorithms. These
systems all solve problems: we pose a question, build a machine to take in information from the world, process that
data and deliver a response. Many of these systems certainly appear intelligent, especially given that they might do
things more quickly and with fewer errors than a human could ever do.
There are different types of artificial intelligence, however. Weak AI is a form of computer functioning which
largely relies on the programming it has been provided with. Any output by a weak AI system is relatively
predictable and explainable by the rules put into it. The types of intelligence in the list above are largely thought of
as weak AI because the possible range of results of the analyses will already have been coded into the machines.
However, researchers are working on developing systems whose programming will enable them to deliver results
which we might not be able to predict, even if we know all the programming put into them. This is called strong AI,
because it is much more like the type of intelligence associated with human beings. If you ask your friend to pick up
a drink from the store, you can largely predict what your friend will say (‘yes’, hopefully), but your friend might do
any number of things that are relevant but unpredictable. They might shrug. They might nod or shake their head.
They might say nothing or sigh dejectedly. They are certainly processing your request and behaving in a relevant
way, but you couldn’t have predicted their behaviour. So far, computers have yet to achieve what we would call
‘strong AI’: while computers might surprise us in all sorts of ways (consider the surprising capabilities of Google
Translate. More on this later), we wouldn’t say that they are doing things we couldn’t have predicted from their
programming. Some researchers suggest that genuine strong AI is still a few decades away, but the possibility of it
arriving within your lifetime is real (Frankenfield). Strong AI would show intellectual capabilities that would appear
to be so like our own that we might feel compelled to say that the system has genuine knowledge.

Learner profile
Thinkers
Are we the only thinkers?

Can computers know things?

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The question of whether computers can know things raises some interesting questions about the nature of
knowledge: just what is it? And what does it mean to have it? Does your chess smartphone app ‘know’ how to play
chess? Well, it depends largely on how you want to define knowledge and what you think that ‘knowledge’ is meant
to achieve.
Earlier we explored the differences between epistêmê and technê and suggested that one way these types of knowing
relate to one another is that the epistêmê provides the theoretical basis upon which you might then develop the
technê.

What does it mean, therefore, to know how to play chess? One response would be to say that you know how to play
chess if you know all the rules of the game and are able to understand the game. This is like the epistêmê discussed
earlier. Your knowledge of how to play chess then is the product of a set of other beliefs that you have – beliefs
about the individual pieces, about the board, about how each piece can move. You might, for instance, have heard of
the game without ever having seen a chess board and just learned about it by reading a rule book and seeing some
diagrams with various moves presented. It seems odd though to say that we can know how to play the game without
ever really having played it.
Suppose it wasn’t chess, but instead rugby. We could, presumably, learn all the rules and facts about rugby, but
we’d never suggest we knew how to play unless we had actually given it a try. Rugby is a terrifically physical sport
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and without actually playing it, there are elements of the game we would miss; without that experience we wouldn’t
really say we knew how to play rugby. This is something we discussed in the last chapter when exploring the
differences between knowing that and knowing how. The opposite is not the case: it seems that being able to play a
game is enough to say that you do have knowledge.
Another response to this question about whether knowledge is something a computer can ‘have’, then, would be to
suggest that knowing how to play chess is being able to play chess. If we want to confirm that someone knows how
to play chess, rather than asking about which beliefs about chess they have, we might instead ask whether they are
able to play it. We will then engage with them across a chess board. It will be obvious to us whether they are able to
play, even though we have no direct experience of their beliefs about or understanding of chess. In other words, we
don’t have any direct access to the way in which they play (their strategy, or how they make decisions about how
they move their pieces), all we can observe is them moving their pieces. If they are moving them in the right way
with some minimal degree of competency, then we’d say they know how to play. If they beat us, then we’d say they
know how to play better than us!
If you were to watch someone trying to play rugby (even though they might have all the relevant beliefs about
rugby), you’d know pretty quickly if they don’t, in fact, know how to play. They might be wandering all over the
pitch trying to catch up and not really knowing how to follow what is a very quick game.
So, if we only need to see someone play chess in order to feel satisfied that they know how to play chess, what about
the chess program on our computer or on our phone? If we lose to it and we know how to play chess, then it seems
fair to suggest, or at least consider that the computer ‘knows’ how to play chess. It may be that we’re pretty easy to
beat in chess, but what if a computer defeats a Grandmaster of chess? This is precisely what happened in the spring
of 1997, when reigning world champion Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players of all time, was defeated
by the ‘Deep Blue’ supercomputer built by IBM (Levy). This would seem, then, to be a case of computers having
knowledge, or at least the knowledge of how to play chess well.
One worry might be that the way in which we know how to play chess is crucial here. For human beings our ability
(know-how) to play chess requires a whole bunch of beliefs. We know that those beliefs are present in us, because in
our own case we can experience that we have those beliefs. We also experience the relationship between that
background knowledge and our abilities; those beliefs about chess are the cause of our ability to play chess. In the
computer’s case, however, we might not want to say that it can have beliefs. We would say instead that ‘it was
programmed’ and therefore doesn’t really understand its actions or that the actions were fixed because of its
programming.

This is a subtle shift of the question, however. Now, instead of wondering about whether or not being able to do
something amounts to ‘having a form of knowledge’, the question has become about whether computers have
knowledge in the same way that humans do. It is clear that they don’t, not least because computers are not human.
We are not wondering if computers can ‘know in the same way humans know’. We’re asking a more challenging
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question about what ‘knowing’ amounts to and suggesting that having the technical ability to do something is a
reasonable starting point.

IA prompt
1 What counts as knowledge?

Consider the types of questions that have appeared on multiple choice tests you may have taken in school. In many
of these cases it was simply a matter of recall. You might have been asked a question like ‘What is the capital of
France?’ or ‘What is the chemical formula for ammonia?’ The teachers were probably perfectly happy to say that
you had knowledge of the answer provided you could tick the boxes for ‘Paris’ or ‘NH3’ and not ‘Lyon’ or ‘NH2’.
Teaching, if effective, had programmed you to reply in the right way.
Now imagine that you program a computer to respond properly when asked about the world’s capital cities or a
bunch of chemical formulas. If done properly, then wouldn’t this be the same? Who cares how you recalled them?
You and the computer both answered correctly. In fact, a computer system named Aristo recently took an 8th
grade/Year 9 science exam and passed with 90 per cent! It also achieved 80 per cent on a 12th grade /Year 13 exam.
Questions were multiple choice, so some were memory recall questions, but there were also more challenging
questions requiring logic, such as the following:
Which change would most likely cause a decrease in the number of squirrels living in an area?
(1) a decrease in the number of predators
(2) a decrease in competition between the squirrels
(3) an increase in available food
(4) an increase in the number of forest fires (Metz)
If your science teacher is satisfied with your knowledge when we select (4), then wouldn’t they also be satisfied
with the computer’s ‘knowledge’ if it selected it too?
Another point related to whether or not computers can have knowledge has to do with claims like ‘computers cannot
come up with new knowledge’. Critics might suggest that while computers might ‘know’ the chemical formula of
ammonia, they certainly couldn’t construct or design a scientific experiment. This might be true, but the principle
here seems to be that computers can only know if they can know to the same extent as an expert, or be able to do
what an expert can do. You might have very little knowledge of how to design or conduct higher level physics
experiments, but it would seem unfair to say that you therefore cannot have knowledge in physics. You clearly do
have some knowledge of physics, but you certainly don’t have all the knowledge that experts in the field do. So why
would we expect a computer to have all the knowledge in a field before we grant that it can have knowledge?

Can computers learn things?

Another reason often given for arguing that computers cannot have knowledge is that they cannot learn new things.
But what must this learning look like? Perhaps someone just tells us how to do things. Much of school-level
mathematics involves teachers telling students how (ie, programming them) to solve certain equations in certain
ways. Learning how to ‘complete the square’ is just learning how to do it. If we develop a program and ‘teach’ it to
a computer, how different is that from us learning to complete the square? Do we know how to ‘complete the
square’? We can show we do know how, by doing it, regardless of how we learned it. But the calculator that you use
for IB Mathematics can do it too. Does it ‘know how’? Input the variables and see if it does.
Moreover, as the two following examples show, machines are becoming more and more capable of learning
independently of what they have been programmed to do.

CASE STUDY
AlphaGo
In 2016, a computer program called ‘AlphaGo’ beat Lee Sedol, one of the best ‘Go’ players in the world
in a convincing 4–1 match. (Go is a board game that originated more than 3000 years ago and involves
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multiple strategies, making it more complex than chess (DeepMind).)
DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo, went on to develop another program called AlphaGo Zero,
which has also become an expert in Go. However, rather than following specific rules programmed into
it, and without developing strategies based on knowing the final objective of the game or studying
thousands of other games of Go (which is how AlphaGo perfected its abilities), AlphaGo Zero developed
its own strategies through a process called ‘self-play’. In self-play, a program knows only the most basic
rules of a game and does not yet know what is the best strategy for that game. AlphaGo Zero was given
the rules of the game, then played 4.9 million games over three days against itself and developed
strategies and skills surpassing AlphaGo’s abilities (AlphaGo developed its strategies over many months
of evaluating other games played by expert Go players). The next iteration of the program, simply called
Alpha Zero, learned the strategies necessary to beat AlphaGo Zero after only 24 hours of self-play.

The point here is that these programs developed their own strategies. The information programmed into
them was kept to a minimum (just the basic rules of the game) and they then worked out for themselves
what was needed to become experts.

CASE STUDY
Google Translate
In 2016, Google Translate announced an interesting example of what might be called ‘learning’.
Engineers at Google programmed the Translate software to translate between Korean and English and
Japanese and English, using a new process which considers the sentences rather than merely the
words in those sentences. What surprised them, however, was that without being programmed to do so,
the Translate program could manage translations between Korean and Japanese (Coldewey). There is
some debate about what this amounts to, but it nevertheless suggests that, in some cases, programs
are able to develop skills and abilities that are surprising to us (Gedalyah).

What, then, are we to make of this discussion about knowledge and computers? Were you to discuss this in the
context of a class or assessment, you should not treat it as if it were a question about computers. What you want to
ask, as we did at the start of this discussion, is ‘What is knowledge?’ or ‘What is knowing?’ in order to see whether
that can be applied to non-human technological systems. We’ve offered a short argument here to suggest that it is at
least not obvious that knowledge cannot be applied to computers.
One thing we might conclude from this discussion is that it makes sense that computers store information and that
this might legitimately be called a form of knowing. We store all sorts of information in our ‘minds’ or brains about
all sorts of things. We store memories and facts and we can be said to know them, even when we are not thinking
about them. For example, we know what the capital of France is even when we are not thinking about it. One thing
technology provides us, then, is a way of storing information such as this. Dictionaries, encyclopedias and the pages

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of an atlas store information in the form of drawings and words; when we don’t know a fact, we can look it up. The
information is preserved in those books.
It’s a stretch of the term to say that a book ‘knows’ things, however. A booklet with all the rules of chess cannot be
said to know anything about chess even though the information is all there. Computers might be different here, in
that at least computers (like Deep Blue) process information, then apply the information in a way that results in an
outcome.

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Perspectives
For all the advantages offered by new technologies, the positive effects that they have on our lives are often
contingent on a number of social and economic factors, such as nationality, income, gender, race and language. The
emergence of the world wide web in the late twentieth century was heralded as a democratization of knowledge,
providing people around the world with equal access to information and equal opportunities to learn. However,
several decades on, it has become apparent that many of the embedded biases and hierarchies present in wider
society are reflected online. Focusing on the internet, this section addresses a few of the problems that have arisen as
a result of new technologies, and asks us to think about how our individual perspectives affect what technology
allows us to know.

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Access to the internet
A significant issue arising is the question of access to the internet. Do people around the world have equal access to
the internet and does having no or limited access mean that we cannot fully engage with our culture?

ACTIVITY
How do you access the internet? Do you use your smartphone? Your computer at home? The
computers at school?
1 Make a list of all the ‘access points’ that you can take advantage of to access the internet. Copy and
complete the table to identify why each access point is available to you, as well as what might make
that access point unavailable to you.
Ways in which you Why are you able to take What might limit your access
access the internet advantage of that access point? to that access point?
School computers I am enrolled in this school My school might not be able to
afford to buy computers
My family might not be able to
afford to send me to school

2 Review your list and consider all the ways in which the availability of the internet might be limited by
people, institutions or circumstances beyond your control.
3 What effect would this have on your status as a ‘knower’? What communities of knowledge would still
be available to you? What communities of knowers would you lose access to? How would this affect
your ability to construct knowledge?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How might technology exacerbate or mitigate unequal access, and divides in our access, to knowledge?

Hopefully, this activity and the discussion it created will show that not everyone has equal access to the internet.
Access to the internet requires access to sophisticated computers and WiFi/data infrastructure and, given that so
much of the world’s commerce and communication takes place on the internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult
to engage with the world without it.
Access to knowledge has always been a problem. Historically, access to knowledge has been limited to those who
have the wealth necessary to attend school, buy resources and take time away from earning money to devote to
learning. People generally needed to be literate and have the political freedom to participate in the activities around
knowledge construction and dissemination. This sort of access, however, has often been limited to those who had
enough wealth to engage, or were part of the power majority, meaning those in the minority have had less access.
There is no reason to think that the internet isn’t also affected by these issues.
Article 27 of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights says that ‘everyone has the right freely to participate in the
cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits’ (‘Universal
Declaration of Human Rights’). Increasingly, the types of knowledge and knowing offered in culture, arts and
scientific advancement are played out on the internet, and the UN ‘underscores the unique and transformative nature
of the internet not only to enable individuals to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression, but also a
range of other human rights, and to promote the progress of society as a whole’, meaning that all states should
prioritize ‘universal access’ to the internet (LaRue). Some even argue that access to the internet has become a
human right (Edwards).

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CONCEPT CONNECTION
Power
In Chapter 1, we explored the relationship between power and knowledge through two perspectives:
knowledge providing us power over how we live our lives and the power structures that limit or constrain
people’s access to knowledge. Both of these elements are present in this discussion about access to
knowledge. On the one hand, many of us use the internet in such a way that our everyday lives depend
on good internet access (for our learning, communication and work). On the other hand, our access to
the internet is provided by ‘internet providers’, telecommunication companies and governments who
might not have any notion of ‘human rights’ in mind when deciding what access we have to the internet.
This might be thought of as an imbalance of power in relation to knowledge: access to the internet and
the knowledge provided is a tool in the methods through which power-majorities maintain their power.

There are many examples from all over the world of how individuals’ access to the internet is limited. Sometimes it
is through the limitations imposed by companies who charge for access and sometimes it is limited by political
bodies and their attempt to only allow access to certain websites, with censorship of the information provided on
those websites. This highlights how financial and political dynamics affect the dissemination of knowledge, which,
sadly is not new.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do social networks reinforce our existing perspective rather than boost our engagement with diverse
perspectives?

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Is knowledge on the internet reliable?
In addition to the general worry over who has access to the internet, individual knowers have a new burden to
overcome. Prior to the internet, most of the world’s knowledge was transmitted through teaching institutions
(schools and universities) and printed media (books, journals and magazines). Each of these have built-in quality
assurances: schools and universities require their teachers and lecturers to have qualifications and print media
publishers vet the information that they put into their publications. They provide knowers with an assurance that the
material presented is credible to some extent. This does not mean that the systems are without fault, nor does it
mean that the information is always true or reliable, but it does mean that someone is ‘standing behind’ the
knowledge presented.
As we all know, however, the internet is not like this. The ease of access means that nearly anyone can add their
thoughts, ideas or ‘knowledge’ to the repository of knowledge that is the internet. This is a well-known issue with
social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and recent data suggests that, in the US, more people get their ‘news’
from social media sites than from printed newspapers (Shearer). The graph on the right shows how US citizens
consume news.
Given the strict journalistic values around credibility and the complete lack of anything like that in the social media
sphere, this is a major concern. Social media sites have basically one goal: to hold people’s attention for as long as
possible so they will see more advertisements. The credibility or reliability of the content is not part of this dynamic,
and in some countries, like the United States, they don’t have any responsibility to vet information…nor do they (in
the United States anyway) have any responsibility to vet information disseminated on their networks (Wakabayashi).

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The freedom of individuals to post whatever they wish (within existing frameworks of ‘freedom of speech’) means
that we are exposed to content that may or may not be true, leaving individuals to make their own decisions about
whether it is credible or reliable. This sounds like exactly the sort of thing we should want – the ability to make free
and informed decisions for ourselves. However, as we will explain later, the biases and prejudices inherent in face-
to-face society find their way onto the internet and the ways in which social media affects us in non-conscious ways
are numerous. The recent debates over the role of ‘fake news’ in the US elections of 2016 and the UK referendum
on whether the UK should leave the European Union are clear examples of how easily people can be swayed (in
both directions!) by clever, subtle and misleading uses of the dissemination of information on the internet.
YouTube’s recommended video algorithms are an interesting case in point. Initially, YouTube’s ‘next up’ algorithm
ranked videos according to one data point – view counts – so the most popular videos were presented to the viewer
to watch next. However, the algorithm has shifted towards matching us to videos that will interest us in order to
prolong our viewing time (Cooper, Lewis). The more time we spend on YouTube, the more advertisements we will
see and the more money YouTube makes. The effect of this is two-fold: firstly, our ‘knowledge’ base is severely
limited as videos outside our ‘interest’ will not be presented to us. Secondly, content which is watch worthy, rather
than ‘true’, tends to be promoted. The 2016 US presidential election was tainted by accusations across the political
spectrum that people were fed lies and falsehoods or ‘fake news’. Videos promoting all sorts of scandalous and
sensationalist stories about both presidential candidates were being recommended by the algorithms without any
view to the truth of their content. Despite this, people watched, perhaps because the sensationalist nature of the
content and the presentation of that content made them very ‘watchable’ and the more watched they were, the higher
up the ‘recommended’ list they climbed.
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ACTIVITY
Think about how you construct your political beliefs.
1 What are your sources of political knowledge? Do you use mainly print media or online sources?
2 Monitor your internet usage for one day. How often did you click on the ‘next video’ or the
‘recommended’ posts on your social media? Why do you think that video or post has been
recommended to you?

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Bias and technology
In early 2018, Google Translate suddenly found itself being challenged for propagating social stereotypes. One
example was in translating phrases from languages which have gender neutral pronouns into English, which does
not. So, the Turkish ‘o bir muhendis’ was translated as ‘he is an engineer’, while ‘o bir hemsire’ came back as ‘she
is a nurse’. Turns out the search engine Bing was also not immune, translating ‘the table is soft’ into German results
in die Tabelle which is the feminine noun referring to a table of figures, which is not at all the meaning of the
original (Olson).
So why would Bing change the meaning and include a feminine noun? Why would Google have returned ‘she’ for
nurses and ‘he’ for an engineer? One reason is the rules written into how the programming works. The translation
programs are not one-for-one translations, rather they use a process called ‘word embedding’, where they look at
various uses of words and link words together by the words they tend to be associated with. In the real world, words
like ‘nurse’ are usually associated with words designating women, so in processing a translation the algorithm feeds
back the English word ‘she’ in relation to the Turkish word ‘hemsire’ (‘nurse’).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can algorithms be biased?

Perhaps, you say, this is just a reflection of the actual use of the word so is a reasonable translation. However, the
social context in which the word ‘nurse’ became identified as a feminine role is itself the result of deeply embedded
social dynamics which are today considered prejudiced. The problem is more sinister in the case of ‘engineer’.
Women have traditionally found it a challenge to break into a number of professions, like engineering. Developing
algorithms which don’t take these social dynamics into consideration could be seen to propagate unconscious biases
and prejudices. Sexist assumptions are made clear in the example of ‘the table’ being translated as ‘die Tabelle’. The
reason why is because of the word ‘soft’, which has been given a feminine interpretation. The algorithm associates
‘soft’ with women, so finds the feminine noun die Tabelle and uses it, although this destroys the original meaning of
the English phrase.

How does this bias occur? We wouldn’t suggest that the machines themselves are prejudiced or discriminatory; in
fact, one of the reasons why we have hope in technology and computers is so we might become less prejudiced as a
society. The problem, of course, is that the values and biases already in the human population get encoded into the
programs and technology that we create.
Indeed, instances such as these aren’t isolated to the web. The development of photographic film processing by
companies like Kodak, for instance, was historically calibrated towards lighter coloured skin tones, which meant
that special filters and processing was needed when photographing people with darker coloured skin (Lewis 2019).
This underscores how a social bias (valuing lighter skin over darker skin) can be encoded into a piece of technology
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(film-processing).

Assessment advice
When considering what sorts of objects to consider when completing your TOK exhibition, you want to
be thinking about the beliefs and ideas behind the object. The ‘Shirley Card’ might be one example. Here
we see objects which illustrate the way in which social values and prejudices might impact technology
and vice versa.

Kodak, a photographic company in the United States, calibrated their film development process towards
whiter skin tones. Kodak produced a ‘colour guide’ with its film processing machines so technicians
could test whether they had developed the film properly. However, only women with light skin tones were
on the card. This translated into technical difficulties for photographers when trying to photograph people
with darker skin and often required different processing techniques or required the use of coloured filters
on the camera’s lens. It wasn’t until 1996 that the company provided cards showing a more diverse
range of skin tones. Use the QR code on the right to read an article about Kodak’s Shirley Cards.
The non-conscious value embedded in this process was that having darker skin was something outside
the norm. As society changed, so did the film development process: in 1996 a new version of the colour
testing cards were included with the colour guide, showing a wider diversity of skin tones (Ollinger).

IA prompt
21 What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?

IA prompt
35 In what ways do values affect the production of knowledge?

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Gender bias can also be found in the objects and processes developed by our society – another instance of bias in
‘technology’. From the size of bricks (just about the right size for a grown man’s hand) to the size of the A1
architect’s portfolio (just about the right size to tuck under a grown man’s arm), the objects we’ve created for
ourselves often are really created for the average man. While bricks and portfolios are not life threatening, there are
other technologies that might have a life-threatening bias built into them. The standards for protective clothing,
safety equipment and even police body armour in the EU are designed around men’s shapes and sizes, and
differences in the shapes and sizes of women’s torsos, legs, hips and waists might mean the equipment is inadequate
even at smaller sizes.
Google’s voice recognition is 70 per cent more likely to recognize male voice patterns. Crash tests for cars use crash
test dummies modelled on the average male, meaning that women are 47 per cent more likely to be seriously hurt in
a car crash – the cars simply are not designed to protect drivers with smaller bodily dimensions (Criado-Perez).
Other examples of gender bias in technology include the size and shape of space suits, scientific equipment and
military equipment (Prasad).
Other examples of bias entering into the algorithmic thinking of our computers include Facebook’s software
disallowing certain Native American names, like ‘Dana Lone Hill’ or ‘Lance Browneyes’ because they were thought
to violate Facebook’s ‘real name’ policy (Bloomberg). The algorithms in charge of screening Amazon’s job
applicants were programmed to ‘learn’ from successful resumes over the previous 10 years, in order to automate the
initial screening process for new applicants. New applications had always tended to be from men, a reflection of the
social fact that more men were in the tech industry, especially in the early years. However, the algorithm then
learned to deselect resumes which contained the word ‘women’ (as in ‘President of the Women’s Debate Team’) or
applicants from all-women colleges. Amazon has since abandoned this automation project (Dastin).
So how does bias find its way into various forms of technology? The important thing to remember is that human
beings begin the process. Any new technological development will have been conceived, designed and implemented
by human beings with whatever background beliefs and ideas they have. They may not consciously build their bias
into the new technology, but their background beliefs and unconscious biases may be reflected in those products.

ACTIVITY
1 Carry out some research into the data that different organizations hold about you. Does anything
surprise you? Why is this data so valuable?

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2 If you have a Google account, click on the QR codes to learn more about how to delete the search
and location data that Google holds about you.

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Big data
The advent of the ‘digital age’, where we are able to store a massive amount of data has ushered in a new form of
analysis thought of as ‘big data’. This refers to diverse sets of ever growing ‘raw’ data that we have the ability to
create and store, but which is unanalysable by traditional human processes. It is unanalysable simply because of the
volume of it, the speed at which it grows and the diversity of data points. (It might be helpful to review the
differences between data, information and knowledge.)
For example, every time we visit a website, a wealth of data is collected about our visit, including how much time
we spent on it, how many clicks we made while there and what we clicked on, and the unique internet address we
used to arrive at the site. This data is collected every time anyone visits any website. Internet companies like Google
collect this data and use it to create a digital version of us which they can then pass on to other companies who
might try to sell us things. In 2008, Google was collecting 20 000 TB of data on its users every day. In 2019, US
retailer Walmart was collecting 25 00 TB of data on its customers every hour (Pierce, et al).
The diversity of the data is also important. For instance, a doctor might collect a lot of data about their patient’s
brain, but this will only be ‘a lot of data’. It becomes big data when the information is linked to the patient’s wider
medical records, and data about where they lived and then perhaps the amount of sunlight for that location, and
when the same data is available for many other people. The types of questions we can ask of the ‘big data’ sets then
might include questions like, ‘What is the relationship between the amount of sunshine a patient receives and the
progress of their disease?’ The information provided by the big data, then, is of an entirely different sort than
previously available and could provide new insights and connections never before imagined.
The use of this big data, however, raises difficult questions. In Chapter 10, we will discuss the fact that at the
individual level, human behaviour is difficult to predict, but at the aggregate level (considering large human
populations and developing how people tend to behave) humans are more predictable. Disciplines like economics
and psychology rest on assumptions that people’s behaviour can be predicted to a large degree. But when the
information about how people in a population tend to behave is used to predict an individual’s behaviour, issues
arise.

CASE STUDY
Sentenced by software
In 2013, Eric Loomis was convicted of running away from police and unlawfully driving a car. When
sentencing him, the judge used information derived from a computer program which analysed data about
people like Loomis, including data about age at first arrest, prior arrest history, employment status,
community ties, substance abuse, criminal associates, educational status and residential stability
(Kowalkiewicz). The analysis showed that people like Loomis tended to reoffend, and so the judge gave
Loomis a longer sentence.

ACTIVITY
1 Could the judge be said to know that Loomis would reoffend, given that the data suggested people in
similar positions tended to do so?
2 Couldn’t Loomis have been in the population of people with all the same data points, but who didn’t
reoffend?
3 Was it fair for the knowledge related to others to be applied to him?
4 In what ways does your school conduct testing that compares your individual results with the results of
other students like you? What decisions does your school make based on that comparison?

The use of big data analysis is also used to help colleges and universities make admissions decisions, where they use
information about an applicant’s internet use, email open rates and social media engagement. Again, these
institutions develop a personal profile of an individual then compare that profile to the data about people with
similar profiles, to see what those students did (for instance, did they accept the place the university offered? Did
they stay enrolled and get their degree? Did they do well?) and then decide whether to accept them (Legatt).
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KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is big data creating a new cognitive paradigm?

Because so much of our life involves engaging with technology, we can hardly do anything without creating more
data. Even wandering around with a smartphone can create data about where that phone has been. The more big data
collected on people like us, the more others might be able to ‘know’ what we are like and what we are likely to do in
the future. Is it possible that information about us gathered from big data is more reliable than what we ourselves say
about ourselves?
The advent of ‘big data’ and the power it offers provides companies and whoever can access the data to analyse it
with an entirely new viewpoint or perspective in the world. The information and correlations being uncovered by
‘crunching the data’ will undoubtedly affect us more and more as increasing amounts of data about us, and everyone
around us, is collected and used to provide predictions about how we behave.
The internet is a hugely beneficial tool in modern knowledge; we are able to both publish our own knowledge and
are able to find the world’s knowledge in a second. We can directly engage with the ideas from anyone around the
world and push our own knowledge to everyone on the planet. No longer do we have to rely on experts to
disseminate their knowledge through universities or print publications, where our access was filtered and controlled.
This democratizing effect on knowledge (creating a space where everyone, in theory, has direct access to
knowledge), has been as revolutionizing an effect on what and how we know in the modern world as Gutenberg’s
printing press was in the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment.
However, there are major tensions when considering just how free our access to this knowledge actually is. On the
one hand, our ability to get to the knowledge is massively fixed on a very low number of access points. Since 2010,
Google has enjoyed a 90 per cent market share for search engines and 63 per cent of the sites on Google are from the
USA (Gordon). While not every use of the internet starts with Google, just think of the last time you typed an
internet address into the URL bar of your browser; how often do you instead type a couple of keywords into Google,
find your site and then head off into the internet? It is also likely that those sites were heavily influenced by only one
of the world’s cultures: the USA. The algorithms for the search engine of this one company are massively influential
in our internet experience. Furthermore, companies spend much time gaming the system so that their company is
shown at the top of internet searches. These facts alone are good reasons to challenge the idea that the internet is a
step towards anything like free and unfettered access to the world’s knowledge.

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Methods and tools
We might break down the influence of technology on our knowledge into three broad categories: creation, storage
and dissemination.

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Creation of knowledge
One might argue that the construction of knowledge, in nearly every case, requires some element of technology.
From complex technology, like microscopes to study cells, telescopes to study the stars and computers to analyse
data, to less advanced technologies like pens and paper, our ability to construct knowledge is inherently tied to
things we’ve created for the purpose of finding new knowledge about the world.
Since the Enlightenment, the basic premise regarding what makes robust ‘knowledge’ has much to do with
observational evidence, and technology is making a huge impact on human ability to create new and ever-more
powerful observations. In the seventeenth century, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek built on existing knowledge using
magnifying glasses and other lenses to fashion the first recognizable microscope, allowing us to first observe cells
(Cox). A further advancement occurred 350 years later, with the invention of electron microscopes, which enabled
us to observe individual atoms (Cordouan Technologies).
There is a similar story of development to be told about telescopes (like the Hubble Telescope currently orbiting our
planet), X-ray and other internal imaging machines such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and other processes
which provide observations. The common theme is that the technology builds upon itself in a way that means there
are a large number of other elements required for the ‘observations’ to be produced in a way that researchers find
useful. High powered computers, complex laboratory environments and even space technology all contribute to
producing usable data.

ACTIVITY

Use the QR code to research how electron microscopes work. They are fundamentally different from the
optical based microscopes that you’re used to from your science labs.
1 Would you say that the electron microscope provides genuine ‘observations’ of the sort that is
prioritized by the scientific method? (See Chapter 9 to learn more about the scientific method.)
2 What other technologies were needed to develop the electron microscope?
3 Do the environments required for the electron microscope to work (like the specimen being in a
vacuum) change the nature of what is being observed?
4 Do you think that the difference in how traditional microscopes and electron microscopes function

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 lowers the reliability of the science produced by them?
5 Do you think that the limited access to electron microscopes limits the construction of knowledge?
Who gets to use them? Does it matter that they are relatively hard to find and use?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do the tools that we use shape the knowledge that we produce?

DEEPER THINKING
Data and technology
Does it make sense to call what we learn from highly technical machines, used to create new
observations, ‘data’? We differentiated between ‘data’ and ‘information’ earlier, suggesting that
information was a processed form of the data. The output of an electron microscope has been
processed through the use of computers and all sorts of complex technology, translating the input into a
visual representation, so how can this be ‘unprocessed’ data? The many decisions about what and how
to create these machines might suggest that there are other sorts of data that the machines are simply
not calibrated to ‘see’, in which case we are not getting all the data. For example, electron microscopes
use electron beams, so only can capture what the electrons can interact with. We are only getting the
data that it is possible to get with the machine we have created.
Does this influence what you think of the status of these machines as producing useable information
upon which to build knowledge?

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Storage of knowledge
Without the means of preserving knowledge, the only way to store it previously would have been to memorize it and
the only way to disseminate it would have been to tell others. Often societies are called non-literate to signify that
they lacked the knowledge and technology to develop a written language, but this term often implies that a society
lacks knowledge more generally. This is not necessarily the case, however. Many societies, early in their
development, established a rich and powerful oral tradition where knowledge was stored in the stories and practices
of the community, rather than in books. In Islam, the hafiz or hafiza is the term for a man or woman who has
memorized the entire Qur’an (some 80 000 words), a powerful illustration of the role of the oral tradition. A
society’s knowledge would be preserved, so long as these oral traditions were passed on verbally, but they would
also be preserved in the practices and rituals of the society. These forms of storing knowledge are discussed further
in the chapters on Indigenous societies and religion.
The history of technological knowledge storage starts about 20 000 years ago with the very first attempts to store
information as nicks on what is known as the Ishango Bone (Marr). It is thought that the practice of writing was
independently developed in four cultures (Diamond 218). When you think of it, this is a remarkable step and implies
a huge leap in technological know-how. Firstly, the culture has to make the cognitive leap tying verbal sounds
(language) to written symbols, and to suggest that the spoken sounds the chair is blue and the written signs (words
and sentences) ‘the chair is blue’ are related to the fact that there is a blue chair.
Secondly, there has to have been a significant technological leap for these languages to have developed as well;
objects had to be created which would enable us to write. Instruments like the stylus used in the early Mesopotamian
culture of Sumer and the papyrus (the first form of paper) of Egypt were both developed in the fourth millennium
BCE and kick started a revolution in the storage and transmission of knowledge. These new instruments were
crafted for the purpose of knowledge storage and transmission and represent technological advances which
transformed our protection of knowledge and our access to it. No longer did knowledge need memorizing; instead it
could be written down and passed on to others. Interestingly, the first knowledge captured seems to have been
relatively mundane and practical facts about accounts, business interactions and politics. Seemingly, the genuinely
important knowledge of the cultures (religious beliefs, for instance) were still transmitted orally.
In the millennia between then and now, the processes by which we record knowledge have become increasingly
sophisticated, allowing for ever more content to be created and stored. Table 3.1 describes a few of the key moments
in that history (this list is not complete!) (‘The History of Computer Data Storage’, ‘Memory and Storage’).

Table 3.1 Key historical dates in the recording of knowledge

Date Type of knowledge recorded
4th • Cuneiform writing (Sumer) and papyrus (Egypt) developed
millennium
• Scrolls made from animal skins are used instead of paper, where paper is not available
BCE
(particularly in Rome and Israel)
• Wax tablets also used in writing
1st–2nd • Paper is developed in China
century
CE
13th • Paper becomes widespread in Europe
century
• China and Korea develop the first movable type used in printing
15th • Johannes Gutenberg develops the first reliable movable type printing press
century
• Printed and bound books become the norm
1932 • Magnetic drum memory developed with a capacity of about 10 KB
1956 • The IBM Model 350 is developed – the first hard disk drive with about 5 MB capacity. This
would hold about one text file of the Bible (4.5 MB)

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1972 • IBM creates the first portable memory storage technology, the floppy disk. It holds about
80 KB
1980 • The IBM 3380 has the first hard disk with more than 1 GB of storage. It is the size of a
refrigerator and weighs 250 kg. It costs between $80 000 and $140 000 USD. It can hold
about 227 text file copies of the Bible
1997 • Writable compact disks with 700 MB are introduced
2000 • The first USB Flash Drives with 2–4 GB storage introduced
2006 • Amazon introduces cloud-based storage, followed by Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive in
2007 and Google Drive in 2012
2007 • Hitachi introduces the first 1 TB internal hard drive. It is about 14 × 10 × 2 cm big and
weighs less than a kilogram (compared this with the 1980’s IBM 3380!)
• Whereas the IBM Model 350 could just about hold one 4.5 MB text file of the Bible, the
Hitachi 1 TB can hold nearly 2.4 million copies of the Bible
2010 • As much data is now being created every two days, as was created from the beginning of
human civilization to the year 2003 (Marr)
2019 • It is estimated that there are 65 billion web pages indexed by Google and about 1.7 billion
discrete websites

ACTIVITY
1 With all the knowledge, information and ideas that are now stored digitally on computers and on the
internet, does this mean that the overall value of knowledge or information is less?
2 What processes do we have to guarantee that the knowledge that we ‘take in’ is reliable?
3 How effective do you think a class like this Theory of Knowledge course is at helping knowers make
decisions about what they should accept as ‘knowledge’?

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Dissemination of knowledge
Knowledge being stored does of course provide the opportunity for it to be distributed. Here, we will look in detail
at two of the developments listed in Table 3.1, both of which represented great leaps forward in terms of the ease
with which data is disseminated.

Learner profile
Communicators
How has technology changed the way we communicate our knowledge to others?

In the middle of the fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg built on the existing technology of the printing press
(where inked plates – often woodcuts – would be pressed onto paper, transmitting an image or words onto the paper)
to develop a movable type press. Now, rather than an expensive and unchangeable wood cut, printers could use
individual letters over and over again to print any sort of document. Clay movable type had been invented by earlier
Korean printers, but it broke easily during use. Gutenberg’s use of lead type was the industry norm well into the
nineteenth century.
Given more recent advances, we might think that the importance of Gutenberg’s printing press is limited, but its
importance cannot be overstated. After Gutenberg, the actual process of storing an idea, in writing, on a page was
quick and far cheaper and as the number of books grew, so too did the number of ideas and the ‘amount’ of
knowledge. Gutenberg’s invention meant books could more easily be created, thereby storing and transmitting the
knowledge previously stored in handwritten and hugely expensive manuscripts. The proliferation of books available
after Gutenberg saw literacy rates begin to rise (previously the manuscripts were largely only written by and read by
the educated clergy and the extremely wealthy). The knowledge transmitted created the conditions under which the
European Renaissance and the Enlightenment could take hold. These periods saw a huge growth in knowledge and
culture (and not only in Europe), resulting in the modern world we see today.
The invention of the internet during the twentieth century, however, has seen a revolution in knowledge storage and
transmission which outstrips even Gutenberg’s printing press. It was 1965 when the first two computers
communicated through the technology later used in the internet (Zimmerman and Emspak). Within 32 years, only
about 2 per cent of the people on the planet were internet users. That number grew to 22 per cent in the 10 years
after that. During that same 10-year period, the percentage grew from 11 per cent to 62 per cent in developed
countries. In terms of how much data is now stored on the internet, we enter a world of numbers that we can’t really
understand. In 2014, it was estimated that there were 1024 bytes on the internet, which is about a million ‘exabytes’,
where one exabyte is a billion billion bytes (Pappas). As of September 2019, it is estimated that there are 65 billion
web pages indexed by Google (‘The size of the World Wide Web (The Internet)’), which translates into about 1.7
billion discrete websites (‘Total number of Websites’ 2019).

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This data shows the massive success of this technology and only hints at the amount of data that it can collectively
store. One could argue that our collective memory is expanding too. In Chapter 11, we will explore the role
journalists play in the collection and recording of facts and information which can then be processed by later
historians. The internet might also be considered as where we as a culture store our own record for future historians.
All the tweets and posts and blogs and vlogs and podcasts and uploads and downloads represent pretty much
everything we as a species know. Just as writing and books removed the need for us to memorize our culture’s
history in order to see it preserved, perhaps now the internet acts as an external memory source, not just for each of
us as individuals but for us as a culture.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How does technology extend or transform different modes of human cognition and communication?

We say ‘a culture’ here as if we are living in one culture. This could be seen as insensitive to the great variety of the
world’s cultures, but we say one culture here for a reason. The history of civilizations on our planet seems to be a
story about societies and cultures becoming increasingly integrated and interconnected and uniform as they interact
and share information and knowledge. The data about the numbers of internet users suggest that we have entered a

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new phase of global integration. While there might be a huge variety and diversity of ‘communities of knowers’ on
the internet, and our individual experiences of the internet might vary, there nevertheless is one internet, and the
rules and processes for putting information and knowledge onto the internet are necessarily uniform. We do not
simply ‘upload our thoughts’ to the ‘net – we have to access certain technologies to turn our thoughts into electronic
data so that it can be put onto the internet. Companies like the various internet providers and YouTube, Facebook,
Google, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and Netflix are the gatekeepers of the world’s use of the internet, and the decision
makers at these companies represent a vanishingly small percentage of the total users of the internet. Their influence
on the internet and its status as the ‘collective memory’ of the species then might be wildly disproportionate. This
represents a huge amount of social and political power that translates directly into a discussion of the old saying
‘knowledge (and access to it) is power’.
An interesting example of this comes from Wikipedia, the internet’s encyclopedia and an incredibly successful
experiment in the notion of ensuring that our collective knowledge is constructed and preserved. You’re no doubt
well aware of the dangers of using Wikipedia as a primary source, but many consider it an excellent first port of call
on the internet when searching for information. Even here, however, we might find that there is an undemocratic
element when you consider that 35 000 of the original articles have been written and over one third of all the over 5
million pages have been edited by a single individual, Steven Pruitt from Virginia in the USA (CBS News). In 2017,
Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people on the internet and he is currently working with
Wikipedia to overcome the gender imbalance as part of their ‘Women in Red’ campaign (Time).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Does the fact that so few companies manage the vast amount of knowledge on the internet have a
detrimental effect on the quality of our knowledge?
In what ways might our knowledge be unfairly shaped by these companies?

As knowers, then, the technology of the internet provides individuals with the ability to join nearly any sort of
knowledge community they wish. Individuals can even earn university degrees online, thereby giving themselves
access to those knowledge communities traditionally limited to those with a physical university education. Without
leaving your house you can access knowledge about how to play guitar (even how to make a guitar), or how to
organize a protest. You can access facts and knowledge coming from archaeological digs, find data to help you
analyse economic trends and the very latest knowledge about medical advances.

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Ethics
In many cases our developing technologies require an engagement with explicit ethical considerations. Two
questions seem paramount here:
• First, how shall we decide on what ethical values a technology should have? This is not to suggest that the
technology itself has any sort of ethical beliefs, rather we wonder in what ways the technology, its processes, the
way it engages with our world and the ‘decisions’ it makes are manifestations of the ethical beliefs of the creators.
• The second question is a straightforward ethical choice, namely ‘should we be developing certain forms of
technology’?
The second question is one that is rather more general and pushes us to the boundaries between TOK thinking and
ethical deliberation. We will explore the first question first, and then offer a few remarks on the second.

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What ethical principles should our technology follow?
The challenges we’ve already discussed in terms of the bias and prejudice creeping into technology will
undoubtedly influence even the most carefully designed systems. A genuine tension then, in the development of new
technology arises between our own ethical value systems and the technology we develop. It is a truism to say that
‘different people have different ethical values’, but it is not at all clear what ethical values our technology should
have.
Perhaps you might want to claim that our technology shouldn’t have any values written into it. We’ve seen,
however, that the technology we build and the processes we program into it contain the sorts of biases and
prejudices that already exist in our social and political environments. We’ve considered the biases that sneak into the
technology in subtle and non-conscious ways (like body armour not fitting women’s bodies properly or the chemical
processes involved in film developing being calibrated with lighter skin tones in mind). However, the subtlety and
the non-conscious nature of these biases are exactly what makes them so pernicious and damaging. We’ve
suggested that, although the technology itself might be thought to be ‘neutral’, there are values and practices built
into them.
A focus throughout this chapter has been on technologies that demonstrate some sort of ‘thought process’ and some
level of autonomy when it comes to acting in relation to those thoughts. Whether we consider these processes a
reflection of genuine thought or whether we think of these processes as only imitations of human thought, the fact
that the technology will be exhibiting free behaviour in the world raises further questions. If our technology has real-
world effects on people’s lives, then we must consider what sorts of ethical principles or theories we want to use to
govern those effects. If our technology was only involved in translating language, we can adjust for prejudice, but
when our technology is making its own decisions, in other words as they begin to act more autonomously, then we
need to think carefully about what sorts of general rules of behaviour we program into it.
We’ll discuss two distinct categories of autonomous technology. The first actively engages in moral (or immoral)
behaviour as an extension of human action already decided upon. In this category we might include things like
police or military recognition software used in policing or war technology. The second engages in its own behaviour
and must be prepared to act in ways which would be considered ‘moral’ (or immoral) when the situation calls for it.
In this category we’ll include autonomous vehicles.
Let us consider technology in the first camp. Rather than being ‘neutral’, facial recognition programs are actively
out to find people. Police and border patrol officials use computers to visually identify faces and compare them to a
database in order to identify people they are looking for. This behaviour is based on an ethical principle which we
are largely happy to accept, namely the principle that the ‘police have the right to find and detain criminals’. Facial
recognition software is merely an extension of this. However, there are significant differences between flesh-and-
blood police doing their job and computers doing it for them. A real police officer at the border will look at you, see
that you do not match the criminal they is looking for, then forget your face. Computers, though, will never forget
your face; even though you’ve done nothing wrong, you will have just become part of a database somewhere,
perhaps to be used later for some other purpose. This could be seen as a violation of your rights, if not now, then
perhaps in the future when that data is used against you. The technology seems to be harmless at the beginning, but
quickly finds itself in a troublesome ethical domain. Take facial recognition programs, add in the bias and prejudice
that we have seen creeping into the technology and there is genuine cause for concern.

ACTIVITY
1 Research some of the ethical considerations of automated facial recognition software. Try entering
‘ethics of facial recognition’ into your search engine.
2 Try to construct an ethical principle which you might appeal to, first to justify the use of this software,
then an ethical principle which you might appeal to to challenge the use of the software.
3 In cases where there are conflicting ethical beliefs, how do you think we decide which principle should
take priority? What methods can be used to decide what is the better principle?
Note: Take care not to get caught up in a debate about whether the facial recognition software ‘is
ethical’. You could easily argue both sides of this position. The TOK approach is to explore the
construction of the principles used in such a debate and to explore what happens when various

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principles conflict.

Now consider if we were to give machines the ability to identify categories of people rather than specific
individuals. Suppose we programmed machines to engage with enemies in a combat situation, in order to save the
lives of real human soldiers. In this case, we would program our machines (robots) to identify enemy soldiers and
engage them. Here again, the robots are already engaged in a morally difficult situation (war and killing), so they are
enacting ethical principles already accepted by society; in this case, something like ‘this war is just and killing
enemies is ethically justified’. You may be uncomfortable with any ethical principles justifying war, but it has been
a commonly ‘accepted’ practice in history. As mentioned in the activity above, whether war can be justified isn’t our
question in TOK. Instead we wonder about the role of ethical principles in the shaping of our knowledge in the
world of technology.
The scenario of robots being engaged in war, however, is an entirely new facet to the age-old practice of war and
requires careful thought. If visual recognition software is being used to allow the robots to identify and engage freely
(without a soldier telling it what to do, as is the case currently with weaponized drones), then all the problems we’ve
already discussed in terms of bias, prejudice and mistakes come into play. In this case, however, people might die,
and civilians might be mistakenly identified as soldiers and end up being targeted. Civilians are often caught up in
battle, sometimes purposefully killed, but, in a real situation with human soldiers, at least there is a real human being
who can be said to be responsible for the mistake. This helps wade through the resulting ethical consequences.
If a robot makes a mistake, who is responsible? Are the software engineers who weren’t even involved in the war to
be held responsible for mistakes a robot running their software made? Are the civilian manufacturers of the robot,
working in factories and laboratories far from the battlefield to blame? What about the commander of the unit who
wasn’t even on the battlefield and who had no direct connection to the choices the robot made? If responsibility for
our consequences is an important part of the construction of our ethical principles, then the use of autonomous
‘killer robots’ seems to raise profoundly difficult questions.

Now consider a rather less dramatic, but no less troublesome example: autonomous cars. They are already on the
road, though at the time of writing we are yet to see fully autonomous cars in widespread use (generally the
autonomous cars of today have a driver who will step in the minute the car makes a bad choice). We cannot write a
program for every event an autonomous car will encounter in real time, so developers must program these cars with
general principles and routines that the car then employs when situations call for it. For example, the car wouldn’t be
programmed to ‘stop at that red light, and that red light and that red light’ for every red light in the city. Rather, it
would be taught to identify any red light and given the general rule ‘stop at any red light you see’ and then we
would let the car get on with the business of finding red lights. The first is a series of particular rules, the latter is a
general or abstract rule. These general rules are what autonomous cars or other machines that must make ‘decisions’
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are programmed with.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Should we hold people responsible for the applications of technologies they develop/create?

What about the principles the car will employ when faced with a ‘moral’ decision, one that will have significant
consequences for its passengers and others? Suppose, for example, the autonomous car has suffered catastrophic
brake failure and so cannot stop. Suppose now the car is racing towards a busy intersection full of pedestrians. It is
perfectly rational to suppose this sort of thing could occur, so programmers will need to give the car instructions
about what it might do in these situations (especially if there is no ‘safety-driver’ sitting behind the wheel just in
case this happens). Suppose that the car could avoid killing the pedestrians by swerving off the road and into a
barrier, but at the risk of killing the passenger. What if the car simply coasted to a stop, but risked killing the
pedestrians?

ACTIVITY

1 Consider the dilemma above. What would you instruct the car to do in this case? Use the QR code to
read an ‘Introduction to Ethical Theory’ and think about which approach your choice best illustrates.
2 Now consider other ethical dilemmas like the one above, but with different specifics (perhaps there
are more people in the car with the passenger, or perhaps the pedestrians are all parents with their
children). Does the principle you chose in the first instance still seem like the right one to choose
here?
3 What do you think this says about the challenges of developing ethical principles in general? What
challenges for the development of technology do you think this raises?

What this example illustrates is that, like it or not, we cannot leave machines to make these decisions entirely on
their own; they need the general principle programmed into them from the start. But choosing which ethical
principle to give to the machine is not an easy question to answer. How should autonomous cars be programmed to
make decisions in cases where any decision will inevitably lead to the death of others?
In the 1940s, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov offered three laws of robotics which have become something of an
unofficial set of laws governing the programming and development of artificial intelligence (AI). Although Asimov
was a science fiction writer, he wanted to suggest that robots might actually be the sorts of things which wouldn’t
necessarily rise up and kill us all, which was the common impression of robots in the writing of his time. Asimov
suggested the laws as a framework with which we could think of autonomous robots as ‘moral’ beings. His three
laws are:
1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First
Law.
3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws
(Salge).
The rise of automated cars offers an interesting test case for these laws, because the scenario we outlined on the
previous page would conflict with rule 1. The car cannot careen through the pedestrian crossing or ditch into a wall
because of rule 1. If the programmers give the car the instructions to protect the passenger in this case, then rule 2 is
broken.
Recognizing that the growth of autonomy in robotics will lead to the need to give them moral principles to follow,
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the Moral Machine research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is gathering information
about how humans make ethical choices in the hopes that they will then be able to help machines make moral
decisions. The group offers visitors to their website a number of scenarios where an autonomous car is going to
crash but users can make one last-minute decision about the outcome. In the scenarios provided by MIT, for
instance, the imaginary car has suffered sudden brake failure but can take one of two courses of action: does the car
run through the crossing and kill the pedestrians or does the car swerve to avoid them but then kill the driver in the
resulting crash? Do you program the car to always act in a way that minimizes suffering (consequentialism)? Do you
tell the car to protect the driver in all cases (deontology)? Does your thinking change if you consider yourself as one
of the pedestrians? How do you measure the consequences of either action? Are there certain things that the car
should never choose? Use the QR code to read our ‘Introduction to Ethical Theory’ and remind yourself about the
different theories mentioned above.

ACTIVITY

1 Take the MIT Moral Machine quiz using the QR code and see what ethical intuitions you have.
2 What general principles do you think you were using when making the choices you did?
3 Would those general principles be the sorts of things you would want a car to hold?

The ethical dilemmas being considered here are not unique to an autonomous car scenario – they would apply for
any driver, or in any number of ethical situations. What the exercise does emphasize is that it will be necessary to
provide some level of guidance for these cars as they make spur-of-the-moment decisions. Our own moral codes,
then, will be extended into the world of AI. However, the world of autonomous technology raises difficult questions,
largely because they are of an entirely new type of ethical dilemma: beyond knowing what the ‘right’ course of
action would be, we don’t even really know who or what is responsible for that behaviour.

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One response to this whole dilemma of autonomous machines being charged with protecting soldiers by doing the
dangerous work of war themselves or having to make split-second decisions to save some lives at the expense of
others, is to avoid the technology altogether.

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Should we develop certain types of technology?
I have no right to judge the morality of napalm just because I invented it.
Louis Fieser

The question posed by the above heading is an excellent ethical question and one which we could look at from a
variety of perspectives. Did we really need to build a bomb after we learned to split the atom and release massive
amounts of explosive energy? Fritz Haber made a name for himself by inventing processes to synthesize ammonia
from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas, thereby making artificial fertilizer possible, and thereby saving untold numbers
of lives by making food production so much more efficient. But did he really need to then go on to develop
processes to weaponize chlorine gas during the First World War, thereby killing tens of thousands of soldiers? What
about Louis Fieser, who discovered a process to synthesize vitamin K, a blood clotting agent, which helps newborn
babies avoid bleeding to death immediately after birth. Why did he need to go on to work with Dow Chemicals to
produce a better, more effective napalm (the chemical that is used in flame throwers, firebombs and other incendiary
devices)? Fieser didn’t seem to have any ethical concerns about this technology, arguing ‘I have no right to judge
the morality of napalm just because I invented it’ (Neer).
As a question, ‘Should we develop certain types of technology?’ really belongs within the discipline of ethics and
philosophy. The TOK issues here would have to do with how such questions are answered, how the ethical
principles are developed and perhaps the ways in which ethical principles limit the construction of new technologies
or limit the growth of scientific knowledge. In the final analysis, it seems unrealistic to say ‘no’ to a new technology
before it is invented. Perhaps the best we can do is remain reflective in our uses of the new technologies and think
critically about the ethical principles we draw on to guide our use of them.

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Conclusion
A world without technology would really be nothing other than the natural world. Human beings have been called
homo faber (‘man the maker’). The idea seems to be that it is essentially human to make things; through the design,
creation and use of tools we shape the natural world around us into something that better suits our needs. We use
technology in all shapes and sizes, from the humble pencil to the most complex scanning electron microscope. We
even have developed technology to extend our human reach into outer space.
The final story about the effect of technology on homo sapiens (‘wise man’), however has yet to be written. In fact,
that story can never be written, because, whenever new technologies are invented, especially new ‘information
technology’, the effects on how human beings know will need reimagining as well. Initially, we stored our
knowledge in manuscripts and printed books, then we stored it in computers and the internet. We are also now
attempting to create our own human intelligence artificially, opening up the possibility that the world’s newest
knowledge will be created by and be known by the very machines that we created to store it. The way human beings
know has changed since even the invention of the smartphone in the late first decade of the twenty-first century, in
ways that were unimaginable before that, except perhaps only to the writers of science fiction. Where our knowledge
will take us in the future and the ways in which we will know it, remains equally unimaginable from our perspective
today.

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Works cited
Allen, G Donald. 2017. ‘Hierarchy of Knowledge – from Data to Wisdom’. International Journal of Current
Research in Multidisciplinary (IJCRM). Vol 2, number 1.
Blakemore, Sarah-Jayne. 2019. Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain. London. Black Swan.
Bloomberg, Ali Ingersoll. ‘How the Algorithms Running Your Life Are Biased’. The Washington Post. WP
Company. 9 Sep. 2019. Web. 28 Sep. 2019. www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-the-algorithms-running-
your-life-are-biased/2019/09/08/58e515a2-d206-11e9-a620-0a91656d7db6_story.html.
CBS News. ‘Meet the Man behind a Third of What’s on Wikipedia’. CBS News. CBS Interactive. 26 Jan. 2019.
Web. 29 Sep. 2019. www.cbsnews.com/news/meet-the-man-behind-a-third-of-whats-on-wikipedia/.
Coldewey, Devin. ‘Google’s AI Translation Tool Seems to Have Invented Its Own Secret Internal Language’.
TechCrunch. TechCrunch. 23 Nov. 2016. Web. 28 Sep. 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-
translation-tool-seems-to-have-invented-its-own-secret-internal-language/.
Cooper, Paige. ‘How Does the YouTube Algorithm Work? A Guide to Getting More Views’. Hootsuite Social
Media Management. N.p. 3 Jun. 2019. Web. 28 Sep. 2019. https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-the-youtube-
algorithm-works/.
Cordouan Technologies, et al. ‘World’s Most Powerful Microscope’. AZoNano.com. N.p. 1 Jan. 2005. Web. 29 Sep.
2019. www.azonano.com/nanotechnology-video-details.aspx?VidID=354
Cox, Lauren. ‘Who Invented the Microscope?’ LiveScience. 14 Sep. 2013. Web. 29 Sep. 2019.
www.livescience.com/39649-who-invented-the-microscope.html.
Criado-Perez, Caroline. ‘The Deadly Truth about a World Built for Men – from Stab Vests to Car Crashes’. The
Guardian. Guardian News and Media. 23 Feb. 2019. Web. 28 Sep. 2019.
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes.
Dastin, Jeffrey. ‘Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting Tool That Showed Bias against Women’. Reuters. Thomson
Reuters. 10 Oct. 2018. Web. 28 Sep. 2019. www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-
insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G.
DeepMind. ‘AlphaGo. What is Go?’ N.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2019. https://deepmind.com/research/case-
studies/alphago-the-story-so-far.
Diamond, Jared. 1999. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society. New York. WW Norton & Co.
Edwards, Scott. ‘Is Internet Access A Human Right?’ Amnesty International USA. N.p. 10 Jan. 2012. Web. 29 Sep.
2019. www.amnestyusa.org/is-internet-access-a-human-right/.
Frankenfield, Jake. ‘Strong AI’. Investopedia. Investopedia. 28 Sep. 2019. Web. 30 Sep. 2019.
www.investopedia.com/terms/s/strong-ai.asp.
Gordon, Kyle. ‘Topic: Online Search Usage’. www.statista.com. N.p. 1 Aug. 2019. Web. 28 Sep. 2019.
www.statista.com/topics/1710/search-engine-usage/.
Kowalkiewicz, Marek. ‘The Human Checksum’. Medium. QUT Chair in Digital Economy. 29 Jan. 2019. Web. 29
Sep. 2019. https://medium.com/qut-cde/the-human-checksum-c9c918954bad.
LaRue, Frank. ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of
Opinion and Expression’. OHCHR. United Nations. 16 May 2011. Web. 29 Sep. 2019.
www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf.
Legatt, Aviva. ‘15 Ways To Beat Big Data in College Admissions (According To Those Who Make Admissions
Decisions)’. Forbes. Forbes Magazine. 21 Feb. 2019. Web. 29 Sep. 2019.
www.forbes.com/sites/avivalegatt/2019/02/20/15-ways-to-beat-big-data-in-college-admissions-according-to-
those-who-make-admissions-decisions/#1dd18e71477c.
Levy, Steven. ‘What Deep Blue Tells Us About AI in 2017. Wired. Conde Nast. 12 Oct. 2017. Web. 21 Sep. 2019.
www.wired.com/2017/05/what-deep-blue-tells-us-about-ai-in-2017/.
Lewis, Paul. ‘“Fiction Is Outperforming Reality”: How YouTube’s Algorithm Distorts Truth’. The Guardian.
Guardian News and Media. 2 Feb. 2018. Web. 28 Sep. 2019.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth.
Lewis, Sarah. ‘The Racial Bias Built Into Photography’. The New York Times. The New York Times. 25 Apr. 2019.
Web. 28 Sep. 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html.
Marr, Bernard. ‘A Brief History of Big Data Everyone Should Read’. World Economic Forum. N.p. 25 Feb. 2015.
Web. 29 Sep. 2019. www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/a-brief-history-of-big-data-everyone-should-read/.
‘Memory and Storage: Timeline of Computer History’. Computer History Museum. N.p. N.d. Web. 22 Sep. 2019.
www.computerhistory.org/timeline/memory-storage/.

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Metz, Cade. ‘A Breakthrough for AI Technology: Passing an 8th-Grade Science Test’. The New York Times. The
New York Times. 4 Sep. 2019. Web. 29 Sep. 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/technology/artificial-
intelligence-aristo-passed-test.html?
fallback=0&recId=1QZjJa233eSu2O2NRceL6ZmY1tP&locked=0&geoContinent=AS&geoRegion=01&recAlloc=control&ge
discovery-vi-prg&imp_id=420611298&action=click&module=Discovery&pgtype=Homepage.
Neer, Robert M. 2015. Napalm an American Biography. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.
Ollinger, James. ‘Shirley’s: Kodak’s Standard Negatives and Prints’. Shirleys: Kodak Standard Negatives. N.p. N.d.
Web. 28 Sep. 2019. www.jollinger.com/photo/articles/shirley.html.
Olson, Parmy. ‘The Algorithm That Helped Google Translate Become Sexist’. Forbes. Forbes Magazine. 19 Feb.
2018. Web. 28 Sep. 2019. www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/02/15/the-algorithm-that-helped-google-
translate-become-sexist/#4579c5f27daa.
Pappas, Stephanie. ‘How Big Is the Internet, Really?’ LiveScience. 18 Mar. 2016. Web. 22 Sep. 2019.
www.livescience.com/54094-how-big-is-the-internet.html.
Pierce, Joseph, et al. ‘Big Data: Why Should You Care? – Video’. The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. 7
Mar. 2019. Web. 29 Sep. 2019. www.theguardian.com/science/video/2019/mar/07/big-data-why-should-you-
care-video.
Prasad, Ritu. ‘Eight Ways the World Is Not Designed for Women’. BBC News. BBC. 5 Jun. 2019. Web. 29 Sep.
2019. www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47725946.
Salge, Christoph. ‘Asimov’s Laws Won’t Stop Robots from Harming Humans, So We’ve Developed a Better
Solution’. Scientific American. N.p. 11 Jul. 2017. Web. 29 Sep. 2019.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/asimovs-laws-wont-stop-robots-from-harming-humans-so-weve-
developed-a-better-solution/.
Shearer, Elisa. ‘Social Media Outpaces Print Newspapers in the US as a News Source’. Pew Research Center. Pew
Research Center. 10 Dec. 2018. Web. 29 Sep. 2019. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/10/social-media-
outpaces-print-newspapers-in-the-u-s-as-a-news-source/.
TIME. ‘25 Most Influential People on the Internet in 2017’. Time. Time. 26 Jun. 2017. Web. 29 Sep. 2019.
https://time.com/4815217/most-influential-people-internet/.
‘The History of Computer Data Storage, in Pictures’. Pingdom Royal. N.p. 23 Apr. 2019. Web. 22 Sep. 2019.
https://royal.pingdom.com/the-history-of-computer-data-storage-in-pictures/.
‘The Size of the World Wide Web (The Internet)’. WorldWideWebSize.com. N.p. N.d. Web. 22 Sep. 2019.
www.worldwidewebsize.com/.
‘Total Number of Websites’. Total number of Websites – Internet Live Stats. N.p. N.d. Web. 22 Sep. 2019.
www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/.
‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. United Nations. United Nations. N.d. Web. 29 Sep. 2019.
www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.
‘Updates to the OED’. Oxford English Dictionary. N.p. N.d. Web. 21 Sep. 2019. https://public.oed.com/updates/.
Wakabayashi, Daisuke. ‘Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech’. The New York Times.
The New York Times. 6 Aug. 2019. Web. 29 Sep. 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/technology/section-
230-hate-speech.html.
Zimmerman, Kim Anne, and Jesse Emspak. ‘Internet History Timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web’.
LiveScience. 27 Jun. 2017. Web. 22 Sep. 2019. www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html.

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4 Knowledge and Language
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will:
• be able to identify the features that make something a language
• appreciate the difference between language as a thing itself and language as the product of cognitive
processes
• understand the difference between human language and animal communication
• appreciate the close association between language and culture
• understand what we know when we know a language
• understand how we acquire knowledge of a language and how we acquire knowledge of other things
through language
• recognize the differences between ethical and unethical uses of language.

Learner profile
Communicators
How important is language in communicating and sharing knowledge?

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Introduction
ACTIVITY
Read the following paragraph and then answer the questions which follow below.
Poyesera kumvetsetsa mgwirizano pakati pa chidziwitso ndi chinenero, zingakhale zothandiza
kuganizira momwe moyo udzakhalira - kapena-ngati anthu omwe amakhala kapena kupita kwinakwake
kumene chinenero chimene chikulankhulidwacho sichinthu chosamvetsetseka kwa iwo. Ngati mungathe
kuwerenga ndimeyi, ndiye kuti sakukupatsani chitsanzo cha mtundu umene tikuuzani. Ngati
mumalankhula nyanja, chinenero cha Bantu chomwe ndi chilankhulo cha Malawi ndi Zimbabwe, ndiye
kuti simukudziwa kuti ndimeyi ikunena chiyani. Ngati simukutero, ndiye kuti mukuwona kufunikira kwa
ubale pakati pa chinenero ndi chidziwitso. Ngati simukudziwa chinenero chimene chidziwitso
chimafalitsidwa, ndiye kuti simungathe kupeza chidziwitso chimenech
(Translation by Google Translate)
1 What is the main idea of the paragraph?
2 In what countries is Nyanja an officially recognized language?
3 What, according to the paragraph, is the relationship between knowledge and language?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do people from different linguistic or cultural backgrounds live, in some sense, in different worlds?

In Chapter 3, you read about some of the problems that occurred in 2018 when it was noticed that algorithms used to
guide the translation in Google Translate contained some built-in cultural and gender biases. We expect that most
readers of this text will be unable to answer the questions, as they will not speak the language in which the
paragraph containing the answers is written. Did you recognize the language? It is the Nyanja dialect of the Bantu
language Chichewa. If you speak and read Nyanja, or if you know someone who does, what do you make of the
machine-generated translation? Would you say that the machine adequately represented your language, or are there
substantive errors in usage, meaning, or style? We will discuss the problems of translation in detail later in the
chapter.
Here is the paragraph in English:
In trying to understand the relationship between knowledge and language, it might be useful to consider
what life would be – or is – like for people who live or travel somewhere where the language which is
spoken is completely incomprehensible to them. If you can read this paragraph, then it is not providing
you with an example of the kind of experience we are talking about. If you speak Nyanja, an official
language of Malawi and Zimbabwe, then you have no problem knowing what this paragraph says. If you
do not, however, then you are experiencing directly the importance of the relationship between language
and knowledge. If you do not know the language in which the knowledge is transmitted, then you cannot
attain that knowledge.
We began the chapter on language and knowledge with this demonstration because it helps provide an immediate
and striking experience of the importance of language in helping us to gain knowledge.
Quite a large portion of the knowledge that any individual gains is gained through language, either from reading or
from listening. We do make knowledge in other ways – direct observation of events, for example, can provide us
with knowledge about the world around us, but even then, we are likely to process those observations in our
thoughts using words.

ACTIVITY

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Use the QR code to go to a video which shows some events without words. Observe the events and
then answer the questions below.
1 What was happening?
2 Was just seeing and hearing the events sufficient for you to know what was going on? Or did you use
words in your thoughts to help you understand?
3 There were a few words in the title of the video, in the lyrics to the song, and on some of the objects in
the video. Did these words relate to what was happening? Did you need the words to understand what
was happening, or could you have understood just as well without them?
4 In trying to answer these questions, of course, you have to use words. What does that fact suggest to
you about the relationship between words and knowledge?

Probably in doing that activity, you discovered that you could understand what was happening just fine without
words, but that you could not begin to share that knowledge with anyone else without them. If we think a little more
carefully, though, we raise some interesting questions. Probably everything in the video was familiar to you, even
though the objects were not being used for their usual purposes. You probably noticed such items as ping pong balls,
rulers, plastic cups, playing cards, a basketball, chairs, a cup of water, boxes of cereal, books and dominoes, among
others. Try to imagine that you were watching this video without knowing what these objects are and having no
name for any of them. What would that experience be like? Do you think you would understand it as well as you
could when you were able to recognize and name all the objects? If you did not know that all of these objects have
purposes different from what they were used for here (part of the background knowledge that you have associated
with their names), would you have had the same reaction to the cleverness and the effort that went into making this
Rube Goldberg machine? (Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist – an example of his work is shown on the right.)

It might be quite difficult to imagine how you would feel in such a situation, but that question points out one of the
interesting issues related to language and knowledge: the question of whether the language that we know actually
shapes what we can know. This and many other questions will form the basis for our exploration into the nature of
language and knowledge in this chapter.

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Scope

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What is language?
Linguist Charles Hockett, in a Scientific American article called ‘The Origin of Speech’, published in 1960,
described a constellation of features which he proposed as the defining characteristics of language. This list of 13
separate features has had a long-lasting influence in the field of linguistics – the study of language – particularly in
terms of describing what language is. Use the QR code on the right to view an illustration of these features.
Although Hockett listed 13 separate features, we will consider 6 here:
• Semanticity
• Arbitrariness
• Displacement
• Duality
• Productivity
• Traditional transmission

Semanticity

This feature of language refers to the fact that language is made up of units of meaning, or words. In written
language, words are made up of letters, while in spoken language words are made up of sounds. Another feature of
the semanticity of language is that the words – whether written or spoken – have stable meanings (Hockett 6). A cat
is always a cat; it is never a rat or a hat or a bat, regardless of the fact that all of those words have similar sounds and
similar letters. The English word ‘cat’ has stood for the domestic feline that we are used to since its appearance in
Old English around about the year 700 (‘Cat (n)’). We can count on ‘cat’ referring to felines next month, next year
and on into the future as far as we can see.

Arbitrariness
This feature of language refers to the fact that the words do not have any kind of essential connection to the things
that they stand for. A cat is not like the word ‘cat’. It isn’t a short sort of squished object made of three parts. It
doesn’t make a noise like ‘cat’. It isn’t shaped like something that is partly semi-circular, partly triangular and partly
cross-like. Hockett used the examples of the word ‘whale’, which is a pretty small word for a very large animal
contrasted with the word ‘micro-organism’ which is just the opposite – a very large word for a very small creature
(Hockett 6).

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These are all examples of the arbitrariness of language, and the implication of this feature is that language is
symbolic. The words and sounds of language stand for things other than themselves. If language was not arbitrary,
then all languages would be identical. Words would have to be the same because there would be some indivisible
relationship between the word and the thing it stood for. Instead, the word for the animal known in English as ‘cat’
is different in French (chat), Spanish (gato), Russian (кошка – pronounced ‘koshka’), Swahili (paka) and so on.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Can all knowledge be expressed in words or symbols?
Is it possible to think or know without language?

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DEEPER THINKING
Language and ambiguity
One important aspect of the semanticity of words is that words have meaning. That may seem a very
obvious point to make, but one of the common barriers to communication is the failure to say what one
means precisely. People sometimes resort to ambiguities, intentionally or not, and sometimes they just
use words incorrectly. Sentences might be ungrammatical. One very common problem that results in
lack of clarity is the failure to actually state assumptions. It is easy to assume that what you mean will be
clear in context, but very often the context is not enough for your listener or reader. An important part of
your job as a speaker or writer is to ensure that you are clear enough for your audience to understand
what you mean. Consider the examples given in the table below.

Table 4.1 Ambiguous sentences

Unclear Nature of the problem
sentence
That Two pronouns which ought to be followed by explanatory nouns but are not. Contrast with
suggests this sentence: ‘That obstacle suggests that this plan won’t work.’ Better still: ‘Your mother’s
that this objection to our plan suggests that the plan will not work.’ Each of these sentences is more
won’t precise than the previous one, and the more precise the sentence, the less likely it is to be
work. misunderstood.
‘Ahmed ‘Reticent’ is the wrong word in this situation. ‘Reticent’ means that I am a person who
wanted doesn’t speak much, but it is a more general term than ‘reluctant’, in that ‘reticent’
me to describes someone who generally doesn’t like to speak up. We can say, for example, ‘My
explain friend Asha is a reticent person. It is hard to get to know her’. ‘Reluctant’ is what is wanted
myself, here. ‘I was reluctant to repeat the mean statement that I overheard’ is a clear and proper
but I was sentence.
reticent to
repeat the
mean
statement
that I
overhead.’
The car This sentence is ambiguous, because it is ungrammatical. The car did not stop for a soda –
stopped at the car cannot drink a soda. The car didn’t actually stop itself, either. The grammatical
the rest problem is that the subject of the sentence, the car, cannot do the actions assigned to it.
stop for a One way to fix the problem would be to say: ‘We stopped at the rest stop so we could all
soda. get sodas.’ We have to remove ‘the car’ as the subject.
Everything This is a gross overgeneralization. It is never true that ‘everything’ is terrible. Somewhere in
is terrible. the world, someone is laughing and happy, someone is giving a gift to someone else, or
helping someone solve a problem. Some discovery is being made. Someone who was very
ill is now getting better. The word ‘everything’ is just way too general. It would be much
better to say: ‘The family dinner turned out to be a disaster. The dinner was overcooked,
the cat got into the dessert and ruined it, there was a malfunction with the alarm system
and the fire department came and blasted the house with their hoses before they realized
there was no fire. And Great Aunt Matilda showed up and insulted everybody present, one
after the other.’ Obviously, this description of what happened is much longer, but it is much
more precise, and it is more likely to generate genuine sympathy than the generalization is.

Displacement
This feature of language refers to the fact that language allows us to recall, describe and share information about
events, people, objects and ideas which are removed from us in time and space. We can talk about the time that

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Kevin Martin’s rink won the Olympic Gold Medal in Curling in Vancouver, Canada, in 2010, even if we are sitting
in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2020. We can talk about how the word ‘cat’ arose in Old English (as catt) in about
700, even though Old English shifted into Middle English in about 1100 and then modern English arose in about
1500, so none of us have any direct experience with Old English. We can use language to discuss the beginning of
the Raj in India in 1858 and the end of the Raj in 1947 (Kaul), as well as the fact that the Raj was the colonial rule of
India by Britain, and we can talk about these things today, from wherever we are reading and thinking about or
discussing this paragraph. The concept of displacement shows us, in other words, that language allows us to know
about things that we have had no opportunity to experience – and which we can never have any opportunity to
experience any other way.

Duality
The duality of language refers to the fact that a language is made up of a set of sounds or letters which are then
recombined into larger units – words and sentences. In English, for example, the letter ‘q’ doesn’t mean anything by
itself, nor do the letters ‘u’, ‘r’ or ‘k’, but combined with ‘a’, they do, altogether, make up the word ‘quark’, which is
a word that refers to a particular kind of subatomic particle in physics.
In English, there are a very few letters which can, depending on how they are used, be words all by themselves. ‘A’
and ‘I’ can each be used as words in sentences, but they can also be used in other words in which their meaning,
when they stand alone, is completely irrelevant. Compare these two sentences:
I bought a book yesterday at a school book sale.
The book sale generated funds for the primary school.

Productivity
This feature of language is related to the idea of duality. Languages are made up of a relatively small number of
symbols – letters, words or other characters, such as the kanji in Japanese. Despite the small number, however, we
can combine these symbols to create a virtually unlimited number of utterances or sentences (Hockett 6).
‘Productivity’ also describes the fact that you can create a sentence which no one has ever created before, but which
will be perfectly understandable by fluent users of the language. Consider this sentence, for example:
After finding the geocache called ‘The Bard’ in Dallas, Texas, my brother and I were so excited that we
decided that we would take on the challenge of designing a comparable challenge for geocachers in
Virginia, and that we would include, as part of the caching challenge, a specially-built puzzle using a
wood block and some dowels.
Perhaps you need to know a little something about geocaching in order to fully understand that sentence, but it is a
perfectly grammatical sentence which describes a perfectly plausible real-world situation, and the odds that anyone
else has written or said exactly this sentence are extremely small. Productivity also describes the fact that we can
create perfectly good sentences which describe events or people that do not exist in the real world. Here’s an
example:
The Venusian traveller arrived at the intergalactic space station low on fuel and desperately hungry,
hoping like crazy that there would be Ogolunic Stew available for dinner.

ACTIVITY
Try productivity for yourself:
1 Write three sentences which you feel confident have never been written or uttered before. If you
speak more than one language, try it in each language.
2 How difficult was it to do this?
3 Do you think any other speakers of that language or those languages would have any difficulty
understanding your sentences?
4 What does the concept of productivity reveal about the scope of language in terms of its relation to
knowledge?

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The productivity of a language is increased by the fact that often words can mean entirely different things in
different contexts. The word ‘quark’, which we saw on the previous page is the name of a subatomic particle and is
also the name of a soft white cheese related to cottage cheese and which originated in eastern Europe (‘Quark’).
When a word can have different meanings, we know the meaning by how it is used in context. If we were talking
about cheeses from Poland and happened to mention quark, no one would be confused and think that we were
talking about the subatomic particle, and if we were talking about how, in physics, there are particles which are
smaller than atoms, no one would think we were talking about cheese.
A final feature which contributes to the productivity of language is the fact that we can use a word to describe
something that we have never seen before because we recognize the features of the object. Consider all of these
pictures of cats, for example:

We recognize them all as cats, even though they look quite different from each other in some ways. We can also
recognize the following animals as cats, even though they are very different from the cats above:

The word ‘cat’ consists of only three letters, but it can be used to name a huge variety of animals. We would not be
confused about what animal was being referred to because the context would let us know. This capacity of a symbol
to stand for many things also contributes to the productivity of languages.

Traditional transmission
This final feature of language that we are going to discuss refers to the fact that language is passed from one
generation to the next. We are undoubtedly born with some innate capacity to learn language, but the specifics of the
language that we learn are acquired from exposure to the culture around us. Babies born to English-speaking parents
in Australia learn Australian English. Those same babies, however, had they been born to Japanese-speaking parents
in Japan, would have been native speakers of Japanese. Some children are born to bilingual families and so learn to
speak two languages natively. Perhaps you are friends with students whose parents immigrated from another country
and who were born into households where the parents speak one language because they were raised entirely in a
country where another language is spoken. Those children might be native speakers of your country and may speak
their parents’ language only a little or not at all. Language is learned. What language you speak depends on the
language that was transmitted to you by the people around you.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the transmission of knowledge from one person or generation to another depend on language?

A final implication of the fact that language is traditionally transmitted is the fact that it allows us to preserve
knowledge and pass it down from one generation to the next, so that, over time, human understanding of the world
increases. Technological development is a direct result of the fact that language is transmitted rather than inborn. We
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create more and more complicated technologies by building (literally and figuratively) on the knowledge that came
before.
We have been discussing spoken and written language so far, but other familiar forms of language also share these
characteristics: sign language and braille, for example, exhibit all of these features and can be understood, therefore,
as fully developed languages. ‘Body language’, on the other hand, although it is called language, does not have most
of these features. Certainly, we can communicate with our bodies – we are particularly good at conveying emotions
through gestures and facial expressions – but ‘body language’ does not have any of the six features that we named
on page 114.

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Do animals have language?
So far, we have been considering language as a human behaviour, but we can use these same characteristics to
consider whether and to what degree other animals may have language ability.
Scientists have established that Vervet monkeys have three quite distinct alarm calls depending on which predator is
spotted. They make a different sound for a leopard, a martial eagle and a python (Ho). Use the QR code to listen to
the three different alarm calls and see for yourself how different they are.

Equally interesting is the fact that the behaviour of the other monkeys when they hear the calls differs depending on
the alarm that is sent:
The ‘snake’ alarm call would cause the group to stand up and study the ground, while the ‘eagle’ alarm
call would see them dive into bushes or the middle of trees where an aerial predator could not reach them.
The ‘leopard’ alarm call would send individuals scuttling up to the very tops of the trees. (Sayfarth, et al)
These facts about the Vervet monkeys would seem to suggest that they have at least some language – there are
apparently semantical units, specific calls, with fixed meaning, and enough information is conveyed through those
calls to tell the other monkeys what they need to do in response. The sounds also seem to be arbitrary – they don’t
mimic the sounds that leopards or pythons make, for example. Infant monkeys do not make the calls perfectly; they
make mistakes. Juveniles are better, and Vervets seem to master the making of the three different calls over time.
So, the calls are to some degree, apparently, transmitted from generation to generation, rather than being instinctive.
That, however, seems to be the limit of Vervet ‘language’. The sounds are fixed in meaning; the sounds of the
communication system are not dual in nature, and so the ‘language’ is not productive as human languages are.
Vervet monkeys can alert each other to an immediate danger in the here and now, but they cannot ‘discuss’ events
from other times or places. We can say that, although their communication system has some features of language, it
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is not a fully developed language.
The honey bee is another creature who seems to have language of a kind. Scout honey bees are famous for being
able to convey to the bees back in the hive where they can go for rich sources of pollen. There are two types of
dance: the round dance and the waggle dance. The former alerts the other bees to the fact that there is a nectar source
relatively nearby – from 25–100 m away (‘Dance Language of the Honey Bee’). This dance does not offer any
information about direction, and the bees simply fly out of the hive in all directions looking for the nectar source.
The waggle dance, on the other hand, conveys information about distance to a nectar source which is further away.
The bee communicates the direction the other bees need to go by facing a direction during the straight portion of the
waggle dance which indicates the relationship of the nectar source to the Sun. Distance is conveyed by the amount
of time that it takes the dancing bee to complete one circuit of the dance. ‘For example a bee may dance 8–9 circuits
in 15 seconds for a food source 200 meters away, 4–5 circuits for a food source 1000 meters away, and 3 circuits in
15 seconds for a food source 2000 meters away’ (‘Dance Language of the Honey Bee’). You can use the QR code
on the right to watch an example of honey bees doing the waggle dance.

This ‘language’ seems to be in some ways quite sophisticated and also somewhat more flexible than the
communication system of the Vervet monkeys. Like the monkeys, the communicating bee is passing information
along which causes particular behaviours on the part of the receivers. The dance can be seen to be semantic, in that
the shapes the movement takes have particular meanings. The ‘language’ is also to some degree productive, since
there is a wide variety of information that can be conveyed with the few segments of the dance, but the productivity
is limited to how far away and in what direction nectar sources reside.

Honey bee language is not dual in nature, and although it does indicate where something is in a place other than
where the bees are, it is not capable of full displacement, as they cannot ‘discuss’ events removed in time. It is not
known for sure whether the dance behaviour is instinctive or learned (Donnelly), but as honey bees live only six
weeks, there is not a lot of time for this skill to be passed along through traditional transmission with its consequent
need for trial and error and improvement over time. We would say, then, that although the honey bee’s system of
communication is quite sophisticated, it is also limited to one particular – albeit very important – subject, and so
must be seen as a communication system, rather than as a language.

ACTIVITY

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Use the QR code to watch a video about Einstein the talking parrot and then answer the following
questions.
1 Do you think that Einstein speaks English as a language?
2 Which of the six features of language that we’ve investigated does his speech demonstrate?

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Other potential languages
As you go through the TOK course, you will discover that all the different areas of knowledge and each of the
different knowledge-related themes have a vocabulary specific to them. But there are two particular areas of
knowledge which seem to use language differently from the way that various practitioners of history or the natural
sciences, for example, develop a technical language to describe the knowledge in that area: the arts and mathematics.

The arts
Language plays a central role in some art forms, of course: poems and novels, for example, consist of words. In
drama and songs with lyrics, words are only a part of the artwork, but they play a significant central role. In other art
forms, however, words play a minimal role or are absent altogether. Think of paintings and sculptures, which may
involve no language other than a title – and which may even be untitled. Classical music may sometimes involve
words, as with the ‘Ode to Joy’ in the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. That symphony was, in fact,
the first time a major composer included vocal music in a symphony (Bonds 387). More often there are no words at
all in classical music, as with Beethoven’s other eight symphonies. Dance usually relies on movement alone without
words. So for most artworks, it would seem that language does not play a significant role; however, some kinds of
paintings do rely on sets of fixed symbols to convey messages to viewers, and so we might consider whether in
those cases at least, art is, or has, a language.
In the Netherlands, the Vanitas school of still-life painting was popular from about 1550 to about 1650 (The Editors
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). The word ‘Vanitas’ is the Latin word for ‘vanity’, and the paintings focused on
the vanity of life in the face of inevitable death. These paintings relied on a number of fixed symbols that would
have been easily recognized by viewers in the seventeenth century. The painting on page 121, Vanitas Still Life With
Flowers and Skull (1642) by Adriaen van Utrecht, used many of those set symbols.

The skull is an obvious symbol of human death, and, in this painting, it is surrounded by many objects that
symbolize self-indulgence and the greed for material objects. The pearls, the gold chain, the ring and the coins
represent the idea of wealth. The open chronometer (a portable timepiece similar to a modern-day pocket watch)

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ticking away next to the coins and pearls symbolizes the relentless passing of time (‘Vanitas Still Life With Flowers
and Skull’). The flowers, which seem to provide a striking contrast to the skull, are cut flowers. They are dying, and
we can see that in some cases, the flowers have dropped out (such as the rose which is drooping off the edge of the
table) and are already withering (‘Vanitas Still Life With Flowers and Skull’). Other symbols in the painting are the
hourglass in the wooden case at the back of the painting, which, like the gold clock, signifies the passing of time and
the pipe (the long white object on the book) and wine glasses, which symbolize the waste of time in indulging
oneself in idle pleasures (Najarian). The nautilus shell came from what was seen as an exotic sea creature – another
sign of the wealth of its owner. Finally, the book represents human knowledge; the fact that the skull is placed on the
top of the closed book suggests the limit of human knowledge – another sign of the vanity of man in the face of his
inevitable death (Najarian).
In this painting, therefore, we can see some features of language: there are objects which have specific meanings and
they combine to create a message; thus, this system of communication can be seen to have semanticity. The objects
are obviously symbolic, but perhaps we cannot really consider them to be arbitrary. The human skull certainly came
from a dead human, and the dying flowers are actually dying flowers. Money is the form in which wealth is traded
in the world. The timepieces do actually keep time in real time and a book is a repository of human knowledge. The
‘vocabulary’ of this ‘language’ can be used to create a wide range of works of art, but the message in all of the
paintings was essentially the same: he who spends his life in pursuit of wealth and luxury is vain; wealth and luxury
cannot keep you from your inevitable death. So, we cannot really consider that the ‘language’ of this school of art is
productive.
We will explore the arts and the methods of creating and understanding meaning in greater detail in Chapter 12, but
this example serves to introduce the idea of meaning in art and the way that symbols can be used to convey ideas.

Mathematics
Mathematics is another area of knowledge which might be seen as being or having a language. You are probably
familiar with the ‘alphabet’ of mathematics: numbers and a variety of symbols such as +, –, =, ≥ and ∞.
Mathematics can also use letters of the alphabet to stand in for a number which is unknown. Unlike the letters of the
English alphabet, numerals do have meaning in their own right: 3, 8 and 9 all have recognizable meaning. Like the
letters of the English alphabet, however, they can be combined in a virtually limitless number of ways to create new
statements. Here are a few examples:

We can already see, then, that the language of mathematics features many of the characteristics that we examined
earlier: semanticity, arbitrariness, duality, productivity and, certainly, traditional transmission. No one is born
knowing the language of mathematics; it has to be taught and it does allow us to preserve knowledge for future
generations. As you will see in Chapter 8, the fact that new knowledge builds on old knowledge is possibly even
more significant in mathematics than in other areas of knowledge – indeed, it is central to the whole pursuit. We can
also consider that mathematical language is capable of displacement, since mathematics describes features of reality
in general and throughout time. Mathematics, then, unlike the communication systems of Vervets and honey bees,
and in contrast to the symbolic function of elements of Vanitas still-life paintings, can be seen as having a fully-
fledged language.

ACTIVITY
Working with a partner, think about the following question, which is debated among mathematicians:
Does mathematics have a language or is mathematics a language?

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Another way to define language
The characteristics from Hockett’s work define what a language is from the perspective of thinking of language as a
sort of object, a thing in and of itself. In recent years, however, some objections have arisen to Hockett’s system of
classification. One of the reasons for this is that Hockett’s way of looking at language as a thing in and of itself
ignores the very significant fact that language is produced out of a set of cognitive abilities on the part of the users.
The idea, then, that language is integrally connected to the way that human – or other – brains function is another
way to consider what a language is.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Perspective
The effort to determine what we are talking about when we are talking about language reveals two very
important perspectives:
• the perspective that language is a thing whose features we can identify and describe
• the perspective that the object part of language cannot be separated from the minds which produce
and use language.

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Language development as a result of cognitive ability
Sławomir Wacewicz and Przemysław Żywiczyński are Polish linguists working on evolutionary linguistics – the
question of how the capacity for language has evolved in different species over time. They have pointed out that too
strong a focus on the superficial features of language as produced by humans tends to drive thinking about language
evolution as a matter of the development of the physical machinery required to make speech. They propose that we
ought, instead, to be considering the way in which language evolved along with various cognitive abilities – changes
in the physical brain which allowed for different kinds of thinking processes to occur. A few of the mental abilities
that Wacewicz and Żywiczyński identify as being needed for language are:
• the ability to cooperate with non-relatives
• the ability to understand that others have minds and thoughts separate from one’s own mind and thoughts
• the ability to mimic others intentionally
• enhanced memory. (Wacewicz and Żywiczyński)
It is not too hard to understand how these mental abilities relate to language. If we cannot cooperate with others, our
need to communicate is severely limited to those in our immediate families. We might imagine that much of the
complexity of language would not need to arise if we did not need to deal with those outside of our immediate circle
and who have, therefore, much less shared experience. A lot of shared experience means many fewer words needed.
The idea that we need to be able to understand that others have minds before we can communicate with them
through language makes sense because if we don’t understand that, then we have no reason to think that
communication would even be possible. The very essence of communication is to transfer an idea or information
from one mind to another. We learn language by mimicking our parents and others around us, so the cognitive
ability to mimic others – and to do so at will, when we want to learn new language – is necessary to the development
of any individual’s language skills. Enhanced memory is needed in order to be able to store the vocabulary,
grammar and other nuances of language that we need in order to be fluent in that language.
The perspective that language can be considered in terms of the cognitive abilities needed to make language possible
provides a different kind of test for determining why animals who have communication systems do not have
language.
Some other interesting features of language are that once we have developed it, we cannot stop using it
(Szczegielniak). We saw in Chapter 2 that words on a page are really just squiggly lines (that is, they are arbitrary),
but we don’t see them that way – we see words, unless we are looking at words in a foreign language or in a foreign
script, in which case the words become squiggly lines, because we cannot attribute any meaning to them. When it
comes to our own language, however, the attribution of meaning is automatic and uncontrollable. Although we
might not understand everything we read or hear if, for example, we don’t know all the words, we can’t make our
brains stop taking in the words or sounds and trying to process them. Consider this sentence, for instance:
Cytochrome P450 is a heme protein capable of hydroxylating unactivated alkane C-H bonds.

EE links
An exploration into the history of linguistics and how beliefs about language have changed over time as
we have come to know more about the psychology both of humans and of other animals could be the
basis for an interesting extended essay. A possible EE research question might be:
How have changes in understanding about psychology over time influenced our knowledge of what a
language is?

You probably don’t know what that sentence actually means because it has many words which are highly technical
(it is a description of a particular kind of protein that an inorganic chemist might want to know about), but, so long
as you can actually read it, you couldn’t stop your mind trying to make sense of it. You can almost certainly identify
which of those words are nouns and which are verbs or adjectives. You can recognize that it is a grammatical
sentence. Contrast that with the following sentence:
and but cat cat cat, chase fox fox had of on out run. The the the the the the to to tried turned yard,

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Even though all of those words are short and very familiar, you know instantly that you can make no sense out of
that ‘sentence’. You can certainly abandon the effort to make sense out of language that you can immediately tell is
not recognizable as a language you know, but you cannot stop yourself processing language that you do recognize.
The ‘sentence’ above, by the way, has been rearranged from a perfectly good English sentence. Try reading it in its
original form and try deliberately not to understand it:
The cat tried to chase the fox out of the yard, but the fox turned on the cat, and the cat had to run.
If you read it, you understood it. You could not help it.

IA prompt
6 How does the way that we organize or classify knowledge affect what we know?

Spoken language works the same way: spoken language consists of a series of arbitrary sounds. If you don’t speak
the language, you will perceive the sounds as meaningless noise.
Try it: use the QR code to listen to the audio clip in which a man from the San culture in the Kalahari desert is
speaking in the click language of Khoisan. We are betting you cannot understand what the sounds mean. If you
listen to someone speaking in your native language, however, the words automatically take on meaning. You
couldn’t keep them from doing so. Language is wired into your mind in such a way that you do not have conscious
control over whether it is on or off. It is automatic.

Considering language from the perspective of cognitive ability provides us with a more complex understanding of
what we are talking about when we are talking about language – not just the sounds or written symbols, but also the
thinking skills which are part of the system.

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What do we know when we know language?
Perhaps the first thing you think of when you consider what you need to know when learning a language is
vocabulary. Your Group 2 teacher might give you vocabulary lists to memorize, and maybe you have put Post-it®
notes on objects in your house with the names of those objects in the target language to help you learn them.
Vocabulary is unquestionably a very significant part of knowing a language. According to a study of 1 million
participants in 2016, average adult native speakers of English have developed a vocabulary of more than 42 000
words by the time they are 20 (Hays). What is meant by having such a vocabulary, however, is that native speakers
of English will recognize and understand that many words. The study also found that adult speakers learn, on
average, a word a day until middle age, so by the age of 60, that number goes up to about 48 000 words. If we
consider, however, the words that native speakers actually produce themselves when they are speaking, that number
is much lower, around 5000 (Bateup).
Another big study in 2015 showed that learners of a foreign language develop a vocabulary of about 4500 words,
but if they then live abroad, they will increase that vocabulary to about 10 000 words (‘Lexical Facts’).

Some people, of course, develop much bigger vocabularies than others. William Shakespeare, often considered to be
the greatest writer in English, used many more than 5000 words: in all of his plays combined, he used between 25
000 and 30 000 words (Huld), depending on how the person counting determines what constitutes different words.
Shakespeare – or the printers who printed his works – often varied the spelling of words, for example.
One final observation about vocabulary: in general, the bigger the vocabulary you have, the more you can know
(this idea will be explored in more detail later). The reason for this claim is that we tend to learn easy, simple words
first, and then we develop a more sophisticated vocabulary as we grow older and learn more – whether from formal
schooling or from other experience in the real world. We can also define ‘more sophisticated vocabulary’ as
vocabulary which conveys subtle, nuanced meanings. The word ‘implement’, for example, is a more sophisticated
word than ‘use’. They are not interchangeable: to use something just means that that thing is a tool to help someone
achieve a purpose. To implement something, however, means more than just to use it: to implement something is to
put it in place for the first time. We can implement a new programme of employee evaluation, or a new tax code, or
a new curriculum, but we cannot implement a hammer or a book or a potato peeler. It would be correct and clear to
say that we are using a programme of employee evaluation or a curriculum, but the verb ‘use’ does not have the
additional implication that those programmes are new to the organization in which we operate. Other examples of
nuanced knowledge of vocabulary include the difference between ‘imply’ and ‘infer’ and the difference between
‘reluctant’ and ‘reticent’. Many people misuse these words, and, in so doing, they may be miscommunicating their
intentions, because they may be talking to people who do know the correct meanings.

ACTIVITY
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1 Look up the words ‘imply’ and ‘infer’, and ‘reluctant’ and ‘reticent’, and make sure you understand the
differences between the two words in each pair.
2 Write a sentence for each one of the four words and make sure that your sentences include context
which reveals the precise meaning of each term.
3 What do the responses to questions 1 and 2 reveal about the relationship between language and
knowledge?

IA prompt
20 What is the relationship between personal experience and knowledge?

The ability to use vocabulary precisely, and to understand vocabulary precisely, results in more nuanced
understanding. For this reason, in this textbook we have decided to use more sophisticated vocabulary when that
vocabulary conveys important connotations. Because those words may very well be unfamiliar to many readers, we
have provided detailed explanations of what they mean on the pages where the words are used. This will allow you
to understand the writing here better, and it will help you to develop your own vocabulary. (The word ‘connotation’
is defined on page 15.)
Regardless of how many vocabulary words you know, they are, in and of themselves, only a part of what you know
when you know a language. If you are a fluent user of a language, you also know a great deal about how the
grammar works – even if you cannot use all the technical terminology for grammatical structures and functions. You
know, for example, about the following:
• word order (as we demonstrated earlier with the sentence about the cat and the fox)
• verb tenses
• punctuation (if the language is written)
• how tone contributes to meaning (both in spoken and in written language)
• when language is metaphorical or satirical or sarcastic
• how context changes meaning (as we saw with the example of the word ‘quark’ on page 116).
Let’s take a look at just two sentences written in English and see how many things we can identify that demonstrate
what we know when we know English. These are the two opening sentences of Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and
Prejudice:

Learner profile
Thinkers
How does thinking critically about language help us to develop a richer understanding of a literary (or
other) text?

Here is a list of some of the things, other than vocabulary, that a person who truly understands these two sentences
knows about how English works:
• ‘Universally acknowledged’ in the first line refers to people and not to the Universe. The suggestion is that every
human knows what is about to follow in the rest of the sentence.
• To say that something is ‘universally acknowledged’ is hyperbole. There is probably no belief which is held by
every human being.
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• The use of hyperbole in this situation is ironic.
• The use of the verb ‘must be’ here suggests an inevitability to the situation. All men who are single and wealthy,
in other words, want wives. This is not a matter of choice.
• Cultural context: the use of the phrase ‘a good fortune’ suggests an older time period. We would be unlikely to use
that term today to describe a wealthy man – we would say that he is wealthy or that he is rich.
• The full stop (period) at the end of the first sentence signals the end of the sentence.
• The use of ‘however’ at the beginning of the second sentence does not mean ‘but’; rather it is a modifier which
works with the word ‘little’ to suggest that it doesn’t matter if no one knows even a little bit about the feelings or
views of this man. His views, in other words, are completely irrelevant.
• The whole long phrase beginning with ‘However’ and ending with the comma is an introductory phrase; the
sentence is actually about ‘this truth’, which is the actual subject of the sentence.
• We may or may not know that the clause before the comma is a dependent clause and the bit after the comma is an
independent clause and together these two clauses make up what is known as a complex sentence.
• You know that the comma signals that the first clause is dependent – even if you don’t know the term ‘dependent
clause’.
• Cultural context: the idea that the man in question here is considered to be the rightful ‘property’ of one of the
daughters of the neighbourhood is ironic, because in the very early nineteenth century, married women were not
allowed to own property – their property became the property of their husbands.
• The tone of the narrator in these two sentences is satirical: in the first sentence, she makes a statement which is
actually fairly outrageous: on the surface of it, the sentence offers us a simple idea that every rich single man is
looking for a wife. That statement cannot possibly be true, any more than the statement that everyone knows that
was, but in the second sentence, she lets us know that we are going to encounter people in a particular
neighbourhood who think this way, and the narrator wants the readers to realize that we are intended to see these
people as being rather silly.
• Even reading the two sentences silently to yourself, you probably could hear, in your mind, how the words are to
be pronounced. If you were to hear them read out loud, you would recognize the way the tone and stresses the
reader used contributed to the message that this passage is satirical. If you were to read it out loud, you would
show that you know how to say the words and where to put the stresses.
The above list names just a few of the things that we know when we know a language. Neither of these two
sentences contained a metaphor or a symbol or a literary or historical allusion. Nor did they contain an idiom, such
as ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’, which is a phrase meaning that it’s raining very hard, even though rain would not
seem to have anything to do with cats or dogs.
We do not have space in this chapter to try to identify in detail all the nuances of language use that reveal what
people who speak a language fluently and with skill know when we say that they know a language. This short look
at the question, however, should give you a good idea of the kinds of things that are involved in knowing a
language. Knowing a language is a spectacularly complex skill, and as you work through your TOK course, we
encourage you to pay attention to the different ways that language is used in different areas of knowledge and in
different knowledge situations.

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What do we know with or through language?
We noted above that one of the thinking skills that had to evolve in our species before language could develop was
the ability to know that we have minds and that others have minds. When it comes right down to it, the reason that
that particular cognitive skill is crucial is that the primary function of language is so that thoughts, ideas, feelings
and observations in one mind can be transmitted to another mind. What we mostly know through language is what is
inside another person’s head.
For knowledge to be knowledge, someone has to know it. That is, for knowledge to be knowledge, it has to be inside
someone’s mind. That’s true of all knowledge in all areas of life. Language, then, gives us the ability to transmit any
knowledge of any subject from one mind to another. The scope of language, therefore, in terms of what we can
know by using language, includes everything that it is possible to explain in words in any subject in any place in the
world. Mathematics and the arts come under the scope of language, as do politics, technology, religion, psychology,
zoology, physics, history, geography and personal feelings and observations. In comparison, some tools for making
knowledge can really only be used for some subjects – a particle accelerator, for example, is very useful for
physicists trying to learn about the characteristics of subatomic particles like the quark, but it is not useful for
historians trying to understand what led to the massacre of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal Nations at Sand Creek,
nor can a politician use it to try to understand what his constituents need him to advocate for. Kendrick Lamar
cannot use a particle accelerator to help him write or perform one of his songs. You cannot use one if you are trying
to learn how to bake Roscón de Reyes for Three Kings Day. Language, however, can be used by all of those people
to aid them in their various and widely diverse pursuits.

This is not to say that language is our only means of knowing things, nor can we say that language alone is sufficient
for us to be able to make knowledge. In Chapter 2, you saw how the various kinds of tools that we have as
individuals to help us make knowledge – reason, sense perception, imagination and so on – work together in tandem.
Language, however, is our primary means of transmitting ideas, hypotheses and conclusions from one person to the
other.
The proposal that the scope of language as a means of conveying knowledge is virtually unbounded leaves us still
with several important questions related to the scope of language as it pertains to knowledge:
• If the primary function of language is to connect minds and transmit ideas, thoughts and feelings, does this mean
that individuals working on developing new knowledge on some particular topic can do so without using words?
Can new knowledge, in other words, ever be developed without language playing a role?
• Can we put all knowledge into words – either written or spoken? Is there knowledge which either cannot be
transmitted from one person to another or which must be transmitted using some other method, such as touch?
• Does our language limit or define what we can know?
We will consider these three questions in the next two sections of this chapter.

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Perspectives
According to Ethnologue: Languages of the World, a resource committed to providing the most up-to-date
information about world languages available, as of June 2019, there were 7111 languages still being spoken in the
world. This number is contradicted in other sources which give a number closer to 6000 languages. Because some
languages are spoken only by a very few speakers – many languages have fewer than 1000 speakers – it is hard to
pin down exactly how many languages there are still alive in the world. The number also depends on who is doing
the counting. Some sources group similar languages that occur in the same place. Nearly two thirds of the active
languages are spoken in Asia and Africa; however, more than 85 per cent of speakers use Asian or European
languages (‘How many languages are there in the world?’).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
To what extent does language allow us to make our private experiences public?

As you can imagine from these numbers, this means that the variety of languages in the world is not evenly
distributed over the globe. In fact, in Papua New Guinea alone, 840 languages are spoken, with another 710 spoken
in Indonesia. By way of contrast, only 1058 languages are spoken in all of the Americas, and only 288 in all of
Europe. You can use the QR code to view an interactive version of a world map, which allows you to explore the
diversity of languages in the world. Visit your country and see how many languages are spoken that you were not
necessarily aware of.

IA prompt
21 What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Culture
We noted earlier in this chapter that the language you learn is the language of the culture in which you
are raised. If you had been born in some other country where a language other than your native
language is spoken, you would have grown up learning that language. Language is necessarily related
to culture – there are words for things in one culture that don’t exist in another culture. Do you have a
word for the object in this picture, for example?
The object in this photo is called a qulliq and is used by the Inuit people for a variety of purposes. It is a
lamp which is lit with oil and burns a wick made of Arctic cotton called suputi and a special moss called
ijju/maniq. It is tended with a hook called the taqquti. The lamp symbolizes the flame keeper in the home
– the woman. The qulliq can be used for many purposes including drying clothes, melting ice, lighting
spiritual ceremonies and providing warmth and energy in the home (‘Fact Sheet: Information About the
Qulliq’).

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You can see that the qulliq is an important article in the Inuit culture. There are a number of other
vocabulary words associated with the qulliq, some of which we have provided above, but we can be
pretty certain that there are many more. How many words, for example, can you list that are related to a
familiar object such as a fireplace or a car? If you don’t know the word, you also don’t know the other
related words, and, more significantly, you don’t know anything about how the use of the qulliq makes
the object important in this culture. We told you, in the paragraph above, a little bit about how the qulliq is
used, but you only know that much, and you only know it intellectually. You don’t have any emotional,
intuitive or imaginative sense of the qulliq and its role in the culture.

ACTIVITY
Think of an object which is significant in your life. If you are a religious person, perhaps you can think of
an object which is important to your religion. Or you might decide to choose something important to your
religious community.
If you are not religious, or if you prefer not to choose an object related to your religion, choose something
else of significance to your family or another cultural group in which you live, such as an important
document, a flag, or maybe a statue which has significance in your town or country. For this exercise, it
would be better to pick an object that has shared meaning in a community, rather than something which
has personal meaning just for you individually.
Now think about all the associations you have with that object.
1 What feelings arise when you think about it or work with it?
2 What is its symbolic significance?
3 How would you feel if someone stole or destroyed that object?
4 What is the role of the object in your community, and what is the effect of the object and its use on the
community?
5 Now imagine how much a person who has no idea what that object is does not know about the object
itself and about the greater community to which the object has importance. If you named the object for
that person and told them a little bit about its function, what would they still be missing?
This activity should give you some sense of how much you don’t know about the Inuit people and culture
unless you are Inuit because you don’t know what the qulliq is.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What knowledge might be lost if the whole world shared one common language?

The understanding that you can lack some significant understanding of a culture because you don’t speak its
language is one kind of way in which we can think of language as shaping what we know and what we don’t know.
Another way that language influences knowledge is the varying nature of how different languages depict the world
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differently.

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Language mapping the world
Does our language limit or define what we can know?
From where you are sitting right now, answer the following questions:
• What is to your left?
• What is to your right?
• What is behind you?
• What is to your immediate northeast?
• What is to the south?
• What is to your southeast in the middle distance?
Now turn directly around 180° and answer the same questions again.

Learner profile
Open-minded
How can learning about the way that other cultures perceive the world help you to develop the trait of
open-mindedness?

It was probably much easier for you to answer the questions about what is to your left and right than it was to
answer questions about your relationship to things in various cardinal directions. Possibly you could figure out what
was to your northeast, if you either happen to know what direction the building you are in is facing and how you are
oriented to the front of the building, or if you are somewhere where you can see the Sun, and it isn’t high noon or
nighttime, when you cannot tell where the Sun is relative to the east–west pattern it travels during the day.
The fact that the former questions are easier for English speakers than the latter is directly attributable to the way in
which we use language in order to orient ourselves in space. Other languages, however, do not use ‘left’ and ‘right’,
but, rather, require speakers to identify themselves in terms of their orientation to the cardinal directions in order to
discuss their location in space.

CASE STUDY
Kuuk Thaayorre
One language that requires speakers to use cardinal directions to discuss their location in space is Kuuk
Thaayorre, a language of the Pormpuraaw community on Cape York in northern Australia. The ability to
identify one’s own orientation to north, south, east and west is deeply embedded in the language. Even
to say ‘hello’, one must know where one is facing: ‘So the way you say hi in Kuuk Thaayorre, one of the
languages spoken here, is to say, which way are you heading? And the answer should be, north,
northeast in the far distance; how about you?’ (Boroditsky).
It is difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to operate in a language which doesn’t use ‘left’ or
‘right’. Suppose that you were gardening with a member of the Pormpuraaw and you wanted to alert him
to the fact that he had cut the little finger on his left hand. You can’t say: ‘Look! The finger on your left
hand is bleeding!’ You would have to say: ‘Look! The finger on your southwest hand is bleeding!’– or
‘north’, or ‘northeast’, or whatever direction is the correct one for how that hand is oriented to the way
that the person is facing. If the person then turns around to look at you blankly, because he can’t feel
any blood and he can’t figure out who you’re talking to, when you repeat the warning, you have to
change what you say, because now the person is facing a different direction and his hand, therefore, is
oriented differently to true north.

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Lera Boroditsky, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied
Pormpuraaw languages extensively:
The fun example I give my students is imagine playing the hokey pokey in a language like this.
You know, there’s no left leg or right leg. As soon as you move the leg, it becomes a different
leg. So you may start with moving your southwest leg in, but then you have to move your
northwest – northeast leg out. (Boroditsky)
The idea of such a language is actually rather fascinating. English speakers, we can see, are less
integrally attached to the world around them. We know left, right, back, front, up and down. Although
we’re perfectly comfortable with the fact that those directions change if we move, we don’t see ourselves
as being tied to the movement of the Earth and the Sun the way that speakers of languages which
require exactly that knowledge do. Try to imagine the kind of internal map that speakers of such
languages must have in order to be able to speak. Boroditsky describes what the mental experience of
mapping oneself was like, once she learned how to do it in order to be able to speak Kuuk Thaayorre: ‘It
was like a little bird’s-eye view of the landscape that I was walking through, and I was a little red dot that
was moving across the landscape. And then when I turned, this little window stayed locked on the
landscape, but it turned in my mind’s eye.’
The ability to locate oneself in space has other ramifications. Our understanding of time is related to the
way that we think about space. If an English speaker is asked to take a bunch of events and organize
them into the order in which they happened, the timeline moves from left to right, just as our eyes do
when we read. We think of time as moving in that direction. Japanese speakers, however, if asked to
demonstrate the way that time moves, will organize the events on a timeline from right to left, the way
that they read. The Pormpuraaw, however, organize time from east to west, possibly because that is the
way the Sun travels, which means that their sequence of events is organized differently depending on
the way that the speaker is facing when asked to organize them. If the Kuuk Thaayorre speaker is facing
south, they will organize the sequence of events from left to right, because east is to their left. If another
speaker is facing east, they will organize those events from top to bottom, starting from the east and
moving west (Boroditsky). The Prompuraaw idea of time is not fixed in relation to the people; it is fixed in
relation to the cardinal directions.
If you are interested in learning more about how different languages require different thinking skills, use
the QR code to listen to an interview with Lera Boroditsky and several other experts in language use.

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The way that languages shape our understanding of ourselves in terms of our location in time and space is just one
example of how language shapes thought. There are languages which have no numbers. You can imagine that
without numbers, mathematics cannot exist – at least not in anything like the form in which we are used to it. What
would your world be like if there was no such thing as counting or its subsequent ability to keep track of things by
number. Could there be anything like money?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do people from different linguistic or cultural backgrounds live, in some sense, in different worlds?

Many languages assign gender to nouns. The gender of inanimate objects, it turns out, influences the way that
people think about those objects. In German, for example, a bridge is feminine: die Brücke. In Spanish, however, a
bridge is masculine: el puente. Many other objects have the opposite genders in those two languages. When speakers
were asked to describe characteristics of the objects, speakers of Spanish focused on more ‘manly’ characteristics
such as strength and endurance, while speakers of German tended to focus on more ‘feminine’ characteristics, such
as elegance and beauty (Deutscher). The ramifications of these unconscious associations are not yet widely
understood, but they could be quite far-ranging. Guy Deutscher, writing for the New York Times, suggests that when
young minds associate gender with language, those language learners begin to associate objects in the inanimate
world with the kinds of emotional responses they have in response to human genders. He asks us to consider
whether thinking of bridges as either male or female might influence the way one designs a bridge. Current
knowledge of the way that gender is encoded in our brains cannot answer that question, but we can imagine that our
social attitudes toward gender might be naturally associated with inanimate objects that we think of as having a
gender.
When we think about what we know when we know a particular language, then, we see that the language we speak
helps to shape our understanding of our place in the world, our understanding of time and the nature of physical
objects – among many other things. The fact that our language shapes what we must know, does not, however, shape
what we can know.
In 1940, linguist Benjamin Whorf published a now-discredited idea which came to be known as the Whorfian
hypothesis, claiming that language shapes what it is possible for us to think. The theory held on for a long time,
although it eventually collapsed when it turned out that Whorf had falsified the evidence upon which he based it
(Deutscher). If you think about it a little more closely, Whorf’s claims cannot possibly be true. If it were not possible
to think about anything for which we do not already have words, then it would not be possible for us to learn
anything new. You probably had no concept for a qulliq a few minutes ago, but you saw a picture of one and learned
the word for it, and now you do have such a concept. You were able to think about the qulliq – to perceive it in your
mind – before you knew the word. Language does not shape what it is possible for us to think, but it does shape
what we do think, at least initially.

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Dying languages
All over the world, languages are in the process of becoming extinct because they are no longer being transmitted to
children, who instead learn a language in the region which is spoken by many more people. In the United States, for
example, where there used to be hundreds of native languages, a recent survey counted fewer than 200, only 33 of
which were actively being spoken by both adults and children (Woodbury). Those 33 are the only ones which might
seem to be safe, but over time, as more and more people speak English, those languages, too, might become
endangered or extinct. Worldwide, some estimates suggest that half the existing languages could become extinct in
the next 100 years. Other estimates are even more dire: they suggest that in a century only a few hundred languages
might remain.

IA prompt
14 Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?

Given the intimate relationship between culture and language, what is lost every time a language dies out? What will
be the consequences to our shared knowledge if 50 per cent or more of the world’s languages are lost? What
perspectives on human experience might be lost to us permanently?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
If a language dies, does knowledge die with it?

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Translation
Having now seen how languages differ from each other in fundamental ways, we might imagine that it must be quite
difficult to produce a translation of a particular work from one language to another. We translated ‘qulliq’ for you as
a lamp. But a lamp in English doesn’t have anything like the same meaning to our culture as the ‘qulliq’ has to the
Inuit culture. If someone is translating for us from Inuit to English, and uses the word ‘lamp’, our impression of the
use and importance of the object is going to be entirely wrong. Suppose that what is being translated is a message
from one Inuit speaker to another, and the letter mentions a qulliq: what is the translator to do? Should she just use
the word ‘lamp’ and hope that the rest of the message will provide the context that would be needed for a reader of
the translated version to understand its import? Or should the translator add in a lot of additional information which
was not explicitly given in the message, so that the reader of the English version can appreciate the implications of
the message more thoroughly? If the translator is translating while the speakers are actually speaking, then it is
unlikely there will be much time for making decisions like this. If the translator does embark in English on a lengthy
explanation of what the cultural significance of the qulliq is, the Inuit speaker is going to start wondering what the
translator is saying, because clearly the translator would have to be saying much more than what the Inuit speaker
says. Surely such a choice would lead to distrust in the translator.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do professional interpreters and translators have any special ethical obligations?

The problem is, then, that anyone learning something through a translation is not likely to be able to know in a truly
detailed and nuanced way what the original speaker or text actually said. Knowledge gained from a translation is
knowledge gained from a new speech or text based on an original, but not an exact copy.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Interpretation
The problem of translation brings up the concept of interpretation. Often when we think about
interpretation, we are thinking about interpretation of particular data or observations or evidence, but in
the case of translation, we are dealing with an interpretation of an original written text or act of speech
(Campbell). The translator has already had to interpret what was being said and make decisions about
what to pass along. The reader or listener of the translation must also then try to interpret the
significance of what he heard, and so the knowledge that comes out of that interaction is the result of
twice-interpreted information.

DEEPER THINKING
Translation and technology
Another issue that arises out of translation comes about because of developing technology. In Chapter
3, we saw some of the ways in which technology influences knowledge. At the beginning of this chapter,
we considered the question of how well Google Translate represented the paragraph in Nyanja. With
regard to language and translation, another important technology is the development of the universal
translator. At the time of writing, there are a good number of universal translators available for sale and
they have proven to be quite popular for travellers.

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The term ‘universal translator’ has its origins in the television series Star Trek where a technological
gizmo allowed for the crew of the starship Enterprise to communicate with alien species throughout the
galaxy, no matter what languages those species spoke. That is a very fanciful device, and it is quite
difficult to understand how such a device could work, because until the crew of the Enterprise
encountered the alien species, there was no way for the designers of the technology to analyse the
language, develop a lexicon and program the translator. The ‘universal’ translators available to us today,
cannot, of course, translate every one of the more than 7000 living languages. You can, at the present
time, get the Smart Voice Translator Device which (the advertising claims) can translate 70 languages.
Another device, the WT2 Plus Translator, offers translation of 36 languages but 84 accents. Those may
not be ‘universal’, but they certainly make it easy for most travellers to be able to converse pretty much
anywhere they are likely to want to go.
The same problems of translation arise, however, with the technological universal translator as arise with
a human translator, without a human on the spot to make any snap decisions. The translation decisions
must be made in advance, as it were. Nevertheless, most travellers will likely find that the translator does
a good enough job for their needs, allowing them to ask for directions and order meals and make
reservations at hotels. We can imagine that in the future, the technology for such translators will improve
and the cost will go down – this is what has historically tended to happen as new technologies arise and
develop – and perhaps many more people will use them. This leads us to some questions about
knowledge.
If we eventually come to rely heavily on cheap, portable technological translators:
• Will the technology eliminate the need for learning new languages?
• If we rely on universal translators, what kind of knowledge about other cultures will we be failing to
develop?
If you would like to watch a demonstration of a universal translator at work, use the QR code.

We have seen that language is one of our primary means of making and sharing knowledge in virtually every arena
in which knowledge is produced. We have seen how the language that we speak requires us to perceive the world in
particular ways, so that the wide diversity of world languages that we presently have reflects an equally wide
diversity of perspectives on what it means to be human. We have also seen how thoroughly interconnected language
and culture are, so that to be truly fluent in a language means that we must have rich knowledge of the culture in
which that language flourishes. In the next section, we will consider the methods which we use for making
knowledge of languages, and we will investigate language as a method for making knowledge in other areas.

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Methods and tools

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How do we know language?
The learning of our native language is an automatic process. We are immersed in a community in which a particular
language is spoken all around us, so that we are exposed to that language extensively and often. We learn that
language by observing – watching and listening – and by mimicking those around us. The process is not deliberate
or even conscious. We are hard-wired to learn a language, and we learn the language (or, if we are lucky) languages
by which we are constantly surrounded.
The process of gaining competence in your native language was probably simple and painless. You just soaked it up
as you went about living your life. You were most probably a fluent speaker of a colloquial form of your native
language, albeit with a relatively limited vocabulary, by the time you started school. Colloquial language, however,
very often differs a great deal from the formal version of the language, and so in school, you are taught the more
formal version.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Power
Competence in a language is certainly highly desirable. If you are a competent speaker of a language,
you can navigate your way through the world wherever they speak that language. You can make
yourself understood and you can probably get much of what you want. That ability is a huge benefit: if
you can make yourself understood, you have a certain amount of power in the world that people who
cannot speak that language do not possess.
The better you are at using your language, however, the more power you have over your ability to
navigate the part of the world where that language is spoken. You have possibly discovered that to make
yourself clear – especially in writing – is a much more difficult proposition than having a casual
conversation with a friend or even with a stranger on the street. If you want to have the ability to
persuade others to see things the way you do, you need to have the kind of language skills that allow
you to be persuasive: control over tone, the ability to organize your thoughts in a logical way and the
ability to make your listeners feel that what you are saying is right – both in the sense of true and in the
sense of morally right.
David Crystal, an expert in linguistics and author of many books about the English language, describes
the ability to sway others with your language this way:
There’s nothing quite like the thrill of successful eloquence, of knowing that you’ve said what
you wanted to say in the most effective way and caused an audience … to be delighted,
enthused, persuaded, and moved by the way you’ve said it. (Crystal xi)
If you have the power to make yourself both understood and convincing you are in a much better
position to have power over your life: to get people to do what you want them to do, or to let you do
whatever it is that you want to do and to take a leadership role in the workplace when problems need to
be solved or projects need to be developed. Perhaps most importantly from a TOK perspective, the
more mastery you have over your language, the less others will be able to manipulate you into going
along with a version of the world which benefits them, but not you, or to convince you to believe what is
not true.
An example of how skilled knowledge of language can keep you from being swayed by inaccurate
information can be seen in a blog post that went viral at the end of June 2019.

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Blogger Phaylen Fairchild wrote a post in which she claimed that JK Rowling, famous author of the Harry
Potter series, had ‘confirmed [her] stance against transgender women’ (MacGuill). Fairchild also claimed
that, ‘It’s been a long time coming, but finally we have a definitive answer. JK Rowling is a TERF [trans-
exclusionary radical feminist]’ (Fairchild). A skilled reader, with the power that comes with detailed
knowledge of vocabulary and sentence construction, will not be swayed by this argument. The claim is
that Rowling has ‘confirmed’ her stance against transgender women; however, nowhere in the post is
there any evidence that Rowling has made public any stance at all.
The word ‘confirm’ means that a previous statement exists and that there is now a new instance which
backs up that original claim. If there is no original statement, then there is no confirmation. Note, too, that
the careful reader also understands that the misuse of the word ‘confirmation’ does not mean that
Fairchild’s opinion is wrong, it just means that this argument is not well-constructed and further
information is needed.
If you are a knowledgeable user of language you have the power to keep yourself from being swept
away by claims that are highly emotionally charged and to wait for – or look for – more facts before you
decide what is and what is not true.

In order to become skilled with your language, however, you have to do a lot of much more conscientious work. In
school, you likely studied (and continue to study) formal rules of your native language, grammatical structures, the
correct use of verb tenses, the various ways you can construct complete sentences and more vocabulary. Your
teachers set you writing tasks of increasing difficulty over time, and, ideally, your skill with the written language
gradually increases.
Practice, in other words, is the means by which we develop mastery, and even artistry, with language.

ACTIVITY
Read the following letter, written during the Civil War in the United States by a soldier who was just
about to go off to his first battle. In the letter, he tries to explain to his beloved wife why he feels that he
must do his part as a soldier, despite his love for her. A week later, Sullivan Ballou died at Manassas, in
the first major battle of the War. After you read the letter, discuss the knowledge that Sullivan Ballou had
of language. What skills did he exhibit in writing the letter? What skills do you, as a reader, need, in
order to read and appreciate its beauty, beyond its straightforward meaning?
How do these skills help you to know more effectively?

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Practice with language consists of more than school lessons. In order to become truly a master of your native
language, you must expose yourself to, or be exposed to, as much high-quality language as possible. If you surround
yourself with written and verbal language which uses sophisticated structures and techniques, such as metaphor and
allusion, and which uses a great range of vocabulary, then you will begin to absorb those patterns of language.
People who are not exposed on a regular basis to complex language will find it much more difficult to develop their
own language skills.

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IA prompt
2 Are some types of knowledge more useful than others?

DEEPER THINKING
Use of language in the technological world
Consider the language by which you are surrounded on a regular basis. Do you watch a lot of television?
Spend a lot of time reading on the internet? How rich and sophisticated is the language which you
encounter in those places? Think about the language that people use in texting.
Text messages tend to abbreviate language, both in terms of spelling and in terms of sentence structure.
Can one develop one’s skill as a reader and composer of text messages in the same way that one can
develop one’s skill as a reader and writer of elegant prose? For many people in today’s world, texting is
probably a more useful skill than the knowledge of how to produce eloquent speech and writing is.
Certainly, most people will send text messages far more often than they will be called upon to write a
powerful essay or speech or to stand in front of an audience and try to persuade its members to feel
passionately about something.

What knowledge, if any, of language do you think is lost if we confine most of our written interactions
with each other to text messages? What knowledge, if any, is lost if most people were to fail to develop
the capacity for powerful, eloquent language? Is the utility of language, that is, its usefulness, the most
important determiner of what knowledge of language we should have?

Methods of learning a foreign language

Think of the methods and tools that you have used in the study of a second language for your IB Diploma
Programme. You will probably recognize that in trying to learn a foreign language, you use many of the same
methods that you used to learn your native language. The biggest difference, however, for many people, is that they
don’t live in a community where that second language is spoken, and so they do not have the opportunity for
learning – or augmenting their school learning – by immersion in the language community. That lack of immersion
explains why the development of vocabulary, as we discussed earlier in the chapter, tends for most learners to lag far
behind the development of vocabulary in a native language.

ACTIVITY
Think about your own experience learning a second language. Ask yourself the following questions:
1 What are the primary resources that you rely on to help you learn the language? Your teacher?
Textbooks? Television programmes in the target language?
2 Do you have access to many native speakers of that language while you are studying it?

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3 Do you know someone who is learning a second language in a community in which that language is
spoken? Perhaps you live in an English-speaking community and you have an immigrant friend who is
learning English. Or perhaps you live in a Spanish-speaking community and you know a native
speaker of English who is learning Spanish. Or perhaps you are a person in this situation. How does
that experience of learning a new language contrast with the experience of learning a language
without the immersion in the community?
4 Which resources and tools have you found to be the most helpful for making knowledge of a new
language?

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How do we know other things via language?
Language is one of the main ways that we learn. We learn from speaking to our friends and family, from listening to
our teachers at school, from reading about current events in newspapers or on the internet, from hearing religious
leaders speak and by speaking and listening in many other situations that we encounter every day. In more formal
ways, people who are working in various areas with the object of generating new knowledge in, say, psychology,
entomology (the study of insects), geology, mathematics and history, rely on language every day. In fact, we might
first wonder whether it is possible to learn anything at all without language.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is it the case that if we cannot express something, we don’t know it?

If the primary function of language is to connect minds and transmit ideas, thoughts and feelings, does this mean
that individuals working on developing new knowledge on some particular topic can do so without using words?
Can new knowledge, in other words, ever be developed without language playing a role?

ACTIVITY

1 Use the QR code on the right to watch the video. As you watch, try to figure out what the magician is
doing. Notice what happens in your mind as you watch.
2 Were you able to just observe and take in the images without using any words?
Remembering that once we learn language, it becomes automatic, we’re betting that you were not able
to separate the words out of your observations. What you saw probably generated questions and those
questions took the shape of words. Maybe you had some ideas about what the magician was doing to
create the illusions. If so, those ideas most likely took the shape of words. You experienced something
similar at the beginning of this chapter when you watched the video of the Rube Goldberg machine and
tried to understand what was happening.

CONNECTION TO THE CORE THEME

Individuals and communities of knowers
This relationship between observation and thought is not confined to personal knowledge and personal
experience. If you think about a scientist in the field, even if she is alone, observing, say, chimpanzees,
as Jane Goodall did for so many years, language is still an important part of the tools that she uses.
Goodall writes down what she observes in order to document the data. She formulates hypotheses to
test. She asks herself questions and poses possible answers. That individual knowledge will translate
into communal knowledge when she evaluates her findings and communal them with the scientific
community and the public. You will learn more about this process in Chapter 9 when we explore the
natural sciences.

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Indeed, as you go through the Theory of Knowledge course, you will investigate with each topic the
methods used to generate knowledge. Language will play a significant role in each of those areas. Each
of the different areas of knowledge have technical terminology which is unique to that area because
particular language is needed to describe phenomena which do not exist in other areas – or which plays
a specific role in one area that it does not play in another. The word ‘theory’, for example, has a different
meaning in the natural sciences from what it means in the study of literature, and both have a different
meaning from the way it is generally used in colloquial English, where it means, roughly,
‘unsubstantiated idea’.
So, one important aspect of language that you will be investigating throughout the course is the use of
technical terminology. Another important role that language plays in all areas of the pursuit of knowledge
is the role of communicating findings to others. We noted above that Jane Goodall gathered a lot of
knowledge about chimpanzees by herself, making it first her own personal knowledge. That knowledge
would have done no good for the wider scientific community or for the world in general – or, indeed, for
the chimpanzees! – if she had not shared it.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Power
An ability with language can, as we have seen, give a person considerable power over many aspects of
their life. We have also seen how one person might have power over another person if language is used
as a weapon. Language is not, however, all-powerful. There are only a very few circumstances in which
language has the power to create a reality: just saying something is so almost never makes it so.

ACTIVITY
Language can sometimes shape reality:
• Your teacher is empowered to decide when your next unit examination will be, and they can then
make that date the actual date simply by telling you that it will be so.
• Religious leaders such as a Catholic priest or a Muslim Imam can make a declaration of marriage, as
can people who have been officially licensed by the appropriate government office, such as judges
and county clerks. When those people pronounce a couple ‘man and wife’, that couple is, legally,
married. If you pronounce someone married, unless you have been properly licensed, no marriage
takes place.
• A boss can fire an employee simply by declaring ‘you’re fired’.
How many other instances can you think of in which the simple declaration of a fact by a person who has
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the actual authority to declare it has the power to create a particular reality? List as many as you can.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Culture
The role of language in giving people the power to make pronouncements of marriage is culturally
determined. You cannot simply declare someone married, unless you have been properly licensed in
your country, but neither can the Catholic priest in all situations. A priest or Imam cannot just stop two
people on the street and declare them married. The power of the words exists only in the particular
context of the marriage ceremony. Chapter 5 (Knowledge and Indigenous Societies) discusses the
power of ritual for transmitting language in much more detail.

The fact that making a declaration only makes something true in a very few instances means that any professional
practitioner who wishes to establish that their knowledge is true and justified must go through the process of not just
sharing that knowledge with others, but also of explaining and justifying the claims. You will find that this process
is necessary in every knowledge-making endeavour. It is important not to just accept claims at face value, but rather
to assess and validate them. The same thing is true in mathematics, science, history and so on. As you study each of
the topics in your course, look for the processes which exist in each area for the sharing and checking of the
knowledge claims made in that subject.
You will investigate these processes in more detail later, but here is one example.

CASE STUDY
Andrew Wiles and Fermat’s Last Theorem
In 1993, Andrew Wiles, a mathematician at Princeton University, gave a series of three lectures at a
maths conference in Cambridge, England (Rubin and Silverberg). The lectures built up to an
announcement that Wiles had solved a 300-year-old maths problem: Fermat’s Last Theorem. His
announcement, however, was insufficient for the mathematical world to simply accept the claim as true –
even after lectures over three days. The work was sent, as all mathematical work is, for peer review.
You may have experienced peer review of some of your schoolwork, in which one of your classmates
read your work or listened to your presentation and gave you feedback about how to improve it.
Professional peer review is similar in the sense that a colleague – an expert in the area in which the new
knowledge claims are being made – reads the work and comments, but beyond that, professional peer
review is rather different from your classroom experience. You can generally choose whether or not you
are going to attend to the advice that your peer reviewer gives you; however, a professional researcher –
in this case, Andrew Wiles – does not have that option. A professional peer reviewer has the power to
stop something from being published altogether. If they find an error, they will send the work back and
require that it be revised – even if revision means re-running experiments or starting almost entirely from
scratch. If a professional cannot justify their claims to the satisfaction of the peer reviewer, then their
claims are rejected and do not become a part of the accepted knowledge in that area.

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In the case of Andrew Wiles, in fact, after a few months, an error was found. The error could not be
easily corrected and after a few tries, the paper was rejected. The problem of Fermat’s Last Theorem
was not, after all, solved. Wiles had to work for two more years before, following another round of peer
review, the proof was published in The Annals of Mathematics, where, because it was so long and
complicated, it took up two full volumes (Castelvecchi). The final publication was the signal that the
mathematics community had accepted Wiles’ work as knowledge. Wiles won the 2016 Abel Award – the
mathematics equivalent to the Nobel Prize – for this proof (Castelvecchi).

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Certainty
The example of Andrew Wiles’ journey in trying to establish his proof as knowledge illustrates a process
which is widely used in many areas of knowledge. This debate – with language as the primary method –
is integral to establishing the credibility of knowledge claims.

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In mathematics, the standard for acceptance of a proof as knowledge is absolute certainty, and the
process of peer review was able to establish Wiles’ work to that standard. In other fields, however, the
explanation and justification of a knowledge claim does not necessarily result in absolutely certain
knowledge. In some areas of knowledge, the claims are made, explained and justified, and then
acceptance may be widespread, or it may be the subject of significant debate. Other ideas may be
proffered as equally good or better explanations of the same observations. In some areas, such as the
arts and history, the object is not necessarily to establish a single unassailable knowledge claim, but
rather to offer differing interpretations, all of which may have equal credibility. In those areas the process
of explaining and justifying is still vital, but our understanding of any particular work of art or any
particular historical event can be made richer by the effective justification of ideas from differing
perspectives, a process quite unlike the search for absolute certainty in mathematics.

We have seen that the methods of making knowledge of a language can make a difference in the degree of mastery
that the speaker will eventually attain. We have also seen that mastery in a language can give an individual power in
the world, both in terms of what that person can accomplish and in terms of being able to resist other people’s
attempts to deceive or manipulate. Language is also an important tool in making, justifying and sharing knowledge
in all other situations, including the professional development of knowledge. Given the importance of language in
the knowledge-generation process, the question of whether language is used ethically takes on great significance.

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Ethics
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me!
This common aphorism suggests that language has no power to wound, but few people, if any, get through
childhood without learning that this saying is simply not true. Bullying very often consists of words. Name-calling,
slurs, slander and the promotion of lies about someone can all do great harm to a person’s self-esteem and
reputation. Cruel people can use language cruelly, and such a use is one example of the unethical use of language.
Another obviously unethical use of language is the telling of lies.

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Truth and lies

ACTIVITY
Read the following very short story – a 2009 contribution to the ‘Six Word Stories’ website – written by
Richard Powers:
Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses. (Powers)
1 What does the story suggest about human nature?
2 What does the story suggest about the power of lies?
3 Since civilization seemed to be stable enough before people could see all the lies for what they were,
does that suggest that lies are fine as long as no one finds out?
4 If a lie causes tremendous damage, but no one ever finds out that the cause of the problem was a lie,
does that mean that the lie was not unethical?
5 Why might having to face the fact that lies are lies cause civilization to collapse?

The story is intriguing because it seems to suggest that the world can run along just fine so long as no one finds out
about lies. That in turn suggests that lies don’t have any real effect on the world – it’s only our knowledge of lies
that has an effect on the world. In The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare’s tyrant king, Leontes, has a speech in
which he describes what it’s like to find out about something he didn’t know about previously:

This is a striking image: if you drink a cup full of water and you don’t know that you swallowed a spider, then you
are not bothered at all, but if you drink a cup of water, and you swallow a spider that you see at the last minute – too
late! – you are horrified, and likely to vomit the spider back up.
The idea that lies have no effect if no one knows about them parallels the spider in the cup. There is one universal
ethical principle with regard to the making of knowledge, and that is that we are obligated, individually and
communally, to always do our very best to make accurate knowledge. If, at any point, it turns out that the
‘knowledge’ we developed was wrong, and therefore not knowledge at all, then we are obligated to go back to the
drawing board, as it were, and try again. We saw that principle in play with Andrew Wiles: when his ‘proof’ turned
out not to be a proof, he had to go back and do it over until it was right.

Learner profile
Principled
How does our use of language contribute to our being principled? How does our desire to be principled
influence our use of language?

An error, therefore, is not a violation of that ethical principle, so long as we acknowledge the error and make an
honest effort to figure out what the problem is.
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CONCEPT CONNECTION
Truth
There is a close relationship between language and truth. We need more than language, of course; we
need the speaker to have the knowledge necessary to recognize, understand and appreciate the truth,
but if we assume that that knowledge is in place, then language is the tool we use in order to transmit
the truth from one person to another. Lies are a matter of the deliberate misuse of language. To tell the
truth properly, however, we need more than just intention: we need the speaker or writer to have
mastered language well enough to be able to say exactly what is intended in the most clear and effective
way possible.
As receivers of language, we also need to have mastered language well enough to be able to
understand the connotations of words as well as the denotations. We need to be able to understand
nuances and implications, beyond the surface level of what is being said; otherwise, we will
misunderstand what is being said, and the truth will escape us. As receivers of language, we also need
more than mastery of language: we need the mental capacity and commitment to avoid willful
misunderstanding.
From both parties engaged in a communicative act, then, for truth to be conveyed, we need knowledge
of facts, mastery of language and commitment to truth.

ACTIVITY
Discuss the following questions with a partner, and then with the rest of your class.
1 Is a lie a violation of our obligation to try to be accurate?
2 If a person knows the truth about the answer to some problem, and then lies about it for some reason,
would we say that that person is not making a good-faith effort to find out the truth, but they would be
instead making a deliberate effort to hide that truth? Can you imagine any situation in which someone
would do that? For what reason might such an action be taken?
3 If a person does not know the truth about the answer to some problem, and then lies and says that he
does, is that the same thing as failing to make a good-faith effort to make accurate knowledge? Can
you imagine a situation in which someone would do that? For what reason might such an action be
taken?
4 In either of the two situations above, if no negative consequences ensued, would the lie be unethical?
5 If some negative consequence results in the world because of a lie, must the liar inevitably be caught?
If a liar is not caught, does that mean that no negative consequences resulted from the lie?
6 Do we each individually have a responsibility to work to become expert users of language in order to
be able to understand and to transmit truth?

IA prompt
10 What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge?

IA prompt
27 Does all knowledge impose ethical obligations on those who know it?

Ultimately, it is difficult to imagine how a lie about anything of real import could fail to have a negative
consequence in the world. Imagine what would happen if a mathematician lied about what is and isn’t true in
mathematics: mathematics is used in thousands of situations, from the design of bridges and buildings to the
calculation of how much money you have in the bank. If we didn’t know how maths really works, the bridges and
buildings would probably collapse, and the money you thought you had might turn out to be non-existent. If a
scientist lies about his findings, then we lose our ability to predict and control the world around us. If a politician
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lies, we cannot make good decisions at the ballot box when we vote. If a technology expert lies, we cannot trust the
equipment that that expert built. If a religious leader lies, then we cannot form a good understanding of the spiritual
world that that religion describes. If holy texts are in essence a contract with our god, lies about what those texts
mean could conceivably destroy that relationship. We count on the experts to be telling us the truth because those
truths form the basis for almost everything we encounter in our daily lives.
We can see, therefore, that people who make knowledge and disseminate it to others have an ethical obligation to be
truthful. One final consideration, however, is that since some people do lie, and we know that we cannot always trust
the word of every ‘expert’, we each also have an ethical obligation to check what we are told. We are always partly
responsible for our own knowledge.

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Language and power
Because language has power, any abuse of that power would necessarily be an unethical misuse of language.
• People can, in some cases, use language to create certain realities.
• Language is a tool which individuals can rely on in order to have power over their own understanding – the power
to protect oneself from being manipulated by others.
• People who are masters of the use of language can use their language as a tool to convince others to see the world
from their perspective.
Given the power of language in these situations, we can see that abuse of power is always possible, and anywhere
there is a potential for abuse of power, there is a need for ethical behaviour on the part of users. A misuse of
language in any of these situations must certainly be considered to be unethical.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
In what ways can language be used to influence, persuade or manipulate people’s emotions?
Is ambiguity a shortcoming of language that must be eliminated, or can it also be seen as making a
positive contribution to knowledge and knowing?

Standard dialect
A final kind of power that we have not yet considered is the power of a standard dialect. A dialect is a variation of
speech which is related to where people live. Different dialects of English have different systems of punctuation and
grammar. Commonly, the ‘standard’ dialect in any language is the language of the people in power. In the United
States, for example, the standard language is the language of white culture, and it came to be the standard dialect
because it has been white people – largely wealthy white people – who have held the political power in the US for
centuries. People who speak non-standard dialects – particularly dialects of minority races, but also dialects from
some geographical parts of the country such as the Appalachian Mountains, are all too often looked down upon by
people who were born to the standard dialect.
Probably you have noticed the same phenomenon in your country: people who speak with certain accents are often
automatically considered by many people to be less intelligent, poorer, uneducated or even morally bad. People who
don’t speak a dialect which is close to the standard dialect cannot get certain kinds of jobs. Language can keep some
people trapped in a cycle of poverty for generations, simply because of the prejudices which the particular dialect
they speak trigger. This problem is not the result of unethical use of language, but rather it is an unethical belief
about the nature of language itself. Language is a learned skill; it is not a reflection of any inborn ability or
character.

CAS links
You could develop a CAS project which involves learning about which dialects of your community’s
language are spoken in your area and then helping to educate your classmates or others in your
community about the history and culture of the dialects. You could host a fair with displays about each of
the different dialects and begin collecting samples of the dialect to add to the collection of a local
historical museum as a celebration of the rich culture of the area, and as a means of combatting ill-
informed prejudices about language.

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Conclusion
Language is an important tool in all of our knowledge-making situations. In this chapter, we have looked at some
general features of that tool – what it is, how it is learned, how it helps us learn. As you continue through your TOK
course, keep these features in mind and ask yourself how the particular knowledge situations you encounter are
influenced by the role of language in those situations.

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Works cited
Austen, Jane. 1981. Pride and Prejudice. New York. Bantam.
Ballou. Sullivan. ‘“My Very Dear Wife” – The Last Letter of Major Sullivan Ballou
www.nps.gov/resources/story.htm%3Fid%3D253 National Parks Service. US Department of the Interior. N.d.
Web. 06 Jul. 2019. https://www.nps.gov/articles/-my-very-dear-wife-the-last-letter-of-major-sullivan-
ballou.htm
Bateup, Ken. ‘Home’. Bell English. Bell Educational Trust. 1 Jun. 2016. Web. 2 Jul. 2019.
www.bellenglish.com/news/how-many-words-do-you-know.
Bonds, Mark E. 2001. ‘Symphony II: The 19th Century’. Edited by John Tyrell and Stanley Sadie. The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London. Macmillan, 2001.
Boroditsky, Lera. ‘Lost In Translation: The Power Of Language To Shape How We View The World’. Interview by
Shankar Vedantam. Hidden Brain: A Conversation about Life’s Unseen Patterns. NPR. 29 Jan. 2018. Web. 3
July 2019. www.npr.org/2018/01/29/581657754/lost-in-translation-the-power-of-language-to-shape-how-we-
view-the-world.
Campbell, James. ‘The Pleasures and Perils of Creative Translation’. The New York Times. The New York Times. 9
Jun. 2011. Web. 4 Jul. 2019. www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/books/review/the-pleasures-and-perils-of-
creative-translation.html.
Castelvecchi, Davide. ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem Earns Andrew Wiles the Abel Prize’. Nature News. Nature
Publishing Group. 15 Mar. 2016. Web. 6 Jul. 2019. www.nature.com/news/fermat-s-last-theorem-earns-
andrew-wiles-the-abel-prize-1.19552.
‘Cat (n.)’. Origin and Meaning of Cat. Online Etymology Dictionary. N.d. Web. 1 Jul. 2019.
www.etymonline.com/word/cat.
Crystal, David. 2017 The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works. New Haven. Yale University Press.
Deutscher, Guy. ‘Does Your Language Shape How You Think?’ The New York Times. The New York Times. 26
Aug. 2010. Web. 4 Jul. 2019. www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html.
Donnelly, David. ‘Instinct vs. Intelligence’. Bee Culture – The Magazine of American Bee Keeping. Bee Culture. 3
Oct. 2017. Web. 2 Jul. 2019. www.beeculture.com/instinct-vs-intelligence/.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World 22nd Edition. Edited by David M Eberhard, Gary F Simons, and Charles D
Fennig. SIL International. N.d. Web. 1 Jul. 2019. www.ethnologue.com/language/.
‘Fact Sheet: Information about the Qulliq’. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and
Girls. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. N.d. Web. 3 Jul. 2019.
www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/fact-sheet-information-about-the-qulliq.pdf.
Fairchild, Phaylen. ‘JK Rowling Confirms Stance Against Transgender Women’. Medium. Medium. 26 Jun. 2019.
Web. 4 Jul. 2019. https://medium.com/@Phaylen/jk-rowling-confirms-stance-against-transgender-women-
9bd83f7ca623.
Hays, Brooks. ‘Most US Adults Have Vocabulary of More than 42,000 Words’. UPI. UPI, 16 Aug. 2016. Web. 2
Jul. 2019. www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/08/16/Most-US-adults-have-vocabulary-of-more-than-42000-
words/2801471361934/.
Ho, Raymond. ‘The Semantics of Vervet Monkey Alarm Calls: Part I’. Primatology.net. Primatology.net. 9 Mar.
2011. Web. 2 Jul. 2019. https://primatology.net/2011/03/09/the-semantics-of-vervet-monkey-alarm-calls-
part-i/.
Hockett. 1960 ‘The Origin of Speech’. Scientific American. Vol 203. Pp 88–111. Reprinted in: Wang, William S-Y.
1982 Human Communication: Language and Its Psychobiological Bases. Scientific American.
‘How Many Languages Are There in the World?’ Ethnologue: Languages of the World 22nd Edition. Edited by
David M Eberhard, Gary F Simons, and Charles D Fennig. Ethnologue. 6 Jun. 2019. Web. 1 Jul. 2019.
www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-many-languages.
Huld, Nickee De Leon. ‘How Many Words Does the Average Person Know?’ Word Counter. WASAI LLC. N.d.
Web. 2 Jul. 2019. https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-person-know/.
Kaul, Chandrika. ‘History – British History in Depth: From Empire to Independence: The British Raj in India 1858–
1947’. BBC. BBC. 3 Mar. 2011. Web. 1 Jul. 2019.
www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/independence1947_01.shtml.
‘Lexical Facts’. The Economist. The Economist Newspaper. 29 May 2013. Web. 2 Jul. 2019.
www.economist.com/johnson/2013/05/29/lexical-facts.
MacGuill, Dan. ‘FACT CHECK: Did JK Rowling “Confirm Her Stance Against Transgender Women”?’

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 Snopes.com. Snopes.com. 27 Jun. 2019. Web. 4 Jul. 2019. www.snopes.com/fact-check/jk-rowling-
transphobia-transgender/.
Najarian, Hovak. ‘Still Life with Bouquet and Skull | Art for Proper 13C’. Hear What the Spirit Is Saying: Sunday
Morning at St. Hugh’s in Idyllwild, California. WordPress. 27 Jul. 2016. Web. 3 Jul. 2019.
https://smecsundaymorningforum.org/tag/still-life-with-bouquet-and-skull/.
Powers, Richard. ‘Lie Detector Eyeglasses Perfected: Civilization Collapses’. Six Word Stories. Six Word Stories. 4
Jan. 2009. Web. 6 Jul. 2019. www.sixwordstories.net/2009/01/lie-detector-eyeglasses-perfected-civilization-
collapses/.
‘Quark’. Cheese.com – World’s Greatest Cheese Resource. N.p. N.d. Web. 1 Jul. 2019. www.cheese.com/quark/.
Rubin, K, and A Silverberg. 1994. ‘A Report on Wiles’ Cambridge Lectures’. Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society. Vol 31, number 1. Pp 15–39. Web. 6 Jul. 2019. www.ams.org/journals/bull/1994-31-01/.
Sayfarth, Robert, Dorothy Cheney, and Peter Marler. ‘Noise: A Human History – The Varied Alarm Calls of the
Vervet Monkey. BBC News. BBC. 11 Mar. 2013. Web. 2 July 2019. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p016dgw1
Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale. Folger Digital Texts. Edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger
Shakespeare Library. Web. 6 Jul. 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org.
Szczegielniak, Adam. ‘What Is Language?’ OpenScholar@Harvard. Harvard Web Publishing. N.d. Web. 1 Jul.
2019. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/adam/files/what_is_language.ppt.pdf.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. ‘Vanitas’. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 25
Oct. 2015. Web. 3 Jul. 2019. www.britannica.com/art/vanitas-art.
‘Translation into Nyanja’. Google Translation. Google. N.d. Web. 1 Jul. 2019. www.google.com/search?
q=google%2Btranslate&rlz=1C1CHBD_S765US765&oq=google%2Btranslate&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.3288j0j7&sourceid=c
8.
‘Vanitas Still Life with Flowers and Skull’. WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions. Washington
University. N.d. Web. 3 Jul. 2019.
http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/flowerstilllifes/17thand18thcenturies/vanitasstilllifewithflowersand
Wacewicz, Sławomir, and Przemysław Żywiczyński. ‘Language Evolution: Why Hockett’s Design Features Are a
Non-Starter’. SpringerLink. Springer Netherlands. 19 Jul. 2014. Web. 1 Jul. 2019.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-014-9203-2.
Woodbury, Anthony C. ‘What Is an Endangered Language?’ Linguistic Society of America. Linguistic Society of
America. N.d. Web. 4 Jul. 2019. www.linguisticsociety.org/content/what-endangered-language.

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5 Knowledge and Indigenous Societies
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will:
• understand the practical and ethical challenges of attempting to define the word ‘Indigenous’
• understand common features of Indigenous knowledge systems
• recognize the impact of these features on the methods and tools used to develop knowledge
• understand the role of myth and ritual in establishing relationships between individuals and
communities
• recognize the threat to Indigenous knowledge systems and the importance of education to protect
these systems.

Learner profile
Caring
Can we empathize with other cultures and remain objective?

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Introduction
In October 1882, a 22-year-old Navajo man arrived in southern Pennsylvania, transported there from his native
homelands in the southwest of the United States. He was joining the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, established in
1879, and was given a new haircut, new clothes and a new name: Tom Torlino, a poor approximation of his Native
name: Hastiin To’Haali (Yurth). He was forbidden from then on to speak his native language. Students like Tom
would have learned English, maths and world history, as well as how to march, and how to play American football,
baseball and musical instruments. Instead of living free with his people, he now took his exercise in the school’s
gymnasium, ‘where liberal provision is made for exercising the muscles and fortifying the constitution against
sickness’ (‘Description of the grounds’). He was there, in the words of the school’s founder Richard Henry Pratt, in
order to gain ‘a civilized language, life, and purpose’ (‘Ephemera relating to Tom Torlino’). The idea was that this
school, and all it offered the boy, was ultimately for his own good.

ACTIVITY
1 Look at the two pictures of Tom Torlino and list the ways in which his appearance has changed.
2 Why do you think Richard Henry Pratt and the staff of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School were so
keen to change their students’ physical appearances?

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the United States’ expansion into the Great Plains of the North American
continent was nearly complete. California and Oregon on the west coast of the continent had already become states,
leaving only the Rocky Mountain territories and the western plains to be incorporated into the Union. The number of
Indigenous people that had been living in what would become the United States had been steadily diminishing since
the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, and at the close of the nineteenth century it was a widely-held
belief that the Native Americans and their cultures would ultimately disappear. While not a solution to the
diminishing numbers, assimilation into the dominant culture was considered at the time the only opportunity to
support individual Indigenous peoples; to save the individual, they would need to stop being part of their Native
tribe and become a fully enculturated citizen of the United States. Towards this goal, Richard Henry Pratt, a United
States Civil War commander, working in conjunction with the United States government, opened The Carlisle
Indian Industrial School in 1879. His goal was one he believed to be charitable:
When we cease to teach the Indian that he is less than a man; when we recognize fully that he is capable in
all respects as we are, and that he only needs the opportunities and privileges which we possess to enable
him to assert his humanity and manhood; when we act consistently towards him in accordance with that
recognition; when we cease to fetter him to conditions which keep him in bondage, surrounded by
retrogressive influences; when we allow him the freedom of association and the developing influences of
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 social contact – then the Indian will quickly demonstrate that he can be truly civilized, and he himself will
solve the question of what to do with the Indian. (‘Excerpt from Pratt’s speech’)
For 30 years, the school took young Native Americans away from their lands, their homes and their families and
sent them to the Carlisle School in southern Pennsylvania. Over the duration of the school’s life, nearly 10 000
Indigenous boys and girls were made to be less like what they were at birth and more like what the new country
thought they should be. They were forced to abandon their language and their religions and, under harsh military
discipline, learn English, Christianity and everything it meant to be a US citizen at the close of the nineteenth
century.

Pratt’s falsely charitable belief that he was improving their lives was built on a deeper assumption that the people
needed improving. Despite the fact that their cultures were getting on happily with life for thousands of years before
the Europeans arrived, there was the pervading notion that they needed to be ‘civilized’.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How have government education policies and systems compromised the transmission of Indigenous
knowledge?

Pratt argued that:

it is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest
of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life.
We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose.
Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language,
superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will
grow to possess a civilized language and habit. (‘Excerpt from Pratt’s speech’)
Pratt’s attitude towards the Indigenous populations, their cultures and their individual capacities was not uncommon;
it is a view shared by colonizing cultures the world over.
The United Nations estimates that there are currently over 370 million Indigenous peoples living across 70 countries
worldwide, or between 15 and 20 per cent of the world’s population. This may seem like more than you would
expect, but consider this: in 1492, Columbus arrived from Spain at the island of Hispaniola where Haiti and the

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Dominican Republic are today. It is estimated that at the time there were about 3 million Native people living there.
Within a generation, because of disease and violence, there remained about 11 000 (Lord). This, again, is the story
of colonization’s impact on Native populations around the world. As the cultures fade away, so too do their
languages, their rituals, their traditions and their unique way of life.
There is a huge diversity across the groups who are recognized as Indigenous, but there is one common theme to
their stories, that of being part of a group which is under threat by some other dominant society and culture. Caught
in the pervasive power of a ‘global society’, the Indigenous cultures in every corner of the world are struggling to
survive. As the world becomes more and more similar, the links to specific geographical regions and traditions
become harder and harder to maintain. Aside from Antarctica, each of the planet’s continents has been witness to the
process of colonial expansion and the weakening of Indigenous societies’ ties to their own lands. The histories and
challenges faced by Indigenous cultures have become more well-known over the last half century and the aim of this
chapter is to further explore what have been called ‘Indigenous knowledge systems’. Unfortunately, the Carlisle
School’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, was not alone in his assumption that the Indigenous systems were simply a
poor shadow of the ‘right’ way to know the world, but this chapter hopes to provide a framework and an
understanding of Indigenous knowledge systems in a way that brings out their value for the future.

ACTIVITY
Identify and research an Indigenous culture. It could be one in your own country or on the other side of
the world. Perhaps you belong to an Indigenous culture.
1 In what ways do you think that culture is under threat by a dominant culture?
2 How has the threatened culture tried to reassert itself in the face of the dominant culture?
3 Can you articulate the struggle for survival in terms of knowledge?
4 Keep in mind what you find out as you read through the rest of the chapter. Does what we discuss
have relevance to the culture you’ve studied?

Indeed, not all attempts to erase a culture are successful. Individual loyalty to one’s own culture and tradition is hard
to eradicate. Hastiin To’Haali remained at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as Tom Torlino until August 1886,
when he left and returned both to his childhood lands in New Mexico and to his people’s language, culture and
traditions. Pratt’s attempt to ‘Americanize’ Hastiin To’Haali wasn’t successful: Hastiin To’Haali lived out his life as
a successful rancher and medicine man and only made use of his Carlisle education when asked to write letters in
English or communicate with outsiders (Yurth). Hastiin To’Haali, as an individual, was lucky. The same cannot be
said for his culture or the other Indigenous cultures around the world. Boarding schools like Carlisle had already
been set up in his native lands and the westward expansion of the United States was unrelenting.
In 1868, the Navajo Nation held only 10 per cent of its ancestral homeland, first taken by Mexican expansion, then
later US expansion, though much of this has been reacquired (Birchfield). The 1872 census was the first genuine
attempt at identifying the number of ‘Indians’ across the US, counting about 38.5 million (Jobe). By 2010, the
number had dropped to 5.2 million (Norris, et al). There are only about 100 communities considered ‘uncontacted’
in the world today (meaning that they have not yet made any contact with any wider culture), but this number is
destined to change in the face of unstoppable globalization (Holmes). Although many Indigenous communities
remain strong and some are even growing, the challenges they face continue to be ever-present.

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Scope

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Defining Indigenous societies
One of the first challenges we are faced with in a discussion of Indigenous knowledge systems is the problem of
definition: how shall we define ‘Indigenous’? A definition is a form of knowledge, but applying a definition onto
something is also an act of creating knowledge.

Identifying an essential element

One way to develop a definition is to identify some essential element and link a definition to that essential element.
By doing so, all things which are defined in this way have that essential element. If we say that some thing or object
should be given some label or definition, we are thereby linking it to other things. Finding an essential element
shared by all ‘Indigenous’ knowledge systems, however, seems like a fruitless task. We can see that there are
communities which we call ‘Indigenous’ all over the world, and trying to describe just one feature that they all share
or one way in which they make knowledge in their communities and which would then differentiate them from all
non-Indigenous cultures or knowledge systems would be impossible. The fact that the UN seems confident enough
to offer a rough count of ‘Indigenous’ people, suggests, however, that there is a working definition.

DEEPER THINKING
Categorization
Much of our knowledge of the world is aimed at categorizing different things into various groups with
others that share similar features. Creating these categories and using them to describe objects is a
form of knowledge construction. Are there such things as ‘natural categories’ in the world or do we
create them? In what ways do our own desires and wishes and paradigms dictate how we impose
categories onto the world?

IA prompt
6 How does the way that we organize or classify knowledge affect what we know?

Identifying overlapping characteristics

A better option might be to identify a set of overlapping characteristics which different groups that we identify as
‘Indigenous share, but without expecting that there is some single characteristic that they all have in common. This
would be like what twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called a ‘family resemblance’. He suggested
that certain concepts do not have one clearly definable definition that can be applied to things in the world. He used
the concept of games as an example, suggesting that the things we call ‘games’ are all similar, but that there is no
single feature common to them all, like the way members of families resemble one another without having a single
defining feature (Wittgenstein). Think of your own family – you might look a bit like your parents and your siblings,
but there is probably not a single characteristic that you all have in common.
This might be a more fruitful way of defining ‘Indigenous’. There might be common characteristics which generally
capture what we think the term should mean. Starting with the acceptance that there are communities of people
around the world (the UN has counted them!) to whom we think the term ‘Indigenous’ applies, we may then explore
ways in which they resemble one another, even if we accept that each may have unique characteristics which are

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related to their unique circumstances and histories. Trying to fit all of these communities into a single definition
could never show an adequate appreciation of those circumstances and histories, but it might be possible to identify
elements that suggest they are distinct from other ways of knowing the world.

Cultural assumptions
In addition to the attempt to find a working definition of ‘Indigenous’ described here, there are further questions
about the politics of making such a distinction. You may have already recognized the problem we’re facing when
reading about Pratt’s goals for the Carlisle School. It’s pretty clear in his quotations on pages 148 and 149 that,
while we might recognize that, from his point of view, he was trying to help the Indigenous students at his school,
he nevertheless saw them and their culture as ‘primitive’, even calling them ‘savage’. Perhaps it can be argued that
Pratt was a product of his time and that his own cultural assumptions made it impossible for him to accept that a
culture so different from his own (and one that that had been happily living on its own for thousands of years).
However, his cultural assumptions about the Native Americans nevertheless pose a real problem and are likely to
render anything Pratt says or does as irretrievably prejudiced and bigoted. The question of how to responsibly define
and then responsibly reflect on Indigenous knowledge systems in the context of a wider dominating society is
contentious and explored more fully in the Ethics section of this chapter. We as writers are aware of this problem,
conscious as we are that we are not part of any Indigenous community. We make an attempt to define and reflect on
Indigenous knowledge systems, though, in the hopes that we can learn about these communities and reflect on our
own cultural perspectives.

TOK trap
One of the key points of the Theory of Knowledge course is that each of us views the world from a
perspective or through the lens of the beliefs and culture we are part of. It is a bit like viewing the world
through a set of spectacles, but not realizing that you’re wearing them.
Recognizing the impact of these background beliefs, expectations and paradigms is a challenge. This
often impacts TOK students’ work in two ways. Firstly, students very quickly think that they understand
or can speak about another culture to which they do not belong. More often than not, it is obvious to a
reader of the student’s work (your teachers and your examiners will spot it a mile away). Secondly,
students (but not just students!) can too easily judge the world from their own perspective (and
unconsciously believe that perspective to be the ‘right’ perspective). It is very easy and all too natural to
judge other cultures negatively, especially when they present ideas and behaviours which are not part of
your own culture.
This is not to suggest that a genuine critical reflection on another culture’s behaviour is not appropriate
and sometimes needed. However, take care not to assume from the outset that just because you are
unfamiliar with a practice or belief from another culture it is therefore not as good as your own, or that it
is in some way ‘wrong’. To conclude that some other culture’s behaviour is mistaken or wrong takes a
fair bit of charitable understanding and argument. To ‘pre-judge’ another culture’s behaviours or beliefs
is just a sign of prejudice.

None of this is to suggest that a working definition of ‘Indigenous’ isn’t possible or important to construct.
Identifying what we mean by Indigenous will help us to both understand the perspective of these communities as
well as understand and help to combat the challenges they might face.
Accepting that such definitions are contentious, the UN has avoided adopting any ‘official’ definition, but it has
offered a number of concepts which might serve as distinguishing features of these communities. Some
distinguishing features include:
• Having historical and pre-colonial or pre-settler connections to a specific geographical region and having distinct
linguistic, social, economic or political systems from the more dominant culture surrounding them. Being a ‘non-
dominant’ community is meant to bring out the fact that in many cases Indigenous cultures are those cultures who
have suffered the worst consequences of colonial expansion: it was generally their lands which were colonized by
more economically and militarily powerful cultures and it is Indigenous cultures which have found their way of
life threatened.
• Self-identification of members into that community and the acceptance by the community of that individual. In

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 other words, the community itself decides who are members of that community.
• The resolve to maintain the traditions and culture of that community in the face of a dominant society which
would otherwise easily subsume the community.
The UN accepts that trying to find definitions in this context is sometimes not helpful or even possible. It therefore
suggests that we should be trying to identify rather than define Indigenous communities, in the hopes that both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities can work together to maintain the traditions, culture and history which
would otherwise be lost (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues).

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Indigenous knowledge systems
If it is possible and right to develop a working definition of ‘Indigenous societies’ in order to better understand them
and better understand their relation to other types of communities of knowers, we must now get a handle on what we
mean by ‘Indigenous knowledge systems’.
Indigenous communities often have unique ways of knowing about the world around them which are often quite
different to those systems of knowledge that are studied elsewhere in the Theory of Knowledge course.
In TOK, the phrase ‘knowledge systems’ is a title reserved only for Indigenous knowledge and religious knowledge.
How is this sort of knowledge different from other forms of knowledge, particularly those forms captured in the
areas of knowledge (AOK)? One difference is that the knowledge systems of Indigenous cultures and religions are
informal in opposition to the AOKs, which tend to have more formal structures. Science and history both have a
reasonably well-defined method; they have ‘rules’ or established general principles which govern how knowledge
ought to be constructed. The informality of Indigenous and religious systems, however, suggests that the methods
used by these communities is varied and might incorporate methods that are unique and one-off events. For
example, some of these methods might incorporate visions, a loyalty to a shared history and a set of traditions or
even centuries of simple trial and error. Some of these methods will be explored in the Methods and tools section of
this chapter.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
In what ways do different AOKs and communities of knowers create structures which make their
knowledge different from others?

One of the features of knowledge systems we are considering here, as opposed to the AOKs, is that both Indigenous
knowledge and religious knowledge are far more absolute than the knowledge of the AOKs and they impose a far
greater influence on the individual. Knowledge in the areas of knowledge might be seen as in a state of flux, with
knowledge changing over time with new evidence and discoveries, whereas one of the features of Indigenous and
religious systems is that they are relatively closed. This is because in many respects they hold and confer cultural
knowledge which people identify with, so an individual’s relationship to that knowledge is different. The intellectual
tradition from which the International Baccalaureate has emerged, for example, starts with the assumption that
knowledge is a sort of commodity that we gain, trade, construct and sometimes overturn. But knowledge in
Indigenous cultures is intimately related to an individual’s sense of identity. Being part of an Indigenous community
means holding on to knowledge as part of your core. This is the tragedy of the decline of Indigenous knowledge:
peoples’ identities are being lost as well. We will consider this more in terms of language later.

Characteristics of Indigenous knowledge systems

What follows here is an attempt to outline a few of the interesting characteristics that seem to be familiar across
different Indigenous knowledge systems wherever they are in the world. These characteristics might serve as
relevant comparison points with what is normally considered ‘western’ or Enlightenment scientific knowledge
systems. Chapter 9 (The Natural Sciences) and Chapter 10 (The Human Sciences) are more firmly rooted in this
tradition, so while reading this chapter you might like to refer to those chapters to look for connections and
contrasts.
By way of developing a contrast, we might consider some of the fundamental starting points of what we might call
Enlightenment science. Prior to the seventeenth century, much of the European tradition of knowledge construction
was what we might consider deductive. This means it began with what tradition and authority said was the case and
then worked to develop theories which aligned what was seen in the world with those accepted principles and
authorities. The advent of ‘modern’ science was different in that it prioritized observation and placed the
development of theories which explained the observations later.
One of the hallmarks of modern science might be called scientific reductionism. This was the idea that any problem
or explanation should start with the breakdown of problems into smaller parts, then the development of an
understanding of the objects and mechanisms at this smaller level, then an explanation of the larger problems on
what was discovered at the lower level. This is why, when you study life sciences, you are often working hard to
understand the smallest units of life – cells – and even lower down you might be investigating chemical reactions in
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those cells at the molecular level. The assumption is that if you really want to know what’s going on, you look at the
fundamental entities and forces at work. Another basic assumption in this process is that the observer and what is
being observed are distinct: observers are meant to distance themselves mentally from what is being studied. Being
‘objective’ means trying to understand the world without imposing our own values on it; it seems that one’s own
perspective is in fact damaging to the knowledge gained. Moreover, a truly scientific view of the world disqualifies
any explanations that reference or utilize any spiritual or religious component; if it’s not directly observable in some
way then it is not scientific.
Indigenous knowledge systems are significantly different in three ways, which we will briefly mention here and then
spend more time unpacking in the Perspectives section. They are illustrated in the cases studies we present.
• Indigenous knowledge systems generally prioritize a deeply relational approach to explaining the world around
us, building a belief that we are all related to one another (especially those in a particular community) and that we
are deeply related to the natural world around us. These relationships bring about interdependencies: the
awareness both that our actions have direct consequences and that the events and processes around us have a
direct effect on our own actions and circumstances. These relationships and interdependencies often extend
beyond the natural world and into the ancestral and spiritual realm.
• This brings us to the second element characteristic of an Indigenous knowledge system, namely the collapse of the
sacred and secular dimensions of the world. Indigenous explanations of the world incorporate both elements of
the world around us, and so are considered ‘dualistic’, and reference spirits and personal beings beyond the here
and now, including deities and ancestors. Often, physical objects in the world (mountains, rivers, forests) are the
manifestations of spirits, so engaging with these objects (climbing mountains, navigating rivers, walking through a
forest) are direct engagements with these spirits.
• Finally, Indigenous systems investigate the world using a holistic perspective that often investigates and explores
the connections between all outward elements of the world but also the internal and spiritual. Our physical and
emotional well-being is directly related to the well-being and interactions of the world around us and the
interconnections of the spirits and people living within it. This holistic view of the world, however, often
prioritizes local interactions and connections between specific places and people. What this means is that the way
that this knowledge is discovered, discussed and transmitted, requires an appreciation of far more than unbiased
observation and cold rationality. It requires the individual to engage with a local culture and a particular time and
a particular place. Knowing about one’s world is to know about a wider process, and again, underscores the deep
connections and relationships between individuals, their communities and the world.
What this suggests, then, is that Indigenous knowledge systems are attempting something different; they seek to
explain the relationships that we have to our place and our histories. They therefore don’t break down the world into
smaller parts, but rather explain the world at a far broader level, and try to explain different elements.
Table 5.1 summarizes these differences between Indigenous and Enlightenment knowledge systems.

Table 5.1 Differences between Indigenous and Enlightenment knowledge systems

Characteristics of Indigenous Characteristics of Enlightenment knowledge systems
knowledge systems
Holistic: the belief that the particular must Reductionist: the belief that to understand the whole, one
be understood in terms of the whole must understand the smallest elements
Relational: emphasis is on how human Objective: often understands the ‘natural’ world and the
beings and the world relate to one human world to be distinct, that the natural world is a
another resource for human beings to use for their own needs
Secular and the sacred are unified: The natural world is the only world: a full understanding of
natural and supernatural forces are both the world includes only the secular or natural world. No
real elements of the world around us reference to the supernatural is needed or desired

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Explanation
We saw in Chapter 1 that an explanation is a description of some thing, system or phenomenon. But
beyond simply describing, an explanation accounts for why the thing is the way it is or what it does or
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what it’s good for. What concepts and language are used in those explanations, however, isn’t
immediately obvious and may be different depending on the communities of knowers giving the
explanation. In the case of Indigenous knowledge systems, the sorts of phenomena being explained will
incorporate the types of objects these communities experience in the world, which we will see can
incorporate spirits like myths, visions or rituals that science wouldn’t accept as real. The methods used
to explain such spirits and their interaction with the world will require different methods than those used
in scientific explanation.

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Perspectives
If it makes sense to say that there is an ‘Indigenous’ perspective on the world, we must take care not to assume that
this is in anyway set in stone, or that there won’t be significant differences across cultures in relation to the details of
each. However, we might continue to develop the ideas and implications of the characteristics set out above using
genuine Indigenous cultural beliefs and practices to unpack them.

IA prompt
32 What makes a good explanation?

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Understanding the natural world
From the characteristics above, it is clear that one major theme for Indigenous culture and knowledge is the natural
world. As we will see, Indigenous knowledge systems rarely make a clear break between the natural and spiritual
forces in the world. This means that an Indigenous individual’s understanding of the natural world and their
relationship to it will strike some as significantly different from what non-Indigenous cultures say about it.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does our culture determine what we know?

The Enlightenment scientific perspective

Explanations of the natural world from the Enlightenment scientific perspective assume that the Universe is like a
big, incredibly complex machine. Everything we see happening in the world is the result of natural ‘laws’ which
describe the events we see. There is no personal aspect to these laws; they are simply rules that the Universe follows
with no intent or purpose. While there might be mysterious forces at work which we don’t currently understand, a
genuinely scientific view will never expect those mysterious forces to be anything other than non-personal, non-
conscious mechanical forces. One prevalent belief since the Enlightenment has been to use the objective distinction
between observer and observed to suggest that this is the hallmark of modern science: to do science properly one
must step back and observe and reflect on the world as if it were entirely separate from us. Even when we try to
understand ourselves (in the human sciences) we consider ourselves as objects and try to find ‘laws’ which describe
our behaviours. From this perspective, a method of understanding the world which describes spirits at work in the
natural forces is the essence of a ‘primitive’ worldview (Kidwell).
The ultimate goal of this paradigm is to control those forces or put them to our use; once we understand the
workings of the natural world, we can then exploit those workings for our own desired ends. Harnessing the power
of steam, the development of the combustion engine and the production of nuclear power plants are the result of a
scientific understanding of those forces (constructing knowledge about them), all in the service of the desire and
exercise of control of those forces.

The natural world perspective

Many Indigenous cultures start from the assumption that the natural world surrounding us is infused with the
purposeful actions of forces working within nature or working at the direct command of some unseeing being.
The Subanen people of the Philippines is one example. Their beliefs are characterized as a sort of animism,
something common in Indigenous knowledge systems. They believe that the world is the creation of Sha’po
Magbabya, the supreme creator of all things and that other spirits live in the world, particularly in unique features
like uncommonly large trees, isolated caves and tall mountain peaks. Because of this belief, they perform rituals
before using natural resources (Quilo 119). Similarly, the experience and explanation of natural disasters become an
interaction between people and these spirits:
Earthquake is caused by the movement of the pig owned by a spirit named Baebolan. It is believed that the
world rests on the back of pig Baebolan. And when it moves, an earthquake occurs. To make the
earthquake stop, the pig has to be made to stop moving through the shouts of the people saying, ‘Bwaaa!
Bwaaa!’ (Quilo 120)
Another example of this comes from the study of Indigenous women in northwestern Canada, who tell many stories
of the spirits living in the glaciers around their community:
Glaciers in these stories listen: a thoughtless remark promoted by human hubris may trigger an unexpected
surge. Glaciers also see and have ‘eyes like the moon’. They resent humans looking directly at them, so in
the past people darkened their faces and more recently began to wear dark glasses to conceal their gaze.
Glaciers have a sense of smell: their olfactory abilities are especially astute and they are particularly
offended by odours arising from ‘cooking with grease’. (Quilo 121)

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does it matter if one culture describes natural phenomena one way, while another describes them
another way?

Understanding our relationship with the natural world

One question which arises from this fundamental difference in paradigm is how best to know or to understand the
natural world. From the perspective of the scientific paradigm, we must observe and reflect on the world; our
understanding of ourselves as social beings is not relevant. An objective rationality takes over and we remove
ourselves as human beings from the attempt to understand. In the Indigenous paradigm, however, any attempt to
understand the world is an attempt to understand the desires, beliefs and purpose of the beings at work in the world.
In other words, to understand the world we must understand our relationship to it. Acting on our understanding of
the world, then, is not about exerting control over the world, but about establishing personal relationships with the
forces at work in the world. We do not manipulate or command the world, rather we engage through communication
with the world, asking, requesting and listening, approaching the world with humility, sacrifice and patience. In
many cases, these interpersonal relationships are understood through the use of myth and are developed and
maintained through ritual. These two methods of developing knowledge in Indigenous systems are discussed in later
sections.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How might our approach to understanding the natural world influence the way we engage with it?

This approach emphasizes the Indigenous belief shared by many communities that we human beings are fully
embedded in the world we are trying to describe; but we are not simply an object to study, we are part of an
interrelated social environment. Describing how the world is, is partly describing the desires, motives and purpose of
the beings in the natural forces we see (Kidwell 212).
What then are we to say about these two perspectives? One in which the world is fully explained through a
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description of the natural laws and impersonal forces as if the world is a big and complex machine, the other in
which we describe the world in terms of spirits and unseen beings (or beings ‘seen’ through the wind and the
seasons changing and in the movement of rivers)? EA Burtt, a philosopher of science writing in 1932, suggested that
perhaps there’s nothing in the world which will make this decision for us, but rather something in us which compels
us to choose one over another (Kidwell 212).
Some might argue that the paradigm in which we are separate from the world, where understanding the world
requires us to step back from it and construct knowledge of the natural forces so we can harness and exploit those
forces and resources, has led us to the brink of disaster. Our track record in maintaining a healthy respect of the
limited resources of the world and promoting a healthy environment is not very good. Might this be because our
paradigm ignores our personal relationships to the world?
One interesting practical outcome is to think about the differences on how we characterize the threat of climate
change.
The way that many Indigenous cultures relate to the land itself has come into conflict with other notions of
‘ownership’. In the eighteenth century, philosopher John Locke emerged as one of the heroes of the Enlightenment
because he wrote convincingly about the basic human rights individuals have in relation to their government.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do the natural sciences provide a more effective way to understand and engage with climate change
than Indigenous traditions? Are Indigenous traditions incompatible with an understanding of the natural
world provided by the natural sciences?

Locke argued specifically for an understanding of ‘ownership’ that placed the emphasis on the labour of individuals.
If a person worked the land, this would be the basis of his or her claim to ‘own’ it. ‘Working the land’ meant things
like farming, mining, building or otherwise transforming the land into something that the owner desired. Having put
that work into the land, kings and queens therefore, could not morally take that land away. When the Europeans
transported this view of land ownership to the New World of the Americas (and we can see the same thing
happening wherever the Europeans sailed to) they found land devoid of any recognizable ‘labour’. They found
virgin forests, untilled land and pristine empty lands wherever they looked. In many cases, the people they did find
(the great cities and civilizations of Meso-America excluded of course) were mobile, following game and the
seasons.
… tis labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing; and let any one consider, what the
difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco, or sugar, sown with wheat or barley; and an
acre of the same land lying in common, without husbandry upon it, and he will find, that the improvement
of labour makes the far greater part of the value. (John Locke, Second Treatise on Government Book II,
Chapter 5, section 40)

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In this quote, Locke is suggesting that what makes land valuable is the transforming of it to produce something, that
land in its ‘natural’ state is land that has not yet become valuable. From their European perspective, therefore, the
lands in the New World were un-owned, and just waiting to belong to someone, to be transformed and exploited. It
was to be made ‘productive’.
However, Indigenous cultures often relate to the land quite differently. The Lakota idea of ‘homeland’, for instance,
was built around a notion of ‘care’ rather than ‘labour’, and care in this sense meant looking after what was already
there rather than transforming it. The natural environment is already home to unseen spirits, gods and ancestors in
many Indigenous knowledge systems and one outcome of this is that the land is already what it should be. Care for
the land meant caring for the spirits all around them and protecting that land as it was (Martinez 87). Many of the
myths and rituals of Indigenous peoples are aimed at reminding individuals of the need for this care.

CASE STUDY
Marovo Lagoon

The Solomon Islands are found about 2000 km north of Brisbane, Australia, and are so named because
when Spanish explorers found gold there in the sixteenth century, they believed it to be home to the
fabled King Solomon’s mines. (King Solomon was said to be an exceedingly rich king of Israel who
reigned in the tenth century BCE. The source of his wealth was a matter of mystery and explorers,
motivated by greed, did their best to find it.)
The Solomon Islands have been the focus of colonizing attempts by Spain, The Netherlands, France
and Britain. The islands gained independence in 1976. Marovo Lagoon, one of the world’s largest coral

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lagoons at over 700 square kilometres is located there. The Marovo peoples have lived there for
thousands of years and are seeing their natural landscapes on the islands exploited by transnational
organizations who extract and export the rich natural resources of the islands. From 2005, a new
UNESCO resource for schools was created called Reef and Rainforest: An Environmental Encyclopedia
of Marovo Lagoon. Local teachers and researchers have been encouraged to conduct local research
and generate content relevant to the local communities (Hviding). Accompanying the text is a teacher’s
resource and lesson plan booklet, which delivers a scientific curriculum focused on the local environment
and, when appropriate, using the local languages for instruction and for assignments. One of the key
aspects of the curriculum is the ‘Home assignment sheet for teachers and schools in the Marovo area:
village level documentation and transmission of local environmental knowledge’, which explicitly uses
elders and people native to the area in the education of the children. One lesson plan asks teachers to:
take a group walk from the seashore up into the forest. Ask a man or woman who knows about this to
come with you as resource person. Find and talk about some of the useful plants listed below. Bring
back to the village leaves, flowers or fruit of the plants you find. Then find the plants in the book and talk
about them. If you speak Hoava or Vanunu, use the book’s name lists in those languages. (Hviding 48)

ACTIVITY
Use the QR code to view the UNESCO study guide Reef and Rainforest: An Environmental
Encyclopedia of Marovo Lagoon.
1 What do you think is the effect of the students learning science through direct reference to the local
environment, engaging with the local villagers (who may not be teachers) and communicating and
writing assignments in the local language?
2 How might this benefit the Indigenous population and contribute to the Marovo Indigenous knowledge
system?
3 Are there ways that this might be limiting?
4 Are there benefits of learning science in this way that could not be achieved were the instruction to be
given entirely in the dominant language of English?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Responsibility
In Chapter 1 we discussed the relationship between knowledge and responsibility. This responsibility
can be thought of as being written into the very understanding of the world. In many Indigenous
knowledge systems, the individual’s place in the environment is characterized as a relationship between
conscious beings. This immediately creates an ethical commitment between the individual and the world
around them, which is analogous to our ethical commitments to people around us. In some cases, we
are directly responsible for promoting the well-being of people (like our friends and family) and in other
cases we are minimally responsible for not damaging others’ well-being (like strangers around us).

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Methods and tools
Earlier, we explored common features of Indigenous knowledge systems as being relational, holistic and
incorporating both the sacred and secular. These characteristics of the nature of Indigenous knowledge mean that the
methods of constructing and developing knowledge are different as well. Knowledge that assumes direct
connections to a world populated by spirits and ancestors requires a different approach than that which we find in
Enlightenment science.
Like all knowledge, Indigenous knowledge is developed within a culture and is heavily influenced by that culture. In
contrast to the ‘universal’ aspirations of Enlightenment science, Indigenous knowledge is generally very much
connected to a specific people or place, and this is reflected in the methods by which it is produced.
Look, for example, at the poster on the next page, which has been published by the First Nations Education Steering
Committee (FNESC) in British Columbia, Canada, in order to help educators in British Columbia approach
Indigenous knowledge in their classrooms.

ACTIVITY
Consider the various ‘Principles of Learning’ listed on the poster and discuss what you think this tells you
about the nature of Indigenous knowledge systems.

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Language
One of the clearest ways of differentiating between cultures is through language. In your own IB Programme (if you
are a full DP candidate), you are expected to take two languages: your ‘mother tongue’ (in Group 1) and an acquired
language (in Group 2). Generally, for your acquired language, part of the knowledge you gain, in addition to
learning both propositional knowledge about the language (eg, ‘fromage’ in French and ‘cheese’ in English mean
the same thing), and ability knowledge about the language (ie, you know how to conjugate regular French verbs),
you’ll also learn about the culture of the peoples that speak that language. There is, in other words, a very close link
between knowing a culture and knowing a language; knowing how to speak your own language binds you to your
cultural community in a deep and significant way.

Imagine, however, if your government officially mandated that you should not speak your mother tongue or follow
your cultural traditions. Indigenous peoples all over the world have suffered this fate. Under the belief that
Indigenous cultures were doomed to fade away, many governments, in a supposed attempt to look after the welfare
of Indigenous people, forced a programme of ‘assimilation’ on members of Indigenous communities.
The United States Civilization Fund Act of 1819 and the Japanese Former Natives Protection Law of 1899 are two
examples where it was assumed that the native populations were destined to disappear, so to help the remaining
members of the communities, their children were forced into boarding schools, their land was taken and distributed
to the wider community and their cultural traditions outlawed. The goal was to remove any distinction between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, except that the only ones to lose out were the Indigenous peoples.
Even while many of these laws have been repealed and countries all over the world are now trying to foster the

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languages of their native populations, many are still destined to die out. In this section we look at the unique role
that Indigenous language plays in the Indigenous knowledge systems and how conserving Indigenous languages
maintains a whole system of values and environmental knowledge that otherwise would be lost.

The UN estimates that there are 2680 Indigenous languages at danger of being lost, and declared 2019 the
international year of Indigenous languages, to bring this to the attention of the world. The potential loss of a
community’s language represents the loss of that community’s identity.
For example, look at this quotation from Minnie Degawan, Director of the Indigenous and Traditional Peoples
Program at Conservation International:
In my community, the Kankanaey Igorot [an Indigenous group living in the Cordillera region of the
Philippines], we have the concept of inayan, which basically prescribes the proper behaviour in various
circumstances. It encapsulates the relationship of the individual to the community and to the ancestors. It
goes beyond simply saying ‘be good’; it carries the admonition that ‘the spirits/ancestors will not
approve’. Because many of the young people now no longer speak the local language and use English or
the national language instead, this notion and value is being lost. The lack of dialogue between elders and
the youth is exacting a toll, not just in terms of language but in ancestral ethical principles. (Degawan)

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
In what ways does the loss of Indigenous languages signify a loss of knowledge and cultural diversity?

In cases where the culture’s language is spoken at home but the dominant language is taught as the only language at
school, the dominant language and its culture comes to be seen as the culture that students should be learning, that in
the public world the ‘right’ language is the language of the dominant culture. This message, then, reinforces the
belief that their own native culture is not as important.

CASE STUDY
The Mayangna, Nicaragua
Francisco Miguel Castro, a bilingual language teacher in Nicaragua and member of the Indigenous
Mayangna people, says that learning their own community’s language is important because students
‘have more freedom to express their knowledge, what they observe, their reality, and moreover, they
have a greater sense of pride – that they are part of a language that is their own language, and they now
feel they have the same rights as other nations’ (UNESCO 2017a). For example, the Mayangna people
have been living in the forests of Nicaragua for centuries and have developed a thorough knowledge of
the plants and animals in the area and of how to live harmoniously with those plants and animals. The
gold mining and cattle industry is now threatening their homeland forests, but the education system
(which was conducted entirely in Spanish) didn’t engage directly with this threat. The Spanish language
instruction was not related to them at all and didn’t have any connection to the perils of their local
forests.
In 2010, a new initiative was launched to teach the students primarily in their native language with
Spanish taught as a second language, meaning that the language was taught through the lens of the
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immediate needs of the community. Students were able to learn the knowledge of their community first,
including the local fish and turtle species which traditionally have been a major food source, but which
have been threatened by the loss of local habitat. Learning in their own language has given them access
to the relevant knowledge and concepts which will empower them to use that knowledge to protect their
land and their culture.

ACTIVITY
Consider your own school’s curricula – or the choices that your school makes in terms of IB options.
1 What are the messages being sent?
2 What values are demonstrated by those choices?
3 What other choices are available and how might they have suggested different values?
Critically reflecting on your curriculum in other contexts provides good TOK insights: we will do this in
relation to history in Chapter 11.

As a TOK student, you will be aware of how different languages pose genuine problems for translation. It is not
always the case that a concept which is captured by a word in one language can easily be translated into another
language. This issue also comes up when working with Indigenous cultures whose background and linguistic
evolution might be entirely different to any of the ‘modern’ languages used by the non-Indigenous populations of
the world. Sometimes this unique linguistic evolution has interesting consequences which illustrates on one hand the
biological, similarities between all humans, and the deep cultural differences between us on the other. These cultural
differences in language seem to have a deep effect on how we perceive the world, how we actually see the world.

Learner profile
Communicators
How does knowing about another’s culture help you communicate with them more effectively?

For instance, the colour terms available to different cultures in their respective languages show how important
language is when describing what we normally consider objective facts. Comparisons between the use of colour
terms between cultures show that toddlers who do not yet speak their culture’s language are equally good at
distinguishing between the whole range of colours, suggesting that biologically, human beings are born equally
skilled at perceiving colour. Once children learn their language, however, an interesting phenomenon occurs; we
seem to lose the ability to make certain colour distinctions that speakers from other linguistic traditions can easily
make.
Research has shown that the ability to distinguish certain colours varies between English speakers and those in the
Berinmo culture of Papua New Guinea and the Himba culture of northern Namibia. Whereas English speakers use
many colour terms, the Himba and Berinmo cultures use only five, which means that English speakers will
categorize the colours they see under very different headings to members of these Indigenous cultures. The effect of
this is that when one language doesn’t discriminate between subtle differences in the hues of colour, that is, when
the same colour term is used for different hues, the speaker of that language struggles to identify the difference.

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Use the QR code to have a go at a test that was used as part of a study comparing the ability of English speakers and
members of the Himba culture to differentiate between different colours. Were you able to identify the different
shade of green? Probably not easily. A member of the Himba tribe would likely have little problem. The website
also contains full colour charts showing the different ways that English speakers and the Himba people categorize
colours. You might like to create similar tests for your classmates. Would you, for instance, reliably see the
difference between the colours ‘dumbu’ (at 5YR/7) and ‘serandu’ (at 10R/7) when they are not directly next to one
another?

Berinmo speakers similarly struggled to see the difference between certain shades of blue-green that English
speakers have no problems with at all, because English uses different words to capture the difference: ‘blue’ and
‘green’. In the Berinmo language the same word applies to both colours. However, the inverse is also true; despite
having more colour categories, English speakers struggled to distinguish between what the Berinmo easily
distinguish and use different terms for: ‘nol’ and ‘wor’. With these colour terms they are able to spot differences
immediately where English speakers cannot (Davidov, et al and Bornstein).
What this suggests is that the influence of culture and language on how we describe and articulate what we can see
has huge ramifications for what we claim to be real features of the world. The Himba people cannot deny that they
see a clear difference between a ‘dumbu’ square and a ‘serandu’ square, even if English speakers simply cannot see
it.
This example also emphasizes the point that to genuinely understand the world from another culture’s perspective
we would need to have a thorough understanding of that culture’s language. Learning the Himba or Berinmo colour
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words, however, might not be enough if we cannot apply them meaningfully, and this might not be possible without
actually living with or even growing up in that culture. They have spent their whole life applying their colour
concepts in a way that someone stepping into that language might not be able to do.

IA prompt
10 What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge?

CASE STUDY
Rapa Nui

Rapa Nui – also known as Isla de Pascua or Easter Island – is an island in the South Pacific, 3600 km
west of Chile. It was annexed by Chile in 1888. It is believed that the first inhabitants arrived there in the
thirteenth century from the surrounding Polynesian islands (although the nearest island is still over 2000
km away). The Rapa Nui culture is famous for producing the nearly 1000 moai statues. UNESCO
designated the entire island a World Heritage site in 2015. Today, nearly 8000 people live on the island,
of whom 3512 consider themselves part of the Indigenous Rapa Nui community.
In 2016, the Chilean government and UNESCO surveyed the status of the native Rapa Nui language
speakers, finding that over 70 per cent of people over 60 speak the native language, but this drops to
half of all speakers over the age of 40, and it drops again to barely one third of the population in the 20–
39 age range (UNESCO 2017b). The vast majority of these young adults do not pass on the native
language to their children, instead opting for the dominant culture’s language, Spanish. Only 10 per cent
of school children today speak their culture’s native language, down from 23 per cent in 1997 (Sopova
and Ortega). The language is dying:
‘If there are no children who speak our language, and we as adults die, when these children are
adults and become parents, they won’t speak the language and will not be able to teach it to
their children’, laments Vicky Haoa, member of the Rapa Nui Language Academy. She dreams
‘that my language will not disappear, because language is part of our way of being, of our
thoughts, our feelings, our joys and much more. If our language disappears, one cannot speak
of the existence of a culture called Rapa Nui. We show who we are through our language’.
(UNESCO 2017b)

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Ritual
Much of the learning that you are used to takes place sitting in a classroom and listening to teachers, or reading
books, articles and textbooks. Within the context of the classroom, your teachers develop and implement any
number of different activities and processes which they hope will provide you opportunities to perform well in
exams and ultimately to lead you towards mastery in the subject. This type of ‘formal education’ is common across
the world, and is an example of instances of genuine instruction in all cultures – instances where an expert takes the
time to focus on consciously deciding what needs to be known, thinks about how best to pass it on and then actually
engages with learners.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What is the role of rituals in acquiring and sharing knowledge?

‘Knowledge’ in this very familiar picture takes the form of ideas and beliefs which we examine, consider, test and
then ultimately accept or not. If accepted, we store this knowledge in our minds and use it to help make sense of
other ideas later. Many of the methods we employ in our areas of knowledge suggest then that we should remain
open to testing those beliefs to make sure they are still justified according to the evidence we continue to gather.
Our exploration of Indigenous knowledge systems opens up new ways of thinking about how knowledge is
conveyed and how we relate to that knowledge once we’ve accepted it. One method by which communities ensure
that knowledge is passed on to individuals is through ritual. Rituals are used in all sorts of societies and
communities as a way of passing on knowledge and an exploration of this method highlights two important elements
of knowledge in these communities.
• Firstly, the knowledge and beliefs conveyed through ritual are embedded in a way that is different from the way
knowledge is ‘held’ when it is passed on through books and teachers. Often, the knowledge gained through rituals
becomes part of the non-conscious, pre-reflective attitudes and dispositions of the knower, rather than being
something that the knower has considered and tested and accepted. Very often, the beliefs gained through ritual
are far stronger than beliefs we accept and sometimes we are not fully aware that we have these embedded beliefs.
This sort of knowledge can of course be developed in ways other than ritual, but one of the points of ritual is to
change the knower in a far deeper way than what can be characterized as ‘teaching’ or ‘learning’.
• Secondly, we might suggest that there are certain types of knowledge that might need to be conveyed in other,
more subtle, ways than the traditional learning occurring in classrooms and libraries. Some knowledge helps bind
communities together, individuals to individuals, and Indigenous societies are often bound together in a way that
is far more interdependent and communal than thinking about these communities merely as ‘cultures’ might
suggest. We might, for instance, suggest that there is a North American or European ‘culture’, a way of living
which has broad similarities across the region, but those similarities don’t bind individuals to each other or to the
local community in a way that is nearly as strong as what is often seen in Indigenous cultures.
Being part of an Indigenous culture is to be, to exist, in the world in a certain way. A way which sometimes is not
learned through books and lectures, but through other avenues such as participating in rituals or exploring myths.
Rituals are things people do but they are also a way of aligning one’s personal knowledge and experience to the
community’s. Some of the knowledge which binds those communal communities is not something learned in the
classroom or through books; it needs to be far stronger than that and ritual might be the best way for an individual to
accept and embed that knowledge.

What is a ritual?
Ritual is not habitual behaviour. You might have a morning ritual in which you do things the same way and in the
same order. You might brush your teeth in a particular way, then lay out your clothes for the day in a certain way,
then set up and eat your breakfast in a particular way and even make your way to school in a particular way.
Repetitive behaviour is often called ‘ritual’, but there is a more profound meaning related to knowing.
One way to understand this difference is to think about something which looks like a ritual but isn’t. Suppose, for
instance, that you are acting in a school play in which you are expected to take part in a wedding. This is not a real
wedding. You might undergo exactly the same actions and you might even say exactly the same things, but taking
part in the genuine ritual imposes a new status upon you; you end up in quite a different situation than when you
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started or you have, through the ritual, renewed the status that you’re aiming for. The difference between play-acting
and a genuine ritual, then, is that the individuals involved (both those participating in the ritual and those attending
the ritual), change during the process. Getting married, for instance, obviously means that the participants have
entered into a new relationship, but also that the community recognizes that new relationship. Everyone, in effect,
has changed.

CASE STUDY
Sateré-Mawé initiation rites
One example of such a ritual in the context of an Indigenous community comes from the Sateré-Mawé
initiation rites. This Amazonian rainforest tribe uses a ritual designed to initiate young men into adulthood
in which the men place their hands into specially designed gloves which hold hundreds of bullet ants.
The stings of these ants are thought to be the most painful sting in the animal kingdom. Having
undergone this ritual successfully, the young man is thus entitled to the rights and privileges of
adulthood, including marriage and joining warriors and hunters. For the Sateré-Mawé men, however, it
seems that once is not enough: the men will undergo this ritual a number of times throughout their life,
each time renewing their status as a warrior in the group. The first QR code below will enable you to
watch a National Geographic video of this ritual. The second QR code provides more information about
the ritual.

How is this particular ritual related to knowledge? In Singapore, children become ‘adults’ at the age of
21, and we know this because of a law (‘Children and Young Persons Act’). All countries will have these
legal definitions of adults and when the conditions relate to age, the individual becomes a legal adult at
the stroke of midnight.

People in the Sateré-Mawé community, however, use the ritual mentioned above not simply as a way of
telling others that these men have become adults but as a means also of justifying that knowledge.
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Undergoing that ritual creates the conditions on which the knowledge that the child has become an adult
can be established. While an individual might undergo all sorts of painful and frightening experiences
during their adolescence, these experiences are not what ‘turns’ the boy into the adult. The community
has established a particular event and it is this event, not any other, by which the truth of the claim, ‘you
are an adult’ is established.

One definition of ritual highlights the fact that rituals are a form of communication. Ritual scholar Roy Rappaport
defines ritual as ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not encoded by
the performers’ (Rappaport 175). The idea here is that through ritual, messages or knowledge are communicated
from the culture to the performers of the ritual. When he says ‘utterances not encoded by the performers’, Rappaport
is pointing out that rituals are one way that the shared knowledge and cultural information of the community is
passed on to individuals in that community. The performers do not themselves determine the meaning (encode) of
the ritual, they participate in that meaning. He says that ‘participants transmit information concerning their own
current physical, psychic, or sometimes social status to themselves and to other participants’ (Rappaport 179). This
information is meaningful only in the context of the shared beliefs and knowledge of the wider community. This is
why sometimes when we watch the behaviour of people from other cultures, particularly when watching rituals, we
find it difficult to make sense of what they are doing. Without being part of the culture and understanding the
context, the rituals might not make sense, but participating in the ritual over and over again is one way for an
individual to come to understand that culture.
Rappaport describes several key characteristics of ritual, including:
• formality – actions which are abstract and divorced from everyday activity
• repetitiveness – they happen again and again, the same way each time without alteration
• effectiveness – participating in a ritual creates a change in you and your status in society and among other people
• earnestness – participating in ritual is far more than just ‘going through the motions’.
A ritual’s formality refers to the processes and actions involved. They are purposefully not part of the normal
everyday range of behaviours. This ‘formality’ is meant to indicate that something special is happening and the
formality of the event underscores an important point: that the events of the ritual are each important and any
deviation from the ritual will mean that it is not effective. If the Sateré-Mawé boys, for instance, show too much
emotion or throw the gloves off before the time is up, then the ritual has not been effective, and they are not
considered ‘men’. Similarly, in the wedding ceremony, if the people getting married don’t, for example, exchange
their vows in the presence of someone who has been given the responsibility of officiating, then all the vowing in
the world won’t necessarily mean that they have been successful in getting married.
The formal actions of a ritual can change over time and in different contexts. There are as many different wedding
ceremonies as there are cultures, but this is part of the point of ritual. That the participants and observers have
chosen a particular set of formal actions is partly what binds them together.
The effectiveness and earnestness of rituals underscores the idea that rituals are designed to create new states for the
individuals or to maintain the normal state of things. Rituals are effective in that they initiate and implement change
(often an individual moving from one stage of life to another) but they also maintain the status quo – how things
need to be.
Rituals protect communities and their cultural knowledge in that they unite the communities under a single
unchanging vision and single framework to understand the world. Each of the elements listed above is crucial in
maintaining a ritual’s effectiveness: in maintaining a clear statement of that shared knowledge, for passing that
knowledge on to individuals and perhaps most importantly, for individuals to communicate to themselves and to
others that they accept this cultural knowledge. Participating in that ritual, time and time again, and knowing that
others in the culture, including your ancestors, have participated in the ritual embeds the knowledge being
communicated ‘into’ the individual. In this case, seeing the Sun rise from the island at the solstice, and being part of
a ritual where that observation is given a meaning in the context of the whole-world view of the culture, will make
that knowledge true in a significant way.

CASE STUDY
The Island of the Sun, Lake Titicaca

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Lake Titicaca on the border of modern-day Bolivia and Peru was the site of such a ritual. In the middle of
the lake is an island called Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun). Standing at a particular point on the island
during the summer solstice, the observer will see the Sun rise from the horizon directly above the island.
The Colla peoples and the Inca both developed a narrative or myth surrounding this in which the island
becomes the birthplace of the Sun (Dearborn, et al).
A Spanish priest recorded the Inca tale in 1575:
They say that it was at night and that there he [the creator] made the Sun and Moon and Stars,
and that he ordered the Sun and Moon and Stars to go to the Island of Titicaca that is near
there, and from there they rose to the sky. And at that time, the Sun who wanted to rise in the
figure of a very flamboyant man called to the Inca and to Manco Capac, as their superior and
said: You and your descendants will be Lords and will subjugate many nations; take me as your
father…and at that point he ordered the Sun, Moon, and Stars to rise to the sky and put each
one in their place. (Dearborn, et al)
The island subsequently became the site of shrines dedicated to these spirits and yearly rituals called
Inti Raymi were performed there in order to worship and to guarantee the Sun’s continued regularity.

For this reason, participants take rituals very seriously because they recognize that their actions are what is important
to maintain how things need to be. The Sateré-Mawé boys take their initiation rites seriously, not just because it is
horrifically painful, but because without it they cannot consider themselves or be considered full adult members of
the society. One can imagine a boy allowing himself to be stung beforehand to test how painful it will be, but this
practice would never be thought of as the ritual itself. Rehearsing the ritual is not the same as undergoing it.
Similarly, the Inca priesthood on the Island of the Sun must also take their job seriously as it is partly the rituals and
the worship that cause the regularity of the Sun’s procession through the sky.
Rituals are also generally repetitive, in the sense that different individuals will undergo the same ritual repeated each
time it’s needed, or that individuals will undergo the same ritual again and again when it is needed. This is one of
the most important elements of how rituals embed knowledge more deeply than perhaps simply learning some fact
would.
Rituals are essentially about the messages and perspectives shared by communities being renewed in the minds of
individuals. They embed knowledge in a way that is hard to drive out. Consider the following quote from a member
of the Yup’ik tribe in western Alaska:
There is a very close connection between the animal world and human world. We believe that humans and
animals communicate through Ellam Yua, and that these relationships are governed by rules. For each
different type of food, there are rules that men and women must follow to take care of it. If the rule is not
followed for that particular animal, then that food source will either become scarce or disappear entirely,
depending on the intensity of the violation. If the rules were followed carefully and the animal spirit was
pleased for example, with the way that the weapons were handled after it was caught, or the way that it
was cared for and eaten, then the food source would multiply and the hunter would be blessed with more
to catch. Subsistence required good relationships between humans and animals and maintaining this

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 relationship was the only way people survived long ago. Respect for the land as well as the sea ensure the
seasonal provision of food given to us through Ellam Yua [‘Spirit of the Universe’ or ‘the Unseen One’].
(Ayunerak, et al)
These rules are part of the Yup’ik people’s yuuyaraq, which was a system of right action which helped to maintain
important interrelationships between members of the Yup’ik community and the natural world around them. Like
many Indigenous cultures, the Yup’ik believe the natural world to be infused with spirits, and maintaining harmony
with these spirits is essential to the health of the community. Undoubtedly the adults in the community teach the
youth that the human world is interrelated with the natural spirits and teach them how to follow rituals and maintain
harmony with the natural world, but physically enacting the rituals embeds this knowledge. One simply cannot treat
the environment or animals with disrespect if one has been engaged since childhood in actions which show genuine
respect to the environment and harmony with it. The rituals, in other words, embed an attitude or a disposition onto
an individual which might be characterized as a knowledge claim – ‘I know that the spirits will appreciate this
action’ – but is more profoundly known than ‘normal’ knowledge is. These dispositions and attitudes bind an
individual to the natural landscape in a way that knowledge produced from books or classrooms might not.

CONNECTION TO THE CORE THEME

Rituals and shared beliefs

One of the authors of this book had an experience which brought this point about the power of belief
given to us by ritual into sharp relief. While living in England during the 2012 Olympics (when it was held
in London) and after the Olympics were over, he noticed that many of the little plastic United Kingdom
flags that only days earlier had been displayed in shop windows, in front of houses and other places, had
suddenly found their way into rubbish bins and sometimes just lay on the pavement. As a US citizen
who, for his entire school education, said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and been deeply
impressed by the reverence given to the flag, he suddenly noticed that he felt if he were to come across
a US flag, plastic or otherwise, he simply could not leave it lying there. The ritualized pledging he
participated in every morning had inculcated a belief that the flag was of special significance. Other flag-
related rituals, like the proper folding of it, the lowering of it to half-mast or the proper disposal of it are
natural outcomes of the belief that it is a genuine symbol of great importance, all encoded through daily
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rituals in which he verbally and physically showed its importance. That ritual was utterly successful; that
belief remains even 30 years after he last pledged allegiance to any flag.
There are other examples of ritual all around us. In some schools, students stand when teachers walk
into the room to inculcate the belief that respect to teachers is due (a crucial belief in education).
Militaries have intense initiation periods (‘boot camps’) in which a soldier’s beliefs about individuality are
reconstructed to prioritize the group (a crucial belief in battle). This sort of knowledge is deeply personal,
and it has a unique relation to the shared knowledge of the community.

ACTIVITY
Think about rituals that have impacted your life. They may be religious, cultural, political or social.
1 Can you identify the beliefs that are encoded in that ritual?
2 How has that belief impacted your life?
3 Could that belief, or the knowing of it or having of it, be given in some other way? Why or why not?
4 Research a ritual in an Indigenous culture (it might be your own).
5 Present the elements of the ritual and explain the beliefs that are passed on by participating.
6 Discuss whether you think that this knowledge or these beliefs can be passed on through other
means.

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Myths
Another common and sometimes primary feature of Indigenous cultures and their knowledge systems is the use of
mythology. When thinking about myths, we often think of stories (fictions) which were popular in the past and
which were used to explain how things were, prior to a ‘real’ understanding of nature. The concept of ‘myth’ is still
used today in this sense; they are commonly understood to be a story that somehow misleads or is a claim that is
simply not true. Begin an internet search with ‘5 myths of …’ and see what you find: generally, these are lists of
ideas and beliefs which are not true and which hold people back from success in some task.
This is not the only way to understand myths, however. No culture on Earth has been entirely without myth, and, in
most non-Indigenous cultures, myths no longer form part of how people think about, learn about or explain the
world. As we described above, a common feature in Indigenous knowledge systems is to describe the natural world
as a world filled with purposeful beings – spirits and beings who act through the natural world. Whereas scientific
descriptions make attempts to explain the world through impersonal natural laws, a genuine explanation of some
event from an Indigenous perspective would naturally include the motives and desires of the beings at work in the
natural world and the relationships that people have with these spirits. Narratives, stories and myths, then, are far
better suited to describing and explaining these relationships than a science report.
Myths not only describe the way the world is, and why it is like that, but they establish the relationship with that
world by creating a framework in which people can see themselves in that natural world. Scholars have suggested
that ‘encoded in myth is a kind of implicit knowledge’ (Lawson 507–23) about some of the deepest truths in human
experience, and the use of myth, in both explaining these insights into the nature of the world, and disseminating this
knowledge to individuals in the community, is an important part of many Indigenous cultures.
A pretty universal example of the use of myth is in developing an understanding of why things have come to be the
way that they are. These ‘creation myths’ are narratives about the origins of the world as we see it and create an
understanding of the world which helps bind communities and individuals together in a shared vision of the world.

CASE STUDY
Kaluli creation myth

The creation myth of the Kaluli people of central Papua New Guinea (who are generally non-literate)
starts with a completely formless land, populated with people, who quickly become cold and hungry.
From within the ranks comes one person who gathers the people together and begins assigning them
various roles in the natural world, from streams and rivers, to plants, trees and animals. The people left
over after this dividing are the ancestors of the humans living today.
This myth, which may be considered ‘true’ by the individuals in the community, teaches an important
point, that the human beings of the tribe are no different than anything around them, as everything is
essentially the same, just taking on a different form. Thus, the myth teaches that humans are not ‘other’
than the world around them (Schieffelin 93–94).
Interestingly, the fact that the Kaluli people are non-literate underscores the importance of myths in the
community – without the intuitive and relatable myths, the knowledge of their relationship to the world
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would disappear.

CASE STUDY
Sámi people, Finland

In the Sámi culture of northern Finland, another sort of myth is told, this time underscoring how
sometimes myths give us a way of understanding particular events. In this instance, it is the return of the
Sun, and how, things might not end up working the same as they’ve worked before (thereby
emphasizing the role of ritual in maintaining how things are).
In this account, based on a fragment of a poem called ‘The Death of Sun’s Daughter’, the title character
lies close to death yet yearns to see her father one last time. He has gone beyond the horizon and has
yet to rise again. She laments that ‘the herd shrinks, the pest rages, insects torment, Children grope
about in the dark’ (Kárrái/Thomas). With her final breath she begs her father to rise again and return the
world to light.
Here we see an understanding of the world that is deeply dangerous and frightening. In the homelands
of the far north, where the Sámi live, the Sun can disappear for months on end (depending on how far
north you live). The understanding captured in this myth provides a personal connection to the darkness
of the winter but doesn’t hide the fact that the Sun’s disappearance is a genuine threat and needs to be
taken seriously. The Sun might not return so one must take care to work to maintain the safety of the
community in light of this fact. So, whether or not people genuinely believe this story to describe what
happens every winter, it provides the knowledge needed to act accordingly.
Not all Indigenous myths are aimed at telling the origins of the cosmos or cosmological events; some are
more limited, but these do not have any less impact on teaching the individual about his relationship to
the world. Like many Indigenous cultures, the Sámi understand the natural landscape to be full of
magical spirits who govern all sorts of aspects of their lives, from the migration of reindeer, to the
success of hunters and fishermen. They have identified seidas in the landscape (natural formations
which stood out from their surroundings, like rocky outcrops in a flat landscape or a grove of trees in an
otherwise barren plain) and believe them to hold these spirits. The people used ritual to engage with
these spirits and would reward the spirits with offerings if they helped the people, perhaps through a
successful hunt. Interestingly the spirits would sometimes be punished or abandoned if the Sámi felt that
the spirits didn’t help enough. One story told is as follows:
A man from Teno caught some trout by his dam and gave some to the seida. But, as it
happened, there was no bounty for the next few days. The man got mad and went to beat his
god with birch twigs, jeering:
‘You are no god!
I’ve anointed you with oils,
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 but you will not give me fish.’
When the fisherman went back to his fishing dam, a gust of wind threw his boat over and he
nearly drowned. Frightened, he crawled back to the rock to ask that it not be angry anymore.
(‘The Sámi World View and Mythology’)
In non-Indigenous cultures this might be seen as simply a story with meaning, but in the mythological
language this is a story which underscores a number of important truths:
• Firstly, that the Sámi people and the spirits of the land live in a close harmony, where the resources of
the land are not simply assumed to be had for the taking. Scarcity is a real feature of living in a harsh
climate and the world’s resources and goods should not be taken for granted.
• Secondly, the myth teaches that human beings work in harmony with these spirits; humans are tied to
the natural world in a deep and interrelated way. Finally, these spirits must be respected even when
they do not provide.
Sámi do accept that sometimes the spirits do not or cannot provide and their seidas are sometimes
abandoned for new ones, but even in these cases the Sámi learn through these stories that respect
must nevertheless be shown.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Explanation
As discussed previously, explanations both describe events and try to offer reasons why those events
are the way that they are. The role of myths in Indigenous knowledge systems are no different; they
provide a description of events and of reasons why things are the way that they are. However, those
reasons are not characterized by impersonal physical forces, but by personal motives and intentions that
can be engaged with by the community through ritual.
One difference with myths as explanations, however, is that we have to keep in mind what is actually
being explained. Like when we discussed maps and their explanatory power, we must understand what
sort of phenomenon or event is being explained. The story about the death of the Sun’s daughter doesn’t
explain the physics behind the Sun’s yearly movement through the sky; rather, it explains the motives
and intentions of the forces at work. The explanation thus provided creates a relation to that event; it
turns the listener into a participant in the movement of the Sun rather than simply a far-off and
unconnected observer.

DEEPER THINKING
Myth and climate change
Consider the current climate crisis.
• How do you think an explanation of the natural features of the world, which incorporates personal
spirits and beings within the landscape, might alter how you characterize the crisis?
• How do you think describing the resources of the world as impersonal objects to be exploited, or how
an explanation of the world which actively attempts to break the connection between our personal
views and our descriptions of the world, might have contributed to the crisis in the first place?
• If an explanation of the crisis using mythological language provides the motive to change our
behaviour in relation to the environment, does it matter whether a scientific perspective might disagree
with it?
• What role could a scientific view of the environment and the facts about climate change play in relation
to such a mythological explanation?

ACTIVITY
Find a ‘creation myth’ or ‘creation account’ prominent in an Indigenous culture. Get into small groups and
read about it. Discuss what you found out and answer the following questions:
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 1 What knowledge is being conveyed?
2 Is it simply historical or scientific, or does it contain beliefs and knowledge about how individuals in
that community relate to the world?
3 How do you think this knowledge would aid a person from that community?
4 In what ways do the non-literal elements of the myths help in developing understanding?
5 Does the notion of truth take on a different aspect here?
Now compare your ideas with another group’s responses:
6 How are they different?
7 What about the students in the group – do you think the cultural background of the group might
account for these differences?
8 Does it make sense to suggest that some interpretations are better than others?
9 How do you think a person from that culture would approach the myth?
10 What other cultural elements are needed for the myth to ‘make sense’?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What methods have Indigenous peoples developed to support the recording, preservation and protection
of their traditional knowledge?

What is the status of myth as knowledge?

Let us return briefly then to a central concern with understanding the role of mythological explanations. How are we
meant to understand them? Can they be thought of as true? And if they are then in what sense? We often discuss
certain types of literature or art as being ‘true’ but certainly not in the sense that we would consider mathematics or
science to be ‘true’.
We need to differentiate the truth of art and literature from mythological ‘truth’ in a number of ways:
• People in Indigenous communities will often accept myth as a genuine description of the world around them, even
while accepting the truth of what science tells us about that same world. As we’ve discussed above, myths (unlike
literature) are not generally considered metaphorical of some general truth, they actually tell us what is true. The
Sámi genuinely accept that there are spirits in the seidas and that some reverence needs to be paid to them.
• The myths do more to bind individuals and communities together than either literature or science. To accept a
mythological explanation, one must accept a way of living or a perspective on the world that is needed to find the
value and importance of what the myth offers. Furthermore, that perspective or way of living is often very local to
a particular community. Because acceptance and a genuine understanding of the myth is local to a community, the
myths themselves, like the rituals in that community, generally are unchanging. They are not open to deep
revision because it is the acceptance of the myth as ‘ours’ which binds the community together. Scientific
explanations are always up for amendment and alteration depending on new evidence, so cannot serve as a
binding element to a community in the same way. Literature, while often designed to speak to a particular
community, doesn’t require the same sort of loyalty or acceptance of it.

Extended Essay
If you’re interested in the nature or function of myths, you might consider exploring this in the context of
an extended essay. The World Studies essay asks students to combine the approach of two disciplines
in the attempt to answer a single research question. In this case you could use World Religions, Social
and Cultural Anthropology, Philosophy or even Group 1 Literature to explore the nature, use and
function of myths and mythology.

An implication of this discussion then leads us to a fundamental worry in discussing myths and Indigenous cultures
more widely: can we genuinely understand the value and function of mythological explanations from outside the

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culture in which, and for which, they have been designed? If one doesn’t identify as a member of an Indigenous
community, is there any hope of fully understanding the role of visions, myth, ritual or authority when thinking
about Indigenous knowledge systems?

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Vision
Given that the worldview assumed by many Indigenous cultures incorporates both the sacred and the secular, how
knowledge is obtained about that relationship poses problems if you are prioritizing only direct verifiable
observation. A common way around this is by seeking direct knowledge through visions. These are altered states of
consciousness sought after by individuals in the hopes that they might gain some new insight into whatever it is they
want to know about.

CASE STUDY
The Lakota people and Sitting Bull

In the Lakota people’s traditions, visions are an integral part of the life of an individual. The culture is not
set up around a set number of beliefs which all people have to believe, so the life of the individual and
his or her understanding of the world is largely left up to them.
Visions, for the Lakota men, were a generally accepted part of life, and young men would seek out
visions hoping to see something significant which might shed light on how to live their life (Martínez 82).
Because there was no specified set of religious dogma in Native American spirituality, each man would
formulate his own system and individuals would accept others at their word that they had been told what
they said they had been told. Lakota ‘medicine-men’, the spiritual leaders, would have visions which
helped them cure the sick, locate hidden articles, predict future events, or assist hunters by coaxing
buffalo near (Martínez 83).
‘Fundamental to the visionary experience is crossing a critical threshold from the explicit world of the
everyday to the implicit reality of the visionary world’ (Martínez 90). As discussed, one of the main
characteristics of many Indigenous knowledge systems is the connection between the secular (or
‘everyday’) and the sacred (or ‘visionary world’). Visions, then, are a full breakdown of this distinction,
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where the sacred becomes a genuine experience to the individual. They were often accompanied by
long and arduous rituals beforehand, which could include self-inflicted physical wounds, fasting,
incredibly exhausting and dangerous physical exertions and exposure to the elements. The lucky few,
however, would be given a vision, which was not always comfortable.
Sounds came to me through the darkness; the cries of the wind, the whisper of the trees, the
voices of nature, animal sounds, the hooting of an owl. Suddenly I felt an overwhelming
presence. Down there with me in my cramped hole was a big bird. The pit was only as wide as
myself, and I was a skinny boy, but that huge bird was flying around me as if he had the whole
sky to himself. I could hear his cries, sometimes near and sometimes far, far away. I felt
feathers or a wing touching my back and head. This feeling was so overwhelming that it was
just too much for me. I trembled and my bones turned to ice. I grasped the rattle and with the
forty pieces of my grandmother’s flesh…I shook the rattle and it made a soothing sound, like
rain falling on rock. It was talking to me, but it did not calm my fears. I took the sacred pipe in
the other hand and began to sing and pray… But this did not help. I don’t know what got into
me, but I was no longer myself. I started to cry. (Martínez 91)
It was this individualism at the heart of the Sioux nation which historian Stephen E Ambrose suggests is
the root of the relative ease that the European descendants in the young United States were able to
remove the Indigenous populations from their lands. Whereas in the US military, soldiers were
commanded as a unit and were obliged to do what their chain of command told them to, the Sioux
warriors were each free to do what they wished. Building an effective ‘Native Army’, then, could only
have been achieved through the strength, reputation and charisma of its leaders. These leaders did exist
and one was named Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Sioux medicine-man (the Sioux are within the same family of tribes as the
Lakota). He was not a warrior but was nevertheless considered one of the bravest the Sioux had to offer.
For example, in 1872, during a standoff with US Cavalry troops, Sitting Bull wanted to raise the spirits of
his warriors, so he calmly took his pipe and wandered out into the no-man’s land between the lines and
in range of the soldiers rifles. He lit his pipe, took a seat and called out to his warriors, ‘Any Indians* who
wish to smoke with me, come on!’ Four other warriors joined him, including a fellow Sioux warrior named
White Bull. White Bull reported that the others smoked as fast as they could while the bullets whined
over their heads and hit the ground all around them, but ‘Sitting Bull was not afraid. He just sat there
quietly, looking around as if he were at home in his tent, and smoked peacefully’ (Ambrose 355).
(*Note that the term ‘Indian’ is used here because this is the term used in Ambrose’s text. It is, of course,
not the term we would use for Native Americans today – who were named this because of Christopher
Columbus’ mistaken belief that he had found a westward route to the trade rich areas of India.)
In 1876, tensions between the warriors of the Sioux and the United States government had come to a
boiling point. During that summer, the US sent a whole army into the lands of the Sioux to drive them all
on to reservations so the US could take full control of the whole continent. Sitting Bull’s Sioux, along with
2000–4000 other warriors, were camped at Rosebud Valley near the Little Bighorn River in what is now
Montana. In an attempt to find out how to proceed and what would happen in the coming battles, Sitting
Bull held a Sun Dance. Surrounded by hundreds of chanting and singing warriors, Sitting Bull followed a
sacred ritual designed to bring on a vision. It required a torturous cutting of his arms and chest, and then,
bleeding profusely, he began a dance, which lasted for 18 hours. When he would faint, others would
splash him with cold water so he could dance some more. Finally, he had his vision: he heard a voice
from above saying, ‘I give you these because they have no ears’, accompanied by a vision of soldiers
and Indian warriors falling from the sky, with their heads down and their hats falling off. ‘They were falling
right into our camp’ (Ambrose 417). This vision was the rallying call that Sitting Bull’s group needed, after
having been chased around the northern plains for months.

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Within three weeks, on 25 June 1876, while camped on the Little Bighorn River, General George
Armstrong Custer of the 7th US Cavalry caught up with Sitting Bull’s group. They stormed out of the
surrounding hills and into the camp in an attempt to annihilate them, just as Sitting Bull’s vision said they
would. But the Sioux were motivated and ready and in a final stand that lasted no more than 20 minutes,
Custer and over 200 of his men were dead.
The victory was short-lived and the last for the Native Americans. After Little Bighorn, new resources
were given to the Army and within 20 years the battles were over, with all the Indigenous Native
Americans living on reservations, kept from their lands and living a life that was not their own, dependent
on US government handouts. In 1890, Sitting Bull was killed while resisting arrest on one such
reservation.

ACTIVITY
1 Describe how you think Sitting Bull’s vision, or any other vision, would be treated by Enlightenment
science.
2 How would the science you learn in IB describe such an experience as Sitting Bull’s, its causes and its
content?
3 Knowing what you know about the Indigenous worldview, how do you think someone from the
Indigenous perspective would describe visions? What is their authority in a knowledge system?
4 What function would visions play in the culture?

A ‘scientific’ view of the situation would presumably note Sitting Bull’s vision as simply the result of dehydration,
blood-loss, incredible stress and physical exhaustion. Anyone in that situation, were they strong enough to remain
conscious, would be hallucinating. In terms of content, the psychologists might point out that of course his visions
would be populated with people and events that were on his mind, in a way that our frequent dreams often are about
the events in our lives. These were the objects and ideas that Sitting Bull was most familiar with and had on his
mind, so it comes as no surprise that they are in his visions.
The Indigenous perspective, however, would focus on the authority of such a vision in a description of the world.
Given the basic assumption common to many Indigenous knowledge systems that there is a deep connection
between sacred and secular, a full explanation of the world from such a perspective would require some sort of
access to this sacred realm and visions are ideally suited to this purpose. Furthermore, of course, the visions are of
immediate events and people and this again would be expected in a knowledge system so focused on the immediate
context. The point of Indigenous knowledge is not to know ‘objective’ universal truths but to know about the
immediate world and how to navigate it.
Knowledge is in the service of the immediate here and now; it serves to orientate an individual in his or her world
and explain how the individual relates to their immediate surroundings. As with mythological language, those of us
outside an Indigenous community or those of us who have never had a vision are at something of a disadvantage
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when trying to understand them. Sitting Bull’s vision, then, held the authority, reliability and credibility others might
give to expert scientists.

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Ethics
We hope that this chapter on Indigenous knowledge systems has given you some opportunities to reflect on some of
the general characteristics of these sometimes quite unique knowledge systems. Many of you will be unfamiliar with
Indigenous ways of understanding the world and they will therefore seem foreign and quite different from what you
are perhaps used to when constructing knowledge in your school or cultural setting.

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Does ‘knowledge’ of Indigenous societies perpetuate colonial
thinking?
The question of ethics, when discussing the optional themes or areas of knowledge discussed in this book, often
encompasses the responsible use of, or responsible creation of, knowledge. As indicated early in this chapter, when
reflecting on or studying Indigenous knowledge systems or cultures, there is another layer of ethical concern which
is tied directly to the dynamics of power in history and which cannot be ignored. Thinking back to the issue of
defining ‘Indigenous’, we must avoid a definition based on some opposition to what they are not and where
communities are seen as somehow ‘less’ because of this difference. Were you to accept your own western culture as
superior, you might be tempted to see anything not like it as somehow less advanced. This is where the definition of
the term ‘Indigenous’ becomes particularly contentious, because however one defines ‘Indigenous’, any use of the
term, given the histories of the communities being considered, will be embedded in and informed by the history of
colonialism. This history often has treated Indigenous communities as if they were ‘primitive’, as is clearly and
explicitly illustrated with Richard Henry Pratt’s comments in relation to the aims of the Carlisle School.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
As an ‘outsider’, can we know and speak about the knowledge held by a different cultural group?

A genuine and honest exploration of Indigenous knowledge systems cannot be achieved if the investigation starts
with the assumption that Indigenous communities are less advanced than the colonizing group. If they are looked
down upon as the ‘lesser other’ then they again fall prey to another form of colonization, this time based on
describing them in a certain way, a way which might lead to individuals seeing their own Indigenous communities
as somehow deficient.
If you come from a non-Indigenous culture, then these historical facts must be foremost in your mind as you
consider the TOK issues related to Indigenous knowledge systems. Mischaracterizing them as ‘primitive’ or ‘not
scientific’ is simply to further denigrate them by reapplying the colonial attitudes that Indigenous cultures have tried
to break free from:
The powerful colonial institutions, whether educational, social or economic, have also colonized people’s
minds which has led to internalized colonialism and the acquisitions of … western values, ways of
thinking and world views. In this way, these subtle forms of colonialism have made many Indigenous
individuals devalue their own culture and anything that is connected to it. (Kuokkanen)

IA prompt
14 Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?

ACTIVITY
Consider the quotation from Kuokkanen.
1 What does this say about the dangers of trying to develop knowledge of a different culture?
2 Is it possible to fully understand and appreciate the fundamental assumptions and ideas of another
culture?

DEEPER THINKING
What makes knowledge valuable?
While we might accept that there are many different ways of understanding the world, assuming from the
outset that one way is simply better might not make it possible to truly understand the other form. Have
you ever been in a situation where someone has tried to tell you that something you know or value is not
important? What made the other person so sure that their view was the better view? How has authority

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or power played a role in their claim that your approach or view was not important or valuable?
Think back to the map metaphor we’ve been developing. Do you think that there are inherently better
maps than others? We might imagine utterly useless maps, ones that are random or purposefully have
no relation to any real feature of our world. These would be inherently bad maps and designed to be
such. But if some map has been developed in the context of the shared understanding of a community
and this map (or way of understanding of the world) works for the people using it and perhaps has
worked for thousands of years, doesn’t this mean that it is, in some ways, valuable? You might not
accept it, but might it be ‘true’ to some degree? What would you have to establish to genuinely show that
another’s view of the world is not ‘accurate’? What do you and another have to have in common to agree
that one map is better than another?

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The politics of making a definition
Essentially the issue is about whether one group can adequately investigate, in a way that is fair and equitable, some
other group, especially when the two groups are significantly different in many ways. How can we characterize
those differences without non-consciously holding that ‘other’ culture to standards that they don’t hold themselves
to? It is entirely conceivable that using categories that are central to one system of belief (like ‘scientific
reductionism’) in a system where those categories are simply not part of the set of assumptions used, will create a
view of that system that is unwarranted or simply misses the point.
You might think of this dynamic in your language classes. It seems obvious that it is not possible to fully understand
another community if you cannot speak their language (just try walking down the street in a country where you
don’t speak the language). However, you might also push this point and ask whether you can truly understand a
community without having grown up in that community. It’s a real challenge, even for people living in new
community for many years, to both feel ‘at home’ in that community and to be accepted by others in that
community.
Any examination of an ‘Indigenous’ knowledge system, then, must take seriously this dynamic of insider and
outsider, and an outside community must take care to avoid using a paradigm or ‘map’ during an analysis which will
necessarily result in an outcome which implies devaluation or judgment. This is not to say that in some instances the
analysis won’t result in a judgment (we might, for instance, devalue an Indigenous system of knowledge if its
understanding of medical illness unnecessarily places individuals at risk), but even in those circumstances, the
questions being asked and the answers must be quite clear. If I wonder how best to synthesize vitamin K to help the
blood in newborn infants coagulate, then I might turn to modern chemistry. Modern chemistry is pretty good at that
sort of thing. However, if I want to better understand how a community might live in harmony with the natural
environment to create more sustainable living, I might turn to Indigenous understandings of the natural world and
the place of human beings within it.

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How to study a community
The Enlightenment paradigm, when trying to develop a ‘scientific’ explanation of something, is to remove the
observer as much as possible and simply observe what happens or to develop experiments where variables are
controlled. Applying this method to investigating cultures, however, is less appropriate because when studying
human beings we know that there are internal motives and perspectives at work in the way people are acting. Simply
observing another culture might tell you about the sorts of objects they surround themselves with and the sorts of
actions they make, but culture includes beliefs, motives, ideas and reasons which might not be observable.
This is a problem in the discipline of anthropology and more generally in the area of knowledge of the human
sciences. What, then, is the best way of learning about culture?

Assessment advice
When you choose objects to exhibit in your TOK exhibition assessment, you’ll be looking for items which
are the manifestations of some belief or set of beliefs over and above just what the object is. Many
Indigenous communities create art or artefacts which have a particular meaning to them, one which is
unknowable to others unless they take the time to learn. Even then the significance might not be
understood without being deeply embedded in that community. An object from an Indigenous culture
could be used to explore these issues in the context of one of the TOK IA prompts.

CASE STUDY
Frank Hamilton Cushing and the Zuni People

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In 1879, when he was 22 years old, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Curator of the Ethnological Department of
the US National Museum in Washington DC was invited to join an expedition to the southwest of the
United States to study the Zuni People, a group of people who had been living along the Zuni river for
3000–4000 years. Cushing, born and educated on the US east coast, was an expert on Native American
artefacts and had joined the Smithsonian Institute at age 19.
Cushing was so impressed with the Zuni people they had been studying that, once the team of
anthropologists decided to leave, he received permission to remain. He moved in with the residents and
was accepted into their secret religious group, the ‘Priesthood of the Bow’. He was ultimately recalled to
Washington by the US government, seemingly because of his involvement in a series of inter-tribal
clashes at a time when the US was trying to smooth over tribal divisions (‘Frank Hamilton Cushing’). His
work in the community, however, was the first of its kind in that he observed the culture from within,
thereby giving a more authentic account of the culture and its beliefs and practices. Cushing’s approach
provided a deeper awareness of the inner workings of the culture and an awareness of its strengths.
This provided further reflection on the nature of ‘culture’ in general, in particular the assumption that it
was something that dominant cultures have and Indigenous cultures do not.

ACTIVITY
Consider any travelling you might have done to countries, places or even into other communities
unfamiliar to you.
1 What were your initial experiences like? Often these experiences can be quite challenging because
they are so different, and your normal beliefs, reasons and explanations don’t fully apply. However,
the longer you spend in a culture, the more you know about the activities and worldview of that
community, the more you might find that your comfort level changes as well.
2 What knowledge do you have or not have at the beginning of the process?
3 What knowledge do you gain in the process of learning more about the community?
4 Is that propositional or ability knowledge?
5 How does your knowledge of or thoughts about your own culture change as a result of being part of
another culture?

CAS links
If you are part of or live near an Indigenous community, you might consider developing a CAS project
exploring links between your own culture and the nearby dominant or Indigenous culture. Perhaps
children in the non-Indigenous community would benefit from regular links with elders or children in
Indigenous cultures to learn about and help preserve the customs and practices in that Indigenous
community. Students in the non-Indigenous community might report back to their own community about
their experience and encourage mutual understanding.

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Conclusion
Thinking about a whole culture and a ‘knowledge system’ and trying to say something about it which is informative
and charitable is a challenge. It is doubly challenging when the knowledge system is significantly different from our
own. Here we have tried to offer a framework to understand ‘Indigenous knowledge systems’, but we accept that
speaking from outside any such knowledge system raises particular challenges.
We hope we have achieved a way of opening up a series of ideas and concepts which could create the possibility for
further research and thinking about these intriguing systems of knowledge. We think this is important, as Indigenous
knowledge systems are, and have been, under threat of disappearing. Many individuals identify with these systems;
the systems of knowledge and the ways of living associated with them provide individuals with a sense of self-
awareness, self-definition and self-confidence. Losing them would be losing many people’s sense of who they are,
so discussing them here and exploring them in your classroom provides further awareness and witness to their value.
As a conclusion and a way to wrap up many of the themes in this chapter, we’d like to finish with a reply from
Canassatego, an Onondaga nation leader and spokesperson for the Iroquois Confederacy to the Virginia State
Legislature, who had offered the Iroquois a chance to send a number of their young men to the college of William
and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1744.
We know you highly esteem the kind of Learning taught in these Colleges, and the maintenance of our
young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We’re convinced, therefore, that you mean
to do us Good by your Proposal, and we thank you heartily. But you who are so wise must know that
different Nations have different Conceptions of things. And you will not, therefore, take it amiss if our
Ideas of this kind of Education happens not to be the same with yours. We have had some experience of it.
Several of our young People were formerly brought up in the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they
were instructed in all your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of
every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a
Cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy, spoke our language imperfectly, and therefore were neither fit for
Hunters, Warriors, nor Counsellors; they were totally good for nothing. We are, however, not the less
obliged for your kind Offer, tho’ we decline accepting it; and to show our grateful Sense of it, if the
Gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a Dozen of their Sons, we would take great care in their Education,
instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them. (O’Brien 239)

IA prompt
21 What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?

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Works cited
Ambrose, Stephen E. 2003. Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors. London.
Pocket.
Ayunerak, Paula, et al. ‘Yup’ik Culture and Context in Southwest Alaska: Community Member Perspectives of
Tradition, Social Change, and Prevention’. American Journal of Community Psychology. US National Library of
Medicine. Sep. 2014. Web. 13 Jun. 2019. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4119478/.
Birchfield, D.L. ‘Navajos’. Encyclopedia.com. Encyclopedia.com. 8 Oct. 2019. Web. 10 Oct. 2019.
www.encyclopedia.com/history/united-states-and-canada/north-american-indigenous-peoples/navajos.
Bornstein, Marc H. 2007. ‘Hue categorization and color naming’. Anthropology of Color: Interdisciplinary
Multilevel Modeling. Edited by Robert E MacLaury, Galina V Paramei, and Don Dedrick. Amsterdam. John
Benjamins.
‘Children and Young Persons Act’. Singapore Statutes Online. N.p. N.d. Web. 13 Jun. 2019.
https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/CYPA1993.
Davidoff, Jules, et al. ‘Colour Categories in a Stone-age Tribe’. Nature: International Journal of Science. Vol. 398.
Springer Nature Publishing AG. 18 Mar. 1999. Web. 11 Jun. 2019.
https://www.nature.com/articles/18335#article-info
Dearborn, David SP, et al. 1998. ‘The Sanctuary of Titicaca: Where the Sun Returns to Earth’. Latin American
Antiquity. Vol 9, number 3. Web. 11 Jun. 2019. www.cambridge.org/core/journals/latin-american-
antiquity/article/sanctuary-of-titicaca-where-the-sun-returns-to-
earth/DEA0B2AD95592AA38F2CAE13F4F759C8.
Degawan, Minnie. ‘Indigenous Languages: Knowledge and Hope’. The UNESCO Courier. N.p. 20 Mar. 2019. Web.
11 Jun. 2019. https://en.unesco.org/courier/2019-1/indigenous-languages-knowledge-and-hope.
‘Description of the grounds’. Carlisle Indian Industrial School Digital Archive. Digital image. N.p. N.d. Web. 9 Jun.
2019. http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/sites/all/files/docs-
documents/NARA_RG75_79_b574_1880_P0269.pdf.
‘Ephemera relating to Tom Torlino’. Carlisle Indian Industrial School Digital Archive. Digital image. N.p. N.d.
Web. 9 Jun. 2019. http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/sites/all/files/docs-
ephemera/NARA_1327_b018_f0872_0.pdf.
‘Excerpt from Pratt’s speech’. Carlisle Indian Industrial School Digital Archive. Digital image. N.p. N.d. Web. 9
Jun. 2019. http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/sites/all/files/docs-pages/CIS-Resources_PrattSpeech.pdf.
‘Frank Hamilton Cushing’. PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. 2001. Web. 15 Jun. 2019.
www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/cushing.htm.
Holmes, Bob. ‘How Many Uncontacted Tribes Are Left in the World?’ New Scientist. N.p. 22 Aug. 2013. Web. 9
Jun. 2019. www.newscientist.com/article/dn24090-how-many-uncontacted-tribes-are-left-in-the-world/.
Hviding, Edvard. 2015. Study Guide and Teacher’s Manual: Reef and Rainforest – An Environmental Encyclopedia
and Wiki of Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands – An Open Education Resource Project. Paris. UNESCO.
Jobe, Margaret. 2004. ‘Native Americans and the US Census: A Brief Historical Survey’. University of Colorado.
Boulder. Web. 9 Jun. 2019. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/54847256.pdf.
Kárrái/Thomas, Charlie. ‘Creation Myths and Worldview: Sámi Animism and Christianity’. Sami Culture.
University of Texas at Austin. N.d. Web. 13 Jun. 2019.
www.laits.utexas.edu/sami/diehtu/siida/religion/creationmyth.htm.
Kidwell, Clara Sue. 1985. ‘Native Knowledge in the Americas’. Osiris. 2nd series. Vol 1. Historical Writing on
American Science. University of Chicago Press.
Kuokkanen, Rauna. 2000. ‘Towards an “Indigenous Paradigm” from a Sami Perspective’. The Canadian Journal of
Native Studies XX. Pp 411–36.
Lawson, E. Thomas. 1978. ‘The Explanation of Myth and Myth as Explanation’. Journal of the American Academy
of Religion. Vol 46, number 4. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/1463046.
Locke, John. ‘Second Treatise of Government.’ Second Treatise Of Government. The Project Gutenberg. 5 Sep.
2015. Web. 26 Jan. 2020. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm.
Lord, Lewis. ‘How Many People Were Here before Columbus?’ US News. 18 Aug. 1997. Web. 9 Jun. 2019.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080305224956/http://www.usna.edu/Users/history/kolp/HH345/PRE1492.HTM
Martínez, David. 2004. ‘The Soul of the Indian: Lakota Philosophy and the Vision Quest’. Wicazo Sa Review. Vol
19, number 2. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/1409500.
Norris, Tina, et al. 2010. ‘The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2010 Census Briefs’. United States

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 Census Bureau. N.p. Web. 9 Jun. 2019. www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-10.pdf.
O’Brien, Sharon. 1989. American Indian Tribal Governments. Norman, OK. University of Oklahoma Press.
Quilo, Queenie S, et al. 2015. ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Practices: Approach to Understanding Disaster’.
Philippine Sociological Review. Vol 63. Pp 105–29. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/24717189.
Rappaport, Roy A. 1979. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley. North Atlantic.
Schieffelin, Edward L. 2005. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. Basingstoke. Palgrave
Macmillan.
Sopova, Jasmina, and Carolina Rollan Ortega. ‘Rapa Nui: Back from the Brink’. UNESCO Courier. N.p. 20 Mar.
2019. Web. 11 Jun. 2019. https://en.unesco.org/courier/2019-1/rapa-nui-back-brink.
Study Guide and Teacher’s Manual: Reef and Rainforest – An Environmental Encyclopedia and Wiki of Marovo
Lagoon, Solomon Islands – An Open Education Resource Project. 2015. Paris. UNESCO.
www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SC/pdf/marovo_tm_lessons_e_2015.pdf.
‘The Sámi World View and Mythology’. Metsähallitus. N.p. N.d. Web. 15 Jun. 2019.
www.nationalparks.fi/inari/sights/mythology.
UNESCO. 2017. ‘International Mother Language Day – 21 Feb 2012. Revitalizing Mayangna Language and
Culture: The Importance of Mother Tongue Education in Nicaragua’. Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
N.p. Web. 11 Jun. 2019. www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/priority-
areas/links/biodiversity/projects/mayangna/events/mother-tongue-day-2012-mayangna-videos/.
UNESCO. 2017. ‘The Rapa Nui Language Is Alive but Endangered’. United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization. N.p. Web. 11 Jun. 2019. www.unesco.org/new/en/santiago/press-room/our-stories/the-
rapa-nui-language-is-alive-but-endangered/.
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII). ‘Who Are Indigenous Peoples?’ N.p. N.d. Web 9
Jun. 2019. www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. New York. Macmillan.
Yurth, Cindy. ‘Manuelito’s Legacy’. Navajo Times. N.p. 14 Feb. 2013. Web. 9 Jun. 2019.
www.navajotimes.com/news/chapters/021413coy.php.

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6 Knowledge and Religion
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will:
• know what a religious knowledge system is and how it might differ from other forms of knowing the
world
• understand key concepts in the discussion of religious knowledge systems that might not be part of
other knowledge systems
• understand arguments about how religious knowledge systems are distinct from scientific knowledge
systems
• be able to reflect on the extent to which knowers outside religious knowledge systems can offer
legitimate critiques of religious content
• recognize some of the key methods of developing and accepting religious knowledge
• understand the role religious knowledge systems play in the development of ethical systems.

Learner profile
Balanced
How can we align our religious beliefs with what we learn in other areas of knowledge?

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Introduction
In all societies across the planet we find religions, and roughly 80 per cent of the world’s population, or nearly 5.8
billion people, consider themselves religious (The Global Religious Landscape). However, as was the case with
‘Indigenous societies’, it might be a challenge to define ‘religion’, since there are things that we would call
‘religions’ that might not fit any particular definition perfectly. The pie chart on the right shows the population of
the world broken down by the most common religious beliefs.

The pie chart does not do justice to the diversity of religious beliefs held by people around the world, however. Most
religions can be divided and subdivided into different branches, denominations or sects, such as Sunni Islam,
Orthodox Judaism or Roman Catholicism. And within these, there will be differing opinions about the
interpretations of sacred texts or the best way to practise religion.

In Theory of Knowledge, however, rather than investigating individual religions’ perspectives, we are exploring
more broadly religious knowledge systems. This means that we’re looking at a type of knowledge and a type of
knowing that is shared among the various religions. This would be a little like considering scientific knowledge
systems as opposed to thinking only of biologists, astronomers, psychologists and geographers; we are looking for
similarities rather than focusing on differences. One way of analysing this idea of religious knowledge systems,
then, is to explore what these ‘religions’ might have in common.

ACTIVITY
1 Working with a partner, write a list of characteristics shared by different religions. Share your ideas
with the rest of your class.
2 Do these shared characteristics help us to define what we mean by religion? What do they tell us
about the relationship between religion and knowledge?

Thinking through these common approaches to religious knowledge is the main goal of this chapter. First, we’ll be
exploring just what the scope of religious knowledge systems is, then exploring some perspectives about the
relationship between religion and knowledge. Then we will be looking at the methods and tools used by religious
knowledge systems and how they differ from non-religious systems of knowledge. Finally, we’ll explore the ethical
dimension of religious knowledge systems.

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Scope

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What is religion?
Religions each contain a set of core beliefs which treats the world we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell as
somehow incomplete; these systems of knowledge suggest that there is more to understanding reality than just
appealing to what we find around us. This already suggests that religious knowledge systems and the view of the
world provided by the natural sciences are quite different. Natural science accepts that metaphysical questions about
what cannot be seen are beyond the scope of scientific description, which depends on observation for evidence. If
something, by definition, exists beyond the physical world around us and therefore cannot be seen or measured in
some way, then it cannot be the subject of science. Many natural scientists think what is physical is all that there is,
suggesting that any claims about what lies outside the observable world is not genuine knowledge or worse, is
simply meaningless. Other natural scientists are perfectly happy to use the scientific method to explain how things
work in this world but believe that religious claims about what happens outside the observable world are not in
direct conflict therewith.
Most religious knowledge systems, however, don’t accept that the two worlds are independent or separate. The
claims about the world beyond what we can immediately see and experience (the ‘religious realm’) has a direct
impact on the way we live in this world. In the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (which share a
historical connection to the God of Abraham) our actions and behaviour in this world are directly connected with the
desires and command of God. Fulfilling those wishes of God is essential to our happiness in the afterlife, over which
God presides. The eastern religious systems tend to move away from a single divine being, and often are focused on
a number of spirits and beings, some malevolent, some benevolent, who are far more integrated or infused into the
world around us. Both western and eastern religious knowledge systems have many rituals and practices that
believers participate in, in order to guarantee that the relationship between the divine beings is a healthy one.
A religious knowledge system might, therefore, be defined as a set of practices and beliefs and traditions which
assume a worldview made up of two distinct worlds: one world populated by the objects we see, feel and directly
interact with (the secular world), and another world which is not directly seen, and is populated with gods or a god,
or other unseen beings (the sacred world). These worlds, however, are deeply connected. This idea of a relationship
or connection in religious knowledge is evident in the Latin root of the word ‘religion’ (Oxford English Dictionary).
Religare is the Latin word meaning ‘to bind again’ or ‘constrain’. The idea is that a religion binds the believer to a
particular set of obligations or duties that are derived from the belief in this supernatural world or deity, rather than
from the world around them.
The two worlds are intimately related, and our existence in this world is often seen as a preparation or a test for
acceptance into the sacred world. The acceptance or transitioning into this sacred world represents the ultimate goal
for humans; in a sense the sacred world is the more real, or at least the final goal of our actions and behaviour in this
world. Many religions focus on a successful transition from this world to the next, and the rules of acceptance into
the divine world depend entirely on our actions and beliefs in this world. If these sorts of beliefs are common to
religious knowledge systems, then a religion is one particular version of such a system, like Islam, Hinduism or
Shintoism.

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Not all systems of belief that we would call religions necessarily place a divine being or beings at the centre of the
system, but most do. A more common starting point in terms of most religious knowledge systems is that human
agency or human action is paramount in the way the Universe works. It matters what we do, and how we behave,
but not in the sense that our actions simply have consequences, like billiard balls have an effect on other billiard
balls, or how a breeze has an effect on the leaves of trees. A full description of this sort of effect need only to refer to
scientific laws governing how objects interact. Rather, religious knowledge systems tend to start from the belief that
there is some being or process which stands outside the world and its natural processes, but that governs them from
afar. So, while physics might give an adequate explanation of the interaction among the breeze and leaves or billiard
balls, religious systems would place those natural laws in the context of the desires and actions of a being or process
which stands outside physics and is not affected by them.
We call these sets of beliefs and knowledge ‘systems’ to bring out the internal connections between the individual
beliefs: each belief in a religious system will form coherent and consistent connections with the other beliefs in that
system. Buddhist beliefs about the nature of the individual self, for instance (namely that there is no self at the root
of our existence), will be consistent with Buddhist beliefs about the nature of suffering and the solutions to suffering
in the world. Similarly, the Christian belief in humanity’s sinful nature helps makes sense of the Christian ideas
surrounding salvation.
Another way of saying this is that religious systems often have made conscious and explicit attempts at creating a
formal theology, meaning religions often produce philosophically rigorous and systematic theories about God and
nearly every other aspect of human life. If you are a Catholic Christian, for instance, then you are part of a long
tradition of Catholic academics and philosophers who have considered nearly every aspect of life and have tried to
develop a Catholic perspective on it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a summary of the official Catholic
perspective on all sorts of issues in the world today, from understanding just what the term ‘God’ means (section
34), to the role of children in a family (sections 2214–2220), the nature of human passions (section 1763), rules
around self-defence (section 2264) and abortion (section 2270ff), and the relationship between private ownership
and the belief that all things belong ultimately to God (section 2403). You can explore the Catechism in more depth
by using the QR code on the right.

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While religious systems are often focused on the fulfilment of the individual, the religious traditions take great pains
to explore just what that individual should believe in order to be worthy of the rewards promised by that religion.

DEEPER THINKING
Religion and reason
Many TOK students will mistakenly think of religious knowledge systems as being primarily grounded in
something they call ‘faith’, by which they mean something like an uncritical, or unreflective acceptance of
claims where there is no evidence for them, and thereby downplay the role of reason in religious belief.
While for many the starting point of an individual belief in God is not explicitly a rational process,
religious traditions, however, are conscious attempts at critically reflecting on this shared belief. The
history and practice of religion shows that the suggestion that religion is merely uncritical acceptance of
non-rational beliefs is simply untrue. The Catholic Catechism (indeed the last 2000 years of Christian
theology) is one example of how reason is used to develop consistent, coherent and integrated systems
of beliefs.
One thing TOK students should always remember is that reason is a process, not an outcome.
Reason is a process by which ideas are related to one another, not one which tells us whether the ideas
are ‘true’. There are any number of false beliefs (eg, that the Earth is flat), supported by ‘rational’
arguments. That the arguments are called rational doesn’t mean that you should think that they are true.
Many students who are not religious, think that because they think religious beliefs are ‘false’ they
cannot be rational, or that they cannot be rationally defended. This is simply not true. What these
students might find more fruitful is to explore the premises of the competing arguments in order to think
about how different premises might lead, through entirely rational development or analysis, to quite
different conclusions. Identifying where two arguments differ is far more complex and challenging to
students, which is why some will simply try to derail arguments they don’t like by claiming that they are
‘irrational’.

The Jewish Talmud is another good example of the role of reasoned interpretation and analysis of religious texts as
central to religious knowledge systems. While Jewish people hold the Torah as sacred (containing the direct
commandments of God), these texts are sometimes hard to interpret in light of modern development. Would the
commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’ cover using an uncited image from the internet in a presentation in class?
Jewish people, however, also look to the Talmud, texts which contain commentaries of the Torah along with the
teachings of thousands of rabbis who analysed and reflected on those texts (Shurpin). The idea is that the original
Torah is complex and general, so working out how to apply it in a particular everyday modern context (like whether
using uncredited images breaks the commandment prohibiting stealing) needs analysis by people with the
experience and knowledge to do this responsibly. This further underscores the role of reasoned interpretation in the
development of Jewish religious belief.

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Religions or religious traditions might have different perspectives within them, for example, the Hindu traditions
have a number of approaches to questions about how the world was created. However, even in these situations there
are enough internal consistencies and common concepts that we can still recognize them as the same ‘system’. The
various religions, in other words, share an approach to the knowledge they construct about the world in ways that are
quite similar – similar enough for us to step back from any particular ‘religion’ and think about the type of
knowledge (both propositional and ability) used in religions.

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Can religious claims be considered knowledge?
Since the Enlightenment, the ability to test knowledge through observation of the world or close analysis of the ideas
themselves has become central to how we generally construct knowledge. One of the outcomes of this intellectual
period was a de-emphasis on accepting knowledge simply because the religious authorities told you so. However,
religious knowledge systems continue to influence the vast majority of people on the planet, so how do their claims
about the world stand up to scrutiny?

IA prompt
1 What counts as knowledge?

Some would consider the ability to be tested as non-negotiable when it comes to whether a claim is actually
something that can be known or something that can be ‘reliable’. An argument from this perspective which
concludes that religious knowledge cannot be called ‘knowledge’ looks something like this parable, originally
offered by John Wisdom and later developed by Antony Flew (this is the author’s own retelling).
Imagine you and a friend happen across a clearing in a forest. Your friend, taken by the beauty of the spot
declares, ‘What a beautiful garden! The gardener is very talented.’ You see no obvious signs of purpose or
intent in the clearing, just a seemingly random collection of bushes, rocks and flowers. You say, ‘There is
no gardener here.’ It appears that the two of you disagree quite fundamentally about the truth of the
matter; you both accept the evidence before you, but you disagree on what exactly it is evidence of.
You propose a series of tests to determine which is correct. You suggest that you wait to see if a gardener
arrives, but one does not. Your friend says, ‘But the gardener is invisible.’ You suggest that you set up
some infrared devices, but nothing is detected. Your friend says, ‘But the gardener is utterly undetectable.’
You suggest that you wait to see if any changes in the garden itself occur that are not simply how things
naturally happen. The plants and bushes grow normally, the rocks do nothing out of the ordinary. Your
friend says, ‘But the gardener is working with and coordinating the natural processes.’
After many such interactions, you both come to realize that nothing that could ever be observed could
count against your friend’s claim that ‘there is a gardener’. Your friend will add to the definition of the
gardener some quality which would explain why nothing counts definitively against his claim. You will
each use all observations as evidence for your separate claims. Both of the claims ‘there is no gardener’
and ‘there is a gardener, who is undetectable’ are consistent with the agreed-upon evidence.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What is the value of thinking about questions to which there are no definite answers?

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What are we to do in this situation? The case here is that two claims:
1 There is a gardener
2 There is no gardener
are both being used to describe the same set of facts in the world. Every time the non-believer uses the facts in front
of them as evidence to argue for claim 2, the believer then re-defines, or ‘qualifies’ the concept of gardener in order
to show how that fact is still consistent with claim 1. It seems then that all conceivable observational facts are
consistent with both of these mutually exclusive claims, given the continually more complex definition of the
gardener. Either there is a gardener or there is not, but the situation suggests that there is no way we can appeal to
observations about the world to tell which is true. What each of two people see can be counted as verification of
their claim, but they cannot both be true. Conversely, neither of the claims can be falsified, they each end up true in
relation to all the available evidence.

ACTIVITY
Carry on this conversation with a partner. One partner should offer an experiment which should detect
the gardener; the other should reply with an additional reason why that won’t work in this case. How far
can you get? What do you think this suggests about the reliability of the claim, ‘There is a gardener’?

In this case, Antony Flew argues that the two claims are meaningless because they both make claims about the
world, neither of which can be shown to be definitively true through appeal to observed facts. In this case, then, no
claims about divine beings (either for or against) should be counted as ‘knowledge’.
Flew suggests that this is different from scientific knowledge about the world. Consider the following claims:
1 The MMR vaccine causes autism.
2 The MMR vaccine does not cause autism.
One of these claims might be true, but they cannot both be, so we need to look to the world, apply the scientific
method and decide which of these claims is justified by appealing to facts in the world. So far, all the available
scientific evidence (that evidence gained through the rigorous application of the scientific method, not evidence
gained through misapplication of the method or based on mere anecdote), shows that there is no evidence for claim
1 and that all the available data suggests claim 2 is true. The opposite might have been true, but this has not
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happened.
So, by looking at the world around us, it is possible to say that in this world, claim 1 is false and claim 2 is true. This
suggests that both 1 and 2 are both meaningful because they describe a situation which we are able to test.
Furthermore, we have made the tests and discovered that, in fact, claim 2 is false. This ability to use facts to show
something is false means that the claims are indeed ‘scientific’ (because they describe this world) and can therefore
be ‘scientific knowledge’.
Flew uses this notion (and the parable about the gardener on the previous page) to suggest that religious claims
cannot be thought of as knowledge. Now consider a common claim in the western traditions such as ‘God loves me’.

ACTIVITY
1 Play the dialogue game from the last activity but now with the claim ‘God loves me’. The first partner
should offer reasons not to believe it – based on real facts in the world. The second partner should
reply, explaining why those reasons don’t really contradict the claim. How far can you get?
2 Consider what other sources of knowledge, other than sensory observation of the world, a religious
believer might appeal to in order to justify their claim. Do the second partner’s reasons draw from facts
in the world, or redefinitions of the notion of ‘God’ or ‘love’?
3 What conclusions about the reliability of the claim can you draw?

There seems to be a lot of counter-evidence against the claim that ‘God loves us’: people are subject to grave
political and social injustice and violence, people lose their jobs for unjust reasons, people get sick and die. These
would seem to count against the claim that there is a loving God looking after people, but often religious people will
suggest that God still loves us, but then qualify their understanding of God to allow what appears to be evidence
counter to the claim. They might say that God is testing us, helping us be stronger, or giving us the freedom to
respond and help others, developing charity and kindness which are traits God wants us to have. In other words, it
seems that no matter how bad things are, all these things are still compatible with the claim that God loves us.

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What questions does religion seek to answer?
We have established that there are genuine problems conceiving religious claims as scientific knowledge. In various
ways, religious claims don’t really stand up to the challenges posed by the scientific method and some might argue
that this means that religious claims can’t even be considered ‘knowledge’. What, then, is the status of ‘religious
knowledge systems’?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does religion try to resolve problems that other areas can’t resolve?

For many, a religious belief is simply a belief in some supernatural being. There are more and less sophisticated
versions of this type of belief, but belief in some supernatural being or beings is central. As we saw above, however,
one of the ways of understanding the context of religion is in terms of its etymology: religare, the Latin for
‘binding’. This brings out the notion that religious knowledge systems are about linking people with supernatural
beings, not just in terms of belief, but in terms of behaviour or living your life. Paul Tillich, a twentieth-century
theologian defines religion as:
the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as
preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life. Therefore this
concern is unconditionally serious and shows a willingness to sacrifice any finite concern which is in
conflict with it. The predominant religious name for the content of such concern is God. (Tillich)
Rather than focusing on supernatural beings, Tillich’s definition is helpful in that it focuses instead on the notion of
the meaning or significance of religious knowledge systems. By ‘ultimate concern’, Tillich is pointing out that
religious belief tends to focus on what people believe to be the most important element of their lives, that element
which all activity should be aimed at. Indeed, this concern is ‘infinite’ in that it is that which is greater than all other
‘finite’ concerns, even our own personal interests. Religion deals with that which is more important than any other
thing, our own lives included. For many religious people their notion of ‘God’ represents that which they should be
most ‘concerned’ by. (‘Concern’ here doesn’t necessarily mean ‘worried by’ but more like, ‘most interested in’.)
God, in other words, is that which is the most important, the most significant thing we could possibly concern
ourselves with.
In this definition of religion we encounter the notion of a supreme, supernatural being, but we also encounter the
notion that we are committed to this being, drawn to this being, obligated to it in a way that is more profound than
any other commitment we could have. In fact, as the quote above suggests, all other concerns are necessarily less
crucial than our ultimate concern. We may be ‘concerned’ or interested in money, friends or an excellent job, we
might devote our lives to helping others or to simply aiming to be the best we can be, but a religious believer might
say that these activities are done in the service of something greater. On their own these goals fall short of being
‘ultimate’. A Hindu might say, ‘Sure, aim for that good job and happy life, but if you are not trying to build good
karma, then you’re not worried about the right things.’ A Jew might say, ‘Sure, working hard to gain a promotion at
work is good, but if you are violating the Torah to do it, then you’re not worried about the right things.’ The idea is
that our own individual or immediate concerns and needs will never outweigh the ultimate concerns and needs,
which is nothing less than our eternal well-being. The limited concerns which occupy our secular, everyday lives
only impact us ‘locally’, rather than ‘absolutely’. We might even devote our lives to helping others, but here again
the impact is limited to those we help. The idea of God, or our gods, however, for Tillich reaches far beyond that.
Whatever happens to those we help, there is still the larger question of God and our relationship to God and our
obligations to God.

IA prompt
2 Are some types of knowledge more useful than others?

What religious knowledge systems are meant to engage with, then, are those things which give our lives meaning
and significance. Whereas scientific or historical claims describe what happened and why and where, religious
knowledge systems try to make sense of what is eternally meaningful. In focusing on those things about which we
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should be most concerned, religious beliefs orientate us toward how we should be, rather than simply how we are.
Religious knowledge systems give us goals and priorities and codes of behaviour.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Values
Values is one of the key concepts of the TOK course and here we see that religious knowledge systems
provide many people their ultimate values. This means that for religious believers there can be nothing
more important than their religious devotions and all other values are part of this ultimate value. As we
saw on page 185 with the Catholic Catechism, the ‘system’ of religious knowledge is all about exploring
those things that we do value in life (family, job, friends, health), in order to understand them in relation
to God. For many Catholics, every aspect of their lives – everything that they value – is related to and
directed towards God, which is the most valued thing.

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Enlightenment, salvation, redemption
As we have seen, one of the central aspects of religious knowledge systems, an aspect that clearly differentiates it
from historical or scientific knowledge systems, explores what we should be ‘ultimately concerned by’ and is the
main goal of religious practice and faith. There are many of these concepts and they vary across traditions, but they
all have the same sort of importance or significance. A full list would need to encompass all religions and is
therefore impossible for this book, but a selection of a few will make the point. While different, they all point to
something like ‘salvation’ or ‘enlightenment’, meaning that religious knowledge systems aim to bring individuals
from a state of imperfections towards one of perfection.
A common dynamic in religious knowledge systems is that our relationship to the ultimate reality has gone wrong
and needs to be put right again. That relationship is the ultimate value of our lives (consider Tillich’s definition on
the previous page) and our number one priority is to try to make that right again. A good job won’t make it right; a
beautiful spouse won’t make it right. Religious knowledge systems challenge us to change how we relate to the
world at a very deep level and challenge us to return to our proper relationship to the world. This is something well
beyond the realm of a scientific description of the world.
‘Redemption’ captures this idea nicely. It is a common concept in Judaism but is applicable more broadly across
most religions. To be ‘redeemed’ in a non-religious context means to be cleared of a debt. In the religious context, it
means to be freed from the state of imperfection (eg, sin, evil, illusion) in which we find ourselves and to be again in
the proper relationship with the divine being. We can see this dynamic between finding ourselves in a state of
imperfection and striving for a state of perfection in the religious systems in Table 6.1.

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One clear way of distinguishing religious knowledge systems is at the level of the final aim or goal of such
knowledge. Whereas science and history seek to describe the features of this world, religious knowledge systems
point us beyond the everyday physical world and encourage us to think about our ultimate state of human perfection,
how best to live a human life or what should be most significant in that life. Whatever claims religious knowledge
systems make about this world (claims which often come into direct conflict with scientific or historical claims)
should be understood as preliminary concerns, because the ultimate aim of religion is far greater than anything
which can be said of this world.
What this amounts to is that the types of questions answered by religious knowledge systems might be quite
different from the types of questions answered by other AOKs. Human beings have a natural tendency to want to
live well – to live in the right way – and although there are deep and genuine differences in what people think the
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‘right’ way to live is, the answers are generally not found in a purely scientific approach. The fact that people have
developed religious knowledge systems since we have been human (these systems pre-date what we would now
consider scientific knowledge by tens of thousands of years) suggests that these attempts to make sense of our lives,
to give them meaning and significance, is a deep feature of our human psychology. Science’s best answer when it
comes to the problem of the meaning of human existence seems at best to be, there is none, which is not really an
answer at all and, for something like 5.8 billion of us, is not adequate.
More than any other AOK, then, the scope of a religious knowledge system is human beings and what our place is in
the Universe. Religious systems ask:
• Who are we?
• How do we relate to the forces that govern the Universe?
• What is our place or significance in the history of existence?
• What meaning or purpose do our individual lives have?
These questions are unique among the AOKs and therefore require a different approach to constructing and
developing the knowledge claims that are central to religious belief. The various approaches, of course, result in
dramatically different religions, each with its unique rituals, practices, methods and perspectives.

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Perspectives
Religious knowledge systems are interesting in that, ultimately, for the ‘religious believer’ all questions can be
subsumed into a single religious worldview. In a sense, therefore, all questions can be considered religious because
religious knowledge systems seek to understand the ultimate questions of the Universe and the place of human
beings within it. In this section, we will address several perspectives on the status of religious beliefs and practices
in relation to other forms of knowledge.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
If knowledge is a map, what is the territory that religion represents?

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Gould and ‘non-overlapping magisteria’
An illustration of one counter position to the idea that religion is an all-pervasive knowledge system comes from
Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ or NOMA. In a 1997 article, Gould, a Harvard
professor of Biology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, addressed the question of the scope and
application of science and religion, arguing that they are indeed not in conflict, precisely because they each are out
to construct quite different types of knowledge. If they were trying to do the same thing they would be in conflict,
but because they seek to ask and answer different types of questions, they are not in conflict. Gould writes:
The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective
domains of professional expertise – science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in
the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. (Gould)
In other words, the ‘respective domains’ or what the knowledge framework would call the scope and application of
science and religion are quite different. The word ‘magisteria’ comes from the Latin ‘magister’, meaning to teach,
and the suggestion is that science and religion have the authority to teach us different things about our experience in
the world: science can teach us the answers to questions of empirical facts and theories about why these observable
facts are the way they are, and religion offers answers when we ask about moral meaning and value. As Gould puts
it, scientists ‘study how the heavens go, and [theologians] determine how to go to heaven’ (Gould).
As we suggested above, however, not all scientists or theologians would agree with Gould; religious knowledge
systems often do make empirical claims about the world and the things within it. Much of the content in many
sacred texts are historical in nature, so therefore make historical claims. Likewise, the human and natural sciences do
make more and more claims about the natural basis of meaning and value in human life, but Gould’s point is
important to keep in mind. In trying to answer questions about how the world works, scientific inquiry follows a
method rooted in observation. As we will see in the Methods and tools section, a religious claim is often justified
according to other non-observation-based evidence, like scriptural authority, or revelation. Too often religious
thinkers side-step this necessary element in the construction of scientific knowledge and suggest that their own
religious claims are somehow justifiable in the same way as science. However, claims about the observable world
based on unverifiable evidence, claims made in sacred texts or based on personal revelation, will simply be seen as
non-scientific. In other words, using a sacred text to justify a scientific or historical knowledge claim is not science
in any traditional sense.
One area in which this overlap between religious knowledge systems and the natural sciences can be seen, is in the
discussion of intelligent design. The discussion has to do with just what a complete explanation of the features of
life would look like. The common position held in the scientific community is that a ‘Darwinian’ explanation is
sufficient and best in keeping with the evidence. Some in the religious community, however, wish to consider
alternative theories to the Darwinian perspective.
The religious view suggests that there are some features which need an explanation that Darwinian evolutionary
theory does not provide, namely the appearance of design. One such scholar, Michael Behe of Lehigh University,
argues that the complex functions we find in the world cannot adequately be explained through reference to
Darwinian evolution by natural selection as it is currently understood. He suggests that the flagella of certain
bacteria (the little tails that, when shaken, propel a bacterium along) display such an intricately fine-tuned structure,
one that would cease to be functional if even one element was missing, that he believes this to be irreducibly
complex. This means that there could have been no previous state from which the current state had evolved. This
example of irreducible complexity, then, needs a new concept to be explained – one not provided by Darwinian
evolution – namely a designer.
The idea is that because the world is designed, there must be a designer (DeWolf, et al). Behe is not the first to
consider this argument. It was famously put forward in 1802 by William Paley, who likened the complexity we see
in the natural world to the complexity we see in a pocket watch. He argued that to suggest that the pocket watch was
the result of natural, undesigned process is inconceivable, so an appeal to a designer is necessary for a full
explanation.

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Whether Behe’s claim is correct is beyond the remit of a TOK discussion, but the question does serve as an
opportunity to consider just what a ‘religious’ view and what a ‘scientific’ view is. Behe, unlike Gould, is suggesting
that a genuine and honest exploration of the natural world leads us to claims about a divine being. Gould would say
the two are essentially distinct. The question matters because there are many people who believe that intelligent
design should be taught alongside Darwinian evolution in the context of a Biology class. Exactly where the divisions
between religious knowledge systems and the natural sciences lie have real-world consequences.
One way for a TOK student to approach this is to question just what sorts of concepts are available to religious
systems and science as traditionally conceived. We have seen already that part of the core beliefs in most religious
systems is the acceptance of a higher power or divine being who stands outside and beyond the world we see around
us. This concept then is available when applying a religious explanation, and this is clearly being applied when
using a ‘designer’ as part of the explanation. A non-religious position cannot appeal to this concept, since any
explanation it provides must use the concepts that have been developed from within the system and have been
verified or confirmed by the logic and tools of that system. The claim ‘there is a designer who exists outside the
natural world but has designed elements of the natural world’ is itself a claim which extends beyond the available
evidence. Much of the intelligent design argument rests on the claim that certain parts of the natural world (like a
bacterium’s flagellum) are like objects which we know are designed and therefore have a designer. Paley’s pocket
watch is an example. We already know the watch’s complexity is designed, and we already know that the watch has
a designer. For some scientists like Behe, it is a short step then to apply that logic in an analogy to the natural world
– because the world also seems so extremely complex (such that if even one part was absent the whole mechanism
would fail to work) that it must also be the product of design (and so there must be an intelligent designer). The
diagram below seeks to explain this analogy. We discuss the nature of ‘analogies’ and their use in Chapter 10.
We will spend more time thinking about the methods of the natural sciences in Chapter 9, but one of the ways in
which scientific claims are evaluated is to consider whether or not they are consistent with other accepted facts and
whether or not the claim helps make sense of other facts. The non-religious scientist would claim that while it is
perfectly reasonable to believe the bacterial flagellum is incredibly complex, one would need independent
verification that such a designer exists. If, however, there is no independent way to establish the existence of such a
being, then the claim is, merely, an unconfirmed hypothesis. However, if there is no possible way of verifying the
designer from within the system (ie, nothing in the natural world can count as direct evidence for something outside
the natural world), then the claim that this designer exists is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, one that cannot even in
principle be shown to be true or false.
Using unfalsifiable claims to explain a natural phenomenon is the hallmark of ‘pseudoscience’. In the vast majority
of other cases, there has never been a need to use the hypothesis of a supernatural designer – the concepts of natural

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science have worked or been discovered – so for there to be a need in this one case is unconvincing. The responsible
scientist would probably conclude something like, we don’t know how this particular object has evolved, but with
more evidence we might find out. The scientist might claim that to reject the whole scientific method and use a being
for whom there could be no other scientific evidence to explain some phenomenon or event in this world is
unnecessary and not in keeping with the scientific method. In fact, Michael Behe’s own departmental colleagues at
Lehigh University, express a position like this on their own departmental website:
While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by
the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been
tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific. (Department of Biological Sciences,
Lehigh University)

Many scientists believe there to be no conflict between ‘religious’ belief in a supernatural designer of the world and
a complete ‘scientific’ explanation of that world, but they generally accept that when they shift from thinking about
the natural world to thinking about what stands outside of and in control of that natural world, they are no longer
doing science. This is why there is no conflict: science is great for working out the mechanisms of this world, but it
is an entirely different question (ie, not a question science can ask or answer) when asking about what happens
outside the world of scientific observation.
So how useful is Gould’s initial claim that science and religion offer ‘non-overlapping’ explanations? On the one
hand, Gould’s division is too simplistic, because many believers in religious knowledge systems believe their
religious knowledge to include claims about the world; it is their religious conviction that, for example, what the
Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Torah (the Christian Old Testament) says about the creation of the world really is
how it happened. On the other hand, Gould’s division is useful when thinking about what constitutes good evidence
in the context of an AOK (especially in the natural sciences) and useful when thinking about what religious
knowledge systems are best suited at doing. Thinking about the scope and application of natural science and
religious knowledge systems gives you the opportunity to compare the two and suggests that when doing science,
one cannot appeal to an ancient text as part of that ‘scientific’ process.

IA prompt
5 What counts as good evidence for a claim?

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Wittgenstein and ‘language-games’
There is another perspective on the nature of religious belief which in some ways is similar to Gould’s (and actually
came first). Ludwig Wittgenstein considers language and our understanding and treatment of concepts more broadly,
and applies it to religious use of language. Language, he suggests, gains its meaning through its use in everyday
interactions. When, for example, we utter ‘Water!’ the meaning of that word in that moment depends on the context
we are in. If we are speaking to a waiter in a restaurant, it might be a request. If we are lost in the desert and say it to
the rescuer who finds us, it is still a request, but rather more urgent. If we are an electrician, it might be a warning to
colleagues. The point is that words often do something other than just name objects. Wittgenstein extends this to
include what we might think as claims about the world and calls them ‘language-games’, suggesting that ‘the
speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life’ (Wittgenstein section 23). What he means is that the
meaning of terms and sentences should be linked to what the speaker and listener are doing with those words.
Suppose at their next wedding anniversary a husband wrote the following note to his wife: ‘Dearest, my brain over
time has continued to release more and more of the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin when I am in your
presence.’

It is unlikely his wife would be impressed, even if she were a neurologist, because that is an inappropriate use of that
sort of language in that context. She would probably prefer it if her husband were to say something like, ‘I love you
more every day’ instead. Similarly, a teacher might get fired were they to see the head teacher at morning assembly
and shout from across the room ‘What’s up, Steve-O?’ If the teacher addressed the head teacher in that manner, they
would be acting as if the two of them were close friends. They might be, but in the context of the workplace that
would be inappropriate. That particular way of using language is appropriate in the language-game of ‘greeting close
friends’, whereas the teacher really should be playing the language-game, ‘addressing my work colleague and
superior’. The use of language in the anniversary card mistook the game the husband should have been playing:
‘telling his partner how much he loved and valued her’, instead of using language that was more appropriate for the
language-game ‘describing scientifically the neurological and hormonal foundations of psychological attachment’.
In other words, the context of our use of language impacts how we should use the language and what that particular
use of the language means.
This might not seem like a ground-breaking insight, but we can find its significance in terms of how differently
religious knowledge systems use language. Earlier, I mentioned that sometimes religious knowledge systems extend
into other AOKs. One such claim would be ‘Jesus was resurrected’, a central belief in Christianity. Most Christians
consider that a historical claim, meaning that they believe it to refer to a genuine historical fact: at one point Jesus
was dead, having been crucified by the Romans, then at a later point he was biologically alive and engaging with his
followers. However, Wittgenstein suggests that the language-game being played by a religious believer who makes
this claim is nevertheless quite different than if a historian were to say it. He says:
Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now
believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe
through thick and thin, which you can only do as a result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take
the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life
for it. (Wittgenstein, et al 32 [emphasis in original])

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There is a lot to unpack here. Primarily, Wittgenstein is suggesting that the type of belief is different for the religious
person than for the historian, or that the form of belief is quite different. He says that the ‘historical proof game’ (the
way that expert historians will use language when developing historical narratives) is irrelevant to religious belief.
The language-game played by the historian towards the claim ‘Jesus was resurrected’ would be governed by the
historical method; the historian would take it as a hypothesis that might be true, and then try to find sources to
support it, consider biases in those sources and consider what other facts about the time or place or people are
accepted, to test for consistency. Accepting the belief for the historian would be a question of probability, meaning
that the historian would accept it only insofar as it is likely, given the evidence. A natural scientist would have a
similar attitude towards the claim, insisting on evidence and accepting the claim only if the evidence was strong
enough (and it would have to be pretty strong).

IA prompt
14 Does some knowledge only belong to particular communities of knowers?

Wittgenstein suggests that this is not the approach or use a religious believer would take towards the claim. Whereas
a historian would evaluate the claim, the religious person (in this case a Christian), believes the claim. They still
accept it as a historical truth (they believe it did happen), but they might hold it in their mind (as Wittgenstein says)
‘lovingly’ or ‘believingly’ as a believer. In relation to religious belief he says that ‘what I [the Christian] need is
certainty … and this certainty is faith’ (Wittgenstein, et al 33). Certainty is not really an option in the methodology
or language-game of science or history, it is generally a matter of ‘more or less confirmed’. The certainty provided
by a religious acceptance of the claim provides the believer a picture or understanding of the world that is used to
provide guidance and direction and their identity, which isn’t part of the attitude a historian would take towards the
claim.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is certainty any more or less attainable in religion than it is in the arts or human sciences?

Wittgenstein references a debate he was having with a Catholic priest, Father O’Hara, who was attempting to ground
religious claims in science and argue that belief in the resurrection is a good historical or scientific belief, one that is
strong enough for a historian or scientist to accept on the grounds of the historical or scientific method. Wittgenstein
suggests that when the priest reduces religious claims to merely scientific claims, he lowers the value of religious
belief to ‘superstition’, by which he means that, if the priest is taking a scientific attitude towards a religious claim
then all he has accomplished is to make poorly justified scientific claims (Wittgenstein and Barrett 59). To maintain
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the power and certainty of the religious claims, the believer must treat it differently.
One might argue that this approach of Father O’Hara (that religious claims should be evaluated in terms of the
historical or scientific methods) is precisely the attitude taken by some of the popular modern critics of religious
belief, but in the critics’ view the religious claims never muster the strength to be accepted on historical or scientific
terms. The ‘New Atheism’ movement takes a similar approach in their highly critical view of religious faith, first
suggesting that religious claims are always meant to be evaluated against scientific or historical criteria and then
suggesting that these claims are worse than simply being untrue, they are genuinely dangerous (Poole).
Whatever you make of the moral judgment that religious belief is dangerous, the movement seems based on an
acceptance of religious belief as simply scientific or historical claims, similar to the way Wittgenstein sees Father
O’Hara’s use of religious claims. As we’ve seen, though, when a believer makes a religious claim, there might be
‘entirely different connections’ being made (Wittgenstein and Barrett 58), such that if a Christian were to claim
‘Jesus has been resurrected’ and a scientist were to say ‘Jesus was not resurrected’, they might mean such different
things that they don’t even genuinely contradict one another.
These types of religious connections need to be understood before the whole form of knowing is dismissed. If the
new atheists’ claims are that religious claims are not scientific claims, we might accept this: they represent different
forms and different areas of knowledge, each with its own methods. To characterize all religious belief as bad
science, however, and then dismiss it for being bad science is to wilfully misread the scope and application of what
religious knowledge systems are generally trying to do.
Of course, the issue is rather more complex than this, as Wittgenstein’s use of Father O’Hara’s scientific defence of
Christian belief in the resurrection suggests. In many cases, religious believers are making historical and scientific
claims about the world when making religious claims. Most traditional Christians do believe that ‘Jesus was
resurrected’ is literally true. It describes an event which really happened.
Whether religious claims are meant to be evaluated using the criteria from other areas of knowledge for establishing
reliable claims is a difficult question. Perhaps we can consider what religious knowledge systems are trying to
describe? If religions are ‘maps’ to guide us through and help us understand our human experience in the world, just
what is the landscape being described?

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Methods and tools
While religious knowledge systems might be internally consistent, they might not appear consistent with other facts
which we construct outside the realm of religion. One Hindu explanation of the Universe suggests that the world
was born from a great egg; the traditional western creation story suggests God (Yahweh or Allah) is the sole creator
of all existence. Scientific systems will not accept these approaches. Similarly, religious knowledge systems often
use historical narrative as ways of explaining the world and our place within it. Here again, these religious claims
about history might conflict with what secular historians might agree has happened. Historians generally accept that
there was a popular Jewish teacher in first century Palestine, known as Jesus, who preached the coming resurrection
of the dead and the ultimate victory of the Jewish God. But these historians will stop short of claiming to have
historical knowledge of exactly what he said or what he did day to day, although the Christian New Testament is full
of such stories.
In many cases, these conflicts can be analysed through an examination of the methods and tools used by religious
knowledge systems. This is often a point of real conflict between various AOKs and religious knowledge systems.
Historians and scientists, for instance, will insist on a particular method and accept only certain types of evidence,
whereas religious knowledge might be happy to accept other forms of evidence as justification for its claims. The
extent to which an individual finds those restrictions and opportunities convincing might govern whether they are
religious or not; if you believe that knowledge must be grounded in the scientific method, then you might be less
likely to accept any religious claim, whereas if you accept the authority of church leaders, revelation or experience,
faith or sacred texts, then you might be more likely to accept religious claims.
The following section seeks to unpack a few of the methods and tools of religious knowledge systems. It will focus
largely on the western religious traditions, both because of the authors’ own experiences and knowledge, and also
because the western religious tradition has been far more concerned with developing rational arguments for faith,
particularly since the Enlightenment period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The methods and tools we will explore are:
• faith
• reason and argument
• authority
• sacred texts
• dogma
• religious experience.

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Faith
Although we’ve argued above that faith is not the only method by which religious knowledge systems are accepted
by individuals, the role of faith in such systems cannot be underestimated. However, just what faith means or
amounts to when thinking about religious claims is not clear. Faith can mean an unwarranted belief or believing
something to be true when there is no evidence to suggest it is. This might more properly be called ‘blind faith’. This
sort of faith is generally not the sort of faith that religious people appeal to when discussing their beliefs, although,
ironically, this is the sort of faith that critics of religious belief say religious people have.

Augustine of Hippo, a Bishop in north Africa in the fifth century, suggested that reason and faith are compatible and
necessary to genuinely understand Christian doctrine. He says:
Heaven forbid, I say, that we should believe in such a way that we do not accept or seek a rational
account, since we could not even believe if we did not have rational souls. In certain matters, therefore,
pertaining to the teaching of salvation, which we cannot yet grasp by reason, but which we will be able to
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 at some point, faith precedes reason so that the heart may be purified in order that it may receive and
sustain the light of the great reason. (Augustine, et al)
So, Augustine’s position is that we are, by nature, rational beings, and we must use that reason to help us understand
our faith. He quotes the Old Testament: Unless you believe you will not understand (Isaiah 7:9) to suggest how faith
and reason work together. While there are certain elements of Christian doctrine (Salvation and the Trinity in this
case) that are to be accepted by faith, this acceptance by faith is nevertheless able to be explored through reason to
aim at understanding.

IA prompt
18 Are some things unknowable?

DEEPER THINKING
Acceptance and understanding
This distinction between acceptance and understanding is an interesting one in the world of TOK and
can be used to explore knowledge claims across all the areas of knowledge. You might, for example,
accept that your teacher’s claim that some mathematical theorem is true or that the chemical structure
for some molecule is a certain shape, even if you don’t understand for yourself just what that means.
Consider how much of your own knowledge gained over your entire school career is accepted in this
manner, through the authority of your teacher. However, accepting claims like this and for these reasons
is not unreasonable; you should consider your teacher a reliable source of knowledge and so should
‘have faith’ in their claims. This, however, does not mean that reason has no part to play in your
developing a full understanding of those claims. Having accepted that mathematical theorems and
chemical structures are knowledge and accepting the way and methods they use to describe certain
features of the world, then you can develop your understanding of the phenomenon by applying your
reason to further study the claims.

Augustine is suggesting that religious knowledge systems can follow a similar pattern. If you are a
Christian, you might accept the central doctrines of the faith, but then use your reason to make sense of
it. Indeed, in other writings, Augustine suggests that when the literal meaning of biblical texts (in this
case the creation story in Genesis) contradicts what reason tells us, then we should treat the biblical
texts as metaphorical (Augustine of Hippo).

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We fully accept that there are many religious people who take quite a different view and will always
prioritize the literal meaning of the texts as they stand, and that the attitudes towards the texts might
differ between religions. However, we offer Augustine’s view as a way to underscore that there are many
ways of understanding the relationship between faith and reason and that they do not necessarily
contradict one another. In fact, they can work together to develop a deep understanding of the
knowledge provided by religious knowledge systems.

ACTIVITY
We’ve suggested that faith before understanding is one traditional approach of religious knowledge
systems.
1 Do you think this is a reliable method?
2 Can you think of other examples in other AOKs where you might be asked to accept something before
you can truly understand it?
3 Do you think those situations are different or similar to the religious context?

Why would anyone start with the acceptance through faith suggested by Augustine on the previous page? In the
secular examples we used earlier, a student would have good reasons to accept what their teacher said in the first
place; as an authority in their subject, it makes good sense initially to take what the teacher says as reliable even if
the student is going to apply reason to more deeply understand it later. In the case of religious claims, though, what
impetus is there to accept the ideas to begin with?
We will discuss ‘religious experience’ later, but we might start the discussion here. In many cases, the initial
acceptance of religious claims might be based on a deeply personal and powerful experience. Blaise Pascal was a
seventeenth-century scientist and mathematician who, in 1654, had a religious experience which changed the course
of his life. He had been born and raised in France as a Catholic but hadn’t written much on religious matters until
after this particular experience, after which he seemed to have devalued mathematics and science as the most
powerful knowledge available (O’Connell). So powerful was the experience that, after he frantically wrote it down,
he sewed it into the lining of his coat so it would never be far from him for the rest of his life. This Memorial was
found after his death:

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It is clear that for Pascal this was a remarkably powerful experience, one that is clearly difficult to put into words.
Despite not having any such experience ourselves, we can fully understand how such an experience would create a
massive impact on an individual and would stand as ‘enough’ justification for their belief in God. For Pascal, then,
to rationalize his religious faith or construct a logical argument based on reason that would be strong enough to
make us believe in God strikes us as implausible. It would be like someone asking a father to prove that his love for
his children is real. What arguments could he offer that would convince them that his love was genuine? He could
just as easily say, ‘If you think love is the sort of thing that needs a rational argument, then you don’t understand the
love I have for my son.’ Likewise, to a critic who says: ‘prove to me this God of Abraham exists’, Pascal might
simply appeal to the power of the experience and say, ‘no argument I can offer will be as convincing as the
experience I’ve had. All I can say is that my experience is real, take it or leave it.’ In this case, the experience
provides the grounding for his faith rather than a rational argument.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Justification
The idea here is that Pascal’s justification for his belief in God is clearly drawn from a different source,
than a traditional argument that uses premises and arguments. This sort of justification by experience is
certainly not the sort of thing that scientists would accept either. While scientific experiments certainly
start with the personal experience of a scientist (they observe the results of an experience), those
observations must be able to be recreated in further experiments and by other scientists. Pascal’s
experience, of course, is not repeatable, nor could any other person experience it. Perhaps what
‘justification’ looks like is different in the contexts of different AOKs.

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Reason and argument
It is interesting to learn that Pascal himself does offer a sort of argument, the conclusion of which is that it is
rationally a better choice to believe in God than to not. In what has become known as ‘Pascal’s Wager’, he points
out that our belief or non-belief in God might have pretty serious consequences if it turns out that God does exist
(Pascal 67). The punishment for denying God’s existence if God does exist are drastic and eternal, and the rewards
for believing in God are infinitely rewarding if God does exist. In the case of God not existing then your belief or
non-belief has no real consequences. On this logic (an early instance of a type of reasoning called ‘decision theory’),
the most rational option is to believe in God’s existence.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are faith and reason interdependent?

Table 6.2 Pascal’s Wager

God exists God doesn’t exist
You believe in God Infinite reward in No consequences: finite loss of having lived with a
Heaven false belief
You do not believe in Infinite punishment in No consequences: finite reward of having lived with a
God Hell true belief
Pascal would never accept this as anything like an ‘argument’ for believing in God. A genuine argument for God’s
existence would mean that there’d be no wager involved at all since an argument would offer something like a
‘proof’. Rather, Pascal merely wants to point out that, in those instances where you have a choice (where, in other
words your reason, faith or experience are not compelling you in one way or another), belief is a reasonable position
to choose. However, this again points to what we’ve said before about the nature of religious knowledge systems:
you must commit to this belief in a way that alters your life and your relationship to the world. Choosing to believe
in God as a result of this argument won’t immediately change your life, but Pascal believes that if you do choose to
believe, and then act like you believe it as a ‘genuine’ religious believer believes it, you may come to the sort of
certainty that seems to accompany true religious faith.

Arguments for the existence of God

In the absence of the sort of religious experience that might convince you God is real, what might otherwise
convince you? In the western tradition (particularly in Christianity), there have been a number of arguments for the
existence of God which believers suggest show that not only does belief in God have rational backing, but that
God’s existence can be demonstrated to be true through argument. There are many types of argument and some are
more convincing than others. Rather than going through them all, we shall summarize four basic types to suggest
that reason can be used as a foundation for religious belief.

ACTIVITY
Begin by first reading each of the argument summaries, which start on page 204.
Try your best to understand the arguments in the most charitable way you can (you don’t want your
evaluation to be based on a misunderstanding of the argument). Then see if you can identify any
weaknesses in the arguments and try to articulate them.
1 What do you think of the four types of arguments presented here?
2 How might you develop them to make them stronger?
3 How might a critic offer challenges to the arguments?
4 Do you think that finding a weakness in each of the arguments necessarily means that God does not
exist?

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These four basic argument types are:
• Ontological arguments
• Teleological arguments
• Cosmological arguments
• Moral arguments.
As with any argument, each begins with a series of claims, or premises, that both the believer and non-believer are
meant to accept. The believer then tries to show how belief in God is in fact consistent with those starting points and
disbelief is not consistent. We shall take each in turn.

ACTIVITY
For each of the arguments that follow, see if you can create a formal version of them. By ‘formal’ version
we mean a version in the form premise, premise … conclusion, where the conclusion in each case is
‘God exists’.

Ontological arguments
‘Ontological’ arguments offer an analysis of the concept of ‘God’ (‘ontological’ means ‘the study of being’) to show
that this concept must refer to something which actually does exist in the world. The starting point is a definition or
understanding of God as something like ‘a supremely perfect being’. This means that God must have all the
perfections (things that make one great, like knowledge, power, goodness) and must have them in the highest
capacity.

Learner profile
Thinkers
Is reason just as important to religious belief as faith?

The argument assumes that even the non-believer would accept this as a definition, even if the non-believer thinks
this definition doesn’t apply to anything in reality. As the argument progresses, it suggests that it is better or more
perfect to exist in reality rather than only existing in the mind as an idea. If this is the case, then even the non-
believer must accept that the supremely perfect being (a being that is as perfect as perfect can be) must also exist in
reality, because, if God were only to exist as an idea (as the non-believer suggests) then God cannot be defined as
‘supremely perfect’. So, having accepted the definition of God, the non-believer seems committed to accepting that
that thing (the supremely perfect being) must exist in both our minds as an idea, but also as a real object in the
world. Therefore ‘God exists’ is true.
Analysis: One common approach a TOK student can take when evaluating knowledge claims is to uncover any
hidden assumptions in arguments. In this argument there is an assumption that many critics have suggested show
that this argument is unsound – in other words, there is a premise which is unacceptable. The unacceptable premise
here is the suggestion that something can be more or less perfect depending on whether or not it ‘has’ existence.
This does sound plausible, however. Suppose we asked someone which was better, ie, which would they rather
have: an idea of a shoebox containing £100 or an actual shoebox actually containing £100. They would definitely
say the latter is better. But to say that existing in the world is better than to exist only as an idea is to suggest we can
take one thing (a shoebox full of money in this case) and say that that thing can either have or not have the property
of ‘existence’. What sense does it make to say that there is an object on the table in front of us, but we cannot see,
touch, feel, hear, taste or smell it because it lacks ‘existence’? In that case we would more properly say there is
nothing at all on the table. It makes no sense to say, ‘I have a shoebox full of money but unfortunately it doesn’t have
existence’. As a result, saying that there is a God in our mind which has everything which makes it perfect, except
existence, means we simply don’t have anything at all. The ontological argument asks us to accept that having
existence is better, but the critic can simply say, if something lacks existence, it isn’t less perfect, it is nothing.
Another important critique has to do with the general strategy of the argument. It hopes to convince us that by
analysing the concept of God we can discover truths about a God that is meant to exist in this world. However, the
best way to establish claims about an object in this world is not through analysing the definition of things, but to
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actually investigate the things themselves to see if they are true. For example, it might be true that the King Arthur
of mythology has a wife named Guinevere, but this fact has no bearing on whether the historical King Arthur also
had a wife named Guinevere. No amount of reading the King Arthur legends will give me any legitimate evidence
for historical claims about the real King Arthur. Genuine evidence from the world is needed to make claims about
the King Arthur in this world. Similarly, then, no amount of simply thinking about God will provide any evidence
for believing those same things about a real God. Just because the concept of God suggests that God must exist in
the real world, does not mean that there actually is a God in the real world! We would need real-world evidence to
make that claim (Alston 1960).
The other three types of arguments do try to offer evidence taken from the world for the existence of God.
Teleological arguments
Telos is a Greek term meaning something’s endpoint or goal or ultimate aim. Teleological arguments for the
existence of God start by arguing that the features in the world are so complex or finely tuned that the best
explanation for them is that there has been a goal in mind from the start. The argument from design (ie, intelligent
design, as discussed earlier) is an example of this type of argument. The world is awesomely complex and works
together too well for it to have been the result of a random, unorganized process. It must have been designed with
some goal (telos) in mind. That designer, then, is God. Another related argument makes use of the anthropic
principle, which argues that the world’s processes have created conditions that are just right for the existence of
human beings. Had any of the conditions been even slightly off, the conditions for life would never have existed and
the Universe would be a cold, dark place devoid of even basic life forms, let alone a wonderous place containing
human beings, with the consciousness sufficient for understanding the truths of the Universe. These arguments
consider the scientific explanation of the phenomenon under consideration to be inadequate and so add another type
of explanation to account for the complex features of the world.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Explanation
Here again we see a disagreement about what makes a better explanation. The facts being described
here are perceived quite differently by the theist (one who claims God does exist) and the atheist (one
who claims God doesn’t exist). The theist believes that the world is designed, the other does not. Given
these different descriptions of the world, different explanations then are needed. The theist suggests that
scientific explanations may tell us how the world works but cannot tell us why the world is the way that it
is. Another ‘level’ of explanation is required, one that steps beyond the world as we experience it and
uses concepts like ‘design’, ‘designer’, ‘creation’ and ‘God’. These concepts are not available to the
scientist (nor are they even desired).

Analysis: These arguments rest on a couple of assumptions. Firstly, that the complexity that is actually present in
the world (something even non-believers would agree exists) cannot be adequately explained by appeal only to
scientific principles. Secondly, they assume that the only plausible explanation must be the existence of some
supernatural, divine process guiding the world towards a final goal. Together these assumptions amount to the
position that the world is obviously designed and so obviously needs a designer. This argument can be quite
compelling – it is hard, for example, to understand what the human eye evolved from, because every element of
human vision must be precisely what it is now for it to work and any ‘previous version’ wouldn’t have worked so
wouldn’t have been an eye at all.
However, both assumptions are highly contentious, and an atheist might respond in two ways. Firstly, the theory of
evolution by natural selection is an adequate explanation; the complexity of the world and the existence of human
beings (with all their incredibly complex systems) can be explained in terms of the concepts within evolutionary
theory, whether evolution deniers like it or not. There might be unanswered questions in the application of the
theory, but nothing suggests that the theory of evolution is wholly inappropriate or wholly inadequate. Secondly,
that even in those instances where science doesn’t fully know or understand some phenomena, that this only means
that science is incomplete, not that an entirely different set of principles based in a supernatural perspective is
necessary. No one thinks that science has discovered everything we can know, and the historical development of
science shows that more knowledge is always on the horizon, not that we have necessarily reached the limits. While
there might be some questions about what stands outside the scope of science (perhaps questions about how we

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should live the life we have, or what the most important things in this world should be), these questions are not the
sort of things science would investigate anyway. A full TOK analysis of this debate could explore the nature, limits
and overlapping of these two perspectives.
Cosmological arguments
A third form of argument for the existence of God starts from a question about the various processes within the
world, ‘Why is the world the way it is at all?’ We might, for instance, wonder why all events have a cause, and
accept that continuing a search for a further cause will result in an infinite regress (there will always be another
cause). Rather than finding the ‘starting point’, we might instead ask, ‘why is there a cause-and-effect process at
all?’ As an example, consider this analogy: Suppose we find a path in the woods and ask, ‘where does it begin?’ We
follow it but can’t find a beginning. Shouldn’t we be instead asking about why there is a path at all? Finding the
beginning answers a question about the path, but ‘why is there a path at all’ then makes us think about whatever
created the path. Many arguments for God follow a similar structure, rather than asking about why the world is the
way it is, we might ask why is there any world at all?
The Islamic scholars Al-Kindi (ninth century) and Al-Ghazli (eleventh century) popularized one version of this
argument. Al-Kindi writes, ‘Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which
begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning’ (Craig 80). The point here is that things are the way they are
for a reason, and God is at the core of that reason. Physics suggests that there was a ‘beginning’, but the
cosmological argument will then ask what caused this beginning?
Analysis: Again, this argument sounds quite plausible, but it does rest on an inductive leap, one that might be
unacceptable to a non-believer. We might fully accept that the events that we see around us do, in fact, need a cause,
but the ‘thing’ that the argument suggests also needs a cause (ie, the whole process of cause and effect) is a
significantly different kind of thing. Why should the thing that is ‘the Universe’ need a beginning? Just because
everything within the Universe needs a cause, the Universe itself might not need one. Bertrand Russell, a
philosopher in the early twentieth century, suggested that the existence of the Universe (the ‘cosmos’) might simply
be a brute fact, which means it doesn’t need an explanation for its existence, it just exists. Furthermore, any
explanation about the Universe would have been developed from concepts which made sense only within the
Universe, so to use those concepts to try to make sense of the Universe itself is to misapply those concepts. Again,
what we see here is a discussion of the scope and limits of the scientific explanation. If science is a language and a
set of concepts designed to explain the world as we find it, it makes no sense to then try to use that set of concepts to
explain what is outside that context. The believer will exploit this and say that God is what is outside that process,
and this might be convincing, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be a scientific claim, so the non-believers need not
comment.
Moral arguments
This type of argument begins from a point we developed earlier, namely, that science doesn’t seem well-equipped to
make sense of our ethical values. The argument suggests that when we examine the world around us through the
perspective of science, we cannot observe ethical principles or observe the cause of ethical beliefs. We might, for
instance, evaluate capital punishment by looking at the process, laws and outcomes, but we won’t see anything like
‘wrong’ or ‘right’ nestled in among those facts. Yet we definitely have ethical beliefs and attitudes towards it.
Furthermore, we find that different people have different views on capital punishment, and we also find that
people’s beliefs change over time. In some cases, those beliefs move between more contentious and less contentious.
Slavery, for instance, is universally looked upon as ‘wrong’ and that we are ‘more right’ than those who don’t think
this way. The first question is, ‘Where do those ethical attitudes come from if they don’t appear to exist in the same
way as physical objects and events?’ The second question is, ‘Why do we have an intuition that ethical beliefs can
improve over time? If beliefs improve, they must improve towards an objective truth about the ethics of certain
actions.’
The moral argument for the existence of God suggests that the origin and standards for ethical beliefs are to be
found in God, not in the world. It accepts that ethical intuitions and beliefs are real features of our world but that
these ethical facts are different in nature from anything else we find in the world of observed facts and events, so
they cannot have their origin in that world. Similarly, the intuition that our ethical beliefs can be better and worse
suggests that there is an objective truth to ethical claims. God is used as a way of grounding that objective truth.
Analysis: One route of critique here is to question whether or not our ethical beliefs or intuitions really are the sorts
of things that cannot be explained using relatively straightforward scientific principles. We might, for example,
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suggest that our ethical intuitions are the result of prevailing social attitudes. Psychological and sociological
methods and processes might be used to explain why people believe the way they do without appealing to anything
other than what we can see and measure. A psychological theory based on stages of moral development for instance,
suggests that we progress through various stages of morality, beginning from the self-interest of avoiding
punishment, through adherence to traditional social conventions, to formulation or acceptance of rationally justified
ethical principles. A modern view called Moral Foundations Theory suggests that our ethical values are the result of
‘several innate and universally available psychological systems [that] are the foundations of “intuitive ethics” (like
notions of care and harm, fairness and cheating, sanctity and degradation) rather than anything supernatural’ (Moral
Foundations).
In terms of the presumed objectivity of ethics, this too, needn’t rely upon a supernatural foundation either. As an
example, Sam Harris, a philosopher and neuroscientist, suggests that we can use the concept of ‘human flourishing’
and neuroscience to make claims about what is considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. He argues that we
can make pretty clear distinctions between the sorts of things which promote human flourishing (like having the
freedom to participate in the political environment through voting, or having access to an education), which can then
form the basis for ethical claims like ‘Women should have the right to vote’ or ‘Children should have the right to an
education’. We might also identify things which tend to make flourishing impossible, like separating vulnerable
children from loving parents or not allowing children to learn their native language, and build ethical prohibitions
against those practices. This might not create a list of things everyone would agree to, but it certainly accepts the
importance of creating conditions in which people might live genuinely happy lives, however they wish to live them.
While this might not solve every ethical dilemma, these methods might go some way in providing a ‘scientific’
framework through which to explore our ethical intuitions, rather than importing methods and concepts from the
religious dimension.

Use the QR code on the right to watch Sam Harris’s TED talk.
What does this all imply regarding religious knowledge systems?
What these arguments suggest is that reason can play a huge role in an individual’s or a community’s belief in the
existence of God. Very often people suggest that religious belief is something that cannot be thoughtful, rational or
well justified, but this is simply not the case. While non-believers might not accept that these arguments are
convincing, they would be desperately uncharitable to suggest that they were ‘irrational’. Theologian Richard
Swinburne accepts that no one of these arguments will ever carry the weight of a scientific proof, meaning it is
unlikely that any argument would, on purely rational grounds, move someone from disbelief to belief. However, he
argues, the weight of all the various arguments combined provide a good and perfectly rational justification for the
belief in God’s existence (Swinburne).
As we’ve seen throughout this chapter, reason plays a huge part in developing religious beliefs, understanding and
analysing those beliefs, and applying those beliefs to the business of living a human life.

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Authority

IA prompt
22 What role do experts play in influencing our consumption or acquisition of knowledge?

The concept of authority is an important one for religious knowledge systems and must be considered as a primary
tool used to construct religious knowledge. In nearly all the religious traditions there are individuals who are
considered to be authorities and whose opinions and proclamations are accepted as ‘truth’ by the followers of that
religion. The clearest example in the world of a religious authority is perhaps the Catholic Pope.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do different AOKs treat the authority of individuals differently?

The Pope’s position as being in authority here is derived from his apostolic succession from the first Roman head of
the church, St Peter, whom Christian tradition claims was the person who Jesus Christ left in charge of his church.
The man who takes on the role of Pope, however, is also an authority on Catholic doctrine. Indeed, all bishops must
‘hold a doctorate or at least a licentiate in sacred scripture, theology or canon law, from an institute of higher studies
approved by the Apostolic See, or at least be well versed in these disciplines’ (‘Code of Canon Law’ 378).

Many religions have individuals whose word counts as authoritative, however. Their authority is established in a
number of ways, from education and experience, in the case of the Pope, and the same is often true for other priests
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(Catholicism), ministers and pastors (Christianity), rabbis (Judaism), monks (Christianity and Buddhism), gurus
(Hinduism) or Shinto priests. These men and women have, in many cases, devoted their lives to learning about their
religions and to passing their knowledge on to others; this makes them reliable sources of knowledge about that
religion’s doctrines and practices. In other cases, an individual’s authority is established through their having some
sort of experience which has revealed to them some truth which hasn’t been available to others (see the section on
Religious experience beginning on page 213).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What role do authority and testimony play in the pursuit of knowledge?

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Sacred texts

The ‘world religions’ are often focused on a sacred text which articulates the core beliefs of the religion. For
instance, the primary sacred text of Judaism is the Torah (a Hebrew word meaning ‘instruction’), which Christians
recognize as the Old Testament. The Torah tells the history of the Jewish people from the creation of the world
(Genesis) through the revelations of the Prophets and the early history of the Jewish kingdoms in what is modern
Israel. The first five books of the Torah are the most foundational because they contain the basic moral codes which
are meant to be followed by Jews, known as the ‘Ten Commandments’. The Torah actually contains 613 mitzvot
(commandments) which an adult Jew might use to govern nearly every aspect of their life. These commandments
are thought to have been delivered by God directly to Moses, an early leader of the Jewish people.
Islam also reveres its sacred text, the Qur’an. Believers in Islam generally accept a direct connection to what they
call ‘the People of the Book’, meaning Jews and Christians, because they accept the Jewish prophets and leaders as
followers of the same God. Islam differs however, in the view that God or ‘Allah’ last spoke directly to a sixth
century man living in Mecca (now Saudia Arabia) named Muhammad, and that these new revelations replace all
others. Muhammad ensured that everything Allah told him was written down exactly as Allah said it. These writings
are the Qur’an, which became the foundational text upon which all Muslim beliefs are based.
The attitude towards sacred texts in religious knowledge systems is another distinguishing feature between this form
of knowing and others. In many of the AOKs, knowledge claims are based on observable evidence; a claim is
justified if the evidence for it is adequate. In the sciences and history this evidence is generally publicly observable
and can be evaluated by disinterested observers. Religious knowledge systems, in contrast, often refer to their texts
as the primary evidence for, and the definitive authority on, certain claims. This is generally more characteristic of
the western religious traditions. For many Christians and Muslims their texts are the ultimate foundations upon
which the rest of their religious beliefs rest; if a belief or action is inconsistent with what is written in those texts
then it is the belief or behaviour which must change. In both religious traditions, concepts like ‘infallibility’ and
‘inerrancy’ are used to describe the nature of the texts. The degree to which people hold the texts as infallible or
inerrant could be used to describe the extent to which the believer is a ‘fundamentalist’.

Interpreting sacred texts

The challenge with any sacred text is just how to interpret it. Texts are the product of a particular person, or group,
at a particular time and written under particular circumstances. Take a look at the last few texts exchanged with your
friends in your texting app. Do you think someone a hundred years ago could make any sense of it at all? Imagine
some future civilization trying to decode your texts in 10 000 years’ time. Even in a non-religious context, historians
sometimes struggle trying to make sense of texts from the past.

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do the different AOKs manage the role of individual interpretations in the construction of
knowledge?

In a religious context, where different interpretations might create fault lines between different denominations, or
where the texts might not say anything about modern worries or concerns, the problems of interpretation are
multiplied. We saw earlier that in the Christian and Jewish traditions there is a long history of struggling with
exactly what the sacred texts mean and how to interpret them.
The Tao te Ching, one of the primary texts of Taoism, raises a particularly challenging problem on the status of the
text as a source of knowledge in its first section:

IA prompt
9 Are some types of knowledge less open to interpretation than others?

The worry here is that if one is attempting to understand the Tao, the unnamable force and natural processes at the
root of existence, then applying a name (or using language to describe it) will necessarily miss the mark. Language
is a human convention which is created in a particular time and place and in a particular community. Applying it to
something which is instead the root of all time and space will mean that nothing you say will ever capture the
essence of what you’re trying to describe. Taoism is a religious knowledge system which prioritizes personal
experience, perhaps even special revelation (see section on Religious experience, page 213) to truly understand the
nature of the Tao.
In the western religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) this is less of a worry, because their central
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focus is on a divine being which reveals itself to human individuals, often in the form of words meant to be written
down. Both Moses (in Judaism) and Muhammad (in Islam) received revelations from God which were in the form of
language. Moses was given the Jewish commandments (all 613 of them) by God on Mount Sinai sometime in the
second millennium BCE and these became the Jewish Torah. Muhammad received his revelations from Allah
beginning in AD 610. In each of these cases, the texts are understood to be faithful representations of God’s own
words.
Even in these cases, however, just how to interpret individual phrases in relation to all the other elements of the text
is not always clear. The Christian sacred text, the New Testament, contains the Gospels – the life story of Jesus
Christ (whom Christians believe was God in human form) – and other texts written by early followers of Christ and
early church leaders. Although Jesus didn’t command things to be written down, his life’s example and his words
were chronicled by his early followers. At one point, Jesus is asked what the greatest commandments are. He
replies, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first
and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ The law and the word of
the prophets should be read as being consistent with these two commandments (The Bible, Matthew 22:37–40). It
seems that Jesus then has pulled two of the Jewish commandments and prioritized them over all the others. But some
of the other laws, particularly those having to do with the punishment of those who have transgressed the laws, seem
to directly contradict the second of Jesus’ main commandments. Homosexual behaviour, for instance, is meant to be
punished by death (The Bible, Leviticus 20:13), which is also the penalty for adultery (The Bible, Leviticus 20:10,
Deuteronomy 22:22) and not being a virgin at the time of marriage (The Bible, Deuteronomy 22:23–24). On the face
of it these seem to be precisely how not to love your neighbour as yourself.
The worry, if we are to use them to construct or justify religious knowledge, is just how to interpret these texts,
particularly when there is a perceived conflict. One answer is not to simply accept the decontextualized verses or
individual phrases as they are, but as they illustrate the overall message of the piece. Religious texts are like other
non-sacred texts in that they are meant to hang together as a whole, even if individual elements are in tension with
one another. These texts might have a beginning, middle and end, where each element feeds into the next,
culminating in final message. Some texts don’t have a succession of ideas, but nevertheless each element contributes
to a whole. Again, from the Tao:

This list of direct contradictions seems utterly unhelpful as a guide for how to live. However, the text as a whole
helps make sense of this passage. It is like a puzzle: while each individual piece might have an image on it, the fact
that they are designed to fit together suggests that, whatever the image on the piece, it is incomplete by itself, but
adds to the whole. You might have seen people using snippets of a sacred text to bolster whatever point they wish to
make, but it is important to remember that whatever the individual element of the text says, that is not the message
of the text as a whole. This is why scholars will devote their academic careers or even their lives to studying the
texts, hoping to uncover and understand the message as a whole.

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ACTIVITY
Have you ever had your words taken out of context and used against you? Consider the sentence or
phrase that was taken out of context:
1 Was it strictly untrue or false? Or would you say that it was incomplete?
2 What further knowledge or context was needed to make it possible to understand your intended
message?
3 What do you think this says about the nature of how narratives work?
4 Can various elements be properly understood without understanding the whole?
5 You might consider rereading the opening chapters of one of the texts you are reading in the literature
element of your Group 1 course. How has your understanding of these opening elements changed,
now that you know the whole text?

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Dogma
Closely related to the value placed on the claims contained in sacred texts and perhaps ultimately more important is
the notion of dogma in religious knowledge systems. ‘Dogma’ is a term that comes to us from the Greek word for
‘opinion’, which is derived from dokein, meaning ‘to seem good, think’ (Lexico). Dogma refers to those beliefs and
opinions which are the right ones to have. Beliefs that are ‘dogmatic’ refer to those non-negotiable beliefs which are
held to be incontrovertibly true and must be accepted in order to be part of a religious tradition.
There are dogmatic beliefs outside the realm of religious knowledge systems as well. Some political beliefs might be
considered dogmatic. One dogma in a politically conservative knowledge system might be that the role of
government is to remain largely out of the everyday decisions and freedoms of individuals, while a more liberal
dogma might be that government should play a larger role in guaranteeing that social goods are distributed equally
among the populace.

ACTIVITY
The terms ‘religious dogma’ and ‘dogmatic’ are often used in negative terms to mean ideas or beliefs
that are held for the wrong reasons. Someone who is dogmatic might be unwilling to change their beliefs
or accept alternatives, and may even be actively trying to impose those beliefs on others.
1 Can you identify and articulate the principle upon which this negative connotation rests? What is the
principle that, if true, would make someone calling someone ‘dogmatic’ a negative term?
2 You might think about how other AOKs might treat someone who held certain beliefs as
unchangeable. Would this be acceptable in other AOKs?
3 How might the community of knowers in that AOK treat such a person who held faithfully onto a
particular claim without changing?

One difference with religious dogma, however, might be a consequence of the different scope of religious
knowledge systems in relation to other AOKs. Because religious knowledge systems are generally about the
individual’s relationship to the ultimate reality, and because religious knowledge systems are about the ultimate
values, happiness and meaning in the world, people will hold on to dogmatic beliefs in a way that is less like how a
mathematician might accept assumptions about the properties of triangles or an economist might accept assumptions
about how people make decisions. For a religious believer, their adherence to a set of beliefs matters in a way that
these other beliefs do not. Sure, it is important to get the maths right or to be able to understand how economies
work to avoid financial ruin, but one’s soul is not at stake, as religious believers think theirs is.

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Religious experience
One of the main sources of religious knowledge is through what is known as ‘religious experience’. This is a type of
experience that seems to be fundamentally different from any other ‘normal’ experience, in that during such an
experience many religious believers claim to have gained knowledge through them, but often this knowledge is
accessible only to the person having the experience and not others. The concept of ‘revelation’ is very important in
this context and refers to knowledge that is uncovered or revealed through the religious experience. However, the
fact that this knowledge is often quite individual and personal raises issues of how the knowledge gained is meant to
be accommodated by the shared community.

IA prompt
20 What is the relationship between personal experience and knowledge?

There are two general forms of religious experience, and the knowledge provided by these two forms are quite
different.

General revelation

Learner profile
Communicators
How can we share knowledge gained from personal experiences, like religious revelation?

Have you ever felt inspired by the beauty of a sunrise or become emotional when considering the kindness of a
stranger, feeling perhaps that there’s something greater going on than simply the rising of the Sun or someone doing
something kind? These events are relatively straightforward and (literally) everyday occurrences and can be
witnessed by anyone. However, sometimes these events make us feel particularly emotional and might bring to mind
thoughts and ideas about the world or its people that are far more profound than those you would normally have.
These types of experiences in the context of religious knowledge systems might be called ‘general revelation’,
which means that knowledge about the divine or about divine action in the world is pulled from what otherwise
might be thought of as a perfectly natural phenomenon. Many religious believers, having experiences which are not
private to them (like sunrises or interactions with strangers) will interpret or explain them in terms specific to their
religious beliefs. The beauty of a sunrise becomes for them a reminder of God’s presence in the world and God’s
promises to them. The kindness of strangers becomes God’s own kindness in the world.

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The ‘knowledge’ gained here, of course, depends on already having a certain set of beliefs before the experience,
which are brought to mind when having the experience. As we saw in the example of the invisible gardener before,
whatever knowledge one gains from this type of revelation is the direct product of what is already there. The
arguments from design which we explored earlier would fall under this category. Where we might see a complex
system and provide a naturalistic explanation (one not drawing on supernatural beings or actions), others might ‘see’
in that complexity genuine ‘design’ and therefore see evidence of a ‘designer’.
From outside the religious perspective this sort of knowledge, then, is not very reliable, in the sense that pointing to
a sunrise as evidence of God’s action won’t be very convincing to someone who doesn’t already believe in God –
one might say it is simply applying knowledge already present. However, general revelation plays a big part in the
believer’s own knowledge system in terms of reconfirming beliefs that they have. They carry a map with them
which helps them ‘see’ God’s action. For them, this may be real evidence.

Special revelation
Another form of ‘revelation’ is often referred to as ‘special’ revelation, and this can be more contentious. ‘Special’
revelation refers to an experience which happens to an individual, but which is private to the individual. Whereas in
general revelation the experience itself (for instance, seeing a sunrise) is a public event – everyone can experience it
– in special revelations, people report having experiences which are private to them. The knowledge conferred is
often new and this gaining new knowledge is often the essence of the experience, not something which is
interpreted.

CASE STUDY
Muhammad and the revelation of the Qur’an

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One very famous example of this sort of revelation is that of Muhammad’s, the Prophet of Islam.
Muhammad was born into a distinguished merchant family who were prominent in the city of Mecca, in
what is now Saudi Arabia. Muhammad made a yearly retreat to the Cave of Hira on the mountain Jabal
al-Nour for meditation and solitary prayer. It was here, in about the year 610, he had the first of a series
of experiences which would last for the rest of his lifetime, and which, once written down would become
the Qur’an, the sacred text of Islam. These experiences, however, were often quite harrowing for the
Prophet. The first revelation was given to him after a powerful presence burst in on his solitude and
squeezed him in an overpowering embrace, one which nearly squeezed the life from him. So frightening
was the experience that he initially thought it was caused by a jinni or desert spirit. He was later
persuaded, however, that he had become the final Prophet of the God of Abraham, the same divine
being worshipped by the Jews and Christians (Armstrong). For the rest of his life, Muhammad received
(directly from God according to Islam) a series of recitations which provided direct and immediate
guidance on how Muhammad and his people should live.

While Muhammad’s revelations took the form of immediate knowledge, not all special revelations are as clear and
unambiguous, although they nevertheless carry clear knowledge content.

CASE STUDY
Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich was a Christian mystic who lived in England in the fourteenth century. In her
Revelations of Divine Love, which incidentally is the oldest text in the English language written by a
woman, she describes a series of revelations or ‘shewings’ which she had while seriously ill and near
death. Over the course of two nights she had a number of visions which she later wrote about. What is
interesting about these special revelations is that they are largely based on imagery, but the
interpretation of those images are also revealed to her. She doesn’t add her own interpretation later, she
experiences the knowledge directly. Here’s one example:
Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand;
and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought:
What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: it is all that is made. I marvelled how it
might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was
answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-
thing hath the Being by the love of God. In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is
that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to
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 me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover,—I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to
Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that
there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me. (Julian of Norwich, Project
Gutenberg)

The knowledge revealed in special revelation poses a challenge to those trying to decide how reliable or
‘true’ the knowledge is. Here again, there are no ways we can apply anything like the scientific method to
the claims, the source of the knowledge itself was entirely private to Julian. On these grounds we may
be sceptical and dismiss them. However, religious knowledge systems around the world take these
types of experiences very seriously, just as we saw how Indigenous people also accept these types of
visions and experiences as genuine sources of knowledge.

ACTIVITY
Consider the two broad types of revelation that we’ve discussed here – general and special.
1 How would you rate them in relation to their reliability or certainty?
2 Do you think that revelation is more or less certain for the person having the experience?

When considering the status of claims based on revelation, it would be very easy to dismiss them on the grounds that
they were either private, or simply expressions of illusions or dreams, but this might be to apply an unfair criterion
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for what makes something believable, one that is based on a prejudice (pre-judgment) against religious experience.
If you are an atheist, for instance, you will very likely find no claims about religious experience believable, because
you already believe that such experiences cannot be experiences of anything real. However, why should we
automatically not accept claims about religious experience as at least possibly true, even if we might not, on later
reflection and analysis accept them to be true.

TOK trap
It would be a mistake to assume that religious knowledge is not genuine knowledge. You might think this
(and many do), but you would have to offer reasons for this belief, since people have throughout the
centuries felt that religious knowledge is a legitimate sort of knowledge. Here we have tried to start from
a charitable position but have also tried to use the TOK concepts and framework to explore challenges
to this view.

Richard Swinburne argues that generally speaking, when listening to other people talk about their experiences we
apply (not necessarily consciously) two principles. The first he calls the principle of credulity, by which he means
that in most cases we will accept that what our senses tell us is a good reason to believe that that is how things really
are. If we hear a voice, for instance, we tend to accept that there is a speaker. If we see a person before us, this gives
us good reason to believe there is actually a person before us. Swinburne accepts that our senses sometimes deceive
us (especially when it is dark, for instance, or in the case of optical illusions), but generally speaking, our senses are
pretty reliable. This, therefore, is a good rule of thumb to live by, except when there are other good reasons for
thinking that the senses might not be truthful in some particular instance.

IA prompt
1 What counts as knowledge?

The other principle relevant here is the principle of testimony, which suggests that generally speaking, believing
what others tell you is a good way of gaining knowledge. People, by and large, tend not to lie to us, so as another
good rule of thumb, we should believe that what they tell us happened to them, really did happen to them, unless we
have other good reasons to think they are lying.
These two principles, Swinburne suggests, are at the root of how we create knowledge every day and in all sorts of
circumstances. The testimony of an eyewitness, for instance, is used by historians as reliable evidence that what the
witness says happened, really did happen. Scientists rely very heavily on the principle that their senses are very good
indicators of what actually happened. No one, Swinburne included, would suggest that scientists always get their
observations right, or that all eyewitnesses should be believed 100 per cent, but the point is that the testimony of
others about what they experienced should not be immediately dismissed as impossible. Applied to the testimony of
religious experiences, then, Swinburne argues that they should not be immediately dismissed as impossible. When
we hear the testimony from Julian of Norwich about what she experienced, we should not dismiss it simply because
of our own pre-judgments about what sorts of experiences are possible. We should not assume that they must be
false.
The historical and scientific methods, however, have processes by which the claims of individuals can be tested,
including their predictive power, their repeatability and their consistency with other facts which have been
established. Often, claims of religious experience, especially special revelations, cannot be tested in this way, so
their credibility as historical claims or scientific claims might not be very strong. However, in reply, we might bring
to mind Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria or Wittgenstein’s language-games and question whether the testimony
was meant to make a historical or scientific claim. If they were not meant to be reliable claims in these AOKs, then
using the rules from those AOKs to judge them might be considered irrelevant.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can there be religious knowledge that is independent from the culture that produces it?

IA prompt
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14 Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?

ACTIVITY
It is rare for people to have religious experiences from a religious tradition outside their own experience.
You wouldn’t expect, for instance, a Hindu living in India to have a vision involving Mary, the mother of
Jesus, an experience which many Christians report.
1 Why do you think this might be?
2 What do you think the consequences are for the reliability of the knowledge gained through such
experiences?

While both general and special revelation might have a huge appeal within religious communities and might be the
source of much of the knowledge of those communities, those who stand outside of them might find very little
reason to accept these revelations. In many cases, of course, this should not pose a problem. If an individual is not
part of a religious community, we wouldn’t expect them to understand or even want to understand the content of
another’s revelations, even if we thought it would be good for them to understand it. However, religious belief more
often than not spills out into wider communities; rarely is it entirely limited to its own community of knowers.
Recently in the United States, there have been a number of laws passed restricting women’s rights to abortion. In the
US, there are strict rules against the publicly elected government promoting or imposing any particular faith
tradition. However, being a representational democracy, where the people elect officials to create, debate and pass
laws on their behalf, many of those representatives are themselves parts of religious communities and will therefore
draw on those traditions and knowledge to guide their own decisions. The Alabama laws restricting abortion were
passed by lawmakers who all profess to be Christians, but who claim not to have written laws based on those beliefs.
(Burke).
While knowledge gained through personal experience, perhaps including revelation through religious experience or
prayer, might be limited in terms of meaning and significance to the particular community of knowers in that
religious tradition, often that knowledge finds its way into other communities who have no connection to that
particular religious tradition. The reliability and credibility of that knowledge gained through religious methods,
then, might find itself being challenged and tested through criteria not accepted within that community. This clash of
knowledge communities creates real challenges for individuals and societies.

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Ethics
If what we have been arguing about the nature of religious knowledge systems is true, then it means that for many
people their religious traditions provide very important guidelines for how to behave. If religions are attempting to
make sense of questions about what it means to be human, or to live a meaningful and significant human existence,
it is no wonder that one of the outcomes of this sort of knowledge system is the development of rules to live by.
These ethical rules become the rules that must be followed to guarantee that the promise of fulfillment (Heaven,
Nirvana, Moksha, etc) is attained.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Does religion provide a way to systematize concepts of right and wrong?
If religion is intimately connected with ethics, should we expect those with religious knowledge to act
more ethically than those without religious knowledge?

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Divine command theory
There is a well-known ethical theory called ‘divine command theory’, which states that God’s own commandments
are what provide us with ethical guidelines. If God says you should do it, then it is ‘good’; if God says not to do it,
then it is ‘bad’. This theory provides a pretty clear framework for understanding how we should behave and can take
away much of the worrying and hand-wringing that comes with trying to work out for ourselves just what sorts of
behaviours are good and bad.

It also provides two other benefits. First, it avoids what we might call a ‘grounding’ problem; that is, it avoids
worries about how to ground our ethical principles. As is the case with the three theories discussed in the
‘Introduction to Ethical Theory’ (which you can access by using the QR code), we might try to ‘ground’ our ethical
principles in either the amount of happiness produced by an action or an appeal to logical consistency or human
autonomy or perhaps an appeal to what we think might be a ‘good’ human character. However, these elements
might be subjective, or relative to a particular society or time or place. Divine command theory avoids this by
grounding what a good action is by simply appealing to the commands of God. God, being the creator and sustainer
of the Universe would also, presumably, have a pretty clear idea about just what actions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for all
people all of the time. Secondly, divine command theory provides a very clear reason to be motivated to follow the
moral laws. Again, in relation to the ethical theories we looked at before, we simply might not want to ‘be good’,
especially when being good might actually mean that my own desires and wishes are thwarted by concern for others.
In the case of divine command theory, we are naturally motivated to follow the rules, knowing that following the
rules will promote the chances that we ultimately receive the rewards promised by the religious tradition.

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Natural law theory
One worry about the divine command theory comes from the question about which commands to follow. The Jewish
Torah has 613 commandments, some of which are obviously important and obviously moral, like some of the Ten
Commandments (eg, ‘You shall not murder’ (Exodus 20:13)). Other commandments, however, don’t strike us as
obviously moral or ethical in nature, like those about what a priest should do when mould is found on fabric
(Leviticus 13: 47–59); should they be held in the same esteem as the Ten Commandments? Divine command theory
would seem to suggest this. Another question is what to do if people have not heard of these commandments, so
don’t have a choice to follow them, or perhaps they are following the wrong commandments.
Another theory about the relationship between religious knowledge systems and ethical principles might be an
answer to these questions. Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century priest and philosopher developed a theory called
natural law theory. The idea here is that God has created a world which follows regular process and rationally
decipherable laws. Some of these laws are ethical in nature, meaning we as living, breathing, human beings have
certain basic motives and desires that are natural to us. Aquinas identified six ‘basic goods’ which he argued all
human beings were naturally inclined towards. These include a number of biologically based inclinations like the
desire to protect our life, to procreate and to be social, some social inclinations like being kind to one another,
educating our children and ourselves and a more religious inclination to seek an awareness of the divine (Aquinas).
Aquinas’ point is that our natural human instincts are designed to drive us towards living a ‘good’ life, in that we
naturally seek out the six things that lead to a good life. Our motivation to live an ethical life is the same as living a
natural life; we just have to use our God-given rational faculties to identify what is the most natural course of action.
Evil in this view is unnatural; it is what happens when we turn away from the natural inclinations which are written
into the structure of our being, both biological and psychological. What makes this a religious view is Aquinas’
belief that God is the creator of all we see. One advantage over divine command theory might be that one need not
know about or even want to follow some set of rules; rather you just want to live your best life, one that promotes a
well-lived human life.

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Conclusion
Religious knowledge systems are probably the most well-known and longest-living types of knowledge systems
humans have developed. There is no culture currently, and probably no culture ever, that has not been heavily
impacted by religious knowledge systems. If you count up those of us who are historians, scientists, artists or
mathematicians, you won’t get anywhere near the estimated 5.8 billion of us who consider ourselves religious. A
religious perspective, therefore, is one that is ever present, even if you are not religious yourself or don’t know many
people who are religious. Often, you’ll find people who consider themselves religious are unaware of other types of
religious knowledge and so develop quite uncharitable attitudes towards others.
This chapter is not meant to advocate for religious knowledge systems, but it is meant to take an open-minded
approach. We have done our best to think about religious knowledge following the concepts and framework offered
by the TOK specification. We hope that doing this will provide the foundation upon which a comparison between
this form of human knowledge and the other AOKs which you’ll also find in this textbook can be made. These other
forms of knowledge do not have the same sort of impact on people’s lives as religion does, and not everyone
considers religion a beneficial force.
Some consider the notion that this life is not as important as some promised afterlife as the root of much arrogance,
hatred and bigotry, given that all too often people will act in violent ways, thinking that in the next life they will
somehow be rewarded for this behaviour. The vast majority of religious people, however, live their lives promoting
charity and kindness for others. We hope that this chapter has provided some awareness and understanding of how
such religious knowledge systems approach the world.

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Works cited
Alston, William P. 1960. ‘The Ontological Argument Revisited.’ The Philosophical Review. Vol 69, number 4.
Web. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/2183480.
Aquinas, Thomas. 2005. ‘Summa Theologica’. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. N.p. Web. 15 Jul. 2019.
www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.FS_Q94_A2.html.
Armstrong, Karen. 2007. Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time. New York. HarperCollins.
Augustine, John E, et al. 2003. Letters = (Epistulae). Hyde Park, NY. New City.
Augustine of Hippo. ‘DE GENESI AD LITTERAM LIBRI DUODECIM’. Augustinus Hipponensis - De Genesi Ad
Litteram Libri Duodecim. N.p. N.d. Web. 12 Jul. 2019. www.augustinus.it/latino/genesi_lettera/index2.htm.
Burke, Daniel. ‘Yes, Abortion Activists Use Religious Language. But It’s Still About Politics.’ CNN. Cable News
Network. 23 May 2019. Web. 10 Jul. 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/23/politics/abortion-religion-
views-alabama/index.html.
Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1994. Liguori, MO. Liguori Publications.
‘Code of Canon Law’. Code of Canon Law. N.p. N.d. Web. 14 Jul. 2019.
www.intratext.com/IXT/ENG0017/_P1C.HTM.
Craig, William Lane. 1994. Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics. Wheaton, IL. Crossway.
Department of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University. ‘Department Position on Evolution and “Intelligent
Design”’. Biological Sciences, Lehigh University. N.p. N.d. Web. 24 Jun. 2019.
www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/News/evolution.html.
DeWolf, David K, et al. ‘Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook’. N.p. N.d.
Web. 24 Jun. 2019. http://arn.org/docs/dewolf/guidebook.htm.
‘Dogma’. Definition of Dogma in English. Lexico Dictionaries English. Lexico Dictionaries. N.d. Web. 23 Jun.
2019. www.lexico.com/en/definition/dogma.
Gould, Stephen J. 1997. ‘Non-overlapping Magisteria’. Natural History. Vol 106, number 2. Web. 22 Jun. 2019.
https://philpapers.org/rec/GOUNM.
Holy Bible: The New Standard Version. Bible. N.p. N.d. Oxford UP.
Julian of Norwich. ‘Revelations of Divine Love’. The Project Gutenberg EBook of Revelations Of Divine Love, by
Julian of Norwich. N.p. N.d. Web. 10 Jul. 2019. www.gutenberg.org/files/52958/52958-h/52958-h.htm.
Laozi, and Stephen Mitchell. 2006. Tao Te Ching: A New English Version. New York. HarperCollins.
Moral Foundations. Moral Foundations. N.p. 2018. Web. 14 Jul. 2019. https://moralfoundations.org/.
O’Connell, Marvin Richard. 1997. Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart. Cambridge. Wm B. Erdmans.
Pascal, Blaise. ‘Pascal’s Pensees’. The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pascal’s Pensées, by Blaise Pascal. N.p. N.d.
Web. 12 Jul. 2019. www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm.
Poole, Steven. ‘The Four Horsemen Review – Whatever Happened to “New Atheism”?’ The Guardian. Guardian
News and Media. 31 Jan. 2019. Web. 24 Jun. 2019. www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/31/four-horsemen-
review-what-happened-to-new-atheism-dawkins-hitchens.
‘Religion’. Oxford English Dictionary. N.p. N.d. Web. 22 Jun. 2019.
www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/161944.
Shurpin, Yehuda. ‘What Is the Talmud? Definition and Comprehensive Guide – How and Why Was the Oral Torah
Written?’ Judaism. N.p. 3 Jun. 2016. Web. 22 Jun. 2019.
www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3347866/jewish/What-Is-the-Talmud-Definition-and-
Comprehensive-Guide.htm.
Swinburne, Richard. 2014. The Existence of God. Oxford. Clarendon.
The Bible: The New Standard Version. Bible. N.p. N.d. Oxford UP.
‘The Global Religious Landscape’. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. Pew Research Center’s
Religion & Public Life Project. 27 Sep. 2018. Web. 10 Jul. 2019. www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-
religious-landscape-exec/.
Tillich, Paul. 1963. Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions. N.p. New York NY. Columbia
University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and Cyril Barrett. 1966. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and
Religious Beliefs. Berkeley. University of California.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein. New York. Macmillan.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, et al. 1980. Culture and Value. Chicago. University of Chicago.

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7 Knowledge and Politics
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will:
• understand the scope of politics as reflected in governmental processes
• understand the positive and negative connotations of the term ‘politics’
• recognize the relationship between politics and culture
• understand the relationship between politics and laws
• appreciate the relationship between politics and ethics
• understand how the individual knower develops knowledge of politics.

Learner profile
Knowledgeable
What types of knowledge are valued by society? How do political factors affect the value of different
types of knowledge?

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Introduction
The theme of politics and knowledge has two separate but related dimensions:
• questions about how we develop knowledge of politics and political issues in our respective cultures
• questions about how the politics of knowledge shapes what we can and do know.
In order to understand the difference between those two perspectives on politics and knowledge, we first need to
have a good idea of what the word ‘politics’ means.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What kinds of knowledge inform our political opinions?

The technical meaning of ‘politics,’ the meaning with which you are probably most familiar, is the processes by
which a society develops the rules by which the members will be governed (Heywood). People who take on official
roles in these processes are known as politicians. The methods by which they are assigned to official roles vary
depending on the particular system in place in the society. We will investigate some of the different kinds of
political systems and how they are structured later in the chapter when we consider scope and methods.
Beyond the strictly technical use of the term ‘politics’ to refer to processes of government, the term is used to
describe decision-making hierarchies in other kinds of systems such as businesses, educational systems and
sometimes even organized religions. We can speak of the politics of school administration or the politics of a club or
a sports team.
We can also speak of the politics of knowledge, by which we mean that people in positions of political power, who
have the authority to make decisions, often control what knowledge gets made and disseminated. Politicians, for
example, very often decide what kinds of scientific research gets funded and what does not. As we shall see, those
political forces have a considerable influence on what questions are pursued and answered – and what kinds of
answers are developed and disseminated – and which ones are not.
Because political systems determine rules by which people must live – whether in a greater society or in a smaller
institution – they necessarily wield a great deal of power, and we therefore entrust politicians with that power. Some
people wield their power wisely and benevolently, but history gives us many examples of people who used their
power for their own benefit, ensuring their own wealth and success by exploiting the weaker and poorer.
Because of the potential for the misuse of power by politicians, we very often hear the word ‘politics’ referred to
with a strongly negative connotation. Someone discussing why one person got a promotion while another person
with more experience did not might say ‘that was just politics!’

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ACTIVITY
Look at the images on the left and think about the political systems and forces that affect what and how
you know. The effects could be positive or negative. Work with your classmates to make a list. You do
not have to limit yourselves to the elements depicted in the images. How much influence do you have
over these aspects of your life?

The suggestion in such a case is that the decision about who got the promotion didn’t have anything to do with
ability or suitability for the position, but instead was to do with some kind of subversive manipulation of the system
– a case of someone in a position of power promoting a friend or ally, regardless of qualifications. Used in situations
such as this, the word ‘politics’ suggests an unethical action taken for the individual good of someone in power.

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Political correctness
Another common reference to politics can be found in the use of the phrase ‘politically correct’. That phrase was
used as early as 1793, when it appeared in a US Supreme Court ruling about what would be appropriate behaviour
by politicians – it was, in other words, a literal description (Florence) – that which is correct for politicians. Over the
ensuing two centuries, the phrase has taken on several different meanings, but in the twenty-first century it refers to
the way people use words. This meaning arose largely out of an attempt in the 1960s by people who wanted to
eliminate the inherent bias in everyday words and phrases and to try to create better understanding and greater
inclusiveness for a wider diversity of people.
Today, this phrase is more commonly used by people who are critical of such an attitude. The use of the adjective
‘politically’, in this context, performs the same function that we saw in the example of the person who said that
someone’s promotion was political, implying that it was not deserved. In the case of ‘politically correct’ or ‘political
correctness’, the implication is that the scrupulous attempt to remove racial and gender bias from language is not
necessary or genuine – it’s just an effort to appear, in public, to care about equality by people who really don’t.
Those in favour of the idea of racial and gender equality, however, see the effort as being an important one in paying
due respect to all people, and they do not use the term ‘politically correct’ to describe their efforts. One could argue
that it is not ‘politically correct’ to be inoffensive, it is just unacceptable (and indeed a crime in some cases) in the
present day to use sexist, racist or homophobic language.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do our values and assumptions influence the language in which we express our ideas?

As part of this effort, there was a push to halt the common practice of using the pronoun ‘he’ or ‘his’ whenever the
antecedent noun was a generic word which referred to an unidentified person. Instead, people were encouraged to
use ‘his or her’ or ‘him or her’. So instead of writing or saying something like ‘a politician has a lot of power at his
disposal’, there was a shift to ‘a politician has a lot of power at his or her disposal’. That grammatical construction
can get quite unwieldy, however, and there has been a subsequent shift to using ‘their’, the plural pronoun, even
when the antecedent noun is singular.
In the twenty-first century, moreover, language, along with other cultural practices, has been shifting to try to
accommodate people who do not see themselves as being gendered either male or female. In many cases, those
people prefer ‘their’ as the pronoun to be used to refer to them. Hodder Education has adopted this practice as
editorial policy, and so throughout this book, you will see ‘their’ used as the pronoun for any singular human subject
for which the gender – or gender preference – is not known. The developing use of pronouns in English is an
excellent example of how culture influences language and how language influences what we know.
We can see, then, that the idea of politics is a loaded one. Politics does, however, play an essential role in human
experience. We could not get along together without a group of people in leadership positions to help us organize
ourselves, make decisions and mediate conflicts. We will, therefore, investigate the neutral idea of politics as well as
the more controversial one. We shall explore, later in this chapter, the means by which people develop their political
beliefs and values and how those beliefs and values lead to sometimes dramatically different political perspectives.
We will also explore questions about how different political perspectives shape our communal and individual
knowledge.

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Scope

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Politics of a society or a nation
As with many other topics that you will consider in your TOK class, politics is a complicated idea and one which is
difficult to differentiate among other related ideas. Ideally, we would like to be able to draw clear lines between
politics, society, religion and ethics, but trying to do so poses a great deal of difficulty. This is because politics –
both at the societal and the individual levels – depends on all of those other features of human experience. Andrew
Heywood, a British educator and political scientist, suggests that the best definition of politics is ‘the making,
preserving and amending of general social rules’, because it encompasses a lot of different elements of social
governance such as the exercise of power, the allocation of resources, and the means by which we make collective
decisions (Heywood).
Throughout history, different societies have developed different political systems, and even today, we can find a
wide variety of political systems in place in different countries. In Theory of Knowledge, we are not concerned with
trying to determine whether any given political system is ‘better’ than any other; we are concerned with trying to
understand how different societies come to believe that the political system they have is the best one for them.

DEEPER THINKING
Political beliefs vs knowledge
When we talk about knowledge in relation to politics, we can talk about knowledge of political systems,
such as knowing the difference between a democracy, a theocracy, a monarchy and a dictatorship. We
can also talk about knowledge of what actions politicians have taken and what issues are of concern in a
particular society. The study of the facts of political systems and political actions is called political
science. When we want to talk about the ‘knowledge’ that an individual has about what a political system
should be like and what actions politicians should take, we must instead talk about political beliefs.

The determination of what makes for the best political system is fundamentally a matter of opinion.
Because different people have different values (see Concept connection, page 226), they have different
ideas about what the role of government is and what rules should be in place for all people. Because
politics are based on people’s opinions and values, knowledge of politics is not a matter of trying to
discover a reality that exists outside of people. There is no objectively ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ system, although
there are systems which have, over the course of history, come to be widely seen as prone to abuse
and, therefore, not in the best interest of many people. We will explore this process in more detail in the
section on methods that follows.

The scope of the politics of a society or a nation is wide and varied. Political decisions must be made about such
things as health care, education, the economy, international relations, national security (including the military),
infrastructure such as roads, bridges, wireless capacity, water, electricity and human rights. Laws are the expression
of the decisions which politicians make on these matters and all others which affect the members of the community
or nation, so politics is related to the legal system of that community or nation. Political decisions are made for
communities as a whole, but they affect each individual living in that community. The scope of politics therefore
includes everyone and many aspects of everyone’s daily life.
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Politics of an institution

Any institution large enough that decisions cannot be made from direct input of all stake-holders has a hierarchy of
decision makers which functions essentially as politics. Community boards, schools and school systems, churches
and religions, military forces and large businesses all require some sort of decision-making hierarchy. The politics of
an institution are essentially the same as the politics of a nation, except that their scope and power are limited to that
institution. We don’t call the decision makers within various non-governmental institutions ‘politicians’: that is a
term that we reserve for the decision makers in governments. The decision makers in other kinds of institutions have
a variety of titles depending upon the institution itself. Titles include Chief Executive Officer, Chair of the Board,
President and Vice-President of companies, Superintendent, Principal, Head of School, Chair of Department, Priest,
Rabbi, Imam, Pujari, Financial Officer, Technology Officer, and so on. Military forces have many titles for their
leadership positions: Commander, Admiral, General, Colonel, Lieutenant, Captain, Major and so on.

ACTIVITY
Think about an organization you belong to – it could be your school, a club or your employer. Answer the
following questions:
1 What political systems are in place within the organization?
2 Could those systems be improved?
3 Where do you feature in the hierarchy?
4 Does understanding the political system in place affect your opinion about the way decisions are
made?
5 How does your personal experience with the politics of an institution help you to understand the scope
of politics?

The kinds of decisions that the ‘politicians’ must make within any given institution, such as a business or an
educational or religious institution, differ considerably from the decisions that a politician makes for a nation. The
scope of the politics of an institution is directly related to the overall function of that institution, though there are
some kinds of decisions which are common to most, if not all, such institutions. Common functions have to do with
hiring practices, financial practices, policies for promotion, hiring and firing and the establishment of the goals and
formal values of the institution. Specific decisions have to do with the specific function of the institution:
educational institutions must make decisions about what constitutes effective educational practice. Religious

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institutions must make decisions about how best to embody the teachings of the holy texts and religious traditions.
Military institutions must make decisions about how to protect their nations and allies, what weaponry is necessary
and so on. The scope of institutional politics is shaped, then, by the nature of each individual institution. Decisions
made within one institution do not have any power to control or direct other institutions or people outside of that
institution.

ACTIVITY
Discuss with your classmates: What is the scope of politics? Is there any part of our lives which is
unaffected by political forces?

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Politics of knowledge
When we talk about the politics of knowledge, we are talking about the ways in which political considerations
influence the development and dissemination of knowledge. Since knowledge is developed formally through
institutions like the government and universities, as well as by businesses, and since the development of knowledge
through these formal structures costs money, political influence is inevitable. One of the things you will explore in
TOK is the ways in which politics can shape what we know and how we share and use that knowledge, both
positively and negatively.

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Perspectives
As we have already seen, the perspective of the knower inevitably shapes what we know. In the realm of politics,
differing perspectives are responsible both for the difficulty of making good decisions and for the conflict which
very often arises out of the decision-making process. In trying to make knowledge about what is the best or right
thing to do for any group of people, the decision makers will ideally take into account the perspectives of all those
who will be affected by the decision. Trying to account for everyone’s needs and wishes is always a problem,
however, and different political systems deal with that problem in different ways.

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Perspectives in national politics
Some political perspectives are formalized in political parties that represent themselves as supporting particular
values (see below). In political systems which include parties, the parties tend to divide along the spectrum of
conservative (or right-wing) ideas to liberal (or left-wing) ideas.
In the United Kingdom, for example, nine different parties were represented in the House of Commons following
the 2017 general election (‘Political Parties in Parliament’). Three of those parties have historically held the bulk of
the available seats: Labour, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. Two of those parties identify their
position in the party name. Labour is a party which identifies itself as being ‘centre left’, which is slightly more
liberal leaning than the Liberal Democrats, who describe themselves as ‘centre/centre-left’. In the United States,
there are two dominant political parties: the Democrats, who are the more liberal party, and the Republicans who
describe themselves as conservative. Naturally, within those parties, there are people with a range of views, with
some people expressing more extremely liberal or conservative values, and some who hold more moderate beliefs.
At the heart of the difference between liberal and conservative perspectives is a fundamental difference in values.

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CONCEPT CONNECTION
Values
Values, as we saw in Chapter 1, are those beliefs around which we shape our lives. Values, therefore,
play an extremely important role in our lives, and our attachment to them is deeply emotional. We feel
that the things we value are essential to a good life. We invest the same emotional attachment to our
political values as we do to any other value. It can become very difficult, then, for people to listen to other
political viewpoints with an open mind. For many people, political values other than their own represent
not just different thinking, but wrong thinking. Their ‘knowledge’ of other people’s political beliefs is
shaped by their own perspective, and the deeper their commitment to their own beliefs, the harder it is to
accept, or even listen to, different beliefs with any degree of objectivity (see Chapter 1, page 21).

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Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has
investigated the values which are at the basis of the difference between conservative and liberal beliefs. He helped to
develop a theory called the Moral Foundations Theory. The theory proposes five values as being foundational to our
political beliefs. The values are presented as pairs of opposites on a spectrum (Haidt, et al). Those foundational
values are:
1 Care/harm
2 Fairness/cheating
3 Loyalty/betrayal
4 Authority/subversion
5 Sanctity/degradation.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
To what extent are our political views shaped by society, family backgrounds, education or social class?

Haidt and his colleagues do not suggest that any people – whether liberal or conservative – think that some of those
values are not important. Rather, that different people value some more than others. In his book, The Righteous
Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt argues that we are born with an innate
disposition to value these things (Haidt 152). Those predispositions are then shaped by our experience as we grow
up. Haidt and his colleagues have developed a profile which shows that conservatives and liberals value these five
things to differing degrees, and that some are more important for people who identify themselves as conservative,
while others are more important for people who identify themselves as liberal: ‘liberals try to create a morality
relying primarily on the Care/harm foundation, with additional support from the fairness/cheating and
liberty/oppression foundations. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all six foundations, including
loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation’ (Haidt).
The following graph shows the differences in the way that conservative and liberal people value five of these aspects
of human relations. (In later work, Haidt added a sixth value: liberty vs oppression):
The data on the graph is from data accumulated between 2007 and 2011, involving more than 130 000 subjects
(Haidt 160–1). You can see that people who identify themselves as being liberal or very liberal identify care and
fairness as being extremely important, while people who identify as conservative or very conservative identify
loyalty, authority and sanctity as being very important. In general, liberal people are more tolerant of changes that
allow for more people to have more rights, while conservative people value traditions, security and loyalty to their
group. We can see that no one could reasonably fault anyone for holding these values – they are all positive features
of human experience. The difficulty arises because people care about them to differing degrees, and people make
their political judgments based on what they believe is most important to living a good life. People’s beliefs about
what kinds of decisions politicians should make, in other words, depend on the underlying values that they hold.

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In addition to the perspectives of various degrees of conservativism or liberalism, people have many other
perspectives which bear on their understanding of politics. People of different genders, races, sexual orientations and
nationalities have differing ideas about what is important in terms of ensuring a good life. People with different
kinds of education see things differently. Immigrants very often have different needs than people who were born in a
particular country. Young people might see the world differently from the way older people see the world. And so
on. All of these perspectives are informed by the personal experiences and values of the people who hold them.
Let’s consider an example using the question of taxation. Many countries, including Belgium, Turkey, Denmark,
The Netherlands, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom (Fontinelle) have an income tax that all
members of the society must pay to help fund the cost of running the government and providing services which the
government delivers to everyone. Politicians are the ones who determine how much tax people will have to pay. If
we want to determine what an acceptable amount of tax is, we look at it from the perspective of what we value.
If we value caring and equality, then we want to fund services for people who might not be able, for whatever
reason, to take care of themselves as well as others. We might want to fund universal health care, free public
education and job training services.

ACTIVITY
Investigate how taxes are spent in your country or local area. Are you surprised by your findings? Do
you agree with the way money is distributed?
How does this research help you to understand the values and governmental processes in your country?

If, however, we value loyalty and fairness, we might see these things quite differently. It might not seem fair to us
that we have to pay high income taxes to fund health care and education for people who don’t hold down jobs or
who have many children or who have only been in the country for a few years, while we have been working hard for
many years to educate ourselves and to get jobs with good salaries. Our sense of unfairness might be aggravated if
we perceive that the reason some people can’t hold down jobs is due to their own choices – maybe someone was a
drug addict or had a high-paying job and quit and now can’t find another one. We want to be loyal first to our
families, before we fund services for other people.
If we value caring and the reduction of harm, we might be willing to pay more from our personal income to help
others, but on the other hand, it might seem very unfair that we have to pay for foreign aid or welfare for people who
have not earned their own money. This would be the more conservative viewpoint.
A person with a more liberal viewpoint might argue that it is fair to help people who cannot help themselves,
because they began from a position of innate unfairness – maybe poverty or lack of effective parenting, or the
consequences of problems like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome – all problems which make it much more difficult for
people to achieve a high-quality education and a well-paid job. Neither viewpoint can be said to be ‘correct’; both
are matters for interpretation.
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We can see that in many political situations, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. In the best-case scenario,
politicians, and those who contribute to political decision-making in any capacity, are trying to determine the right
thing to do based on human beliefs and opinions, which are not subject to a factual determination of accuracy. My
personal perspective is going to shape my understanding of any decision that politicians make – as well as
determining whether I approve of the decision or not.

ACTIVITY
To learn more about Haidt’s work on Moral Foundations Theory, use the QR code to take a survey to
map your own moral values.
1 Do you think that the result of the survey accurately represents your personal political beliefs? Why or
why not?
2 What does this study help you understand about the basic differences between essentially
conservative and essentially liberal political beliefs?

When we think about how our perspective affects our knowledge of political values, then, we can see that we are
influenced to see six important elements of human experience in certain ways based on the experiences we have in
our lives. We develop emotional attachments to those values in differing degrees. We also form our beliefs about
which values ought to be considered to be the most important when it comes to making decisions about how the
whole group should be treated and how all members of that group should be required to act. It is not easy to get
people to change their fundamental values, which is why so many political decisions are contentious.
Use the QR code to read more about these foundational values on the Moral Foundations Theory website.

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Perspectives in institutional politics
Perspective is going to be similarly important in institutional politics. Our view of what policies a company should
have, and what actions it should take, will depend on our role in the company, as well as on any number of other
factors, such as our education, our total income, the number of children we might have and so on. Our understanding
of whether the leadership of a company or institution is making good decisions will likely be based in large part on
the goals of that institution. If, for example, someone is a teacher in a school, we might judge their decisions to be
effective or not effective based on our perception of whether they have a positive effect on the ability to help
students learn or not. If we perceive that decisions about who is assigned to teach particular classes are being made
in order to ensure that people in power positions have the most desirable schedules, rather than in order to ensure
that the most qualified teachers are teaching each course, we are going to believe that the decisions being made are a
matter of ‘politics’ in the negative sense, rather than a matter of trying to achieve the goals of the institution. If you
are a member of a church, and you perceive that decisions about how to allocate funds are being made in order to
best help people in the community who are in need, you are likely to believe that the decisions are being made
wisely.

CASE STUDY
The Challenger disaster
Sometimes poor decisions are made within an institution because of pressure that is applied by people
who have power, but who lack real knowledge.
In 1986, NASA’s space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida and 73 seconds
later, it exploded, killing all seven of the astronauts on board. The night before the scheduled launch, five
engineers who worked for the NASA contractor Morton Thiakol, and who helped design and build the
Shuttle, tried to stop the launch, warning the decision makers that it was not safe to fly the Shuttle in cold
temperatures because the rubber gaskets on the booster rockets wouldn’t seal properly (Berkes).

No one is absolutely certain as to the reasons why the decision makers decided to ignore the warnings

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from the people who built the craft, but political pressure seems to have played a significant role: ‘The
space shuttle programme had an ambitious launch schedule that year and NASA wanted to show it
could launch regularly and reliably. President Ronald Reagan was also set to deliver the State of the
Union address that evening and reportedly planned to tout the Challenger launch’ (Berkes).
In the case of the Shuttle Challenger, the politicians had one perspective and the engineers had another.
It turned out to be an example in which the two perspectives were not equal; clearly the engineers’
warnings should have been heeded. Although they did not have the power of decision making, they did
have the knowledge that should have formed the basis of the decision. The failure in that case was
catastrophic.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Culture
In Chapter 1, we considered the definition of ‘culture’ primarily from the perspective of the culture of a
whole country or a whole community. Culture, however, is a concept that can apply in smaller groups as
well. We can talk about the culture of a business, a club or a family. In the Space Shuttle example on the
previous page, we might consider how the culture of NASA as an organization, which is part of the US
government, contributed to the decision-making process. We might consider that the culture of that
organization at that time was one which featured competitiveness with space agencies in other
countries, as well as a culture which featured significant pressure on people doing the actual work to get
the job done quickly. We can, therefore, consider that the politics of an organization can reflect the
culture of the organization.
We can also consider how our individual and group politics are reflections of our culture. Some nations
have democratic systems of government, and the people who grow up in those countries are likely to
have the perspective that a democracy is the best form of politics for a government to have. Other
people live in countries where religion plays a very prominent role in both daily lives and in government,
and those people might have the perspective that a theocracy is the best form of government. Some
examples of theocracies are Saudi Arabia and the Vatican.
Our culture also plays a powerful and integral role in shaping our political beliefs. If you think for a
moment about your own beliefs about what is important in terms of contributing to a quality life, you will
be able to see right away that those beliefs came from your parents, your peers, your religious institution
and your community. When you took Dr Haidt’s survey earlier in this chapter, which of the values did you
think were most important? Probably you felt that all were important to some degree, but if you were
forced to choose, you would pick some over the others. Where did you get those values? Note that
‘values’ are also a TOK course concept, and now you can probably see the relationship between your
cultural experience, what you value, and your political beliefs.

EE links
If you are interested in the relationship between culture and politics, you might want to pursue this topic
further and investigate the question of how the cultural history of a nation has shaped its political system.
You could, for example, choose to write an extended essay about how, historically, cultural attitudes
have kept women from rising to the top political roles in many countries. By 2019, Australia has had only
one female prime minister, the UK has had two, New Zealand has had three female prime ministers and
Canada has had one female prime minister, while the United States has never had a female president or
vice president.

Learner profile
Reflective
How does reflecting on the politics of knowledge help us to understand what it is possible to know?

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The politics of knowledge and the shaping of perspectives
So far, we have looked primarily at our knowledge of politics – the system of decision making for a community or
country. We must now also consider the politics of knowledge: the ways in which political decisions and political
power affect our ability to make knowledge.

History
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Politics generally affects knowledge-making on an institutional level, but it is also possible to see how politics can
affect the knowledge that you, personally, can make and how you make it. In his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,
George Orwell depicted a futuristic society in which the government exerted rigid control over all information that
was accessible to any member of the society. The government slogan was ‘Who controls the past controls the future;
who controls the present controls the past’ (Orwell 313). In the novel, the Party (the political machine) controlled
the past by altering news reports and photographs so that individual people couldn’t learn anything about the past
that the government didn’t want them to learn. One important reason to know the real past is that it helps us
understand how we came to be what we are today, both individually and as a nation, and so when a past is
constructed deliberately to suit the wishes of the politicians in control, so is the understanding it is possible to have
of the present. Orwell’s vision might seem to be excessive – even apocalyptic; however, attempts to control
information on this scale have occurred in relatively recent history.
Josef Stalin’s efforts to control the knowledge of history that it was possible for citizens of the Soviet Union to have
are widely known. His revisions to historical documents included the doctoring of numerous photographs in order to
remove people who had once been his allies but who had become his enemies: ‘Sometimes, official censors had to
retouch photos over and over again as the list of political enemies grew longer. In one photograph, Stalin is shown
with a group of three of his deputies. As each deputy fell out of his favour, they were snipped out of the photo until
only Stalin remained’ (Blakemore). The original photo is shown below; Stalin is the second from the left. The
second image is of the revised photo, with no one but Stalin left.
Changing historical documents such as photographs results in people who try to learn history from those documents
taking away a completely wrong understanding of historical events. We know now what Stalin tried to do, because
in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Stalin’s secrets became known to the rest of the world
and original documents were recovered. Many people, however, lived their entire lives during Stalin’s rule, and
those who lived beyond it had to relearn the history of their country.
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Education
The deliberate rewriting of history is an extreme example of how politics can shape people’s knowledge. As we
have already seen, politics very often determines what knowledge is pursued because of the allocation of funding.
That process also naturally affects what individuals can know. If knowledge doesn’t get developed, it isn’t available
to be learned.
One of the most significant ways that politics can help or hinder individuals’ knowledge is by the control over who
has access to education. The provision of education is a significant decision that must be made in virtually every
modern society. If education is an entirely private venture, for which individual people have to pay, then only the
wealthy can afford to educate their children. If the government is going to provide education for everyone, then the
problem becomes how to pay for it and whether the same education can be provided to everyone. In trying to make
that decision, politicians must take into account many different perspectives.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
With regards to politics, do we know as much as we think we know?
How can we know whether we have sufficient knowledge before voting in an election?

Schools
In the United States, for example, the goal is to provide publicly funded education for everyone. A portion of the
funding comes from the federal government, and a portion comes from the state governments. Trying to determine
how much money will be spent requires a consideration of how many school-aged children there are in any given
state, how much money each state can afford to provide (some states being poorer than others) and so on. A very
common problem is that areas with a high percentage of low-income families end up with school systems which are
underfunded. If one school can provide all the students with access to laptop computers, fully-stocked science labs
and up-to-date equipment for health and physical education, and another school in another city or state can only
provide five computers in the library (or none), a science lab with only four microscopes and no access to lab
specimens for dissection, and jumping ropes and balls for physical education but no weight machines or monitors
for heart rate and counting steps, then the kind of education that the students will get is very different.
In many countries, such as the United States, Canada and the UK, families who can afford to do so can send their
children to schools which are privately funded, which means that they are not funded by the government. In some
cases, private primary and secondary schools are very well funded, and, because parents pay high fees, can provide
many more resources than public schools can. It is sometimes the case, therefore, that people who can afford these
schools can get a better education than people who must rely on state-funded schools for their education. At any
rate, in any system where there are both publicly and privately funded schools, the systems are inherently different,
and which one you attend shapes what you can learn.

Learner profile
Caring
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How might knowledge of inequalities in a country’s educational system contribute to our ability to take
action in the world?

Historically, inequalities in school systems have sometimes been based in an overtly racist political situation.
Official government policies, such as the Jim Crow era ‘separate but equal’ laws in the United States and apartheid
in South Africa, meant that white children had access to much better funded schools than black children had access
to. During the Jim Crow era, the races were certainly separated, but they were not, despite the claim in the slogan,
by any means provided with equal facilities or resources. Black schools were often housed in old, run-down
buildings and lacked books and other materials. Carter G. Woodson, one of the first scholars to study African
American history ‘… told how some black children in southern schools were not allowed to use books that included
the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution’ (Brooker). Although in both of those countries the laws
have been changed, the inequalities are often still reflected in the poverty of some cities and neighbourhoods.
One more important political factor that shapes what young people can learn in schools has to do with the fact that
every school system must decide what content should be taught. One decision to be made is which subjects will be
offered. If you go to a school where, say, Chinese is not taught, then you won’t be able to gain knowledge of
Chinese, unless you take it upon yourself to find a private Chinese language school. Perhaps your IB Programme
offers philosophy but not psychology, or biology and chemistry but not physics. All of these choices, which can be
seen as political at least to the degree that there are decision makers who have the power of choice for everyone, and
to the degree that money is involved in the decision, shape what it is possible for you to study.
A second, less obvious decision that must be made is what content will be taught within the courses that have been
chosen. No secondary school in Canada could, for example, teach everything there is to know about Canadian
history. High school calculus can only cover so many topics over the course of a year. What are the most important
topics to be taught in physics? Someone has to make choices, and each system has a different means of determining
course content.
One powerful influence on what will be taught in any given class is the production of textbooks. Textbook
publishers cannot afford to publish many different textbooks for many different situations, schools or states, so each
publisher usually has only one textbook for each level of each subject. Depending on how many textbook publishers
there are in any country, school systems are limited to a very few choices of which book to buy.
For the last Theory of Knowledge curriculum, for instance, there were several choices of textbooks for the TOK
course, including the Hodder book which preceded this edition, a book published by Oxford University Press, a
book published by Cambridge University Press and a book published by Pearson. All the books were written for the
published IB curriculum, but the authors of each one determined what aspects of the curriculum should be featured
prominently and how to explain each of the ideas that would be included in the course. Each book was, therefore,
different from all the others. Different schools chose different books, and some schools chose no books. Students at
those different schools, therefore, had access to different ideas about what was important knowledge in Theory of
Knowledge.
In the case of Theory of Knowledge, the differences in the books seemed to be relatively minor. No large political
interest group got involved in trying to determine what could or could not be included in the TOK books. For many
textbooks, however, different groups of people have very strong opinions about what should and should not be
taught. These groups sometimes get involved in lobbying textbook companies to have certain information included
or excluded from student textbooks. If they are successful, then those textbooks are what are available to everyone,
even in places where the community and the school officials wish to teach the excluded information.

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CASE STUDY
Evolution in schools

One topic which is often the target of special-interest groups is the teaching of evolution. In 2016,
Biology textbooks in Alabama schools in the US were still required to include a sticker with a message to
students which claimed that evolution is a ‘controversial theory’ supported by ‘some scientists’
(Schlanger). You can use the QR code to read the entire statement which is presented to students in
that state who take biology.
Opponents of the use of such stickers are concerned that they harm students’ understanding of both
science and of religion (Glaze).

Anti-evolution sentiment, in fact, extends well beyond the political pressure put on textbooks. In India, in
2018, the Minister for Higher Education, Satyapal Singh, called for the removal of evolution from
schools, claiming that Darwin’s work is ‘scientifically wrong’ (Dixon). In Turkey, claims have been made
that evolution cannot be taught because it is beyond the ability of secondary students to understand,
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while in Israel teachers were claiming that there is pressure from the education ministry to teach subjects
other than evolution in biology (Dixon). All of these examples demonstrate the effects of political
decision-making on the personal knowledge of individuals through the influence those decisions have on
the educational process in any given country.

ACTIVITY
Consider the political decision-making in your country. How does it affect what people can learn in
schools and can, therefore, know?
1 Do you think that people of all races are treated the same way in terms of their education?
2 Do you think that immigrants have access to the same kind of education that native-born citizens do?
3 Do you think that young women get the same kind of education as young men?
4 Is there a different educational path for students who wish to go to college and students who wish to
go into a trade or into the military?
5 Can all students at your school choose to study the IB curriculum? Are all students at your school
required to study the IB curriculum?
6 Do you think that such differences are always necessarily negative? Why or why not?

Learner profile
Principled
What principles should underlie the creation and implementation of an educational system?

CAS links
If you are interested in finding out more about how educational decision making takes place in your
community, you could organize a field trip to the nearest state-run education office. You could arrange
for an official to make a presentation to you and your classmates about the process that is used in your
area for determining what curriculum is to be taught in your schools.

Higher education
Access to higher education is also often influenced by political factors. In China, access to higher education is
determined by the gaokao, an examination which students must pass to be eligible for university. When it was first
developed in 1952, under the rule of Mao, only students who were seen to be sufficiently communist could apply to
take the exam (Qin and Hernández). In the twenty-first century, the test is available to many more people and is
perceived as offering opportunity to anyone who is willing to work hard enough; however, it can also be seen as a
‘tool of social control’ (Qin and Hernández), which happens because those who benefit from the education are
expected to acquiesce with government policies. One mother, who dropped out of school herself, has big dreams for
her son, who will, she thinks, raise the family out of poverty.
To achieve all this, Ms Gong and millions of other Chinese like her have an unspoken bargain with the
ruling Communist Party. The government promises a good life to anyone who works hard, even the
children of peasants. In exchange, they stay out of politics, look away when protesters climb onto rooftops
to denounce the forced demolition of their homes, and accept the propaganda posters plastered across the
city. (Qin and Hernandez)
Interestingly, in terms of how politics influences knowledge, because the gaokao is now seen as offering pretty fair
opportunities for anyone who wants to take it, even those students who fail the exam do not complain about the
politics of their country. The blame for failure rests on the students who, as they see it, simply did not work hard
enough.

Information sharing
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Another example of how politics can influence knowledge reveals how, depending on the political goals of a
government, knowledge can be deliberately kept from the public, even when the public has paid, through taxes, for
that knowledge to be gathered or developed.

CASE STUDY
Climate change
Global climate change has been a politically contentious topic for some years, because the cost of
engaging in a dedicated effort to combat climate change is quite high. Those costs include the money
that would have to be expended to develop new technologies as well as the costs to businesses and
industries of modifying their factories and changing their practices for things like disposing of waste.
Some political groups place the value of caring for the environment higher than the value of promoting
business profits, while others believe that free enterprise and capitalism are of greater value.

In recent years, this clash of beliefs has led to dramatic changes in policies regarding the sharing of
information about global climate change with the public. In September 2016, for example, under
President Barack Obama’s administration, the United States joined the Paris Accord, a multi-national
agreement to commit to an effort to keeping global warming below 2° C in this century, as well as
participating in other efforts to cope with the effects of climate change (‘The Paris Agreement’). You can
read the text of the Paris Agreement using the QR code.

In signing the accord and committing the US to meeting the standards it lays out, Obama said this:
One of the reasons I ran for this office was to make sure that America does its part to protect
this planet for future generations. Over the past seven and a half years, we’ve transformed the
United States into a global leader in the fight against climate change. (Somanader)
Obama states directly that protecting the planet was a political goal under his administration. Just a few
months later, however, after Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, there was a dramatic change
to the political values guiding the decision making in Washington. Under the new administration,
significant changes were made to the Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental protections
passed by previous administrations were rolled back, and Trump’s White House withdrew the United
States from the Paris Accord (Davenport and Landler). The Trump administration has also put into place
regulations about what information about climate change can and cannot be released to the public:
the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a
former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by
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 that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate
change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.
(Davenport and Landler)
While this limitation on what knowledge can be disseminated seems, at first glance, to be fairly
innocuous, the implications are actually pretty significant, as the models show that the greatest effects
of climate change will occur after the year 2040 (Davenport and Landler). By limiting the models to the
years in which the effects of climate change are likely to be the least problematic, the government is
ensuring that people do not hear about the most devastating consequences.
The United States is not the only country with a government which has taken active steps to stop the
spread of knowledge about global climate change. In Canada, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper
consolidated power in 2011 with the election of more members of the Conservative Party to Parliament,
his administration set in place specific new rules denying government scientists the right to speak
directly to the press. All requests for information about climate change had to go through a special media
centre which dealt with those communications. Often responses were stalled until the reporters’
deadlines were past (Learn). Other times, they were simply tied up in a long back-and-forth of emails. In
one case, a request by a reporter from The Canadian Press to speak with Max Bothwell, a government
scientist with Environment Canada, an environmental watchdog, was bogged down in what ultimately
turned out to be 110 pages of emails involving 16 different government agencies (Learn). The reasons
for the change to regulations in Canada were based on the fact that Harper’s administration opposed
spending money to fight climate change and favoured developing energy resources:
Early on in his administration, Harper boasted that Canada would become an ‘energy
superpower’ built on the growth of the Athabasca oil sands in the western part of the country.
This oil-rich region would subsequently become a driving economic force for the country, until
low global oil prices caused the loonie (the Canadian dollar) to crash. Climate change science –
and environmental regulations – posed a hindrance to that ambitious vision. (Learn)
Harper’s political goals were different from the goals of the government which preceded him, and the
decisions that he and his administration made resulted in a change to the knowledge readily available to
the Canadian public.

Both of these examples show how the values which underlie political decision making influence the kind and
amount of knowledge which is available to the public.
This kind of influence of politics on knowledge is not, of course, particular only to the United States and Canada.
Politicians must make choices between options – indeed, that is their function in a government. Whichever choice
they make will have consequences in terms of what knowledge does get made and disseminated and what does not.
Therefore, all countries in which politicians make decisions for the populace at large will experience the fact that
those political decisions affect the way that knowledge gets made and distributed within that country.

Funding
A final way in which politics influences knowledge has to do with funding. Much of our knowledge is developed by
professionals – biologists, psychologists, mathematicians and so on. These people are almost without exception
employed either by the government, by universities or by private industries. As employees, they are not free to do
whatever work they want to do. Rather, they do the work that their employer is willing to pay for.

ACTIVITY
Can you think of examples in your country of how political decision making has resulted in your having
access to either more or less knowledge of a particular subject?

CASE STUDY
Alan Turing

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An example of the way that funding determines what knowledge gets made can be found in British
history. During the Second World War, the Germans developed a cyphering system that they could
change every day, and which the British and their allies could not crack. They were able to pick up
messages, but they could not understand them. Breaking the enigma code, as the cypher was known
as, became a top priority for the British military, and the government set up a department at Bletchley
Park, in Buckinghamshire, devoted to finding a way to crack the code (IWM Staff).
Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician, was instrumental in helping to crack the code, which he did by
inventing a machine he called ‘Bomba’. In the post-war years, Turing continued to work on his computing
machines, using what he had learned during the war. It wasn’t until long after he died that Turing’s
contribution to modern computing was recognized, but his work is now seen as foundational to the
development of computers and computer science, and the highest award in computer science is named
after him (IWM Staff).
The example of the high value to the British of being able to intercept German messages during the war
and their subsequent funding of a very expensive project to develop the necessary knowledge shows
how powerful the allocation of money is in the effort to generate knowledge. We might imagine that had
the British government not funded Turing’s work, he would not have learned what he needed to learn in
order to advance the invention of computers as far as he did. Had he not done his work, the
development of modern computer science might have been delayed or it might have taken a very
different path from the one that it did. Knowledge is often power, but so is money.

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Methods and tools

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Making knowledge about politics
The history of politics reveals how a society came to have the political system that it has now. In England, for
example, the political system began as a monarchy in the ninth century. Parliament was formally convened in the
thirteenth century with the signing of the Magna Carta, which established a body of wealthy landowners who were
chosen by the King and who served as advisers to him (History.com Editors). Parliament gradually gained more
power over the next several centuries, and in 1688 the Glorious Revolution led to the formation of a constitutional
monarchy (British Monarchist League). The system has gradually evolved further in the intervening centuries so that
today the monarch holds a largely ceremonial position and the governing of the nation is done by the prime minister
and parliament. The history of politics in England reveals a change from early beliefs that the monarch was God’s
representative on Earth, and so infallible, to a contemporary belief that all people in a society have rights to be
protected, one of which is to have a say in how they are to be governed.
This description is, of course, very simplified; 13 centuries of history cannot be represented adequately in a
paragraph. You can get an idea, though, of how the history of politics in England would reveal all the gradual
changes and how they came about. Perhaps more importantly, from a TOK perspective, it also reveals the changing
values which drove those changes. The history of politics reveals the history of people’s knowledge and their beliefs
about how the country should be governed.
Different countries’ political systems have undergone different kinds of political change, and so reflect different
beliefs and values about how a country is to be governed. There are still, in the twenty-first century, a number of
countries whose political system is an absolute monarchy, one in which there is no parliament or other governing
body, and in which the king’s or queen’s word is law.

ACTIVITY
Identify one time in your country’s history when there was a change in the political system. This change
might be a dramatic one, such as the adoption of a constitution, or it might be a simpler one, such as a
shift from a more conservative government to a more liberal one. Identify the events and values that led
to that change in the political system.

CASE STUDY
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. During the twentieth century, there was considerable talk about
moving the country toward a constitutional monarchy, and several documents were drafted over the
years which could have formed the basis for such an arrangement. However, none of these plans came
to anything, and the current monarch, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (commonly known as MBS)
has firmly denounced any such plans. Saudi Arabian Abdullah Alaoudh, writing for The Washington Post
in July 2018, had this to say:
The change of mind-set with MBS toward embracing eternal absolute power marks a dramatic
shift from past democratic promises that offered some hope for the future, even though none of
them were ever fulfilled. The new Saudi administration has gained positive press for its futuristic
rhetoric, including talk of a robotically manned city, and for allowing women to drive. But make
no mistake: We are witnessing a return to Saudi Arabia’s past. In abandoning the promise of
democracy, the crown prince may actually be on his way to making Saudi Arabia more
medieval than ever. (Alaoudh)
The history of the politics of Saudi Arabia reveals the fact that when a nation has a leader with absolute
power, it requires the cooperation, and possibly the active leadership of that monarch, to move the
country toward something more democratic, regardless of what the political beliefs of the people of that
society may be.

History is full of examples, however, of people rising up in revolution to overthrow an absolute ruler who refused to
make any such changes. The American Revolution which began in 1776 is one such example and resulted in a new

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nation being formed when the 13 British colonies broke away from the rule of King George III of England. The
French Revolution of 1789 removed the monarchy in that country, and in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution removed
the Emperor of Russia from power and ultimately established, in its place, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics –
the USSR (The Learning Network). The USSR, in turn, fell in the late twentieth century when President Mikhail
Gorbechev instituted a series of reforms during his time as leader of the Soviet Union. Each one of these revolutions
arose out of changing beliefs and values.

IA prompt
33 How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?

Knowledge about the history of politics is made by historians, using the methods of history, which you will read
about in Chapter 11.

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Political facts and laws
Politics has a close relationship to the legal system in any government, because the decisions that politicians make
are disseminated to the public in the form of laws. Laws are, of course, creations particular to a given society, and
they are the formal statements of what people living in that society can and cannot do. One way to think about the
laws of the country, then, is that they are the knowledge claims about what is politically acceptable in the country as
a whole.
In general, federal laws (those passed by a country’s national government) apply to all places and all citizens of that
country. Smaller governmental entities, such as states or provinces, also pass laws, but those laws may not contradict
any federal law. Many issues, however, are not addressed by federal law, and so there may be actions which are
legal in some places within a given country, but which are not legal in others. In the United States for instance, the
age at which it is legal to marry without parental consent is set by the individual states. In almost all states, the age is
18. However, in two states, people must be older: in Nebraska, you must be 19 to marry without parental consent,
and in Mississippi, you must be 21 (Free Advice Staff). As with federal laws, state or provincial and local laws are,
in effect, knowledge claims about the political decisions of that geographical area. So how is this knowledge made?
Laws are initially written by people, and they can be changed by people, using the processes allowed in that
particular society. In December 2017, for instance, 245 laws were formally repealed by two acts of the Indian
Parliament. Among the laws which were repealed was one which regulated hackney carriages, vehicles which were
in common use in the nineteenth century (PTI).

The repeal of this law doesn’t have much significance in terms of day-to-day life in India, as no one uses hackney
carriages anymore. Another law which was repealed in these acts, however, has more interesting ramifications. The
bill repealed the ‘Dramatic Performance Act’ of 1876, which outlawed theatrical performances because they were
being used as protests against British rule (PTI). Since theatrical performances are certainly being given in India in
the twenty-first century, some or all of these performances may be technically in violation of the law. Formally
repealing the law means that no one can try to challenge a theatrical performance they don’t like using that 1876 law
as the basis for the suit. The process in this case was the normal process for passing laws in the Indian Parliament.
This process is typical of countries in which there is a representative government.
In the case of governments with absolute monarchies or dictatorships, the process of knowledge-making is quite
different. In those cases, the leader determines what is to be permissible and what is not, and their decree is
sufficient to establish law. The common term for ‘laws’ in these nations is ‘edict’. There are no procedures for
repealing edicts. In North Korea, for example, an edict was issued in 1972 which is called the ‘Three Generations of
Punishment’ rule. Under this edict, if a person is convicted of a crime which results in his being sent to a prison
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camp, his entire family and all members of the next two generations can be sent to the prison camp as well (Wright
and Urban). As of 2017, this rule was still in place.
The laws and edicts of any country function as the embodiment of beliefs about what is right and what is wrong and
about how things should be. This fact accounts for the controversy that often surrounds the proposal and passage of
laws. Consider, for example, the emotional debate over gun control laws, particularly in the United States. The fight
stems from disagreements such as whether it is right for individuals to be able to own even military-grade weaponry,
as well as being about what kind of society should exist.
One very familiar role that the legal system of a government plays at any level is to determine (ie, to make
knowledge of) whether or not a person has broken a law. How this process works differs somewhat from country to
country, but it generally involves lawyers, witnesses, evidence, a judge and, often, a jury. The decision is very often
communally made.

ACTIVITY
1 Working with several of your classmates, each of you choose a country and do some research about
how laws are made in that country and then compare notes.
2 Remember that the process of making laws is a process of making knowledge, since the resulting
laws are knowledge claims. How do these processes shape the kind of knowledge that is possible in
each country?

Another very significant function of the legal system, however, is to hear challenges to laws which someone or some
people feel violate the higher law of the constitution of the state, province or nation. As we saw, in the case of
dictatorships or absolute monarchies, there is no process for launching this sort of appeal. In other countries,
however, where the governmental structure includes a system of checks and balances, courts do take up the question
of whether some laws are legal according to the higher authority, and ought, therefore to be allowed to stand, or
whether those laws violate the constitution, and must therefore be struck down. Knowledge of whether a law is fair
or not, in other words, lies with the court system in many instances.
Sometimes the process of challenging a law on legal grounds can be quite tricky for the courts, because situations
and facts that did not exist previously now require new thinking about the implications of the constitution. In the
United States, for example, a group of young people filed a suit in 2015 to require the government to combat
human-caused climate change on the grounds that such change violates young people’s ‘constitutional right to a
clean environment’. By early 2019, the courts had been denying government challenges requesting that the suit be
dropped, but in June 2019, a new challenge from the government claimed that there is no constitutional right to a
stable environment and that the lawsuit brought by the young people is an effort to get around the separation of
powers that is a fundamental aspect of US government. The latest challenge claims that the students are asking the
courts to take on the job which normally belongs to the legislature by asking it to make new law (Dennis).
This particular case gives us a very interesting example of trying to make knowledge in politics, because the
fundamental question in this latest challenge is about where the line is between applying existing law to new facts
and creating new law. In the US, it is not the job of the courts to make new law. It is the job of the courts to perform
the check of new situations against existing law. In this example, the government is claiming that the student suit
requires new law to be made, while the lawyer for the students says, specifically, ‘We’re asking the court to apply
bedrock constitutional law and principles to a wholly new set of facts’ (Dennis). The first question which needs to
be decided is who actually has the right to make the knowledge needed in this instance: the legislature or the courts.

DEEPER THINKING
The foundations of present-day law making
Notice that the entire system of making, testing and repealing laws rests on the honesty and integrity of
those responsible for applying the procedures. The constitution, or other underlying document of any
country, was written, at some point in history, by people who committed to trying to establish the
guidelines by which all future decisions would be made. The constitution was then ratified, or approved,
by some significant portion of the people who were alive at that time. A constitution is, therefore, an
agreement made by specific people and by which all ensuing people have agreed to abide, unless
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formal amendment is made to it. All laws written and tested since the adoption of a constitution are
required to comply with the constitution, and the legal system is the means by which the constitutionality
of any given law can be tested.

We depend, in a very fundamental way, on politicians, lawyers and judges to act in accordance with their
vows to uphold the constitution or other foundational document. The power, in other words, of a
constitution to express what we know about what can and cannot be done in any given nation, depends
on people abiding by it. If people in the present day simply decide that they are not going to operate
within the rules as set out in a constitution, and if the people who are responsible for legal decisions
decide that they are not going to hold others to the rules as set out in the constitution, a constitution has
no power at all. Since we must put great faith in those we choose to represent us, we might argue that
all individuals have a responsibility both to educate themselves about the people who would represent
them and to participate in the electoral process of choosing those representatives.

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How politicians make knowledge about the problems that must be
addressed
Professional politicians require a great deal of knowledge on a wide range of topics. Local politicians must know
about the kinds of people who live in their constituencies, the problems that those people face, and which come
under the scope of the politicians’ work: education, health care, infrastructure, crime, water supply, management of
sewage and garbage and so on. A database search for the bills under consideration in the first half of 2019 in just one
state in the United States, Virginia, turned up 6085 bills (Virginia Legislative Information System).

ACTIVITY
Do some research and find out how many bills have been considered by your local legislature so far this
year. You can choose to investigate either for your city or town or for your state or province. If you
cannot find the information on the internet, you can probably telephone your local legislator’s office to
find out how you can gain access to that information. Make a list of general topics that the politicians
have been considering recently.
1 How many different bills have been considered?
2 How many different topics have come before the legislature for your local politicians to make
decisions about?
3 How would you characterize the knowledge that your local politicians must have in order to perform
their jobs well?
4 Which of the topics under consideration would you have sufficient knowledge about to be able to
make responsible decisions for your community? How did you acquire that knowledge?
5 If you wanted to know more about the topics you don’t have a lot of knowledge about, how would you
go about learning what you need to know?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is being knowledgeable an important quality in a political leader?

Depending on their role, politicians who have responsibility over larger geographical regions need to have
knowledge about all these topics for that larger region and many more. At national levels, politicians have to be
concerned about the need for such larger issues as military services, diplomacy with other nations, immigration
policy, global warming and human rights. They may have to concern themselves with problems faced by other
countries, because those problems have consequences which affect the home country. Peace in the Middle East, for
instance, becomes a significant issue for many other nations in the world, because if the severely troubled
relationship between Israel and Palestine cannot be resolved, many other nations may find themselves ultimately
drawn into, or at least significantly concerned with the dangers of, a war between those two groups.
Just as worldwide concerns can expand to draw in individual nations who would not appear to be immediately
affected by them, national and international concerns can become significant local problems as well. In nations
where immigration has come to be a vital national concern, places in those nations in which immigrants settle must
deal with immigration questions locally, such as how to provide for the education and health care of immigrants. If
there is a large body of illegal immigrants in a city, state or province, how will that locality address that issue? Will
the local authority offer the immigrants asylum in their area? What are the effects on the economy of a number of
immigrants settling in a particular place? Similarly, in localities in which the effects of global warming are likely to
be extensive or even catastrophic, politicians in those localities must learn about the issue and must involve
themselves in trying to solve the problem.
In addition to needing to know facts about all these various topics, politicians at all levels must have a set of
coherent political beliefs (more on this in the Ethics section below), upon which they can base their decisions. All of
this knowledge is ultimately made by each individual. The methods that they use are the same methods that you, or
any other individual, can use to make political knowledge, and we will investigate these in the next section.

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How individual knowers make knowledge about politics
As we have seen from previous chapters, much of what we learn is learned directly from other people. We listen to
what people have to say, and we believe what we hear, particularly when the people who are telling us things are
people we know well and trust – parents, teachers, peers and people in authority, such as news broadcasters and
politicians. We gain much of our political knowledge in this way.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
With regards to politics, do we know as much as we think we know?
Why do facts sometimes not change our minds?

CONNECTION TO THE CORE THEME

The formation of a general political stance
Earlier in this chapter, we learned that we form our political beliefs based on more fundamental beliefs
about what things matter in a human life. Some of those deeper values, as Jonathan Haidt has shown
(see page 227) are caring, loyalty, authority, fairness and sanctity. You can imagine other important
values such as safety and economic security which might form the basis for your personal definition of
the things that are required for a successful and happy life. You are going to develop your personal
values – your personal beliefs about which of these you care about and which you care about the most –
from your life experience. You will be influenced by family, friends, religion and culture. Initially, you will
likely accept the viewpoints of those people you respect without questioning them.
As you live your own life, however, you may find that your initial views are solidified by your personal
experience interacting with the world, or that your views may change, and that your beliefs may
eventually differ in greater or lesser degree from those of your parents. You may have experiences that
they did not have. Perhaps you go to school with many people from different countries, and you,
therefore, have experience seeing the world from different perspectives. Perhaps you get a summer job
working for a company which is dedicated to cleaning up beaches in your area, and you learn to develop
an appreciation for preserving the environment, while your friends, who worked in the city, did not
necessarily develop the same perspective. As you meet people you respect, your beliefs are likely to be
influenced by their beliefs. If people you respect let you down in some way, you may come to question
the attitudes that they hold and which you formerly accepted without question.
All of your experiences together help shape your basic values. These values in turn form your worldview,
your understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to have a good and successful life.
That worldview shapes your knowledge in all areas of your experience. Since politics are a direct
expression of what we believe is the right way for people to live together, our political beliefs are
necessarily a direct expression of our worldview.
Professional politicians develop their general political stance the same way that you develop yours:
based on their personal experience throughout their lives.

ACTIVITY

Use the QR code to visit the website for the Political Compass. You can take a survey on that site, and it
will produce for you a profile of your political views based on your answers to a number of questions.
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After you take the survey, answer these questions:
1 Do you think that the questions you were asked were relevant to revealing your political views?
2 Do you agree with the result of the analysis of your answers? Why or why not?
3 Do you think that categorizing people’s political views in this way is useful? Why or why not?

IA prompt
6 How does the way that we organize or classify knowledge affect what we know?

Developing knowledge about current political events

Political scientists
Political scientists study the nature of political systems at all levels from the local to the national and international.
They study all different types of political systems – monarchical, totalitarian, democratic, theocratic and so on.
Political scientists also study political theory, examining the basis for the political beliefs that people hold as well as
the historical trends that lead to a country’s having a particular sort of government. The history of political thought
includes the study of theory dating back to Aristotle and Plato, so you can see that the nature and mechanisms of
politics has been a human concern for many centuries.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
To what extent can polls provide reliable knowledge and accurate predictions?

After university, political scientists work in a variety of careers related to politics, including serving as policy
analysts, legislative assistants, consultants working on political campaigns and so on. Some political scientists work
on administering polls to gather information about people’s political beliefs and concerns as well as on analysing the
data gathered in these polls. Results of the polls – knowledge of public opinion – can be used by politicians to shape
their policies and it can be used by news media to convey to the public information about how a campaign is
progressing.
Individual citizens
People who live in societies with governmental systems that require the participation of the citizenry need to keep
themselves informed about current political events so that they can make good decisions when they vote. Voters
need to be aware of which political issues play a central role at any given time, and they need to know what is
involved in those issues. In some communities, for example, immigration might be of concern. In others, the need to
improve education might be of pressing importance, while in still others, the problem of ensuring that all community
members have clean water might be the most important issue of the day. Of course, all communities will have
multiple needs, and decisions about which politicians to vote for will be based on those politicians’ stances on
multiple issues.

In order to find out what politicians intend to do, once in office, about the various problems that concern a
community, individuals need to educate themselves. Often communities will provide for formal means by which that
education can take place: groups or organizations will arrange forums in which politicians can answer questions
from members of the public or engage in debates. Politicians have organizations working on their behalf which will
publish formal statements of policy. In the present day, these policy platforms are often published on the internet.
People who desire to learn more about any given politician’s policies can seek out that information on those
websites.

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A lot of political knowledge-making, however, takes place in less formal ways. In most places, the news media is
the primary source of information about current political events. News media in the twenty-first century takes
myriad forms: newspapers, radio and television are still active sources of political news. There are also many
websites which are dedicated to producing commentary on political topics. Some of these are written by political
experts – people who have studied politics formally. Some are written by statisticians – political scientists who work
with polls. Other websites publish politicians’ voting records. Use the QR codes in the margin to look at some
examples from the UK, the US and Canada.

Some sites track the votes of individual politicians and some track the votes of individual bills. There are many
others besides the ones we have offered here; if you want to know more about how politicians vote in your country,
you should have no trouble finding many online resources.
However, social media increasingly has become a forum in which people exchange ideas about politics. Twitter and
Facebook have been popular forums in the past few years on which people post their personal political views.
Politicians, too, have taken to posting on social media, which has the power to reach many people in a very short
amount of time.
People who are interested in learning about contemporary political issues, therefore, have many resources at their
disposal in order to be able to do so. The problem is that these social media platforms are available for people to post
to with little or no restraint. This means that not only can people post whatever they want (which may be true or
not), but they can also do so while hiding their true selves behind a fake identity. The reader of the posts has no way
of determining whether the person posting the message has an ulterior motive. You saw, in Chapter 3, how
algorithms are used to determine what appears on your Facebook and Twitter feeds, which results in people having
little or no exposure to ideas other than those they already have. If you have a particular political belief, then, and
you post a few things that express that belief, the technology will begin funnelling your way other posts which are
like the ones you posted. Included in those posts are likely to be some statements which are not true – either because
the person posting them didn’t bother to check and passed on what they just assumed was accurate – or because the
person posting them deliberately lied. If you do not check the accuracy of the posts that you read, you will likely
begin believing things which are not true.

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Political knowledge and technology
One problem for people trying to make political knowledge by using what they read on the internet is that our
modern technology has outstripped evolution. We have evolved, as a species, to depend on each other.
Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to cooperate. Cooperation is difficult to establish and
almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed
not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather,
it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups (Kolbert).
In other words, we couldn’t have survived as individuals living alone among wild animals and the many other
dangerous forces of nature half a million years ago, so we developed into a species which cooperates with each
other. Once we depend on cooperation, then we have a system in which some people are responsible for some
knowledge and other people are responsible for different knowledge. We survive when everyone delivers the
necessary knowledge at the right moment.
Modern society absolutely depends on our being able to believe much of what we are told, and to believe that other
people, who have jobs that create things we use – like cars, bridges, cell phones, computers, hot water heaters,
refrigerators and so on – know what they are doing, even though we don’t know or understand what that is. You
probably know how to operate your computer. You can boot it up, run programs, write papers. Maybe you can
create spreadsheets. You can access the internet to do research. Most students, however, have no idea how the
computer actually works. They cannot program it, and they cannot explain why, when they push ‘send’ on an email
message, the message actually shows up on someone else’s computer, no matter how far away that person is
physically located. (Try it. Can you explain how that works?) Both historically and in terms of our personal,
individual experience, we have learned to count on other people.

IA prompt
24 How might the context in which knowledge is presented influence whether it is accepted or rejected?

The problem for knowledge and the internet, and especially for social media, however, is that we are no longer
dealing just with experts. If someone who is not an expert in building a computer tries to build one, and someone
else who is not an expert in programming that computer tries to program it, it simply will not work. We are not,
therefore, in any real danger of being misled by the lack of expertise. If someone who is not an expert in politics – or
any other subject – posts a claim on the internet, however, it looks just like a post by an expert would look. Finding
out whether posts on social media are like broken computers requires a completely different kind of mental work
from what we have been used to, and most of us have not been alerted to the need for the work, nor have we been
given the tools to do that work. Thus, people who have been used to trusting what they hear, go right on trusting it,
and false information spreads rapidly on the internet.

ACTIVITY
Evaluate your own personal use of social media.
1 Which platforms do you rely on the most?
2 Are there people whose posts you just believe without checking their validity?
3 Why are those people trustworthy?
4 Have you seen a post on social media that was clearly untrue? How often does this happen?
5 How often do you take steps to find out whether what you are seeing online is true? What steps do
you take?

CAS links
You could organize a survey of classmates or a school-wide survey to collect information about how
much students rely on social media and how often they check the validity of the information that they see

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online. You could then organize an event at which you share the findings and provide the audience with
some tools for how to make better judgments about claims which have been posted online generally and
on social media in particular.

In recent years, another problem has arisen, particularly with regard to political ‘information’ on social media: bots.
Bots are automated programs that run on the internet and they can act like people. They can post things to Facebook
accounts, for example, and they can be programmed to post whatever the person who programs them wants. They
are, therefore, a particularly powerful tool for manipulating people with false information.
Bots were unleashed on consumers in the United States through Twitter and Facebook during the 2016 election to
spread false information, in an effort, apparently, to influence the election. Studies have been ongoing in an effort to
try to figure out just how much false information was spread and whether it did actually have an impact on the
outcome of the election. The extent of the problem is still not known, but in early 2018, Twitter admitted that more
than 50 000 Russian-linked accounts were used to post automated material to Twitter (Swaine).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What impact has social media had on how we acquire and share political knowledge?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Power
We can see from this situation that technology gives unscrupulous people power to persuade people
who are unaware of the ways in which technology can be manipulated, especially because of the human
tendency to believe what we hear. Anyone who tries to learn about politicians and politics from social
media, and who does not take the extra step of checking what they read against other sources to see if
they support each other, runs the risk of being manipulated by someone who has a particular interest in
one certain outcome. The same is true of anyone who doesn’t analyse what they read carefully and
thoughtfully in order to determine whether it is plausible and logical. The people using the technology in
such an unscrupulous way wield it to gain power over others, and they don’t care whether that outcome
is good for the readers of those posts or not.
Consumers can take the power back, but they have to do it consciously, by taking the extra step of
checking the accuracy of what they read. This is one of the important aims of Theory of Knowledge: to
arm you with the tools to do that so that you have the power of your own opinions, and you do not cede it
to someone else.

ACTIVITY

Choose a politician in your community, state, province or country. Work with some classmates to locate
some good resources for finding out what politicians claim and what they actually do. Use the QR code
to see one example of many.
Many politicians also have an individual webpage on which they publish their platform and beliefs. Look
up the policy claims that that politician made when they were running for election. Compare those claims
with the actual voting record of that politician. Do their actions reflect the early promises?

We have been looking at ways in which individuals can try to educate themselves about contemporary political
issues. For a more extensive and more formal understanding of politics, however, students at university can make
political science the subject for their degree.
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Problems of knowledge in politics
The methods of making knowledge in politics are similar to the methods of human scientists, which you will study
in more detail in Chapter 10. When the person making knowledge is a political scientist administering a poll, for
example, they are functioning as a human scientist. When the person is not a trained political scientist, but is, rather,
a person such as yourself, a member of a society who simply wants to know more about the politics of the region
and the day, the methods are much less formal. Both methods, however, pose significant problems for trying to
develop certain knowledge.
You will learn more about the problems of the methodology of the human sciences in Chapter 10; however, we will
look at one example here in order to demonstrate the kind of difficulty that political scientists face in trying to make
knowledge.

Polling
Polling is an important means of collecting information about people’s political beliefs and priorities. Ideally, when
a poll is administered, the people who respond to it are a perfect representation of the whole range of people in the
society in which they live, in terms of race, age, gender, economic status, profession and so on.
Statisticians can determine how many people are needed for a poll to be considered representative of the larger
community. Ideally too, the questions used in the poll are constructed carefully so that they are perfectly unbiased
and do not lead people to provide particular answers. The accuracy of the polling results depend on the statistical
reliability, but they also depend on whether or not the people responding to the poll have told the truth.
In the United States, the polling leading to the 2016 presidential election was notoriously misleading. Virtually all
the polling before election day showed with a high degree of certainty that Hillary Clinton would win, but, of
course, she did not. No one knows for certain why the polling was so far off; however, the Pew Research Center, a
non-partisan ‘fact tank’ that develops and provides information on a variety of public issues, has suggested a number
of possible reasons for the fact that the polls failed to give the public an accurate picture of people’s opinions. These
include (Mercer, et al):
• ‘Nonresponse bias’: the failure of certain kinds of people to respond to polls. In the case of the 2016 presidential
race, people may not have wanted to admit to supporting a man who was seen by so many people as being anti-
social.
• Dishonesty on the part of people responding to the polls.
• Problems identifying ‘likely voters’ – the polls try to target people who will actually vote, and problems in the
models of how to identify those people might have slanted the results.
The problem of inaccurate polls has not been limited to the United States. Polls also failed to accurately predict the
outcome of the British general election in 2015 (Mercer, et al). Pollsters are aware of the significant problems that
can arise from the false representation of people’s attitudes during elections, since the polling can, itself, cause
people to decide that there is no need to vote (if they think that their candidate is ‘safely ahead’ or ‘impossibly
behind). The Pew Research Center has this to say on the matter:
Pollsters are well aware that the profession faces serious challenges that this election has only served to
highlight. But this is also a time of extensive experimentation and innovation in the field. The role of
polling in a democracy goes far beyond simply predicting the horse race. At its best, polling provides an
equal voice to everyone and helps to give expression to the public’s needs and wants in ways that elections
may be too blunt to do. That is why restoring polling’s credibility is so important, and why we are
committed to helping in the effort to do so. (Mercer, et al)

IA prompt
10 What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/ or communication of knowledge?

Lying politicians
Whether or not people are telling the truth is a question which poses another problem for anyone trying to learn
about the beliefs and attitudes of politicians. Politicians themselves do not necessarily tell the truth. Sometimes the
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desire to win a seat or to keep a seat drives politicians and their campaigns to say what they think their followers
want to hear, or to dodge questions with vague answers, rather than to take the risk of telling an unpleasant truth and
alienating their would-be supporters. Non-partisan organizations have been created in order to keep track of the
accuracy of the statements that various politicians make.

In Canada, one such organization is FactsCan. You can scan the QR code to visit their webpage to see the latest facts
they have been checking.
In the US, the main fact-checking organization is PolitiFact. Scan the top QR code on the right to visit their site.
In Britain, FullFact, whose website can be seen by scanning the second QR code, is a non-partisan fact-checking
charity.

The kinds of falsehoods we have seen in recent years have taken a variety of forms. One problem is that politicians
sometimes say different things to different audiences. President Donald Trump, for example, regularly changes his
claims about global warming. In 2012, Mr Trump famously tweeted that global warming is a hoax created by the
Chinese. You can read his tweet by scanning the third QR code on the right.

Once he became president, however, his story tended to change. On some occasions, particularly when addressing
his ‘base’ – his strongest supporters – he claims that there is no such thing as global warning, or even claims that we
need more global warming. In December 2018, he tweeted, ‘Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global
Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect
against’. In other situations, while speaking to people who accept the fact that science has definitively tied global
climate change to human activity, Mr Trump changes his claims. In an interview with the New York Times in 2016,
Trump said that he did believe there was some relationship between human activity and climate change (Meyer).

This kind of misrepresentation of facts is not, of course, limited to US politics. In the run up to the Brexit vote in
2016, a now-notorious advertisement was painted on the side of a bus:

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The figure of £350 million was, according to Full Fact, misleading, as was the implication that leaving the European
Union would essentially give Britain control over that money to spend as it wished.
£350 million is roughly what we would send to the EU budget if it wasn’t for the UK’s budget rebate. The
rebate is effectively a discount on what we would otherwise be liable for. This rebate was negotiated by
Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and the way it is calculated can’t be changed in future without the UK’s
agreement. (Full Fact)
As late as 2018, Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, claimed that the number was actually much higher, and that
it would rise as high as £438 million a week (‘£350m Brexit claim was “too low”’ – BBC News). The promotion of
misleading information in this case was seen by some as being so damaging that Mr Johnson was deserving of legal
punishment, and in May of 2019, an attempt was made to prosecute him for misusing his office. The suit was thrown
out of court, however. The incident does, nevertheless, indicate the importance of accurate political knowledge and
the wide-ranging effects of having bad information.

IA prompt
4 On what grounds might we doubt a claim?

Fake news
The examples we have been looking at are instances of what has come to be known as ‘fake news’. In both of these
cases, the claims being made were actually false. In other cases, however, real claims have been labelled as ‘fake
news’ by people who don’t like the claims and wish to convince others to ignore them. For the purposes of Theory
of Knowledge, the fact that the term ‘fake news’ has arisen makes the important point that enough false information
is now being spread through various news media to require the development of a term to name the phenomenon. If
you are trying to develop your knowledge of politics, you must be alert to the fact that some of what you are getting
is, indeed, fake news, and you must develop strategies for trying to tell the difference between fake news and real
news.

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IA prompt
23 How important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge?

Confirmation bias
The problem of the existence of fake news is further aggravated by the problem of confirmation bias, which is the
tendency we have to listen to and believe reports that back up what we already believe to be true, rather than being
open to having our minds changed. This tendency, in fact, contributes to the problem of fake news, because if the
fake report tells us what we already believe or want to believe, we are very unlikely to check the facts. Even if the
facts are given to us, it is easier to discount the facts than to change our minds.
Many studies have demonstrated how difficult it is to get people to change their minds, and one explanation for this
fact is that we have evolved to live in communities. Living and working in communities means that we rely on each
other to get things done: I don’t have to know how my computer works, because you designed it and someone else
built it. I have learned to trust you and the others who built the computer – or my car or the roads or the airplane in
which I took my trip to Madagascar last summer. I have become used to relying on the knowledge of others.
This kind of trust, however, becomes a problem when it comes to dealing with politics, social media and fake news.
Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman, at Brown University, and Philip Fernbach, at the University of Colorado, have
described the problem:
‘This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous’, Sloman and Fernbach observe … In a
study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-
payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions
depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to
explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point
ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either
agreed or disagreed less vehemently.
Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we – or our friends or the pundits
on CNN – spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy
proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, ‘may be the only
form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes’.
(Kolbert)
Consider the following scenario: If I trust you when you tell me that global warming is not a real problem, and your
knowledge of global warming is not well-founded, then my opinion of global warming is now also not well-
founded. If I tell my friend that global warming is not a problem, and my friend believes me, then my friend’s
opinion is also not well-founded. Thus, badly formed political opinions can spread rapidly. No one checked the
facts, because everyone trusted their source. Actual facts, if they are subsequently presented, don’t carry any weight,
because if I were to believe the facts, I would have to accept that my friend didn’t tell me the truth.
We have seen that humans are genetically engineered to cooperate and to trust the knowledge of others. We have not
developed a capacity to reason that works against our deeply ingrained trust of the people we depend upon to make
our lives run smoothly.
If you want to ensure that your political knowledge is accurate, you will have to take conscious and conscientious
steps to check the claims that are made to you.

IA prompt
12 Is bias inevitable in the production of knowledge?

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Ethics
In the section about Jonathan Haidt’s work earlier (page 227) we saw that political knowledge is, essentially, ethical
knowledge. Politics is about making choices about what the right way to govern a country is, and about which rules
are good rules for people to live by in order to get along together. Differing political beliefs arise from differing
moral and ethical values. The belief that people ought to be rewarded when they earn rewards and punished when
they have done wrong is a belief that is very widespread, if not virtually universal. The question of when someone
has done something to earn a reward and when someone has done something that deserves to be punished is a more
difficult question, the answer to which becomes the basis for a certain kind of political decision.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can knowledge be divorced from the values embedded in the process of creating it?

Some people might believe that those who do not have jobs have failed to do their part in preparing themselves for
the workplace, and, therefore, they might believe that those people do not deserve any help from the government.
The political belief that the government ought not to provide extensive services to the poor in the form of assistance
for housing, food and health care, rests in the ethical belief that the poor did not do what they should have done to
take care of themselves, and are not, therefore, deserving of rewards they did not earn.
Others might believe, however, that the poor did not simply fail to take care of themselves out of a failure of
character, but that many poor people are poor because they lacked the opportunities that others had to prepare
themselves to take care of themselves and their families. The belief that government ought to provide assistance in
the form of housing, food and health care arises from the ethical belief that everyone deserves the chance to help
themselves and that where opportunity was not fair, the role of a government is to help to balance the scales.
Virtually all political beliefs can be traced back to this kind of ethical belief. Table 7.1, on the next page, provides
some examples.

Table 7.1 Justifications which can be used to support different ethical stances
Belief Ethical justification
Taxes are too high • All people ought to be able to keep what they earned
• It is wrong for government to take my money in order to help people I
don’t know
• It is wrong for government to take my money to pay for services I
cannot use
Taxes ought to be raised • We live in a community together, so we are obligated to help others in
the community, even if we have to pay for services I cannot use myself
Military spending is too low • The safety of our country and all its citizens is the most important
service a government can provide
Military spending is too high • War is essentially wrong, and governments ought not to contribute to a
culture of war-like aggression
The government should be • The role of humans in the Universe ought not to be destructive
helping to protect the
• We should be helping to preserve the Earth for future generations
environment
• We should be helping to preserve the Earth for its own sake
The government ought not to • The Earth is here for the use of human beings
spend money to preserve the
• The government ought not to be making decisions for individuals and
environment
businesses which ultimately affect the amount of income that those
people and companies can earn

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CONCEPT CONNECTION
Justification
All knowledge must be justified. In fields such as politics, where we are seldom able to make knowledge
claims which we can confidently assert are ‘certain’, the justification takes on a particular importance.
Neither politicians nor individuals can expect to make political claims and have them just be believed on
their face value. Those claims must be justified, and, as we saw in Chapter 1, an effective justification is
one which convinces others. That in turn means that the justification is rational, balanced and based on
accurate information. In TOK, then, when we evaluate the effectiveness of political claims, we will want
to look for accuracy, balance and rationality.

IA prompt
19 What counts as a good justification for a claim?

ACTIVITY
Think of at least three political decisions that have been made in your country or in your state or local
community recently.
1 Identify the ethical values which underlie those decisions. Did you agree with those decisions? If so,
then do you share the ethical values that you just identified?
2 If you do not agree with those decisions, what are the differences in your ethical values which lead
you to hold a different political belief?

We have seen that our political judgments are based on our values, and our values are reflections of what we believe
is necessary for us to be able to maximize the quality of human life. Political judgments, in other words, are
essentially ethical judgments. Politicians decide what is the right way for a society to function, and the decisions that
politicians make draw from and contribute to the legal system of that society. The problem is made more difficult by
the fact that neither ethics nor politics has a clear external basis against which we can make those judgments.
In many of the contexts in which we try to make knowledge, we have a solid basis for determining whether
something is true or not. In the natural sciences, for example, we have nature itself: we are trying to describe nature
as it is, independent of us. In history, we are trying to ascertain what actually happened in the past. In mathematics,
we are trying to figure out implications of existing mathematics based on the inevitable character of numbers and
other mathematical concepts and their relationships to each other. When it comes to ethical judgments, however, it is
difficult to pinpoint the thing in which ethics are grounded – the thing that we can point to as the basis for all of our
claims about what is right and what is wrong. That is why, historically, we have developed proposals for ethical
systems, such as consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. You can read more about these three ethical
theories by using the QR code to access an ‘Introduction to Ethical Theory’.
Even so, questions of what constitutes good and evil have to be negotiated among us. Some principles are widely
agreed upon while others are subject to widespread disagreement. Since our political judgments are ethical
judgments, then, we find ourselves in the same position: we are creating and negotiating the rules as we go along.
What is politically correct, or good, is a matter of what we can agree upon. The methods section earlier detailed the
means by which we try to come to those agreements. Essential to those methods is the use of reasoned justifications,
based in evidence, in order to convince others to see things our way. In Theory of Knowledge, then, as you examine
claims made about politics, you will be looking for patterns of consistency or contradiction in the ethical principles
which underlie those political beliefs on the part of any one individual or group.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
When exposed to numerous competing ideologies and explanations, what makes an individual settle on
a particular framework?
Is there ever a neutral position from which to write about politics or from which to judge political
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opinions?

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Ethics as the foundation for political knowledge
The ‘Introduction to Ethical Theory’ (linked to by the QR code on the right) examines several different systems for
forming ethical principles, and shows that each one is problematic in its own way. Nevertheless, in trying to make
political knowledge, we ideally try to hold beliefs which are part of a series of consistent ethical principles. It is not
logical, for example, to claim that you value all human lives, and therefore you believe that it is politically wrong to
allow abortions if, at the same time, you believe that it is politically correct for the government to support taking
away health care services for people with mental illnesses. Believing that the government has an obligation to
protect people who haven’t been born yet is not consistent with believing that the government has no obligation to
protect those who have been born, but who cannot take care of themselves for reasons which are no fault of their
own.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are political judgments a type of moral judgment?

The ‘Introduction to Ethical Theory’ looks at systems of ethical principles based on consequentialism, deontology
and virtue ethics. When trying to consider whether political beliefs are good ones or not, we can consider whether
they are soundly based on the consistent application of one of these ethical principles. Let’s consider belief 1 – that
government should ban most or all abortions. Table 7.2 shows possible arguments for each position based on those
three ethical principles.

We can see from Table 7.2 that a person with this political belief could justify that belief based on any of the three
types of ethical principles. Now we will examine political belief 2 and see if the same principles apply.

We can see that political belief 2 can also be justified using any of the three types of ethical principles. However, the
ethical principles for this second set of justifications is fundamentally different from the ethical principles offered in
the first set of justifications in Table 7.2. The first set is based on an underlying principle that we ought to look out
for others. All three of the principles are based in an attitude that it is good to help others. The second set (Table
7.3), however, is based on a completely opposite value, the belief that one should look after oneself first. There is no
valuing in this second set of principles for helping others.
When we think of virtue ethics, the character traits that we generally consider to be virtuous are things such as
charity, mercy, kindness, supportiveness, unselfishness, courageousness and trustworthiness, among others. Those
virtues all require an underlying belief that good people help others, so the reasons given in Table 7.3 would seem to
be essentially unvirtuous. We have tried to make the case that it is a virtue not to take away someone else’s money,
but when we’re talking about members of a society paying taxes in order to help sustain the society for everyone, we
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are not talking about theft. It might be easier to argue that a good person is willing to contribute to the society in
which they live, rather than to argue that a good person should not have to contribute to that society.
Even if we do accept that the idea that a good person doesn’t take money away from someone who earned it, even
for the purposes of maintaining a community, is a virtue, we are left with the problem that the two arguments above
are not consistent. If the same person holds both political beliefs, they cannot justify them using a coherent system
of ethical principles.
One difficulty, therefore, for individuals trying to form strong political beliefs, is the difficulty of being consistent.
Another difficulty related to the ethical aspect of political beliefs applies to groups of people who hold differing
political beliefs. This is because different people justify their positions based on different, and potentially
irreconcilable, ethical principles. The fact that our political beliefs are tied to our ethical principles is one reason that
politics can be quite contentious. We naturally have a very strong emotional attachment to our ethical beliefs. We do
not easily abandon our beliefs about what is morally right and what is morally wrong.

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Deliberate untruths
Finally, as we saw from the discussion about social media, technology and politics, some people – politicians and
others – set out to deliberately mislead voters about what is true. This behaviour is clearly unethical, as it violates
that underlying principle of knowledge-making that we learned about in the introduction to this book: we must make
every effort to ensure that the knowledge claims we make are true. That doesn’t mean that we expect politicians –
and everyone who has an interest in spreading political knowledge – to be right at all times. It does, however, mean
that we expect people to try to be right, and then we expect them to admit when they are wrong. In a ‘fake news’
world, where, apparently, some people have come to believe that they need not worry about telling the truth,
individuals who want to know what is real must take it upon themselves to counter the unethical behaviour through
careful checking of facts and denouncing whatever lies they encounter.

IA prompt
7 What are the implications of having, or not having, knowledge?

ACTIVITY
Choose a controversial issue, such as global warming. Do some research about what politicians in your
community are saying about this issue. This is the knowledge that they are intending to disseminate to
their constituents.
1 Do you think that politicians in your region are, in general, providing accurate information about this
issue? How can you know?
2 Do you think politicians themselves have accurate knowledge? How can you know?
3 What kinds of forces work on politicians to cause them to provide misleading information to the public
on this, or other political issues?
4 What can you, as an individual living in your society, do to ensure that your knowledge both of the
issue and of what the politicians are doing about the issue is accurate?

Over the course of this chapter, we have seen how fundamental politics are to the smooth running of any society.
We have also seen how important our politics are to us, being, as they are, based in our ethical principles. We have
also seen how difficult it is to develop an accurate understanding of politics and political issues. Finally, we saw in
the last section how difficult it is for us to change our beliefs and how easy it is to believe the first thing we hear and
then to hang on to that belief.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Responsibility
The decisions that politicians make affect people’s lives – our own and others’ – in very deep and
significant ways. If we live in a society in which the participation of the populace contributes to the
decision-making process (if only by the selection of representatives who will make the decisions), each
one of us has a responsibility to do everything we can to make sure that our political knowledge is as
accurate as we can make it. We also have a responsibility to keep an open mind and to be willing to
change our opinions when the facts reveal that our opinions and beliefs are not well-founded. The
responsibility arises from the fact that political knowledge has such wide-ranging and long-lasting effects
on people’s lives. The consequences are, well, extremely consequential, and any failure to take
seriously the knowledge that determines the decisions which get made may result in people suffering.

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Works cited
Alaoudh, Abdullah. ‘Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Is Taking the Kingdom Back to the Dark Ages’. The Washington
Post. The Washington Post. 19 Jul. 2018. Web. 6 Jun. 2019. www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-
opinions/wp/2018/07/19/saudi-arabias-crown-prince-is-taking-the-kingdom-back-to-the-dark-ages/?
utm_term=.17c2dcac1ab0.
Berkes, Howard. ‘30 Years After Explosion, Challenger Engineer Still Blames Himself’. NPR. NPR. 28 Jan. 2016.
Web. 30 May 2019. www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-
challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself.
Blakemore, Erin. ‘How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin’s Great Purge’. History.com. A&E Television Networks.
20 Apr. 2018. Web. 30 May 2019. www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching.
British Monarchist League. 2014. ‘Constitutional Monarchy’. British Monarchist League. British Monarchist
League. Web. 6 June 2019. www.monarchist.org.uk/constitutional-monarchy.html.
Brooker, Russell. 2013. ‘The Education of Black Children in the Jim Crow South’. America’s Black Holocaust
Museum. ABHM. Web. 30 May 2019. https://abhmuseum.org/education-for-blacks-in-the-jim-crow-south/.
Davenport, Coral, and Mark Landler. ‘Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science’. The New York
Times. The New York Times. 27 May 2019. Web. 3 Jun. 2019.
www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html.
Dennis, Brady. ‘Government Argues for Halt to Youth Climate Lawsuit, Saying There Is No Constitutional Right to
a Stable Climate’. The Washington Post. Washington Post Company. 4 Jun. 2019. Web. 7 Jun. 2019.
www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/06/04/government-argues-halt-youth-climate-lawsuit-
saying-there-is-no-constitutional-right-stable-climate/?utm_term=.9d0ac3ca67e3.
Dixon, Michael. ‘The Removal of Darwin and Evolution from Schools Is a Backwards Step’. The Guardian.
Guardian News and Media. 3 Oct. 2018. Web. 30 May 2019.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/03/darwin-theory-evolution-schools-earth.
Florence, Joshua. ‘A Phrase in Flux: The History of Political Correctness’. Harvard Political Review A Phrase in
Flux The History of Political Correctness Comments. Harvard Public Opinion Project. 30 Oct. 2015. Web. 14
May 2019. https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/phrase-flux-history-political-correctness/.
Fontinelle, Amy. ‘Countries with the Highest Income Taxes’. Investopedia. Investopedia. 17 May 2019. Web. 19
May 2019. www.investopedia.com/taxes/countries-highest-income-taxes/.
FreeAdvice Staff. ‘Teen Marriage: What Is the Legal Age to Get Married Without Parental Consent?’ Family Law.
FreeAdvice. N.d. Web. 7 Jun. 2019. https://family-law.freeadvice.com/family-law/marriage/parental-
consent.htm.
Full Fact. ‘£350 Million EU Claim “a Clear Misuse of Official Statistics”’. Full Fact. Full Fact. 19 Sep. 2017. Web.
9 Jun. 2019. https://fullfact.org/europe/350-million-week-boris-johnson-statistics-authority-misuse/.
Glaze, Amanda. ‘Textbook Evolution Sticker Hurts Children’s Understanding of Science but Also Their Faith’.
Al.com. Alabama Media Group. 31 Mar. 2016. Web. 30 May 2019.
www.al.com/opinion/2016/03/textbook_evolution_sticker_hur.html.
Haidt, Jonathan, et al. ‘YourMorals.Org’. 30 Jan. 2016. Web. 19 May 2019. www.yourmorals.org/aboutus.php.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2013. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York.
Vintage.
Heywood, Andrew. 2014. Politics. 4th ed. Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan.
History.com Editors. ‘British Parliament’. History.com. A&E Television Networks. 10 Aug. 2017. Web. 6 Jun.
2019. www.history.com/topics/british-history/british-parliament.
IWM Staff. ‘How Alan Turing Cracked The Enigma Code’. Imperial War Museums. N.p. 5 Jan. 2018. Web. 17 Sep.
2019. www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. ‘Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds’. The New Yorker. The New Yorker. 19 Feb. 2017. Web. 9
Jun. 2019. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds.
Learn, Joshua Rapp. ‘Canadian Scientists Explain Exactly How Their Government Silenced Science’.
Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution. 30 Jan. 2017. Web. 30 May 2019.
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scientists-open-about-how-their-government-silenced-
science-180961942/.
Mercer, Andrew, et al. ‘Why 2016 Election Polls Missed Their Mark’. Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center.
9 Nov. 2016. Web. 9 Jun. 2019. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-election-polls-missed-
their-mark/.

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Meyer, Robinson. ‘Trump Slightly Revises His Views on Climate Change’. The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company.
16 Oct. 2018. Web. 9 Jun. 2019. www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/trumps-always-shifting-
views-on-climate-change/573037/.
Orwell, George. 1977. 1984: A Novel (Book Club in a Bag). New York. Signet Classic.
‘Political Parties in Parliament’. UK Parliament. Parliament.uk. N.d. Web. 18 May 2019.
www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/parties/.
PTI. ‘Centre Passes Bills to Repeal 245 Obsolete Laws | India News - Times of India’. The Times of India. N.p. 28
Dec. 2017. Web. 9 Jun. 2019. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/centre-passes-bills-to-repeal-245-
obsolete-laws/articleshow/62285343.cms.
Qin, Amy, and Javier C. Hernández. ‘How China’s Rulers Control Society: Opportunity, Nationalism, Fear’. The
New York Times. The New York Times. 25 Nov. 2018. Web. 30 May 2019.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/25/world/asia/china-freedoms-control.html.
Schlanger, Zoë. ‘Here’s the Evolution-Questioning “Sticker” Alabama Puts on Its Biology Textbooks’. Newsweek.
Newsweek. 19 Apr. 2016. Web. 30 May 2019. www.newsweek.com/alabama-biology-textbooks-evolution-
sticker-373662.
Somanader, Tanya. ‘President Obama: The United States Formally Enters the Paris Agreement’. National Archives
and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration. 3 Sep. 2016. Web. 4 Jun. 2019.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/09/03/president-obama-united-states-formally-enters-
paris-agreement.
Swaine, Jon. ‘Twitter Admits Far More Russian Bots Posted on Election than It Had Disclosed’. The Guardian.
Guardian News and Media. 20 Jan. 2018. Web. 25 Aug. 2019.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-admits-far-more-russian-bots-posted-on-election-
than-it-had-disclosed.
The Learning Network. ‘Nov. 7, 1917 | Russian Government Overthrown in Bolshevik Revolution’. The New York
Times. The New York Times. 7 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Jun. 2019.
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/nov-7-1917-russian-government-overthrown-in-bolshevik-
revolution/.
‘The Paris Agreement’. UNFCCC. United Nations Climate Change. 22 Oct. 2018. Web. 3 Jun. 2019.
https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement.
Virginia Legislative Information System. ‘Bills and Resolutions’. LIS Search Bills and Resolutions 2019 Session.
Virginia State Assembly. 7 Jun. 2019. Web. 9 Oct. 2019. http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?
192+men+BIL.
Wright, Mike, and David Urban. ‘Brutal and Inhumane Laws North Koreans Are Forced to Live under’. The
Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group. 19 Sep. 2017. Web. 7 Jun. 2019.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/19/brutal-inhumane-laws-north-koreans-forced-live/.
‘£350m Brexit Claim Was “too Low”, Says Boris Johnson’. BBC News. BBC. 16 Jan. 2018. Web. 9 Jun. 2019.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42698981.

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8 Mathematics
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will:
• understand the wide and varied scope and applications of mathematics
• recognize the differences between students of mathematics, pure mathematicians and applied
mathematicians
• appreciate the different perspectives of those who believe that mathematics is invented and those who
believe it is discovered
• understand the importance of the rigorous proof as a method for making mathematical knowledge
• recognize how some of the fundamental methods of mathematics are changing due to developing
technologies
• appreciate the varied ways in which ethical values shape knowledge-making in mathematics.

Learner profile
Thinkers
How do we use critical and creative thinking to solve mathematical problems and apply mathematical
knowledge in the real world?

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Introduction
ACTIVITY
What number should replace the question mark?

The activity above presents a rather strange mathematical problem. There are some very familiar elements of
mathematics – the addition signs, equal signs and some numbers, for example, but there are also cats and fish and
mice – not things we normally associate with mathematics problems. Still, you can probably solve this problem.
Take a moment to do so, if you haven’t already, before you read on to the next paragraph.
What answer did you get? Some possible answers are 10, 0 and –30. Some people might come up with other
responses, depending upon how they approached the problem. In mathematics, however, there can be only one
answer to a problem – or, at least, there must be one clearly defined set of answers to a problem (the square root of
4, for example, is either 2 or –2 because of the properties of multiplication). If we are to have more than one correct
answer, it must be because of the properties of numbers, not because different procedures generate different
answers.
Check your answer again, and, when you are confident that you have the correct response, rewrite the problem and
the steps you used to solve it using regular mathematical language.
There is, in fact, one correct answer to this problem: 0. If you got a different answer, it may be because you
neglected to notice that in the final statement there is only one fish and one mouse, whereas in the earlier statements,
mice and fish were always presented in pairs. Each mouse, therefore, is worth 2, not 4, and each fish is worth 5, not
10. The other easily made mistake is to overlook the required order of operations: you must multiply first, before
you add. The final statement can be correctly rewritten as:

Possibly you have seen problems similar to this one circulating on the internet in recent years. They are very
popular, perhaps because this relatively simple problem reveals at least two significant features of mathematics.
First, the problem reveals the inherently symbolic nature of mathematics as an endeavour. We have seen problems
laid out in numbers, and often with some letters as well, as in an algebraic expression such as:

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We have encountered word problems, such as this one:
Imagine that two trains are approaching each other (on separate tracks), from stations 100 miles apart, and
both leave at the same time, each heading for the other station. The train heading west is moving at 50
miles an hour, while the train heading east is moving at 60 miles an hour. How many minutes will pass
before the two trains pass each other?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Should mathematics be defined as a language?

We don’t, however, really expect to encounter maths problems with pictures of animals (or anything else) in them.
Nevertheless, you had no difficulty converting those animals in your mind into numbers. Mathematics is – or has – a
language, and, as we saw in Chapter 4, one feature of language is that it is symbolic. ‘10’ is a symbol which results
from the combining of the symbols ‘1’ and ‘0’, and which stands for a very particular quantity, but so, in this case, is
a cat a symbol. The problem isn’t about cats, it’s about quantities which can be manipulated in mathematical
statements. ‘10’ doesn’t have any presence in the real world; we have just learned how to read it. Once we
understand the basic principle of addition, we have no trouble adding tens, and to swap in the cat for ‘10’ is so
simple as to be automatic. We see that there are three identical things that add up to 30, and the only possible
meaning for each of those three things then, is 10. Cats, mice and fish are not part of the normal language of
mathematics, but it’s quite simple to replace numbers with pictures – much easier than swapping, say, Swahili words
for English words, unless we are speakers of Swahili. We can easily read:
ten plus ten plus ten equals thirty
but we cannot so easily read:
kumi pamoja na kumi pamoja na kumi sawa na thelathini.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do any other areas of knowledge have a language or function as a language in the way that
mathematics does?

We probably can, however, figure out that:

kumi plus kumi plus kumi equals thelathini
means that ‘kumi’ is a number, three of which added together, equals another number, ‘thelathini’. The recognizable
mathematical language (‘plus’ and ‘equals’) directs us to understand whatever comes in between those mathematical
signifiers must be a symbol for some number. If we know that all of these statements are identical:
• ten plus ten plus ten = thirty
• 10 + 10 + 10 = 30
•

• kumi plus kumi plus kumi equals thelathini

then we know that ‘ten’, ‘10’, a picture of a cat and ‘kumi’ all stand for the same thing. The fact that so many
different things can stand in for the quantity we call, in English, ‘ten’, reveals the fundamental nature of symbols: a
symbol is not the thing itself. It stands for something, and once we agree on a system, then we can swap out the
symbols quite easily.
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KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How does the use of symbols in mathematics to convey meaning differ from the use of symbols in the
arts to convey meaning? Are there similarities?

This problem with cats and fish raises another quite interesting question about the nature of mathematics: why must
we multiply first in the last statement? What’s wrong with reading the statement left to right, as, in English, we read
all other language-based texts? The answer to that question, of course, is that in mathematics, there is a rule which
stipulates the order in which operations must be done in order to correctly solve a maths problem – regardless of
where the operations appear in a mathematical statement. You probably learned to remember this rule using a
mnemonic. You may have learned PEMDAS, BEMDAS or BODMAS, or maybe you learned the sentence ‘Please
excuse my dear aunt Sally’, which works as a mnemonic because the first letter of each word spells out PEMDAS.

The existence of this rule is quite revealing in terms of the nature of mathematics as an area of knowledge as
opposed to other areas of knowledge. There is no reason for this order. It is arbitrary. The order does not represent
any feature or process which occurs in the physical world; we have no external standard – no real standard – to tell
us why we should work out anything in parentheses before we work out exponents, why we should work out
exponents before multiplying or dividing, or why we should multiply and divide before adding and subtracting.
PEMDAS (or BEMDAS) is a convention. The order of operations is the result of agreements that have arisen
among mathematicians about how the notation of mathematical statements ought to work. The order of operations,
in other words, is an invention, not the result of a discovery. We will explore the question of the order of operations
later in the chapter when we consider the role of ethics in mathematics. For now, it is important for you to recognize
that an important feature of mathematics is that much (or possibly all!) of it is invented, rather than discovered. In
this way, mathematics is more like the arts than it is like natural science.

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Scope

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The origins of mathematics
So far, we have looked at two important characteristics of mathematics: its symbolic nature and its nature as
something invented by humans. But what is it, exactly?
The first thing most people think of when they think of defining mathematics is that it is a system of numbers which
we use for expressing ideas about quantity. We can easily expand that idea because those numbers – that language –
can be used to express ideas about many other things: size, dimension, space, motion, properties of objects and so
on. This is certainly an extremely important and useful function of mathematics. But mathematics is also,
interestingly, the study of itself. Mathematicians spend a lot of time looking at existing mathematics and then
working out the implications of that knowledge. The essential procedures can be thought of this way: if X is true,
then what else must also be true? This basic question has brought us from the earliest known mathematical activity
to today.
The oldest known mathematical object is the Lebombo Bone, a 35 000-year-old fibula of a baboon carved with 29
notches (Williams), which was discovered in the 1970s during an exploration of a cave in the Lebombo Mountains
between Swaziland and South Africa (Gerdes). A similar object, the Ishango Bone, was discovered in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (then the Belgian Congo) in 1960 by Belgian explorer Jean de Heinzelin de
Braucourt (originalpeople.org). Both of these bones have been identified as tally sticks – objects used in order to
keep track of objects in the real world. The actual purpose is not known – some historians have suggested that the
sticks are calendars, some specify lunar calendars, some think it was used in a mathematical game involving units of
ten (Gerdes) and some think that the sticks have a more sophisticated mathematical purpose than simply counting
(originalpeople.org).

CONCEPT CONNECTION
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Evidence
These very early mathematical objects serve as evidence for the existence of mathematics as a human
endeavour much earlier than the work of the mathematicians in ancient Greece. Historians and
mathematicians have no way of knowing with a high degree of certainty what these objects were used
for. They base their suggestions on the grouping of the notches into regular units and on the role of
similar objects in other, later societies. Note that the evidence alone is not sufficient for knowledge; the
evidence has been interpreted, and hypotheses have been developed and explained on the basis of the
evidence. In Chapter 2, you learned about the coherence theory of truth (see page 45); the interpretation
of these tally sticks as mathematical objects coheres with other known facts about mathematical objects
from other places and times.

We can imagine how the development of basic mathematics evolved from the original starting place of tally sticks.
It is pretty easy to count a small number of things by using notches in bones or sticks, but as the number gets higher,
the job gets more difficult. So long as each notch stands for one object being counted, we can only usefully use a
tally stick for small numbers of things – days in a month, or bushels of corn, perhaps. But if what we need to get is a
very large quantity, we need a system which does not rely on a one-to-one correspondence between object and tally.
We can see how a sign might have developed to indicate ten or a hundred. Still, very large numbers cannot easily be
indicated with notches – what would 1 million look like, for example? Over time, a variety of systems arose for
indicating quantity, including Roman numerals, Egyptian hieroglyphics and the abacus, among others.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
How significant have notable individuals been in shaping the nature and development of mathematics as
an area of knowledge?
Is mathematical knowledge embedded in particular cultures or traditions?

The system that we are used to today arose in India in the sixth century (‘Indian Numerals’), and consists of only ten
numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. This system is capable of generating an infinite number of quantities, with the
vast majority consisting of a very manageable number of digits. The development of zero came later than the
development of the other symbols, and the system evolved over several hundred years as it was disseminated
throughout the Arab world and, eventually, to Europe. If you are interested in a more detailed explanation of how
the Hindu-Arabic system which we use today arose, use the QR code here on the right to watch a video lecture on
the history of the system.

The Roman numerals system seems like a pretty simple number system using a relatively small number of symbols.
In fact, there are even fewer symbols in Roman numerals than there are in the Hindu-Arabic system:

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To read and write Roman numerals, you need to remember a few rules:
• In order to write the numbers in between those that we have symbols for, you must indicate lower numbers by
subtraction and higher numbers by addition. If you want to indicate nine, you show 10 – 1 = 9 or IX. If you want
to show 54, then you have to show 50 + 5 – 1 = 54 or LIV.
• You can only use three of the same symbols in a row before you have to shift to the symbol with the next higher
value. So, you can write XXX for 30 but not XXXX for 40. For 40, you write 50 – 10 or XL.
If you need a refresher on how to use Roman numerals, you can use the QR code here on the right to watch a video
about how they work.

ACTIVITY
1 Try writing out this number in Roman numerals: 3682. Give it a try before you read on. How did you
do? If you broke the number down into its parts, you might have come up with something like this:

Add them all up, and you get MMMDCLXXXII.

To write 3682 in Roman numerals, then, requires 11 symbols, as opposed to the four we can do it with
using the Hindu-Arabic system.
2 Imagine that the Roman numeral system had been the one which had taken hold and was
disseminated worldwide for use in mathematical and scientific study. How might that system have
changed what it was possible for us to learn?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
The language used to express mathematical concepts can be seen to constrain the pursuit of
knowledge. Are there similar constraints in other areas of knowledge?

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Studying the implications of existing mathematics
Once we have a number system, then, we can see that that system has inherent properties that we can discover. One
implication of being able to generate numbers from a small set (remember the productivity property of language
from Chapter 4, page 116) is that we can generate an unlimited number of numbers. All we have to do is add one to
the current number. There is nothing either in the real Universe or in the invented system of numbers to stop us
doing that indefinitely, and so the concept of infinity is developed. Infinity, in other words, is an implication of the
nature of integers. Another implication of the nature of the integers and how they relate to each other is the concept
of even and odd numbers, and the fact that if we add one to any odd number, we will get an even number and vice
versa. We can start noticing other inherent characteristics of this system: some numbers are prime; that is, they can
only be divided by themselves and 1. All of these discoveries arise naturally from the invented system.

Learner profile
Inquirers
How does the study of pure mathematics rely on the skill of inquiry?

All of mathematics, since that humble beginning, has been derived in the same way. Once we know about prime
numbers, we can start asking ourselves what the implications of prime numbers are – how many are there? Are there
an infinite number of prime numbers? We can start developing ideas about what happens when we multiply numbers
by themselves, and we have squares and square roots to learn more about. And so on. The mathematics that
professional mathematicians work on today is a lot more complicated than ideas about the existence of even and odd
numbers, but the process in which they engage is the same: pure mathematics is the study of the mathematics which
inevitably arises from existing mathematics. We will investigate this process in more detail in the section on
Methods and tools, but for now, we can see that when we try to define what mathematics is, there are two critical
features:
• it is a language for expressing knowledge about space, quantity and motion
• it is the ongoing development of new mathematical principles based in the mathematical knowledge that we
already have.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Part of the scope of mathematics is mathematics itself. Are there any other AOKs with a goal of studying
existing knowledge in that AOK?

So, when we think about the scope of mathematics, one big part of that is mathematics itself. New mathematics is
developed out of any and all existing mathematics.
Another big part of the scope of mathematics, however, can be defined by the aspects of the world and our lives to
which it can be applied. The scope of applied mathematics is huge – maybe encompassing all of human experience.
Most people use mathematics quite frequently in their everyday lives, for working out a budget, or figuring out how
long it will take to get from home to a friend’s house 100 miles away. A lot of this kind of everyday mathematics is
done for us, of course, by the technological gadgets that we have: financial records software and GPS, for instance.
Some people use basic mathematics more frequently.

ACTIVITY
Consider an alpaca farmer who owns, say, 25 acres of land and 40 alpaca. She wants to breed and
raise her alpaca and sell some of them, while shearing others for the wool, which can be sold, or made
into knitted goods which can be sold. Here are some of the activities for which she might use
mathematics on a regular basis:
• Calculating the quantity of food she needs to feed her alpaca through the winter.
• Calculating the amount of pasture she needs vs the amount of land she needs for growing food to

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 store for winter.
• Determining the best shape to make her alpaca enclosures and her crop fields in order to reduce the
amount of fencing material needed.
• Calculating the amount of fencing she needs in order to keep the alpaca out of the grain crop.
• Calculating how many alpaca she needs to sell after the alpaca young are born if she wants to
increase her herd by 10 per cent each year.
• Calculating the price of the alpaca, the wool and the knitted goods she needs to sell in order to
maintain her farm, pay her workers, cover all her household expenses and make a reasonable profit.
• Determining the best proportion of her wool to sell and how much to keep in order to have knitted
goods made.
• Calculating the cost of employee salaries and insurance.
1 Can you think of other uses a small farmer might have for mathematics in order to run her business
efficiently and profitably?
2 Do you think that the average person needs to use this much mathematics?
3 What about the average business owner?
4 How are these uses different from the ways in which you use mathematics on a regular basis?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Why is mathematics so important in other AOKs, particularly the natural sciences?
Does mathematics only yield knowledge about the real world when it is combined with other AOKs?

Mathematics is used for a wide variety of other purposes beyond what the average person would use it for. It can be
used, for example, to determine the identity of the creator of a work of art. In 2013, Patrick Juola, a professor of
computer science at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, used a computer program that he developed to create an
extensive and detailed statistical analysis of a crime novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith. The
program was able to determine that it had, as a tip given to a London newspaper had suggested, actually been
written by JK Rowling, the famed author of the Harry Potter novels (Juola). If you want to read in detail about how
the statistical analysis was done, use the QR code on the right.

Mathematics can also be used in order to determine whether a painting is the creation of a famous painter, or
whether it is a forgery. A Princeton mathematician, Ingrid Daubechies, developed a software program using a
mathematical function called wavelet analysis, in order to analyse the brushstrokes in paintings. The mathematical
function breaks the image down into many layers of features. By analysing those layers in digital images of a large
number of paintings by Van Gogh, the algorithm was able to establish a sort of digital fingerprint of Van Gogh’s
brushwork (Greenwood). When challenged by the Public Broadcasting System (NOVA) to see if they could use the
mathematical tool to correctly identify a copy among six Van Gogh paintings, three different teams were all able to
do so. The fake turned out to have many more wavelets than the real Van Gogh work. The team think that the
explanation for this is that the copier had to work more slowly in order to try to copy precisely, and that more
hesitant work results in more wavelets, which cannot be seen by the naked eye, but which can be detected through a
mathematical analysis of the digital image (Greenwood).
The use of mathematics to analyse identify the creator of artworks might be a surprising one, but mathematics is, of
course, used for many much more familiar purposes. Engineers use mathematics in building bridges, architects use
mathematics in designing buildings. Mathematical models are used as a means of determining the effectiveness of
projects. In Chapter 3, you read about the problem of building the ability to solve ethical dilemmas into a self-
driving car, but we can also consider that the design of the self-driving car is an example of a project which is based

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in mathematical analysis. Mathematicians with Intel Corporation in the United States have developed a model for
designing self-driving cars in such a way as to reduce the number of road fatalities in the US from the approximately
40 000 there were in 2016 to approximately 40 per year (Shashua and Shalev-Shwartz).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does mathematical knowledge have more power in the world than other AOKs? Is the power of
mathematical knowledge different from the power of other kinds of knowledge?

DEEPER THINKING
Driverless cars

The mathematical modelling related to autonomous cars all suggests that self-driving cars are
dramatically safer than human-driven cars. Self-driving cars can ‘see’ in 360°, they never get distracted
by passengers or cell phones, and they never get sleepy or otherwise stop paying careful attention to
what goes on around them. Yet surveys about self-driving cars given to the consumers who would have
to buy into the concept suggest that people aren’t convinced. A March 2019 survey in the United States
showed that 71 per cent of consumers who responded to the survey fear self-driving cars (Naughton).
Another, more global, survey in May of 2019 revealed that about a quarter of drivers would be willing to
ride in a self-driving car a year from now, but that that number increased to 67 per cent when the
consumers were asked how they would feel 10 years from now (Martin). The highest rate of acceptance
came among Chinese respondents, with the highest anxiety reported by consumers in the UK and the
US (Martin). If you would like to read about the survey in more detail, use the QR code here.

What do you think accounts for the fact that people’s attitudes toward this technology are so dramatically
out of line with the mathematical facts? Do you think that if people were given the mathematical facts
they would change their minds? Why or why not? How reliable do you think a person’s claim about how
they will feel in 10 years’ time is? Why?

EE links
An exploration into the kind of mathematics needed in order to design a safe autonomous car, as well as
to model the functionality of that car, could make for an interesting extended essay project. What role

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does mathematics play in the development of technology intended to reduce risk by functioning more
efficiently than humans can?

Scientists rely heavily on mathematics, and this has made many technological developments possible. Houses, cell
phones, dams, airplanes and computers, for example, all need extensive mathematics in their creation.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do other areas of knowledge, such as the natural sciences, have the ability to change people’s values
and beliefs differently or better than mathematics?

CASE STUDY
Katherine Johnson

The 2016 book by Margot Lee Shetterly, called Hidden Figures explores the role of women
mathematicians working for NASA in the early days of the race to the Moon in the wake of Russia’s
launch of Sputnik. The movie of the same name was pretty heavily fictionalized, but it did correctly
convey the fact that Katherine Johnson worked on the calculations which allowed the module to orbit the
Earth and to re-enter safely.
Her work, done by hand, was more accurate than the work done by early computers which were too new
to be reliable, and sometimes gave out contradictory answers. The re-entry calculations in particular
were critical because if the capsule were to come in too steeply it could break up or burn up. If it were to
come in at too shallow an angle, there might be insufficient braking and the ship could continue its orbit,
heading back out of the atmosphere and then re-entering at some later point, well out of range of where
it was supposed to be (Scuka).
Johnson is most famous for her work making the calculations for John Glenn’s Freedom 7 mission. He
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did not trust the computers and he asked for Johnson specifically, saying that he would trust the
numbers she came up with (Shetterly).

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Power

The space race in the 1960s provides a good example of one of the ways in which power influences
knowledge. The space race began when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, in
1957. At that point, the United States stepped up an effort to get ahead in what had suddenly become a
space race (Garber 2007). But after Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space on 12
April 1961, the pressure to catch up and pass the Soviets intensified. The US sent Alan Shepard into
space three weeks later, but Shepard flew a short suborbital flight, where Gagarin had orbited the Earth.
On 25 May, 20 days after Shepard’s flight, President John F Kennedy made a speech before congress
announcing the US goal of putting a man on the Moon before the end of the decade (Garber 2013).
The goal was achieved on 20 July 1969 when Neil Armstrong took the now-famous ‘giant leap for
mankind’. Three men went to the Moon in Apollo 11, but the scale of the programme which made that
possible was almost unimaginably large. Taking into account all of the different problems that had to be
solved – engineering, physics, maths, design of clothing, development of food, and many more – 400
000 people worked on the project (Riley). Many of these people worked on solving problems that had
never been solved before – making, in other words, brand new knowledge in many fields, but in
particular, science, mathematics and technology. The cost of the project was $28 billion, or the
equivalent of $288 billion in 2019 money (Planetary Society).
Such a massive knowledge-making endeavour could never be organized or carried out without the
power of a government behind it. No private individual or organization could fund or organize such a
project. The reason that this knowledge was developed at the time it was developed and in the relatively
short amount of time that it took, was that the power structure of the United States was brought to bear.
Possibly all the same knowledge would have been developed eventually, but without the call to action
from the US president and the financial commitment authorized by Congress, it would almost certainly
have taken much longer, and all the technology which has developed in the 50 years since then would
have been delayed as well. Some of the technologies with civilian uses that arose as part of (or in the
aftermath of) the space race are artificial limbs, the handheld vacuum, the world’s fastest swimsuit and a
water purifier, among others (Kolbe).
The space race, then, provides an excellent example of how systemic power shapes the knowledge that
is developed and which becomes, inevitably, the foundation for later knowledge development.

The scope of mathematics, then, is wide-ranging. It can be used to complete an almost unimaginable number of
tasks ranging from counting change to bringing a man safely back from outer space. Mathematics is not just useful,
then; it is, in many cases, critical to the point of being the difference between life and death.
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ACTIVITY
Can you think of any human activity or physical object in the Universe to which some mathematical
description could not be developed or applied?

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Concepts that underlie mathematical knowledge
A final consideration in trying to define the scope of mathematics is that the ability to do mathematics relies on
having knowledge of a good many significant concepts about how the world is organized. The Texas School for the
Blind and Visually Impaired has identified a number of these concepts, which sighted people mostly begin to learn
automatically by interacting with their environment, but which must be deliberately taught to blind students. Table
8.1 is a summary of their list (‘Teaching Mathematical Concepts’):

Table 8.1 Teaching basic mathematical concepts

Concept Definition Example from
mathematics
Classification Grouping, matching and categorizing based on certain shared Odd numbers
characteristics and even
numbers
Seriation Being able to put things in a particular order based on certain Fibonacci
characteristics sequence
Conservation The understanding that a quantity of something remains the same 7 + 3 = 10
even if it appears to change in some ways
2 + 8 = 10
20 – 10 = 10
22 + 6 = 10
Spatial and The ability to recognize the shapes of things as well as their Right angles and
positional relationship to each other in space, such as ‘next to’, ‘under’, ‘over’ perpendicular
concepts and ‘curved’ lines

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are these same mental skills which are needed for success in mathematics necessary in other areas of
knowledge? Which ones? Why?

In being able to manipulate objects (physical and then symbolic) using these concepts, children and then students
can use such characteristics as shape, size, weight, length, width and height. As understanding of how to use those
characteristics develops, students also learn about quantities such as many, few, fewer, more and none. They must
learn how to discriminate between things which are the same and things which are different, how to match and
group, and how to categorize based on multiple characteristics. All of these cognitive skills must be mastered in
order for a person to make progress in mathematics.

ACTIVITY
1 Take a regular deck of 52 playing cards and begin by organizing them in order by suit from highest to
lowest. Which of the concepts in Table 8.1 did you have to use to do that?
2 Next, put them into categories. Make sure that when you create your categories, you do not have any
cards left over. Do this in three different ways, using three different systems of categorization. Which
of the concepts in Table 8.1 did you have to use to do that?
3 Finally, hold the deck loosely and drop it onto the table from a height of a couple of feet. Identify all the
ways in which they are now physically related to each other (such as ‘next to’). Which of the concepts
in Table 8.1 did you have to use to do that?
Probably you had no difficulty doing any of these tasks. How did you learn to perceive the world in those
various ways?
4 Repeat steps 1–3 using the following collection of numbers:

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5 Why can’t you do something like step number 3 with these numbers?
6 Now think about how you learned to make the shift from being able to recognize these relationships in
physical objects to being able to see them in symbolic objects, such as numbers. How did you learn to
do that?

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Concepts that we learn from learning mathematics
As you learn mathematics, you learn many concepts which themselves are about mathematics: numbers, addition,
multiplication, exponents and so on. But from solving mathematical problems and developing mathematical skills,
you also develop an understanding of real-world concepts which you use more often than you probably realize, and
the mathematical driverless skills themselves are applicable in the real world in ways you might not ordinarily think
about.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the kind of thinking required to solve the problem in the activity below compare to the kind of
thinking used to solve problems in history or the arts?

ACTIVITY

Use the QR code to access a mathematical problem called ‘Route to Infinity’.

Go ahead and take your time solving the problem. Discuss it with your friends. There are several
different ways it can be done, so there is not a right or wrong method. The most important thing for you
to attend to is how you go about solving the problem.
1 What kind of thinking skills do you have to use?
2 If you had to help someone else solve this problem, how would you describe to that person what they
will need to do without telling them step-by-step?
3 After you have solved the problem your way, you can go back to the website and click on the solutions
tab and see how other people solved it. Choose two and discuss what those students did differently
from what you did. Were the thinking skills similar or different to your approach to the problem?
4 Identify two ways in which you have used or might have to use these same thinking skills in another
situation in your life.

The IB guides for Mathematics, from the Primary Years Programme through the Diploma Programme, identify the
following skills (among others) as goals for students to achieve as they study mathematics throughout their school
years:
• Count, sort, match and compare objects, shapes and numbers.
• Recognize and continue patterns (and relationships) to make reasonable estimates.
• Analyse, make predictions and infer from data.
• Describe patterns as general rules consistent with findings.
• Organize information using a logical structure.
• Justify the degree of accuracy of a solution.
• Justify whether a solution makes sense in the context of the authentic real-life situation.
• Approximation.
• Generalization.
• Modelling.
Did you identify any of these skills as being needed in order to solve the problem on page 268?
We can see, as we start to consider the fundamental nature of these mathematical skills and concepts, how integrally
connected mathematics is to the nature of physical objects in the world and their relationships to each other. We can

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also see how the kinds of thinking skills that we develop through mathematics are skills that can help us function in
a wide range of situations in our daily lives. That should not really surprise us at this point, as we have now seen
how mathematics functions to describe much of the physical universe.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What is it about mathematics that enables mathematical results to remain unchanged over time?

One final point about the scope of mathematics: because advanced mathematics relies on symbols, rather than on
real objects, and because the development of new mathematics so often occurs as a result of the effort to extend
existing mathematics, mathematics is capable of dealing with things that do not exist in the real world or which
might exist, but whose existence has not yet been absolutely established. A simple example of this is negative
numbers. The number –12 does not represent a quantity which can be represented by real-world objects such as
oranges. The concept of negative numbers had appeared in China by 200BC (Rogers) but remained controversial
until the nineteenth century. The need for negative numbers was illustrated by an Alexandrian mathematician named
Diophantus, who offered this problem:

If we solve for x, we find that x has to equal a negative number:

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
The scope of mathematics includes material that does not exist in the real world. How does that
compare and contrast to religious knowledge, for example?

Diophantus called that result ‘absurd’ (Rogers). Certainly it is absurd if we want to restrict ourselves to mathematics
that reflects things that can and do exist in the real world; however, if we consider that pure mathematics explores
the implications of mathematics, even this early example reveals the inevitable need for negative numbers. The
nature of mathematics certainly allows for the creation of such problems as 4x + 20 = 4, and so the ‘absurd’ answer
is an answer to a real, though abstract, problem.

ACTIVITY

In some situations, we do use negative numbers to describe a real-world phenomenon, such as

temperature. Use the QR code to read the story about a lottery game in the UK that had to be withdrawn
because people did not understand it.
1 What was the fundamental misunderstanding?
2 How might you demonstrate the concept to people who did not understand so that they could
understand it?
3 Since negative temperatures are a real-world phenomenon, does that mean that negative numbers
do, after all, represent ‘things’ that exist in the physical world? Why or why not?
4 How is it that we can use a negative number to describe temperatures? Why is zero not the lowest
possible temperature?

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Some other mathematical elements with which you may be familiar but which do not describe things that exist as
physical objects in the real world are imaginary numbers, parallel lines (which, we imagine in maths, extend into
infinity), and the concept of infinity itself. We know that there are an infinite number of numbers, but there is not an
infinite number of any object in the Universe – not even atoms. The estimated number of atoms in the Universe is
very large: between 1078 and 1082 (Helminstine) – but the idea of an infinite number of things is infinitely bigger
than that.
We have seen, now, that mathematics has a very broad scope indeed. Physicist Richard Feynman said that
mathematics is the language of nature, and if we are to understand the beauty of nature, we must learn her language
(TalkReelTV). Such a statement brings all of the natural world into the scope of mathematics. Use the QR code to
listen to Feynman’s lecture. His comments about the relationship between mathematics and nature begin at about
50.00. If that were not enough of a job for mathematics to do, we have also seen how it encompasses the study of all
the logical ramifications of all existing mathematics. That study increases all the time as new mathematics are
developed, because then mathematicians will study the implications of the new mathematics as well. The scope of
mathematics also includes our ability to apply mathematics in an enormous range of situations to help provide
solutions to an enormous number of problems that we encounter in the real world. Finally, the scope of mathematics
includes all of our cognitive abilities to recognize and organize relationships between physical objects and between
objects which are strictly imagined. As you continue through your TOK course, compare the scope of mathematics
to the scope of other areas of knowledge and note the difference in type and scale. Few, if any, will cover so much
territory!

In the next section, we will consider how different approaches to and beliefs about mathematics might change our
understanding of mathematics as an area of knowledge and our knowledge of the nature of mathematics itself.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the knowledge we can develop about nature from mathematics differ in significant ways from the
knowledge that we can gain about nature from the natural sciences or the arts?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Truth
Truth takes on different significance depending on what aspect of mathematics we are looking at. If we
are talking about pure mathematics, the truth that is revealed is truth about the nature of mathematics
itself. If we are talking about applied mathematics, we can gauge the truth of mathematical statements
by how functional they are. If the mathematics works, as it did in the effort to send men to the Moon,
then we can say that it is true, or at least that it successfully depicts truths in the world.

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Perspectives

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Students of mathematics
One important perspective on mathematics is the perspective of the student. Students of mathematics, especially
students in primary and secondary school, have a perspective which is significantly different from the perspective of
professional mathematicians, because students of mathematics aren’t breaking new ground in the field. Students of
mathematics are following in the footsteps of mathematicians who developed the concepts and procedures which
now make up the mathematical knowledge that someone who wishes to pursue mathematics as a career must have as
a foundation.

ACTIVITY
Which of the following activities are familiar to you as part of your study of mathematics in school? Which
do you not engage in?
1 Memorizing formulas.
2 Solving problems from a textbook.
3 Getting ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers.
4 Following established procedures.
5 Demonstrating that you know what the proper procedures are.
6 Applying known formulas to practice situations.
7 Creating an original proof.
8 Studying the nature of modular forms.
9 Analysing existing mathematical conjectures in an effort to see if they can be proven.
10 Submitting mathematical papers for publication in maths journals.
11 Making presentations at conferences to present new conjectures or new proofs.
12 Collaborating with mathematicians at universities or even from other countries.
Probably most students will identify the first six as being familiar activities, while the last six are not. How
might you characterize the difference between what you do as a student and the kinds of activities
described in numbers 7–12? What is the difference between the kind of mathematical knowledge you
are developing and the kind of mathematical knowledge that professional mathematicians develop?

The experience of learning mathematics is not, of course, the same for all students. Some students struggle with it
much more than others. In the Methods and tools section, we will investigate the kind of thinking skills needed to
learn mathematics, which may differ among students and professional mathematicians.
Toward the end of the previous section, we looked at some concepts developed by the Texas School for the Blind
and Visually Impaired. The school delved into those concepts in detail, because the experience of learning them is,
for blind students, quite different from the experience that sighted students have of learning those concepts and,
therefore, of learning mathematics.

CAS links
If there is a school for the visually impaired in or near to your community, you might organize a trip to
speak with the students and teachers about how they go about learning mathematics. You could also
volunteer as a tutor, which could help the younger students and expand your understanding of what is
required in order to develop strong skills in mathematics.

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Pure mathematics
In addition to the student perspective, mathematics can be seen from two other perspectives: the perspective of the
pure mathematician and the perspective of the applied mathematician. You were introduced to both perspectives in
the Scope section. The pure mathematician is the one who considers mathematics from the perspective of exploring
the implications of existing mathematics. This is the approach to mathematics that does not concern itself directly
with the ways in which maths describes the real world. This approach consists purely of extending existing
mathematical knowledge by following logical pathways. In 1964, Richard Feynman gave a series of lectures at
Cornell University. In one of those, he described the difference between the mathematician and the physicist, and he
described pure mathematics this way:
Mathematicians only are dealing with the structure of the reasoning and they do not really care what they
are talking about. They don’t even need to know what they are talking about … or whether what they say
is true. Now I will explain that. If you state the axioms, you say such and such is so and such and such is
so and such and such is so, what then? Then the logic can be carried out without knowing what the such
and such words mean … if the statements about the axioms are carefully formulated and are complete
enough, it’s not necessary for the man doing the reasoning to have any knowledge of the meaning of these
words, and he’ll be able to deduce in the same language new conclusions. (Feynman)
You can use the QR code to listen to the whole talk, which is called ‘The Relation of Math and Physics’.

Feynman talked about axioms as being the starting place for making knowledge in mathematics. Axioms are
defining characteristics of mathematical systems. What that means is that once a system, such as geometry or
algebra, has been defined, there are certain characteristics of that system which define that system. You can think of
axioms, or postulates, which is another word for axioms, as being something like the rules of a game. The rules of a
game define the game and they are what make the game different from all other games.
The metaphor of the game as a system and the rules as axioms is not perfect, but it should help us now to notice a
few important things about axioms:
• The rules of a game do not need any kind of argument or proof. They are the rules that have been agreed upon by
the people in charge of governing the game. In the same way, axioms do not need any kind of argument or proof:
mathematicians simply agree to accept them as true. They are the facts of a mathematical system.
• Just as when we know the rules of a game, we know the nature of the game, what we know when we know the
axioms of a system is the nature of the system itself.
• When we change the rules of a game, we get a completely new game. The metaphor here for mathematical axioms
is not exact, because while we could just decide to change the rules of a game (and in fact, the professional
organizations governing sports do, from time to time, adjust rules), we cannot do that with mathematics. The
axioms of mathematics are not chosen by mathematicians in the same way that rules are developed for games. The
system is defined, and the axioms are the assumptions that automatically come along with that system. To change
an axiom, we would have to change the system first.
• Rules only work for one game – we can’t apply the rules of baseball to cricket and still call it baseball, as it is
known in the United States. In the same way, we can’t say that one set of axioms is ‘wrong’ because that set
doesn’t work in a different system.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
The example of games serves as a metaphor, or an analogy, for how axioms work in mathematics. What
other AOKs rely on metaphor or analogy to provide explanations?

Now we’ll move from the metaphorical comparison with games to an example from mathematics: Euclid’s
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postulates for his geometry. First, a little review: Euclidean geometry is the geometry of the flat plane. Euclid
defined a flat plane this way:
A flat surface that is infinitely large and with zero thickness (‘Plane’).
There are only five postulates which form the entire basis for geometry. These postulates are (‘Euclid’s Postulates’):
1 A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.
2 Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
3 Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as centre.
4 All right angles are congruent.
5 If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less
than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.
This postulate is equivalent to what is known as the parallel postulate.

ACTIVITY
Given what you learned about axioms (postulates) using the games metaphor, discuss the following
questions with a classmate.
1 Why must all right angles be congruent?
2 Why is it not possible to just decide to eliminate one of these postulates? Consider, for example, the
second one. Why can we not just decide that straight lines cannot be extended indefinitely? (Keep in
mind the definition of a flat plane, which is what forms the basis for Euclidean geometry.)
3 If we consider the geometry of a sphere instead of the geometry of a flat plane, would you expect
these same postulates to apply? Why or why not?

Out of these five postulates, all the theorems of geometry have been derived. One well-known theorem about
triangles, for example, is the Triangle Sum Theorem, which you may be familiar with. The theorem states that the
interior angles of a triangle add up to 180° (Sloman). If we switch systems, however, from the Euclidean geometry,
which is the geometry of flat planes, and we move to the geometry of a sphere, the axioms change. A spherical
triangle does not have the same properties as a flat triangle, and the Triangle Sum Theorem cannot apply. In fact,
with spherical triangles, the sum of the angles varies with the size of the triangle and can be as large as 540°
(‘Spherical Triangle’).

One more important point about pure mathematics: axioms form the basis for defining any system of mathematics,
and thus they form the basis for the earliest theorems which are developed in that branch of mathematics. Once
theorems have been proven, though (and we will investigate this process further in the Methods and tools section
that follows), the theorems become available as premises to be used in developing future mathematics. In Chapter 1,
we talked about the nature of formal arguments and their reliance on premises. Axioms are the earliest premises in
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developing the arguments in any given branch of mathematics which become theorems – established proofs – but
every theorem can also be used as premises in later proofs. The diagram on the right illustrates the process.

This diagram is intended only to demonstrate the process, showing how at each level, the new knowledge becomes
the basis for the next stage of developing knowledge. It is not intended to illustrate the only possible ways that
knowledge grows in mathematics. For one thing, it would not be likely that there would always be three axioms or
theorems forming the premises of the argument. For another, axioms and theorems could be mixed at any level. In
fact, any effort to develop a new mathematical proof is likely to involve many more premises than are shown here.
Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, about which you read in Chapter 4, is 200 pages long (‘The
Proof’). Clearly, many different mathematical claims formed the basis for such an argument. One important thing to
notice in this diagram, however, is that each level is built on the one before it, simply on the basis of logic, rather
than on the basis of any kind of reflection of the physical world. The arrows represent the logic which connects the
statements at any given level. So long as the logic is valid, and if all the statements in the first column are true, then
the statements in the second column are true. So long as the next level of logic is valid, and if the statements in the
second column are true, then the statement in the third column is true.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can natural or human scientists ever use this kind of deductive reasoning in supporting their knowledge
claims?

DEEPER THINKING
Euclidean geometry and real space
We have already acknowledged that axioms are assumptions which have been excused from any need
for proof. They form the starting point for a long string of logical deductions which become new
mathematics, which in turn forms the basis for the invention of still more mathematics. We can go one
step further in considering what we know as a result of this process of logical deduction. Feynman made
the claim, possibly somewhat shockingly, that mathematicians do not care – or need to know – whether
the mathematical facts that they are working from are true or in any way related to reality. We looked,
however, at Euclid’s axioms for geometry, and we are quite accustomed to thinking that geometric
figures are real-world objects. If we build a house, for example, the walls are rectangular or square, and
so we can use the geometry that we know to help us design the house.
If we think more deeply, however, we will realize that Euclid’s geometry is the geometry of the flat plane.
Remembering that the definition of a flat plane is:
a flat surface that is infinitely large and with zero thickness
we can immediately see that no such thing exists. We have flat surfaces, but a flat surface that is
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infinitely large would spread in all directions indefinitely without end, and that is clearly impossible.
Nothing in the Universe, furthermore, has zero thickness. Something with zero thickness cannot exist as
a physical object.
Other geometric figures pose us the same problems. Consider the rectangle, which, as we just noted, is
a familiar shape which is integral to the building of houses. The actual definition of a rectangle is:
a 4-sided polygon where all interior angles are 90° (‘Rectangle’).
We have to realize, however, that a rectangle is part of plane geometry, which means that rectangles are
figures which exist as part of the plane – the infinite flat surface with no thickness. The rectangle is not
infinite, but it does still have zero thickness. Such a rectangle, because it is imaginary and is not subject
to the consequences of physical existence, can be understood to be absolutely perfect. That is: it has no
flaws of any kind. If we consider that an absolutely perfect rectangle has four 90° angles, those angles
are exactly 90° – not even the tiniest smidgen more or the tiniest smidgen less. In the real world, we
cannot create rectangles with that degree of perfection. If we draw one with chalk on a board, it might
look perfect to the naked eye, but if we examined the chalk lines closely with a magnifying glass, we
would see that the lines have rough edges or that they are slightly wider in some places than others. The
angles would be just slightly more or less than 90°. We have tools that help us to get closer and close,
and with computers, we can get pretty close, but if we print it out on paper, flaws in the paper or slight
inconsistencies in the surface of the paper will mean that anything with visible lines is not the same thing
as the imaginary rectangle of Euclid’s system. A rectangle on a computer screen has physical lines
which we can see, but which do not exist in any kind of visible form in the ideal rectangle that Euclid
described. And, perhaps most importantly, if we make a rectangle out of drywall as part of our process of
constructing a house, our rectangle’s sides will only be as straight as it is possible for our saws to cut,
and the corners will only be as close to 90° as it is possible for our tools to make them.
Euclid’s axioms, and all the theorems, such as the Triangle Sum Theorem, apply to the imaginary flat
plane which Euclid defined. They do not apply precisely and exactly to anything that actually exists in the
real world. So when we think about the question of what we know when we know the axioms and
theorems of Euclid’s geometry, what we know precisely and with absolute certainty (see page 3 in
Chapter 1), is the nature of the flat plane and the other geometrical figures, all of which are imaginary.
Fortunately for us, that level of precision is not necessary for us to be able to use the principles of plane
geometry in the real world. What we know about the real world when we know the axioms and theorems
of geometry is good enough for us to be able to manipulate real-world versions of geometric figures well
enough for them to serve our purposes. Our wall is not going to fall down because of tiny errors in
measurement, so long as, when we create our real-world rectangle, the corners are as close to 90° as
we can make them.
In the discussion of absolute certainty in Chapter 1, we talked about the fact that most of our knowledge
does not have to be absolutely certain to be functional. The creation of geometric figures in the real
world and the use of geometric theorems to govern the design of those physical objects is a good
example of knowledge which is accurate enough for us to use with confidence.

ACTIVITY
Discuss the following questions with your classmates.
1 What is the difference between certainty and absolute certainty?
2 Does that difference have a functional meaning in pure mathematics?

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Applied mathematics
We have just seen how pure mathematics proceeds within its own boundaries as an intellectual pursuit without
needing any direct connection to the real world. Much mathematics, however, does apply to the real world, and that
gives us a third perspective on how and why we make knowledge in mathematics: applied mathematics. Earlier in
the chapter, we considered how an alpaca farmer uses mathematics in a variety of ways on a regular basis; the alpaca
farmer is applying mathematics to her business. We also considered a variety of other applications of mathematics
from architecture to the design of automated cars. In all those instances, mathematics was being applied, but it isn’t
clear that the people applying the maths were people we would call mathematicians: farmers, architects, construction
workers and engineers all use maths – as do many other people – in a wide variety of endeavours every day.
There are, however, people working as mathematicians whose objective, unlike the objective of pure
mathematicians, is the development of the mathematics needed in order to solve problems in the real world. One
example of this kind of applied mathematician is one who is working on developing ‘unbreakable’ codes and on
how to break ‘unbreakable’ codes. There are quite a few such mathematicians in the world; most of them work for
governments which need codes and code-breaking tools for military purposes. There are specific titles for the
mathematicians who do these jobs. The people who create the encryption systems are called ‘cryptographers’. The
people who work on breaking encryption systems are called ‘cryptanalysts’ (‘The Enigma of Alan Turing).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can homeowners and business owners apply the knowledge made from other areas of knowledge such
as history or the human sciences in the way that they can apply the knowledge from mathematics?

CASE STUDY
Alan Turing and the Enigma machine
One such mathematician was Britain’s Alan Turing, who famously helped to break the German Enigma
cipher during the Second World War.
Some background information: although often used interchangeably, the terms ‘code’ and ‘cipher’ are
not precisely the same. In a code, the words of the intended message are replaced by other words. In a
cipher, the letters of the original message are changed or rearranged (‘The Enigma of Alan Turing’).

Alan Turing was a cryptanalyst. When he was working on breaking Enigma, he was actually trying to
break a very complicated cipher, which had in turn been created out of messages which had already
been translated using a code. The reason a mathematician was needed was because of the enormously
high number of possibilities that the machine could generate. The machine had three wheels inside of it,
and each wheel had all 26 letters. The person encrypting the message would type in a letter, which
would be cycled through each of the three wheels in one direction and then back through each of the
wheels again. You can use the QR code to read a more detailed explanation and see a diagram of how
the complexities of the machine worked.
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The Enigma system was so complex that there were 17 000 possible combinations that could be used to
assign a coded letter before one had to repeat (Hern). No human could ever figure out how to decode
even one letter; a mathematical algorithm was required to figure it out. Turing actually invented and built
a computing machine that had the capacity to run the possibilities and break the cipher. It took Turing
and a team of mathematicians more than five months to break the code (IWM Staff). As the war went on,
Turing developed the mathematics needed to break the Enigma naval code, which was more
complicated than the original Enigma code.
Although Turing set out to figure out the mathematics that would help solve the very important problem
of the Enigma cipher, the knowledge that he developed also turned out to have wide-ranging application
in the world. The work that Turing did during the war became the foundation for the modern computing
age, including the development of computing machines, chips and processors (IWM Staff). A major
award – the equivalent to a Nobel Prize in computer science – is named after Alan Turing.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Values
Clearly the work that Alan Turing and the other cryptanalysts did during the Second World War was
incredibly valuable to the world. It is credited with saving thousands of lives and with shortening the war
by several years. We also saw that the work done then brought us into the computing age, and the value
to the world of computer technology is incalculable.
An important point to notice about mathematics, however, is that although applied mathematics is of
great importance to our lives in the twenty-first century, pure mathematics is valued deeply as well. In
Chapter 4, we heard about Andrew Wiles and his solution to the 300-year-old problem of Fermat’s Last
Theorem. In 2016, Wiles was awarded the Abel Prize, the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize, for
his solution. His prize is equivalent to the prize named after Turing, and so we can understand that to
mathematicians, outstanding work is valued, both when it has great utility in the world and when it does
not.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Are other areas of knowledge equally useful to mathematics?
Are the reasons we have for seeking knowledge in mathematics different from our reasons for seeking
knowledge in the other AOKs?

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Different perspectives on mathematical content
So far, in terms of different perspectives on mathematics, we have considered how the different perspectives of
mathematicians result in different kinds of mathematical knowledge. However, we can also consider how different
mathematical systems represent differing mathematical perspectives. In the same way that we have seen how new
mathematics builds on existing mathematics, the branches of mathematics also build one on the other. Table 8.2
shows some of the main branches of mathematics and the kind of knowledge that each one generates. Each branch
can be seen as a perspective, because it looks on mathematical questions in different ways, using different methods
and generating different kinds of knowledge (Lamb).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is the knowledge generated in the different disciplines of the natural and human sciences related in the
same way that the knowledge in the different disciplines of mathematics is related?

Table 8.2 Mathematical branches

Branch of Focus of attention
mathematics
Arithmetic Basic manipulation of numbers
Algebra An advance on arithmetic in that it still focuses on the manipulation of numbers but adds
in the use of symbols for unknown quantities – variables
Geometry Studies properties of shapes, including points, lines and solids
Trigonometry Focuses on triangles, including the measurements of angles and the relationship
between them and the sides. This is a focused development from geometry, in that
trigonometry zeroes in on one geometric form
Calculus Calculus was invented independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Newton’s
calculus focused on rates of change while Liebniz’s calculus focused on the summation
of an infinite number of small factors. Newton’s is differential calculus, and Liebniz’s is
integral calculus (Lamb). Newton’s calculus is geometrical, while Liebniz’s is analytical.
The exact nature of calculus developed over a period of more than 100 years into the
form we use today (‘The History of Calculus’)
Table 8.2 shows how the different branches of mathematics relate to each other. Each new branch of mathematics
takes a different perspective from the one before it – from basic manipulation of numbers to the inclusion of abstract
values into the study, then the move from numbers to shapes, then from shapes to a particular shape, and then on to a
complex type of mathematics that deals with the study of objects or systems in motion; it allows us to map how
something changes over tiny increments of time (Kleitman).

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Invention or discovery?
A final way we can consider the role of perspectives in mathematics is the question of whether mathematics is
invented or discovered. Earlier in this chapter, we learned that Richard Feynman thought of mathematics as the
‘language of nature’, and he declared that if we want to truly understand nature, we must learn its language. This
view of mathematics is held by a number of mathematicians and is known as ‘Platonism’. The idea in Platonism is
that mathematics exists, independently of humans, in the same way that animals and oceans and atoms and
molecules exist. Mathematics is more like atoms and molecules, of course, because we cannot see them. The belief
is named after Plato because Plato believed in two kinds of objects: the material and the immaterial. If we draw a
square, then that drawing is a material object, but the actual square, which our drawing represents, is an immaterial
object (Anglin and Lambek). For people who hold the view of mathematical Platonism, all of our development of
mathematics is the discovery of mathematical principles.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Consider the other AOKs: Is the question of their invention or discovery problematic in the same way
that it is problematic in mathematics?

Many mathematicians hold this view, but it is a contentious one. Many other mathematicians hold the exact opposite
view: that mathematics is a human invention which has been developed as a means of describing or modelling
reality – it is a useful tool, which we use for solving problems and which we expand by pursuing the logical
development of ideas (Knapp).
An interesting thing about this difference in perspective is that they cannot both be right. One view describes the
situation as it really is, and the other view does not. We have no way, at least not at this point in time, to establish
which belief is true. What is important about this difference in perspective is that our understanding of what we
know is completely different depending on which perspective is correct. If Platonism is correct, then part of what we
know when we know mathematics is the immaterial world, a reality outside of ourselves. If the anti-Platonist view is
correct, however, then our knowledge of mathematics does not reveal anything to us about a reality outside of
ourselves that would continue to exist if all humanity suddenly blinked out of existence. Instead, we know
something about the way human minds work, and our capacity for developing abstract concepts that we can use for
our purposes.
We have now considered three different ways to consider different perspectives in mathematics:
• the different perspectives of the people who study maths, defined by their purposes
• the different perspectives of the content of mathematics, defined by the focus of the different branches of maths
• the different perspectives of the relationship of mathematics to reality.
Considering these perspectives can help us understand the complexity of mathematics and the diversity of the ways
in which our mathematical knowledge develops.
In the next section, we will consider in more detail the methods and tools of knowledge-making in mathematics.

ACTIVITY
1 Which of these two views of the origin of mathematics makes the most sense to you: Platonism or the
idea that mathematics is an invented system for describing things that happen and things that exist in
the physical world? Why?
2 What arguments would you use to try to convince someone who holds the opposite view that your
view makes the most sense?
3 Discuss and debate these different perspectives with your classmates.

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Methods and tools

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Methods of pure mathematicians
Throughout this chapter, we have been considering the cumulative nature of mathematics. New maths is created out
of older maths. We examined the ‘if–then’ structure of mathematics: if this is true, then this must also be true.’ We
also explored the infinite nature of mathematics: there are an infinite number of numbers, and a geometric plane, for
example, extends infinitely in all directions.
This infinite nature of mathematics means that we can never demonstrate a mathematical claim by trying out all the
possibilities. When Pythagoras proved his theorem that for all right triangles a2 + b2 = c2, he did not do it by
drawing every possible right triangle and measuring. Such an approach would be impossible, as he could never draw
every possible right triangle, even if he had all eternity in which to do it. He had, instead, to use deduction (see page
5) in order to demonstrate that regardless of what the lengths of the sides of a right triangle were, the claim would
always hold true.

Proof
The formal name for that method of making new knowledge in mathematics out of a series of logical deductions is
rigorous proof. Mathematicians begin with a conjecture, which is like an hypothesis in the natural sciences: a
conjecture is an idea that one or more mathematicians think is true, but which has not yet been through the process
of proof. In order to convert that conjecture into a theorem, the mathematicians must subject it to the process of the
rigorous proof. ‘Rigorous’ means that all the possibilities that the proof could be wrong have been excluded, and the
proof is absolutely certain.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What is meant by the term ‘proof’ in mathematics, and how is this similar to, or different from, what is
meant by this term in other areas of knowledge?

CASE STUDY
The Pythagorean Theorem
Pythagoras, for example, had to demonstrate that his conjecture was true for every single possible right
triangle. Once he could do that, then the conjecture was proven and became the Pythagorean Theorem.
The proof itself can be seen as a tool for conveying the logic which ensures the absolute certainty of the
proof.
Here is a proof that we can use to demonstrate the absolute certainty that a2 + b2 = c2:
We begin with a right triangle with sides of unknown lengths, so we label them a, b and c.

The term a2 can be physically represented with a square whose sides are all length a, so now we draw
the squares with the sides a, b and c.

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If Pythagoras’ conjecture was correct, then the area of squares a and b would add up to exactly the
same area as the area of square c. He still couldn’t just measure the squares, however, and add them
up, because that would only demonstrate the claim for that one triangle. So now we need some creative
thinking: how can we show that the area of the orange and green squares combined is equal to the area
of the yellow square?
Before you read on, take some time to discuss this problem with your classmates and see if you can
come up with an idea of what to do next.
We can create a new figure by moving the square with side a over to the other side of the triangle. You
can see, when we do that, that there is now a new triangle formed in the empty space, and that that
triangle is exactly the same size as the original triangle. The sides are a, b and c.

We can also see, now, that, because the two squares have sides a and b, there is a rectangle just
waiting to be formed under the a square which is going to have sides a and b, and will, therefore, be
made up of two more triangles with sides a, b and c, just like the ones we just made.

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Now we have the original triangle plus three more exactly congruent to it. Congruent means that they are
exactly the same in size and shape. We also have two squares, one which has area a2 and one which
has area b2. The question is: what does this get us?
Before you read on, take some time to discuss this problem with your classmates and see if you can
come up with an idea of what to do next.
We still haven’t done anything with the square with sides c. If we draw a box around that square, we get
four new triangles. We know that the hypotenuse of each triangle is length c, because we made them
from the box with sides c.

Those resulting four triangles with hypotenuse c certainly look as if they are congruent to the original a,
b, c triangle, but how can we know that they are?
Before you read on, take some time to discuss this problem with your classmates and see if you can
come up with an idea of what to do next.
We know one more thing: the triangles are all right triangles. There is no way to create a right triangle
with hypotenuse c, where c is exactly congruent to the hypotenuse of our original triangle, without also
having sides a and b which are congruent to sides a and b in our original triangle. Therefore: we have
four new triangles with sides a, b, and c.

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There is only one step left in our proof: since our conjecture is that the first figure is equivalent to the
second figure, we can subtract the parts from each figure which we know are congruent. We can see,
furthermore, that both large squares are made up of sides with lines made of two line segments, one
equal to a and the other equal to b. That means that the two larger squares are equal in total area. Now
it’s easy to see that we can simply subtract out the four triangles from each figure and we are left with
the fact that the a square and the b square together are equal to the c square. The conjecture is proven
for all right triangles. It doesn’t matter what the lengths of the sides are, so we have a rigorous proof, and
the conjecture is not a conjecture, it is a theorem.
Here is how this proof looks written out as a series of mathematical statements:

The area of the first square is given by

The area of the second square is given by
Since the squares have equal areas, we can set them equal to another and subtract equals.
The case (a + b)2 = (a + b)2 is not helpful, so let’s do the other case.

Subtracting equals from both sides we have a2 + b2 = c2.

There are many additional ways that the Pythagorean Theorem can be proved. Use the QR code to
watch a video of a clever proof using water.

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The method of the rigorous proof is at the heart of the pure mathematician’s work. It is important because it results
in absolute certainty, which is the standard for knowledge in mathematics.

DEEPER THINKING
Reason and imagination
Pythagoras developed his proof using deductive reasoning and a good dose of creative thinking. The
thinking that you must do when you work on mathematical problems is very similar, even when you are
not creating original proofs.
Let’s think back to the problem involving cats and mice and fish, which you solved at the beginning of the
chapter. What methods or tools did you have to use in order to solve that problem? Certainly you had to
see in order to read the problem, and you had to use your memory in order to know what cats and fish
and mice are, as well as in order to recognize the significance of the mathematical symbols + , – and = ,
and that memory is, of course, related to your knowledge of language. You had to use reasoning to work
out various steps such as ‘if there are three cats and they add up to 30, then one cat must be worth 10’.
If you had never seen a mathematical problem with cats and mice and fish before, you also engaged in
an imaginative act: the ability to imagine that cats and other animals could be symbols for numbers.
All of these processes occurred simultaneously, not one after the other, and you most likely didn’t even
notice them happening: they were automatic. Probably even the logical deduction that if three cats are
30 then one cat is 10 happened so automatically you did not have to think about it. You looked at the
problem and right away knew that one cat = 10.
Discuss the following questions with your classmates.
1 Why were you able to do that much thinking, using sense perception, language, reasoning, memory
and imagination, so smoothly and rapidly?
2 We call the kind of instantaneous processing described above, which results in your immediately
knowing something (in this case, part of the answer you need in order to solve the larger problem)
intuition. What does this example reveal about the nature of intuition?

I just had to find something completely new; it’s a mystery where that comes from.
Andrew Wiles

CONNECTION TO THE CORE THEME

Imagination and intuition
Another of the world’s most famous mathematical proofs is Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last
Theorem, which we learned about in Chapter 4 (see page 140). The proof demonstrated that for all
equations of the form ax + bx = cx, x cannot be greater than 2. Certainly, much of the work Wiles did
during the nine years he worked on the proof involved reason; however, reason alone was not enough.
He describes the process this way:
I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of
mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about … And sometimes I
realized that nothing that had ever been done before was any use at all. Then I just had to find
something completely new; it’s a mystery where that comes from. (NOVA)
Whenever Wiles ran into a problem he couldn’t solve using existing knowledge, he had to come up with

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something new. Imagination is exactly that: the ability to put pieces of the known together and come up
with something new. Imagination, then, allowed Wiles to solve problems that no one had been able to
solve before him. The ‘mystery’ Wiles talks about is intuition – the ability of a mind to work on a problem
on the unconscious level, using all of the knowledge one has previously amassed. Imagination and
intuition are skills used by every mathematician who tackles a problem. Students must also use
imagination in figuring out how to solve a problem which is new to them. Intuition is likely to be less
useful to young students, however, as it takes time – many years, even – for someone to develop
enough expertise in a given area so that the unconscious processing is trustworthy and productive.
Trained professional intuition is much more than a simple hunch or guess.
Mathematics does not require imagination solely to solve problems; mathematics is, arguably,
essentially an act of imagination about the nature of reality. As we have seen, one of the great questions
about the nature of mathematics is the question of whether maths exists in the real world, independent
of human cognition, and is, therefore, simply awaiting our discovery, or whether mathematics is invented
entirely by humans. Those who believe the latter are very aware of the powerful role of imagination in
making knowledge in mathematics:
Contrary to Platonist beliefs about the ability of mathematics to give us these things is the
stance that mathematics is actually about multiple realities, relative truths, complexities, and
ambiguities. In essence, doing pure mathematics (not merely doing computations) is an
exercise in imagination – and imagination, an exercise in abstraction. (Saiber and Turner)
Consider, for example, our ability to use mathematics to describe dimensions beyond the third – realities
that we cannot perceive for ourselves and which may or may not exist. Imagination, therefore, is not
merely a method of making knowledge in mathematics; mathematics is a system which helps us to
imagine the Universe.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the use of imagination in mathematics differ significantly from the use of imagination in the arts?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do mathematicians reconcile the fact that some conclusions seem to conflict with our intuitions?

Learner profile
Balanced
How does the development of knowledge in mathematics rely on a balance of our various cognitive
skills, such as reason, imagination and intuition?

ACTIVITY
Do you think there is a difference between the way that students must use their imaginations in learning
mathematics at school and the way that professional mathematicians such as Andrew Wiles must use
theirs? If so, why? If not, why not?

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Methods of applied mathematicians
Applied mathematics does not involve exploring the ramifications of existing mathematics through the tool of the
rigorous proof. Instead, people who are trying to apply mathematics to the real world generally start with the real-
world problem and then either select or create the mathematics that are needed in order to solve that problem.
Suppose, for example, that you have agreed with your parents that you will save £2000 toward your college
expenses for your freshman year. You have a job, and you need to decide whether you should keep that job, get one
that pays more, or arrange to work more hours between now and the start of university. You know what the problem
is; how would you solve it?
1 Think about what you would do.
2 Describe the process and methods that you would have to use.
3 How do those methods differ from the methods of the pure mathematician?

CASE STUDY
Richard Arenstorf

Richard Arenstorf was working at the Army Ballistics Missile Agency with Werner von Braun when the
goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s was announced. Among the many problems
that had to be solved was a problem that no mathematician had been able to solve for 300 years: the
three-body problem. The problem for NASA was that celestial bodies in space exert gravitational forces
on each other. The solution to the two-body problem had been fairly easily solved, so NASA knew, for
example, how the Earth and the Moon were each affected by the gravitational force from the other.
Sending a spaceship to the Moon would necessarily introduce a third body into the system, and NASA
needed to know how the gravity from the Earth and the Moon would affect the ship’s trajectory. The ship,
too, would exert a gravitational pull on both the Earth and the Moon, though obviously that pull would be
much weaker than the gravity created by either the Earth or the Moon. It had to be taken into account,
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nevertheless.
The trajectory of the spaceship would be the path that the ship would follow. It could not just fly in a
straight line from the Earth to the Moon the way you might be able to drive in a straight line from one end
of your street to the other. Each end of your street remains in the same position relative to the other,
regardless of how the Earth turns and travels around the Sun. But the Earth and the Moon do not stay in
the same position relative to each other; both bodies are turning and the Moon revolves around the
Earth while both Earth and Moon travel around the Sun. A spaceship shot in a straight line from Cape
Canaveral in Florida would head out into outer space and miss the Moon by a long way. The trajectory
had to be curved. The exact amount of curve had to be controlled, or Apollo 11 could end up flying off
into outer space.
Think about moving objects in relationship to each other: if you want to throw a ball at a moving car and
hit it, you have to time your throw so that you release the ball before the car is lined up with you. If you
throw when the car is in front of you, it will be past you and gone before the ball can reach it. The further
away you are from the car, the greater the distance behind the car will be when the ball passes the line
where the car once was. The Moon is 238 000 miles away, so if we don’t ‘throw’ the spaceship at it at
just the right moment, taking into account how the gravity will affect the speed and direction of the ship,
we could miss the Moon by a truly enormous distance. The maths had to be right. (We do not, by the
way, suggest that you should go out and throw balls at moving cars!)
The illustration on the next page shows the two different trajectories that Apollo 11 had to take. The
bottom line shows the path it would take on the way to the Moon, and the top line shows the path it
would take on the way back from the Moon.
In order to work out precisely how to make Apollo 11 go where they needed it to go, NASA needed to
know exactly how all the gravitational forces would work on the ship.
Arenstorf knew precisely what the problem was when he set out to solve it. He was able to solve the
problem for the exact case at hand: the case in which the three bodies were the Earth, the Moon and the
Apollo spacecraft. The problem has not been solved for all cases. Arenstorf did not provide a rigorous
proof for this problem; however, he did have to create a justification good enough to convince the rest of
the NASA scientists, engineers and mathematicians that it would work. In the end, the fact that his
solution was correct was demonstrated because it worked. The trajectory that was planned based on
Arenstorf’s solution did, in actual practice, get Apollo 11 to the Moon and back.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Explanation
A proof is one kind of explanation used in mathematics – it is the mechanism for explaining how
mathematicians know that a particular claim is absolutely certain. The proof doesn’t necessarily work in
a situation such as Richard Arenstorf’s: he could not develop a rigorous proof, because he solved the

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problem only for a particular case (and, in fact, as of 2019, that problem has only been solved for a few
special cases). Despite the lack of a rigorous proof, however, the work was to be used in a very
important, very expensive, very dangerous project – the sending of men to the Moon and bringing them
back. Arenstorf needed to be certain that his mathematics was correct, which probably meant
demonstrating that he was absolutely certain about the mathematics for that one special case. That
need meant that he had to be able to explain, using much the same process of logical deduction, why
his conclusion was true.
We saw with the work that Andrew Wiles did on Fermat’s Last Theorem that peer review of a proof plays
an essential role in the construction of mathematical knowledge. Wiles’ proof had to be gone over in
minute detail by someone who could understand it before the mathematical world would accept the
work, and that person did actually find a fatal flaw in the proof. When the error was corrected, Wiles had
to submit the paper for careful peer review again, and it was published only after it passed that test. The
demand for a thorough explanation of the reasoning that went into any proof is a required step in the
process.
We don’t know what kind of peer review Arenstorf’s work went through, but we can safely assume that it
was subjected to careful checking. Without the approved explanation, no one in the mathematical or
scientific community would have been able to accept his word that he had solved the problem.
Explanation is a crucial element of applied mathematics.

We have looked primarily at cases of applied mathematics in which the problem is known before the mathematics
exists to solve it. There are, however, cases in which pure mathematicians create mathematics which can be used
later in order to solve real-world problems, although that was not the intention when it was developed. Here are two
examples (Rowlett 166–69):
• Irish mathematician William Rowland Hamilton came up with the mathematics for something called quaternions
in 1843. Quaternions are representations of what happens if the complex number system is extended into the
fourth dimension – a dimension which we, of course, as three-dimensional beings, cannot experience. Nothing
much happened with the idea of quaternions for more than 150 years, until they turned out to have an application
in robotics and gaming. The mathematics that no one was very interested in turned out to be extremely useful in
an industry worth more than $100 billion.
• Mathematics about probability theory began to be developed in the seventeenth century by a mathematician who
was also a compulsive gambler, Girolamo Cardano. Cardano thought he had calculated the odds of being able to
throw a double six with two dice at least once in 24 throws, but it didn’t work. He called in Blaise Pascal and
Pierre de Fermat in 1654, and together they laid the foundations for modern probability theory. One very practical,
but unanticipated, application of this mathematics is for use in the insurance industry. Insurers used to think that
they should sell few policies because each one was of high risk, but probability theory demonstrates that the
opposite is true: it’s better to sell many policies because, as shown by the law of large numbers, the bigger the
number, the better the prediction.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can you think of examples from other areas of knowledge in which knowledge that was developed for
one purpose was then discovered much later to be very useful for another purpose?

EE links
Research into one or more cases in which mathematical principles which were developed purely for the
sake of expanding our mathematical knowledge but actually turned out to be useful could make an
interesting extended essay. A research question might be: What is the relationship between pure
mathematics and applied mathematics?

Mathematics does not rely on the kind of tools that are used in laboratory science, and for many centuries, the tools
that were used were quite simple: a pencil and paper, a ruler, a mathematical compass and a protractor, plus the
cognitive abilities of the human mind have been the tools which created much of the world’s maths. In recent
decades, the electronic calculator and the computer have been added to the repertoire and have greatly extended the
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ability to process mathematical concepts beyond what the human mind can do. But the basic methods have been
unchanged for many centuries: logical deduction and rigorous proof remain the primary means by which
mathematical knowledge is extended.

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Ethics

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Ethical concerns with regard to developing mathematical knowledge
Ethical concerns as they relate to mathematics are different, in some ways, than the ethical concerns for all other
areas of knowledge, because only in mathematics is absolute certainty attainable as the standard for knowledge.
Given that standard, then, it follows that in order to employ the methods of mathematics ethically, mathematicians
must take whatever actions necessary to attempt to attain it.

Learner profile
Risk-takers
What role do ambiguity and uncertainty play in our development of mathematical knowledge?

Ambiguity
At the beginning of the chapter, we asked you to solve a problem that eventually required you to use the order of
operations in order to know which steps to take in order to get the correct answer to the problem. That problem is
tricky, because it simply assumes that you know about the order of operations and that you will automatically apply
it. The creator of the problem put the onus on the solver, in other words, rather than taking responsibility themselves
for making sure that the problem was clear. The problem doesn’t really treat the solver fairly, and, as such, it
violates an important value in mathematics: clarity.
The problem at the beginning of the chapter was a relatively simple one, which really had only one possible way to
apply the order of operations. There are problems, however, for which it can be much more difficult to determine
what to do. PEDMAS says, for instance, that we do division and multiplication before addition and subtraction, but
there is not actually a hard rule that we always do division before multiplication, and, in fact, many mathematicians
prefer that multiplication comes first (Dr Peterson).
One example of how a lack of clarity can arise from a confusion that PEDMAS cannot necessarily resolve clearly
can be found in the following problem (Knill):

If we read the problem as being 2x ÷ (3y) – 1, we get an answer of 2.

If we read the problem as being (2x ÷ 3)y – 1, we get an answer of 11.
If we read the problem as being 2x ÷ (3y – 1), we get an answer of 18 ÷ 5.
Had the person who constructed the problem put the parentheses where he wanted them, there would have been no
confusion. In the early days when algebraic notation was first being developed, each writer was expected to provide
an explanation at the beginning of his publication so that it would be clear to all readers how that mathematician
ordered the operations (Dr Peterson). This meant that there was little consistency, but there was no ambiguity.
The reason that ambiguity is a problem in mathematics is that, in pure mathematics, the standard is absolute
certainty. We can’t have absolute certainty if any of the premises in the proof are ambiguous, or if the final
statement of the claim is ambiguous. In applied mathematics, the standard requires that the mathematics necessary to
solve a problem actually helps us solve the problem. If our mathematics is ambiguous, then we are reduced to trial
and error to see if we can use the maths effectively.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is ambiguity a central concern in other AOKs, such as history and the human sciences, as well?

In one famous example, a $125 million satellite was lost in 1999 because a lack of clarity between two different sets
of engineers led to the satellite moving far off course and burning up in the atmosphere of Mars, rather than orbiting
the planet as intended (Hotz). The problem occurred because the engineers who built the satellite used the English
measurement system which relies on inches, feet, and pounds while the people who planned the launch and designed
the flight path used the metric system, which relies on metres, millimetres, and grams (Hotz). It’s hard to say who
was at fault: the builders for not being clear, or the navigation team for failing to validate their assumptions about
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which system was used. Either way, this example shows us the importance of clarity, accuracy and precision in
applied mathematics.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Who judges the validity of a proof?

These days, it is still good practice for anyone writing out mathematical statements to eliminate all ambiguity by
using notation in such a way that no one has to interpret it using such mnemonics as PEDMAS or BEDMAS. The
onus, in other words, is on the writer, not on the reader.

DEEPER THINKING
Values and ethics
This chapter has pointed out several problems with knowledge-making in mathematics that arise out of
human failure to deliver work which is precise enough to represent important values in mathematics.
There is no written requirement for precision or clarity in the American Mathematical Society’s code of
ethics, though the European Mathematical Society Code of Practice does stipulate that in published
work, the authors must ensure that ‘the mathematical symbols, words, and sentences that are used in
the published work are clear and are not a barrier to understanding’ (European Mathematical Society).
Where the value for precision is formally encoded in the European document, it is not in the document
from the American Mathematical Society.
Are values the same thing as ethics? Is a failure to adhere to the important values of mathematics, or
any other subject area, the same thing as an ethical violation?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Certainty
We have said several times that the standard for knowledge in pure mathematics is absolute certainty.
Given that requirement, any mathematician who declined to provide a satisfactory explanation as to why
their work met that standard would be violating an extremely important value. Any publisher who agreed
to publish such a paper as a proof would also be behaving in an unethical fashion.
We must now, however, acknowledge a problem which has arisen in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first century which challenges the assumption that absolute certainty is possible. Computers can now
generate proofs which are so complicated that they cannot be checked by human minds to the level of
absolute certainty. One example is a proof from 1998 which was submitted for publication by
mathematician Thomas Hales. The proof claims to have proven the Kepler conjecture, dating back to
1611. It has to do with the most efficient way to pack spheres in a box. Hales’ proof, however, involves
40 000 lines of computer-generated explanation, and the whole proof is more than 300 pages long. The
proof was checked by 12 reviewers. ‘After a year they came back to me and said that they were 99 per
cent sure that the proof was correct,’ Hales says. ‘But the reviewers asked to continue their evaluation’
(Khamsi). After four more years of checking, there was no further improvement on that 99 per cent.
The fact that modern technology has made possible mathematical work that cannot be done by a human
or humans has created a problem for existing values and ethical practice. Mathematicians are struggling
with the idea that absolute certainty may have to be dropped as the standard, which would make
mathematics much more like the natural sciences, in which absolute certainty has never been possible
in the same way, since science is based on inductive reasoning. (The differences between mathematical
and scientific reasoning will be discussed in much more detail in Chapter 9.)
If the value placed on absolute certainty has to change, then so will the ethics based on that value.

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Ethical concerns with regard to applying mathematical knowledge
The Mars satellite that was lost in 1999 is an example of why clarity is necessary, if accurate, useful knowledge is to
be made in applied mathematics. There is another way, however, that ethics plays a role in applied mathematics: as
new technologies arise, new ethical questions and problems also arise. Earlier in the chapter, we considered the
technology of the self-driving car, and how the mathematics behind the technology tells us that autonomous cars are
safer than human drivers, though humans have a difficult time accepting that. Mathematics is involved in
autonomous cars in another way, however: it will be complex mathematical algorithms which make decisions about
what to do when the cars find themselves in situations in which an accident is unavoidable.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
To what degree is a desire for certainty an ethical concern in other areas of knowledge? Does that
desire have the same effect on the methods of those areas as it does in mathematics?

ACTIVITY
Before you read the next section, consider how you would answer each of the questions in the following
hypothetical situations. Assume in each case that the death of one person is unavoidable. Which should
the car be programmed to choose and why?
1 Should a self-driving car prioritize the safety of passengers over pedestrians, or pedestrians over
passengers?
2 Should the car hit a homeless person or a wealthy businessperson
3 Should the car hit an elderly woman (someone’s grandmother) or a young person in her twenties?
4 Should the car hit a college student or a factory worker?
5 Would you buy a car which was programmed to use the choice you picked? Would you buy a car
programmed the other way?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conduced a very large survey (more than 2 million people
in 233 countries) to see if any kind of consensus could be found on questions similar to the ones you answered
above. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the patterns of answers were not universal, but were tied to
cultural values in the countries where the respondents lived (Laursen).

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Culture

Use the QR code to watch a video about this study and the ways in which culture affected the ethical
knowledge that people who responded to the survey relied on.

All of these choices are extremely difficult. A person driving a car faced with these choices will likely make an
intuitive decision, but autonomous cars can’t be given intuitions or emotions; they have to be programmed in
advance. Because self-driving cars cannot eliminate all accident-related fatalities, we have to be ready for some
people to be killed in accidents involving self-driving cars. There are difficult moral and ethical questions regarding
how to make the decisions about how the cars should be programmed. Who should decide? Should mathematicians
decide? Engineers? Could individual car buyers decide? We do not currently have answers to these questions, which
is to say, we do not, as a society, or as teams of mathematicians working on the projects, know what the ethical thing
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is to do. Ideally, before any such decisions are made, a clear set of values will be identified to serve as the
underpinnings for the ethical decision making.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
To what extent do you agree with the mathematician Paul Ernest’s claim that mathematics ‘serves as a
training that shapes thinking in an ethics-free and amoral way’?

ACTIVITY
Discuss and debate the questions below with your classmates.
1 Does the fact that decisions can be made in advance about who a car would be programmed to
choose when a death is unavoidable make the emotional reaction to the loss of that person worse?
2 Do you think people are more likely to believe that it’s better to accept a much greater number of
deaths rather than plan ahead for a relatively small number? (Remember, the Intel mathematics
suggest that automobile-related deaths can be reduced from 40 000 a year in the United States to
only 40.)

The autonomous vehicle is only one example of the way in which developing technologies challenge our ethical
decision-making processes regarding the mathematics that underlie the technology. Think back to Chapter 3, for
example, where we saw the problems that have arisen as a result of the fact that we can use mathematics to track
every click that an individual user makes on the internet. This technology has enabled mathematical algorithms to
choose which content those users are then faced with – ads, news stories and entertainment recommendations. These
problems have not been resolved, and the question as to whether they should be has yet to be satisfactorily
answered.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How might we compare the ethical uncertainty involved in the application of mathematics to the real
world to ethical questions in other areas of knowledge such as history or the human sciences?

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Conclusion
Over the course of this chapter, we have seen how the various aspects of mathematics are intertwined. When we
considered the scope of mathematics, we had to consider the fact that there are different perspectives that can be
taken towards the subject, because the different perspectives approach knowledge construction in different ways.
When we investigated the question of what perspectives there are in mathematics, we had to begin considering the
methods of mathematics, because the different perspectives require different methods. When we moved on to
exploring the methods, we saw more clearly how the methods depended on the perspectives and how together, they
help to define the scope of the study. When we discussed the role of ethics in making knowledge in mathematics, we
realized that ethics shapes the methods. This intertwining of the four elements of the framework can be seen in all
the areas of knowledge.
One final aspect of mathematics that we have not considered is the fact that mathematicians consider mathematics to
be elegant and beautiful. That belief sometimes comes as a surprise to people who have had to struggle with
mathematics which has been presented to them as a subject with fixed procedures and formulas that must be
memorized. By now, however, we hope that you have been able to see how mathematics is all around us in the
world in much richer forms than just the numbers and symbols which make up the language which expresses it. We
got a hint of the attitude that mathematics is beautiful when we read Richard Feynman’s words about mathematics
being the only way we can truly appreciate nature, even for one moment. Bertrand Russell, who began as a
mathematician and then turned to philosophy, summed up the feeling this way:
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere,
like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of
painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can
show. (Bailey and Borwein 2017)
The fact that mathematics has the ability to express so exactly the world of nature and the world of the imagination
makes it elegant, and takes us back to the question of whether maths is invented or discovered. Many people believe
that it could not be so elegant if it were invented by mankind. This is a question for you to ponder as you continue
your exploration of how mathematics is similar to, and different from, the other areas of knowledge.

CONNECTIONS TO OTHER AOKs

• Scope: The scope of mathematics, as we have seen, is far-ranging and touches most aspects of the
world, even though we might not often think of that fact. The scope of the arts is also extremely far-
reaching; how does it compare to the scope of mathematics? Is the scope of history in some way less
widespread? Why?
• Perspectives: The differing perspectives in mathematics do not ultimately seem to result in
disagreement about what is true in mathematics and what is not. The same cannot be said about
differing perspectives in history. What about the nature of history as a knowledge-making endeavor
that makes the role of differing perspectives so powerful?
• Methods and tools: The possibility of certainty in mathematics reflects the method of the rigorous
proof. How do the methods of the other AOKs reflect the less certain nature of the knowledge claims in
those areas?
• Ethics: Many ethical concerns in mathematics arise from the impact of mathematics on the world and,
therefore, on people’s day-to-day lives. The natural sciences seem obviously to have the same kind of
widespread impact on people; does the knowledge from the other AOKs have the same kind of
powerful influence on the world and, therefore, do the ethical constraints arise from a responsibility to
humanity, or do they arise from something else?

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Works cited
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Hern, Alex. ‘How Did the Enigma Machine Work?’ The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. 14 Nov. 2014. Web.
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game.
Hotz, Robert Lee. ‘Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error’. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times. 1 Oct.
1999. Web. 20 Jul. 2019. www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-01-mn-17288-story.html.
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‘Indian Numerals’. MacTutor History of Mathematics. School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St
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and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Indian_numerals.html.
IWM Staff. ‘How Alan Turing Cracked The Enigma Code’. Imperial War Museums. IWM. 5 Jan. 2018. Web. 18
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computer-program-helped-show-jk-rowling-write-a-cuckoos-calling/.
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Kleitman, Daniel. ‘Calculus for Beginners Chapter 0’. 1.2 What Is Calculus and Why Do We Study It?
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math.mit.edu/~djk/calculus_beginners/chapter00/section02.html.
Knapp, Alex. ‘Does Math Really Exist?’ Forbes. Forbes Magazine. 13 Jul. 2012. Web. 19 Jul. 2019.
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Knill, Oliver. ‘Ambiguous PEMDAS’. Ambiguous PEMDAS. Harvard University. 9 Apr. 2014. Web. 12 Jul. 2019.
www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/pedagogy/ambiguity/index.html.
Kolbe, Kerry. ‘10 Tech Developments to Thank the Space Race For’. The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group. 9
Feb. 2017. Web. 18 Jul. 2019. www.telegraph.co.uk/films/hidden-figures/technology-from-the-space-race/.
Lamb, Robert. ‘How Math Works’. HowStuffWorks Science. HowStuffWorks. 8 Feb. 2019. Web. 19 Jul. 2019.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/math-concepts/math3.htm.
Laursen, Lucas. ‘Swerve to Save the Homeless Person or the Executive? How People Around the World Differ on
Self-Driving Car Morality’. Fortune. Fortune. 26 Oct. 2018. Web. 21 Jul. 2019.
https://fortune.com/2018/10/26/self-driving-cars-culture-morality/.
Martin, Chuck. ‘Consumer Acceptance Of Self-Driving Cars Skyrockets (Down The Road)’. Connected Thinking.
Media Post. 10 May 2019. Web. 15 Jul. 2019. www.mediapost.com/publications/article/335676/consumer-
acceptance-of-self-driving-cars-skyrocket.html.
Naughton, Keith. ‘Most Americans Continue to Be Very Afraid of Self-Driving Cars: AAA Survey’. Insurance
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www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2019/03/15/520765.htm.
NOVA. ‘Solving Fermat: Andrew Wiles’. The Proof. Public Broadcasting Service. Nov. 2000. Web. 19 Jul. 2019.
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Originalpeople.org. ‘The Lebombo Bone and Ishango Bone: World’s Oldest Math Tools’. Originalpeople.org.
Originalpeople.org. 15 Nov. 2012. Web. 14 Jul. 2019. http://originalpeople.org/ishango-bone-worlds-oldest-
math-tool/.
‘Plane’. Math Open Reference. Math Open Reference. 2011. Web. 17 Jul. 2019.
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2019. Nd. Web. 18 Jul. 2019. www.planetary.org/get-involved/be-a-space-advocate/become-an-expert/cost-
of-apollo-program.html.
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Riley, Christopher. ‘The 400,000 Strong Backup Team’. The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. 1 Jul. 2009.
Web. 18 Jul. 2019. www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/02/apollo-11-back-up-team.
Rogers, Leo. ‘The History of Negative Numbers’. NRICH. University of Cambridge. Feb. 2011. Web. 16 Jul. 2019.
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Rowlett, Peter. ‘The Unplanned Impact of Mathematics’. Nature: International Journal of Science. Vol 475.
Springer Nature Publishing AG. 3 Aug. 2011. Web. 19 Jul. 2019. www.nature.com/articles/475166a.
Saiber, Arielle, and Henry S Turner. 2009. ‘Mathematics and the Imagination: A Brief Introduction’.
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Scuka, Daniel. ‘Reentry: Accurate Navigation Is Everything’. Rocket Science. European Space Agency. 5 Feb. 2015.
Web. 15 Jul. 2019. http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2015/02/05/the-facts-on-reentry-accurate-navigation-is-
everything/.
Shashua, Amnon, and Shai Shalev-Shwartz. ‘A Plan to Develop Safe Autonomous Vehicles. And Prove It’. Intel
Newsroom. Intel Corporation. 28 Nov. 2017. Web. 15 Jul. 2019. https://newsroom.intel.com/newsroom/wp-
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enigma-of-alan-turing.html.
‘The History of Calculus’. The History of Calculus. University of Houston. N.d. Web. 19 Jul. 2019.

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 www.math.uh.edu/~tomforde/calchistory.html.
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Diaspora. State University of New York at Buffalo. Web. 14 Jul. 2019. www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/Ancient-
Africa/lebombo.html.

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9 The Natural Sciences
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will be able to:
• define the scope and application of the natural sciences
• appreciate how widely scientific findings are applied in their everyday lives
• recognize the different stages of the scientific method
• understand how the methods of science reflect important aims and assumptions about the nature of
the natural sciences
• appreciate the reasons why and conditions under which scientific claims can be trusted
• understand the conditions under which natural science claims are revised
• appreciate the fact that once something has risen to the standard of a scientific theory, it will not be
altered in its broad outlines
• understand that the conditions under which the generation and application of scientific knowledge are
ethical.

Learner profile
Inquirers
What conventions and methods do we use to shape effective scientific inquiry?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Should the natural sciences be regarded as a body of knowledge, a system of knowledge or a method?

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Introduction
Here are two scenarios. One we would call science; the other we would call pseudoscience. Read the scenarios and
decide which is which and why you think so.
Scenario 1: Get a small amount of dirt out of the garden or a nearby park and put it in a jar. Then add water a little
at a time and observe what happens. Keep adding water until you have a very watery mix. Observe what happens to
the colour and texture of the substance in the jar. What do you think is happening? Make a hypothesis: could you
separate out the dirt from the water? Why or why not? If you let all the water evaporate, will you be left with dirt
that lookes exactly like it did when you put it in the jar in the first place?
Scenario 2: Go out and find a good, solid forked stick. Go to a park or field and hold the stick firmly by the two fork
prongs. This activity is called dowsing, and it is supposed to help you find water. One source has this to say about
dowsing:
… dowsers, using a variety of methods, disagree on why water witching works and even on who can do it.
They use different woods and claim to be able to predict different things, such as depth of water or
direction of flow. But one thing they all agree on – the thing that has been proven by well after well – is
that they do locate water. (Mother Earth News Editors)
So now make a prediction: do you think that the divining rod (which is the name for the forked stick) will start
vibrating when you are over water?

Which one of those activities seem more like science to you? Why?
The first activity, as it is described, is science. It is an examination of properties of some aspects of the physical
world – dirt and water. Ultimately, this activity is a chemistry experiment, though a quite simple one. If you actually
did the experiment, and you went and got some dirt and put it in the jar and observed what happened, you were
exploring the nature of the particular chemicals that make up the dirt that you found and how those chemicals
interact with water – the chemical compound H2O, dihydrogen oxide. Possibly, depending on where you got your
water, there were other chemicals present as well.
You observed the reaction that you created, and you formed an hypothesis as to whether it was possible to separate
the dirt back out from the water, and, if so, whether the dirt would look exactly the same as it did when you first put
it in the jar. From this point, you could test your hypothesis by designing an experiment intended to attempt to
separate the two substances. Notice that if you did not actually run this experiment, if, instead, you only sat in your
chair and read about it, you were not doing science. Natural science does not generate knowledge through thought
experiments, though thought experiments might help a scientist develop a hypothesis or design an experiment.
From this basic experiment, you could explore a number of other questions related to the interaction of the
chemicals in your local dirt and water. You could, for example, determine exactly which chemicals are present in
each sample, and then you could start experimenting to discover whether different combinations of chemicals
resulted in the same reaction of dirt and water. You might explore which soil retains water best for growing certain
crops, and which soil dries out too quickly, or stays too wet too long. The initial question that we had about the
reaction between soil and water not only provides us with information about the physical world, it also opens up
many new lines of inquiry. Lest you think that the question about soil is too simple to be useful in the world, you
might be interested to know that there is a whole branch of chemistry called soil chemistry. You can use the QR
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code on the right to explore a website from the Soil Science Society of America and learn more about the wide range
of research questions that soil scientists pursue.

In contrast to the soil experiment, the dowsing activity, as it is described, is pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is an
interesting term. Before reading on, think of some activities that you might call pseudoscience or which you have
heard others call pseudoscience.
Perhaps you thought of some of these:
• astrology
• psychic readings or fortune-telling
• the search for extraterrestrial life
• flat Earth claims
• Moon landing conspiracy theories
• the belief that ancient astronauts visited the Earth.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, argues that the most objective way to differentiate pseudoscience
from science is to test the work against the standard of how testing is done and see whether the findings generate
new questions for other scientists to pursue: ‘That is, does the revolutionary new idea generate any interest on the
part of working scientists for adoption in their research programmes, produce any new lines of research, lead to any
new discoveries, or influence any existing hypotheses, models, paradigms or worldviews? If not, chances are it is
pseudoscience’ (Shermer).

Learner profile
Principled
What is the difference between principled scientific inquiry and pseudoscience?

We saw, with the example of the dirt and water study, that the findings from such a study could open many new
lines of research. On the other hand, the claims of the dowsers have not been scientifically established. The article
admits that dowsers don’t know why it works. They don’t know which kinds of wood are best and they can’t explain
why dowsing only works for some people. They just assert that it does work. We can’t take that ‘finding’ and extend
the research, because there is no evidence that any research took place. We don’t know who can find water by
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dowsing; we don’t know if demonstrations of dowsing, assuming some have taken place, were controlled in any way
to preclude every possibility of trickery. We don’t really know if any water has ever been found using a dowsing
stick.

ACTIVITY
We could, of course, decide we wanted to subject dowsing to scientific study.
1 What hypothesis might you formulate as the basis for your study?
2 What are some questions you could ask and how could you test your hypotheses?
3 What would the experiment look like?
4 Why do you think that scientific studies of this sort have not been carried out by dowsers?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Perspectives
‘Pseudoscience’ is a bit of an odd term, as it is only applied to activities by people who are not engaged
in those activities. Dowsers do not call themselves pseudoscientists; they call themselves ‘dowsers’ or
‘diviners’. Whether a person calls an activity pseudoscience or not is, therefore, a matter of perspective.
There are two main situations in which people use the term ‘pseudoscience’:
• Often what some people call pseudoscience is not science at all, and the term is used to express
displeasure that the activity is being presented as science, or that it challenges the findings of science.
Creationism, for example, is often called pseudoscience, but it would be more precise to say that
creationism is not science. You learned about the methods for making knowledge in religions in
Chapter 6. We will explore the methods of science in more detail later in this chapter, but you can
already see that the methods of science – which begin with observation of the natural world – are
different from the methods of religious knowledge systems. This difference does not mean that
religious knowledge is not knowledge; it is just different from scientific knowledge, and those people
who denounce it as pseudoscience are not applying accurate language to describe it.
• Another perspective on the concept of pseudoscience is that ‘pseudoscience’ is a word that is applied
to activities which are in some ways related to science. For example, the dowsing activity above claims
to reveal knowledge about the physical properties of the Universe, but does not use the methods of
science to develop this knowledge.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
In the natural sciences, reliability is established in part through careful experimental design. What
features of knowledge in the other areas of knowledge help us to determine its reliability? Are those
features more similar to or more different from the experimental design of the natural sciences?

The question of whether some activity is science, pseudoscience or not science at all, is a good one for us to consider
at the beginning of this chapter because it helps us to identify the central defining characteristics of science. That is,
natural science is the study of the physical properties of the Universe, and that study is undertaken systematically,
with the aim of producing knowledge which is as objectively and certainly established as possible. Scientific
knowledge is developed from observation, analysis and reason, and does not rely on opinion or thought experiments.
Hypotheses are developed as a matter of speculation; however, they remain formally hypothetical until demonstrated
by careful study. In the rest of this chapter, we will consider the complexities of the subject and the means by which
we come to call something scientific knowledge.

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Scope
The term ‘natural science’ incorporates a wide range of different endeavours. Since natural science has, as its focus
of study, the physical properties of the natural Universe, it has, as its subject, the physical properties of everything
that naturally exists in the Universe. That means that there are sciences which investigate soil (as we saw earlier),
animals, plants, air, water, light, planets and stars. There are scientific studies involving the very smallest particles
that make up matter – atoms and sub-atomic particles such as quarks – and the very largest objects in the Universe:
galaxies and even other universes. Constructed objects, such as buildings, bridges, artworks, cars and mobile phones
are the result of the application of the natural sciences. In some cases, they can also be the focus of scientific inquiry
when knowledge is needed to solve problems. We will look at some examples of this later in this section.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What knowledge, if any, is likely to always remain beyond the capabilities of science to investigate or
verify?

The natural sciences can be categorized in broad terms which are probably familiar to you: physics, chemistry, and
biology, but within those broad categories you will find many, more focused, subcategories. Table 9.1 shows some
of the subcategories you can find under the umbrella of biology, for example:

Table 9.1 Subcategories of biology

Name of science Objects of study
Anatomy The structure of body parts
Astrobiology Origins and distribution of life in the Universe
Botany Plants
Cell biology Cells
Entomology Insects
Herpetology Snakes
Physiology The function of body parts
Marine biology Plants and animals that live in the ocean
Mycology Mushrooms
Zoology Animals

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are other AOKs organized into disciplines in ways similar to the way that knowledge in the natural
sciences is? How does the organization affect the knowledge which is produced?

There are many more branches of biology, and of course the branches sometimes overlap with each other and with
fields in chemistry and physics. Biophysicists, for example, use the methods of physics, which includes such
methods as the application of complex mathematics to physical problems, to questions about how biological systems
work. Biophysicists have done work with how DNA can cause cells to change into cancer, how plants can take
sunlight and convert it into food, and how nerve cells communicate (‘What is Biophysics?’).
Within the narrower fields of a branch of natural science, even further specialization exists: an entomologist might
be any of the following (Bueza):

Table 9.2 Subcategories of entomology

Branch of Focus of study
entomology
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Insect ecology The relationship of insects to their environments
Insect morphology The structure of an insect’s body and body parts
Insect pathology Insect diseases
Insect physiology The internal systems of an insect’s body
Insect taxonomy The classification of insects into orders, families, genus and species, so that we
can see how insects are related to each other
Industrial entomology The ways in which insects can be used to generate products, such as honey or
silk
Medical and The study of how humans and animals can be made ill by insects (with a focus
veterinary entomology on public health)
Forensic entomology The role of insects, such as fly larvae and flies, in contributing to an
understanding of when and how someone died

There are other specialties within the field of entomology. Some entomologists take a different approach to
entomology, and they focus on particular types of insects, such as bees, and study those from several of the different
perspectives that are mentioned above. Someone might, for example, spend an entire career studying the ecology,
morphology, pathology, physiology and taxonomy of honey bees. The study of bees is called melittology. The
diagram on the right gives you an idea of where that person fits in to the larger category of the natural sciences:
When you begin to consider all the hundreds, or even thousands, of different combinations of specialties which are
possible within any one of the major branches of the natural sciences, you begin to get a sense of the far-reaching
scope of the sciences.

ACTIVITY
Go to the website of a university near you (or any university which interests you) and look up a professor
in one of the sciences. Find his or her particular specialty and then see if you can place that specialty in
the chain of categories and subcategories of science. Draw a diagram like the one for the bee specialist
above that represents the relationship of that person’s specialty to the pertinent categories.

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Applications of scientific knowledge
Biology
The scope of the natural sciences can also be considered from the perspective of how we use the knowledge we get
from the work that scientists do. We can see from Table 9.2 that some of the applications of entomology help
support the global economy through the development of industries such as the distribution of honey and the sale of
silk spun by silkworms (which are the larvae of a moth native to China). The study of insects also contributes to the
medical and legal systems by helping people figure out how to stop the spread of disease, cure disease and solve
crimes. There are also numerous applications of entomology which affect local and global economies. For instance,
a moth from Australia, the Light Brown Apple moth, has spread to a number of countries such as New Zealand,
England, Ireland and the United States. It is considered to be a dangerous pest, because in agricultural areas where it
has no predators, such as in California, it could spread rapidly and destroy plants ranging from fruit crops to trees
such as oaks, redwoods and cypresses (‘Light Brown Apple Moth’). One important application of entomology, then,
is the effort to control and eradicate this pest which could endanger billions of dollars’ worth of agriculture.

There are similar applications of the study of plants and other animals. Yellow and Dalmation toadflax are two
closely related kinds of weed that were introduced to North America in the nineteenth century through a
combination of accidental transport by travellers and deliberate introduction as ornamental plants. They have spread
throughout North America, and, because they have no natural predators, these plants have caused significant
economic impact to agriculture, as the toadflax plants crowd out crop plants. Some of the crops which have been
affected include grain, oil seed and oil mint, berries and small fruits (Sing, et al). Biologists have studied the
problem of these two toadflaxes and have developed methods for eradicating them, the most effective of which
involves a biological approach – that is, using other biological entities such as other plants and insects to wipe out
the toadflax.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can the knowledge from other AOKs be used to solve real-world problems in the same way that
knowledge from the natural sciences can?

One widespread and common application of biology is the preservation of endangered species. Biologists studying
grizzly bears, for example, have helped in the restoration of the grizzly bear population in Yellowstone and Grand
Teton National Parks in Wyoming, in the United States. In 1975, there were an estimated 136 bears in the area, but
by April 2019, due to legal protections and careful management, there were an estimated 718 bears in the same area
(National Park Service). The species was temporarily taken off the endangered species list but was restored in the
fall of 2018.

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Another mammal conservation effort is underway to try to save North American bats from the spread of White-Nose
Syndrome. The syndrome is caused by a fungus and is fatal to bats of several different species. It seems to have
arisen in 2006 and has so far killed millions of bats in North America. The fungus, Pseudogymnoascus destructans,
or Pd for short, has been found in Europe and Asia too. However, the bats in those regions do not get as sick from
the fungus as the North American bats do (White-Nose Syndrome Response Team). As a result, biologists from all
over the world are working on the problem.

CAS links
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 16 306 endangered species of plants
and animals as of early 2019 (Kasnoff). You could engage in a CAS project or a series of activities to
find out what species are endangered in your area and to educate your classmates and your local
community about them and about what could be done to help them. You might arrange guest speakers
to come to the school. You could organize fundraisers, or you could volunteer at local organizations
engaged in preservation work. As a creative activity, you could create artwork of the endangered species
to help familiarize people with them.

Chemistry
Broadly speaking, Biology deals with the nature of things on the large scale, seeking answers to questions such as,
‘What is a plant and how does it work?’ and ‘What is an animal and how does it work?’ Biologists are concerned
with plants and animals as systems, and they want to know how these systems work, both in terms of the individual
living thing and in terms of how they work in the systems in which they live. Chemistry, on the other hand, deals
with the fundamental nature of things in terms of what substances they are made of on the molecular level.
Two main branches of chemistry are organic and inorganic chemistry. The difference between the two is that they
deal with different elements on the periodic table of elements.

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Nearly all organic compounds are made up of five elements: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur
(outlined in the red box in the illustration). These, then, are the elements that an organic chemist is going to work
with, while all the rest of the elements comprise the compounds that inorganic chemists work with. There are some
exceptions to this generalization, but that is the basic division between the two types of chemistry.

ACTIVITY
Think about the objects you use every day – from your toothbrush to your mobile phone to a car or bus.
Is there any manufactured product in twenty-first-century society that did not require some knowledge of
chemistry, either in its design or in its production?

Despite the fact that organic chemists normally work with many fewer elements than inorganic chemists do, both
organic and inorganic chemistry have applications in a wide variety of situations. Table 9.3 is a list of just a few of
those applications, according to the American Chemical Society.

Table 9.3 Applications of inorganic and organic chemistry

Inorganic chemistry Organic chemistry
Fertilizers, insecticides and soil treatments Biotechnology – cultivation of plants
Jet and rocket fuels Biofuels, oil and natural gas
Pharmaceuticals Pharmaceuticals
Water treatment Agricultural applications
Plastics Bioplastics
Paint and ink Rubber

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Fibres (including synthetics used in clothing) Textiles and paper
Cosmetics Soap, detergents and cosmetics
Microchips Petroleum refining and primary metals
Chemists do work which ultimately results in more than 70 000 consumer products. ‘These base products are then
used to make consumer products in addition to manufacturing, service, construction, agriculture, and other
industries’ (‘Organic Chemistry’).

CASE STUDY
Using chemistry to solve global problems

In April 2018, the international organization Earth Day Network reported the amount of disposable
plastics that are used around the world in a year. Some of these figures are shown in Table 9.4.

Table 9.4 Quantities of disposable plastic objects used around the world (Source: Earth Day Network
March 2018)
Disposable plastic object Quantity used
Plastic water bottles 1 000 000 per minute
Plastic drinking straws Half a billion every day
Plastic bags 4 trillion annually, of which only 1% are returned for
recycling
Disposable cups (including Styrofoam coffee 500 billion a year
cups)
Very little of the plastics that is used every year ends up being recycled, and a great deal of it ends up in
the oceans. A study published in 2016 by the World Economic Forum found that 32 per cent of 78 million
tons of plastic packaging ends up in the ocean every year. To try to help you understand that quantity
better, that’s the same as pouring one garbage truck full of plastic trash into the ocean every minute.
That is expected to rise to four trucks per minute by 2050, at which point there will be more plastic in the
ocean than fish (Pennington).
According to the World Economic Forum, another 40 per cent of the plastic we use ends up in landfill
sites, with a further 14 per cent incinerated or used in other energy-producing processes. Meanwhile,
just 14 per cent is collected for recycling, of which more than a quarter is lost in the recycling process
and more than half is recycled into lower-value types of plastic. This means that only 2 per cent of the
plastic packaging that we use is recycled for use in the same or a similar-quality application, for
example, used plastic bottles being remade into new plastic bottles (this is known as closed-loop
recycling).
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Chemists are working on trying to help solve this problem. The first step has been the development of
biodegradable plastics – products which result from the work of both organic and inorganic chemists.
Biodegradable plastics have not proven to be the magic bullet solution that everyone hoped for,
however. In 2016, a team of scientists from Ireland and Belgium found that many biodegradable plastics
do not, in fact, degrade under conditions in which most people put them. Some do not degrade in
landfills or compost, and some require very high temperatures in order to degrade (‘Biodegradable
Plastic’). They did find, however, that because some plastics degrade under anaerobic conditions (that
is, under conditions where no oxygen is present), and because that process produces biogas, there is a
potential for developing plastics which consumers could compost at home and convert to biogas, which
could be used to power their homes (‘Biodegradable Plastic’). Obviously, this is a futuristic idea, one
which will not be available in the short term, but this is an excellent example of the way in which
knowledge of chemistry can be used to help solve global problems.

EE links
Western countries used to send their recycling waste to China and other Asian countries to be recycled.
However, now that China has become more prosperous, it has no need to employ people to sort the
materials by hand in order to pick out what can actually be recycled and what has to be burned or put in
landfill because it is actually trash. China, alongside Malaysia and Vietnam, have drastically reduced
their acceptance of recycling, or have even stopped altogether, and, in some cases, have sent
thousands of tons of it back (Joyce). This has caused a significant problem for towns which cannot afford
to pay vastly higher fees for recycling, and many locales have stopped recycling altogether – sending
materials consumers thought were being recycled to incinerators, which results in increased carbon
emissions (Semuels).
The global problem of recycling could be an excellent topic for an extended essay in economics. A
potential research question might be: ‘Can cost-effective methods of recycling be developed in the wake
of the withdrawal of many Asian countries from importing trash for recycling?’ Another possible research
question for an extended essay in economics could be: ‘How can chemistry help make solving the global
problem of plastic waste economically feasible?’

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How might developments in scientific knowledge trigger political controversies or controversies in other
areas of knowledge?

Physics
So far, we have seen that biologists study the nature of plants and animals in terms of the ways in which their
biological systems function, while chemists study the nature of all physical objects, including living ones, in terms

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of the way that their elemental make-up affects their function. Physicists explore the mechanical nature of objects
and living beings, learning about how motion, forces and energy work. Objects as simple as a playground slide or a
teeter-totter (or see-saw, depending on where you live) rely on physics to make them work (Johnson).

ACTIVITY
Before you read on in this section, see if you can list ten objects that you have used in your personal life
which have been created with the help of knowledge from physics.
Now try to think of ten more inventions or processes which involve physics but which you may not have
experienced directly for yourself.

Because physics involves the study of motion, energy and forces, any invention which requires any of those things
results from knowledge gained in the study of physics. Some of the applications of physics are described below.
• The design of wheels: The wheel is a device that works on principles of physics, so any machine that uses a
wheel depends on knowledge of physics. We might guess that the very first wheels were developed on a trial-and-
error basis, rather than being deliberately constructed using knowledge of physics, but nowadays wheel design is a
highly technical business. In bicycle racing, for example, the weight of the wheel and the design of the spokes can
make a big difference in the amount of work that the rider has to put in order to move the cycle forward. You
probably never think of the physics of your bicycle when you get on it, but they are actually quite complicated: ‘A
bicycle wheel needs to be able to handle a variety of forces. Besides holding up the weight of the cyclist, a wheel
must withstand the forces of pedalling and braking and the jarring effects of the road surface’ (Krizek).
• The development of corrective lenses for improved vision: The knowledge that we have of the human eye and
how we can see, comes from biology and physics. The chemistry of the eye also comes into play to explain how
the rods and cones help us to distinguish colour (Chen, et al). The anatomy of the eye, as shown in the drawing
below, is a matter of biology, but the way that the structures of the eye interact with light is a matter of physics. In
a person who does not need glasses, the light coming into the eye is bent by the lens just the right amount so that it
hits the retina just at the point where the light rays converge (Chen, et al).
‘Converge’ means to come together. The diagram below shows how the lens of the eye takes the light waves
reflecting off a particular object and focuses them together so that they all hit a single point on the retina
simultaneously. This image is of normal vision – when the light waves converge just at the retina, the object is in
focus.
Two of the most common problems with eyes is when there is an issue with the lens which makes the light rays
converge too soon or too late. In a person who is near-sighted, the lens of the eye converges light rays from distant
objects too soon, so that they cross in front of the retina. This makes far away objects appear blurry (OpenStax
College). In a person who is far-sighted, the lens of the eye fails to converge light rays from nearby objects in
time, so they do not converge before they hit the retina. This makes nearby objects blurry (OpenStax College). By
using knowledge of physics, the optometrist (the doctor who tests your eyesight) can prescribe the right kind of
lens which will compensate for the failure of the lens in the eye. The optician (the person who makes your glasses)
can create the properly ground lens to fill the prescription.
• Medical applications of physics: If you’ve ever had an X-ray taken, then you’ve experienced one of the many
medical applications of physics. Knowledge of physics is responsible for many developments in medical
technology that allow doctors to treat a wide range of diseases. Radiology for looking at damage to bones, laser
surgery, sonograms, which allow doctors to check on the health of developing fetuses, fMRI (functional magnetic
resonance imaging), which measures minute changes in blood flow and so provides a way to look at activity in the
brain (Radiological Society of North America) and radiation therapy for cancer are all possible because of
knowledge made in physics. The invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope in 1982 earned its inventors,
Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer, the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics. That invention opened the door to the use of
nanotechnology in medicine, which can now be used for targeted delivery of drugs to very specific areas of the
body as well as for cancer treatment (El-Sherbini).
• Mobile phones: Physics also made possible the mobile phone. Here are two main ways in which knowledge of
physics contributes to your being able to carry a phone around in your pocket and to make calls whenever you
want to, wherever you are.
1 Your voice, which consists of soundwaves, has to be converted to an electrical signal – radio waves – which
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 travel to wherever they need to go and then they are converted back to soundwaves by the phone of the person
you are talking to (Institute of Physics).
2 To be able to talk on the phone while moving around, or to talk to someone who is very far away, you need a
cellular network. The phone itself can broadcast radio waves for a short distance, and its antenna can collect
waves from a short distance. The phone, therefore, sends the waves to a nearby tower and the tower sends them
on to the next tower, and so on. There are about 800 frequencies available in any one network, and you need
two of them – one frequency for talking and one for hearing (Institute of Physics). So, 400 simultaneous
conversations could use up all the frequencies; however, as your conversation is sent from one cell of the
network to the next, the two frequencies you were just using can be picked up by another conversation in that
cell. Knowledge of how sound waves work is knowledge of physics, and that knowledge allowed for the design
of cellular networks.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
This example of the study of the eye reveals that the different fields within the natural sciences often
function together to solve problems. What are some ways that the same thing happens in other areas of
knowledge, such as the human sciences or the arts?

Many other modern technologies depend on knowledge of physics: cars, airplanes, military weaponry (including the
atomic bomb), spacecraft and satellites are some of the technological developments that have had a significant
impact on human life in the last century. In Chapter 8, we took a detailed look at how mathematics helped to put a
man on the Moon. The mathematics was developed to model the physical processes of motion and force which were
known because of physics.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
The natural sciences rely heavily on material tools and technological developments in the production of

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knowledge; do history and the arts rely on material tools in the same way?
How does the relationship between knowledge and culture in the natural sciences compare and contrast
to that same relationship in other areas of knowledge?

Did you think of any of these? This is, of course, a very small list of the ways in which physics can be applied in the
world and beyond.
We have now seen how knowledge from all three major branches of the natural sciences have widespread
applications that reach across the Earth and into outer space. Those applications affect billions of people by aiding
them in nearly all the activities in which they engage on a regular basis. As with mathematics, the scope of the
natural sciences, though focused on a particular kind of knowledge, is nearly limitless.

ACTIVITY
Do you think that scientific knowledge functions similarly for the Indigenous cultures that you read about
in Chapter 5 as it does in highly technological society? Why or why not?

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Perspectives
We’ve already considered one kind of perspective in the natural sciences: the differing views of the natural world
from the perspectives of biology, chemistry and physics. We’ve also seen how those perspectives can overlap and
intertwine, as in the example of how knowledge from all three of those disciplines contributes to the ability to create
corrective lenses to help people see better. Each of the three perspectives provides knowledge about a different
aspect of the physical Universe, and so all three together give us a more complex and complete understanding than
any one alone does.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do differing perspectives in the other AOKs, such as history and the arts, extend our knowledge of the
world, cause complications in our understanding, or both?

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Opposing perspectives
The human eye is an example of how different perspectives support and extend each other. The opposite case often
occurs in science, however, as scientists often disagree about what certain facts mean. This occurs when no one has
yet developed a coherent theory that accounts for all the facts, and so the process of developing knowledge is still
active and underway.

CASE STUDY
The Big Bang theory
An example of this in the present day is the ongoing discussion about the origin of the Universe and the
implications for the nature of reality depending on what the origin was. The Big Bang theory is a widely
held explanation for how the Universe began. It says that about 14 billion years ago, all matter was
compressed into a tiny particle smaller than a single grain of sand, and all at once it exploded, starting
the expansion of matter which eventually became what we know of as the Universe (‘The Big Bang’).

Much about the Big Bang is generally agreed upon, but there is a lot of disagreement about what such a
beginning means for what will happen in the future, and even about what it suggests about how many
universes there are. The diagram above shows some of the competing ideas about what happened and
what it might mean (Tate).

The main difference between these two ideas is shown in the green boxes. If the Universe is expanding
eternally, without any end, then a logical conclusion that can be drawn is that new universes are coming
into existence all the time, without limit. This concept is called the multiverse. One objection to the idea
that there are multiple universes is that the laws of physics could be different in each one. Cambridge
physics professor Stephen Hawking, in the final paper he wrote, which was published shortly after his
death in 2018, rejected this idea because it ultimately negates Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hawking
and his co-author, Thomas Hertog, proposed a different model based in string theory and which
proposes that the Universe is finite (University of Cambridge). In the present day, there is insufficient
evidence to demonstrate the truth of either of these ideas.
The model of the oscillating universe provides a very different explanation for the nature of the Universe.
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That model suggests that matter in the Universe is not expanding infinitely, but that rather it will reach a
point at which it will start collapsing again and will end in a hypothetical Big Crunch. Then, the
hypothesis suggests, the process will begin again with another Big Bang. In this model, we may be living
in the very first Universe following the very first Big Bang, or we could be living in a later cycle, after an
undetermined number of Big Bang–Big Crunch cycles (Villanueva). A number of different variations of
this model have been proposed, beginning in the 1920s, when Einstein considered the possibility. Each
time a new proposal is put forward, physicists have found significant problems with it in terms of its
violating the basic laws of physics. There are recent models which attempt to resolve those problems,
but they too are problematic and the most recent evidence, including work on dark matter, seems to be
leading toward the negation of this possibility (Villanueva).
Other ideas have been proposed to explain the fundamental nature of the Universe and what will happen
to it in the future. These ideas have arisen out of more recent developments in physics involving
quantum mechanics and string theory. One is that the Universe is actually something like a hologram
projected onto the surface of a sphere. This idea was proposed by two physicists, Leonard Susskind at
Stanford and Gerard ‘t Hooft, a Dutch physicist, in response to a problem that Stephen Hawking
discovered with regard to the loss of matter in black holes. The idea was initially thought to be very
bizarre; however, an Argentinian physicist, Juan Maldecena, worked out a mathematical principle – the
Holographic Principle – which supports the metaphor of the Universe as a holograph. The idea of the
Universe as a holograph is taken much more seriously now (The Good Stuff); nevertheless, it is not
definitively established. If you would like to know more about the idea of the holographic universe, you
can use the QR code to watch a video with Leonard Susskind explaining the idea.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Evidence
These different versions of the nature of the Universe rely on different kinds of evidence. The evidence
related to the expanding universe is physical – scientists can look at events which occurred shortly after
the Big Bang. Light travels at a fixed speed per year, and past events can be seen when the light which
they gave off reaches us. The evidence for the holographic model, however, is of an entirely different
sort: it consists of theorizing about what must be true given facts that we know – very much as
mathematical knowledge is made. And, in fact, mathematics exists to support that model. The evidence
for one kind of idea is physical and the evidence for the other is based in logic. The kind of evidence
being used gives us a window into one fundamental difference in these two perspectives.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How is the kind of evidence used in the natural sciences similar to or different from the kind of evidence
used in the human sciences and history?

It is important to note that the discussion here of the various explanations for the nature of the Universe are
simplified. Our intention is not to provide you with a detailed explanation of physics; rather we want to demonstrate
the ways in which scientists working from different perspectives can see data in different ways and draw different
conclusions about them. In a case such as the problem of the nature of the Universe, there is no comprehensive
theory. The different perspectives are important because they ensure that questions keep being asked and
assumptions keep getting challenged.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
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Which other AOKs rely on models to help provide explanations, or possible explanations, for phenomena
under study?

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Paradigm shift
So far, we have seen how scientists with differing perspectives can contribute to the development of knowledge in
science by challenging each other’s ideas and assumptions and requiring that more and better evidence and
explanations are provided before an answer can be determined. In some instances, however, there is widespread
agreement about the nature of something, but over time, that agreement comes under challenge because new
evidence arises, or someone offers new interpretations of existing evidence. Generally speaking, the first challenges
to existing beliefs are ignored or even denigrated as foolishness, because they are fringe ideas. Over time, however,
if more and more evidence is gradually amassed, proponents of the existing paradigm will have to account for it. If
they cannot, and if challengers can provide a new explanation which accounts for all the data and observations, then
what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift occurs, and the new paradigm takes hold as the most widely held
explanation for the observed phenomena.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What role do paradigm shifts play in the progression of scientific knowledge?

A paradigm is essentially a system of beliefs about how things are. We have paradigms for many things in our lives.
You probably have paradigms for the way your family operates, for what school is like, and for the role of a
smartphone in your life, among many others. You can think of a paradigm as being a set of rules or explanations
which reflect your understanding of the world. These paradigms might seem to be set in stone – unchangeable – but
we can actually imagine that something might happen to change them. Imagine a family, for example, which has
always been quite poor. The family interactions are shaped around the need for all family members to work and
contribute to the family finances. It has always been this way, and it seems that it always will be. Now imagine that
something happens to make the family much more financially stable. Say the father inherits a fortune from some
relative he didn’t know he had. Now the family dynamic might change quite a bit. Perhaps the mother and children
give up their jobs and the children go to better schools. The family might move to a bigger house where all the
children have their own rooms, so the expectations about sharing space and possessions changes dramatically. And
so on. That change would be a paradigm shift. All the expectations, rules and beliefs about what can and should
happen in that family change because of the new situation.

Learner profile
Open-minded
Why is being open-minded an important trait for a scientist to possess?

In science, paradigm shifts work the same way. A particular way of viewing the world is widely held among
scientists based on evidence which has been discovered and explained. Over time, however, problems arise with that
evidence – or, very commonly, new evidence is discovered, and a challenge is made to the existing paradigm. We
saw a process of ideas and counter-ideas very similar to this when we looked at the varying hypotheses about the
nature of the Universe. Those relating to the Big Bang theory and the expanding universe have been widely held for
a long time, but the explanations have not been solidified into a paradigm; there have always been problems and
questions, and there continue to be problems and questions now. Alternative hypotheses have been presented, but we
don’t have a paradigm shift because we don’t have a system which fits all the facts, and which satisfies the scientific
community in general.

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Aristotelian classification of living things
The illustration from Retorica Christiana (1579) by Didacus Valdes depicts the Great Chain of Being, which had its
origins in Aristotle’s idea that there were two kinds of creatures, strongly divided from each other: celestial beings
and earthly beings. The Great Chain of Being took as its assumptions that all living things on Earth, other than man,
were put there to serve man. Man in turn existed to serve God. A significant difference between God and man was
that man was changeable and corruptible, while God was perfect (Brake 89). The paradigm was also based on
beliefs about certain attributes. Each of the creatures in the chain had one more attribute than the creatures just
below it. The attributes on which the Great Chain of Being was based were:
• Existence
• Life
• Will
• Reason
• Immortality
• Omniscience and omnipotence (Snyder).
Only God had all the attributes. The lowest objects, such as rocks, were seen to have existence, while plants had
existence and life. Animals had existence, life and will. Man was seen to have existence, life, will and reason. This
put man at the top of the earthly hierarchy. Above man were angels, who were believed to possess existence, life,
will, reason and immortality (Snyder). In the later version represented by the sixteenth-century drawing in Retorica
Christiana, animals were further divided into birds, creatures of the sea and animals of the land. The view of the
relationship among plants and animals was strictly hierarchical: every living thing was organized in such a way as to
demonstrate the superiority of each creature to all those below it. Here is just one short example:
Wild beasts were superior to domestic ones, since they resisted training. Useful creatures, such as horses
and dogs, were better than docile ones, such as sheep. Easily taught birds of prey were superior to lowlier
birds, such as pigeons. Edible fish were higher up the totem pole than more dubious and inedible sea
creatures. (Brake 89–90)

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
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Does paradigm shift function in other AOKs, such as history or mathematics? If so, how is it similar to or
different from paradigm shift in the sciences?

There are actually remnants of this idea in modern culture: many people still think of the lion as being the king of
beasts, for example (Brake 90).
An example of a paradigm shift can be seen in the shift from an Aristotelian classification of all living things to the
classification system which was developed by Carl Linnaeus in 1735.

Linnaean system of classification

The Aristotelian paradigm for the classification of all creation held sway in Europe until the eighteenth century,
when Carl Linnaeus proposed a new way of thinking about living creatures and their relationships to each other.
Linnaeus’ system did not include supernatural beings. He divided all the creatures and other objects on Earth into
three kingdoms: the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. Linnaeus created further subdivisions in the kingdoms:
class, order, genus and species. Linnaeus’ system was, like the older paradigm, hierarchical: he organized the
kingdoms with animals at the top, followed by plants, followed by minerals, and within each kingdom he organized
the individual species to reflect which he felt were the most important. Within animals, for example, he placed the
primates at the top of all the orders and homo sapiens (man) at the top of that order (Seddon). The hierarchy
reflected Linnaeus’ acceptance of some of the basic principles of the older chain of being. This system, which was
widely accepted very soon after it was published, represented a dramatic change from the old system of six
categories. By the time of the tenth edition in 1758, Linnaeus had identified 4400 animal species and plant species
(Gambino). A second major innovation that Linnaeus’ classification system introduced was the two-part naming of
species based on genus and species (Seddon).

Before Linnaeus proposed his system of classification, the dominant perspective was that living things existed in a
strict hierarchy, in which each plant or animal was lesser than all those above it in the hierarchy. There was one long
chain of being. Linnaeus’ system rearranged the whole perception of the relation of living things to each other by
introducing groups: he proposed three kingdoms, and then, within those very large groups, a series of increasingly
smaller groups. He retained some of the old idea of the hierarchy by organizing hierarchies within the groups, but he
did away with the one long chain of being.
The Linnaean system of classification is still with us today, although it has been revised, including two major
changes: we no longer use it to classify non-living things, and the hierarchical arrangement of kingdoms and orders
has been dropped. We now view all members of the same level of classification as being equal; this change
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represents another paradigm shift which arose largely out of the Darwinian revolution. Linnaeus’ classification
showed how living creatures are related to each other, but it made no attempt to explain how those relationships
came to be. Only when Darwin proposed the theory of evolution did we get that explanation. The development and
acceptance of the theory of evolution, which completely altered our understanding of species development, may
have been the biggest paradigm shift in the history of biology.

TOK trap
Many students want to write about the Copernican Revolution in their TOK essays, often using it as an
example of a paradigm shift. There is nothing wrong with the idea of doing so, but far too often students
are not careful about their facts. They think that they know something about Copernicus and the shift
from the geocentric universe to the heliocentric universe, and too often students make the mistake of
relying on sweeping generalizations which are, in fact, wrong. To give just one example: as we noted in
Chapter 1, Nicolaus Copernicus published his theory of the heliocentric universe in a book entitled De
Revolutionibus in March of 1543, and then died two months later. The Catholic Church did not ban the
book until 1616 (Solis). You can use the QR code on the right to read more about the history of
Copernicus and the Catholic Church.

Galileo, on the other hand, was indicted for his ‘heretical support for Copernicus’ heliocentrism’ (Linder)
in 1616. An important idea to take away from this TOK trap is that it is always going to be wise to do
some research about any example you wish to use in your TOK essay, rather than trying to rely on easy
generalizations or ‘facts’ you think you know from some time in the past.

ACTIVITY
Discuss the following question with your classmates:
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How does a paradigm shift represent a shift in perspective?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What methods are used to establish reliability in other areas of knowledge?

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Perspectives in the reception of scientific knowledge
A final aspect of the relationship between perspectives and scientific knowledge that we will consider in this chapter
is the way in which one’s perspective affects how one receives scientific knowledge. In the present day, some
scientific knowledge which has been thoroughly substantiated by scientific methods (which we will investigate in
the next section of this chapter) is seen as being highly controversial or flat-out wrong by some communities. Some
examples of these are the theory of evolution, the existence of global warming and the efficacy of vaccinations.
Each one of these scientific findings challenges strongly held beliefs. These beliefs are extremely difficult to
dislodge, even when they are strongly contradicted by facts and by other people within the community.

CASE STUDY
Evolution and belief
One reason given for the denial of evolution is that it violates a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible,
which says that God created all the creatures of Earth. A very strict interpretation of that text in the book
of Genesis means that all living things exist today as they existed after the six days of creation. Perhaps
the first very serious challenge to this belief came in the nineteenth century when ships began to arrive
in England with fossils of Woolly Mammoths, a clearly extinct species whose bones were unlike any
those of any known living animal (Conniff). Determined adherents to the biblical story, however, propose
that fossils are not evidence that some of God’s creations no longer exist, but that, rather, they are traps
laid by the devil to sway people from God’s word (IBSS).
In the United States, efforts by some religious groups continue to try to remove the teaching of evolution
in public school biology classes, or, failing that, to mandate the teaching of creationism alongside
evolution. This stance, too, is very controversial, as creationism is not science, and there is much
resistance to its being forced into the science curriculum. These strongly felt positions persist despite the
fact that many religious organizations have accepted the theory of evolution as being compatible with
religious history and doctrine. The official attitude toward evolution from the Catholic Church, for
example, has changed dramatically over time. In 1950, in an official statement, Pope Pius XII declared
that he hoped that the theory of evolution would prove to be a passing fad, but that ‘nothing in Catholic
doctrine is contradicted by a theory that suggests one specie might evolve into another – even if that
specie is man’ (Linder). Forty-six years later, however, Pope John-Paul, in a similar official statement,
acknowledged evolution as ‘proven fact’ (Linder).
Many organized religions have formally accepted evolution, at least in the sense that they have
acknowledged that the theory of evolution is not incompatible with religious doctrine. Table 9.5 shows
the position, determined by the Pew Research Center, of a number of different religious organizations
(Liu).

Table 9.5 Official position regarding evolution by recognized religious organizations

Religion Official position
Buddhism No inherent conflict with evolution
Church of Jesus Evolution does not contradict church doctrine
Christ of the Latter
Day Saints (Mormon)
Episcopal Church Passed a formal resolution which affirms that God has the ability to create in any
manner he chooses. The resolution officially rejects a dogmatic adherence to
creationism
Evangelical Lutheran Affirms the creation of Earth by God; however, acknowledges that creation may
Church not have occurred in six days as we know them (24 hours in duration) and that
he may have used evolution as part of his creation
Hinduism There is no central official position with regard to creation of life; however, many
Hindus do not find the idea of evolution to be incompatible with their religious

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 beliefs
Judaism Evolution is not inherently contradictory to religious doctrine
Protestantism In 1969, rescinded its older position denying evolution; however, explicitly
refrains from either affirming or denying the validity of the theory of evolution
United Methodist Evolution is not in conflict with religious doctrine
Church

There are, however, three religions in the Pew study which expressly deny the validity of the theory of
evolution. These are shown in Table 9.6 (Liu).

Table 9.6 Religions that deny the theory of evolution

Religion Official position
Southern Baptist Rejected evolution formally and asserted that ‘creation science’ can be supported
Convention by scientific evidence
Lutheran Church – Rejects evolution or any theory which contradicts the biblical story of creation
Missouri Synod
Islam There is a split in beliefs among Muslims: some reject evolution out of hand, while
others accept it as compatible with their religious beliefs
Use the QR code to review the research study and explore the sources of its findings if you are
interested in a more detailed explanation of these.

We are left, then, with a perplexing situation: scientists and most religious leaders accept the theory of
evolution as being an accurate description of the means by which the species that exist today have
come to be. It is: ‘one of the best substantiated theories in the history of science, supported by evidence
from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including palaeontology, geology, genetics and
developmental biology’ (Than). The fact that work from so many different fields of inquiry supports the
theory of evolution makes the knowledge that much sounder, as it coheres across many disciplines of
science. You learned about correspondence and coherence theory in Chapter 2 (see page 45); the
theory of evolution is an example of knowledge which can be tested using both of those theories.
Despite the complexity of the knowledge which has gone into the theory of evolution, and despite the
fact that physical evidence going back millions of years supports it, it remains controversial among some
groups. This is a good example of the difficulty of conveying knowledge (especially complicated
knowledge) from experts to the general population.

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CONCEPT CONNECTION
Culture

Widespread denial of evolution is a striking problem in the United States. A 2006 study of 32 European
countries demonstrated that only one, Turkey, was less likely to accept evolution than the US (Hecht),
though significant percentages of people in other countries also reject evolution. The chart illustrates the
findings of the study. The highest acceptance of evolution occurred in Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden
(Miller, et al ).
In 2014, a Pew Research study found that a third of people living in the US reject evolution outright
(Norman), despite the official positions of a wide variety of religious authorities as shown on the previous
page. Half of those claim, wrongly, that scientists are not in agreement that evolution is real. The same
survey showed that 98 per cent of scientists accept evolution as biological fact (Norman).
One professor has suggested that the reason for the extremely high incidence of denial of evolution in
the US is a result of the fact that in the US, the issue has been politicized, with one political party making
it a major issue in its platform (Hecht). This choice appeals to religious fundamental groups, and they
have fought, often successfully, to keep evolution from being taught. Such groups require creationism to
be taught in biology classes alongside evolution, or, perhaps even more dangerously, ensure that when
evolution is taught, it is presented, falsely, as being scientifically dubious. A report from 2007 revealed
that: ‘1 in 8 public high school biology teachers presented creationism as being scientifically credible,
and 6 in 10 were teaching evolution in a way that misrepresented its scientific soundness’ (Norman).
The theory of evolution is an excellent example of how certain cultural attitudes can have a widespread
influence on how scientific knowledge is received in a country as a whole.

The denial of evolution based on arguments that it is not science, or that it is scientifically dubious, or that
creationism is an equally sound scientific finding, represents a profound misunderstanding of what science is and
how scientific knowledge is made. In the next section, we will explore the methods used by scientists in order to
establish claims as being scientifically sound.
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ACTIVITY
Biologists are the people with the experience, education and understanding of the science behind
evolution. The heads of religious organizations are the experts in religious doctrine and official church
policy. Some people, however, reject the knowledge claims made by both of these kinds of efforts, even
though the vast majority of people in those groups trust science every day when they go to see a doctor,
use a cell phone, ride in a car over a bridge, travel to the 32nd floor of a high rise in an elevator, or get
on a plane.
1 What makes it difficult for some people to accept the expertise of those who have undergone the kind
of education needed in order for them to become experts?
2 How do we resolve conflicts if experts flatly disagree?
3 Under what conditions do our values help us gain accurate knowledge of the world, and under what
conditions do our values hinder our ability to gain accurate knowledge of the world?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
We have seen that sometimes experts in the natural sciences are effective in influencing the
consumption of knowledge and sometimes they are not. Are experts in other areas of knowledge equally
regarded and disregarded? Why or why not?

ACTIVITY
Evolution is not the only scientific finding which has not been easily received by the public. Well-known
controversial topics include the safety of vaccines and the fact that human activity has contributed in a
very significant way to rapid global warming. Others include the safety of nuclear power and the need for
embryonic testing. All of these are accepted by scientists but have not been universally accepted by the
public.
1 Think of at least one area of settled scientific knowledge which causes controversy in your community
and explore the reasons for that conflict.
2 Do you think the conflict arises from the personal perspectives of individuals? From a lack of clear
communication and education? Or perhaps from important cultural beliefs?

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Methods and tools
At the beginning of the chapter, we asked you to do a small experiment with dirt and water. If you did that
experiment, you were engaging, in a small way, in scientific method. The scientific method is a framework that
defines the way that knowledge is developed, tested and revised in the natural sciences. The process begins with the
observation of some phenomenon in the real world, followed by the development of a hypothesis about how or why
that thing happens. The explanation must in turn allow for predictions to be made, and then further tests are made to
see if the predictions pan out. The framework itself is straightforward, and when the science is uncomplicated, so is
the method. Table 9.7 on the next page describes the processes involved in the observation of what happens when
water is mixed with dirt.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is there a single ‘scientific’ method?

Table 9.7 Basic framework of the scientific method

Stage of Description
process
Observation You observed what happened when you added water to dirt. No doubt you first got thick
of mud, and then, as you added more and more water, you got a soupy solution in which
phenomenon the dirt was suspended. The colour probably changed: at first, it got darker, and then,
with more and more water, it got lighter and lighter. Maybe some of the dirt did not blend
into the water and formed a sludge on the bottom of the glass.
Making an A hypothesis is a guess, although it is a guess based on observation and experience, not
hypothesis a wild guess!
From observing the water mixing with mud, you were asked to form a hypothesis about
whether it would be possible to separate out the dirt and water again, and, if so, whether
the two parts would be the same as they were when you began.
Perhaps your prediction was that yes, you could separate out the water, but that no, you
would not end up with the same products as before. The mixture could be heated to
remove the water, in which case, the water would no longer be liquid, but gas. This
would also be true if you did not heat the mixture, but rather waited for the water to
evaporate. If you found a very fine strainer to try to strain the water out, you would not
get it all, and you would likely lose some of the dirt.
A prediction about the state of the dirt after evaporation might be a little harder to make.
The dirt alone in the jar probably looked like pretty big clumps. Once a lot of water was
mixed in, however, the dirt suspended in the liquid likely consisted of very small particles
– maybe even particles that were not visible to the naked eye. It seems like a logical
guess that when the water evaporates off, the particles of dirt would not get bigger again.
Making a Let’s imagine that you tested the hypothesis and found that you were correct. (If you did
prediction actually test the hypothesis, then you can continue thinking through how the experiment
fits the scientific method using your actual findings, rather than the imagined ones here!)
Now we can make a prediction: if we mix a large enough quantity of water into a quantity
of dirt so that the dirt becomes suspended in the liquid and itself appears to be part of the
liquid, we will not be able to remove the water in such a way as to restore the dirt to its
original texture and appearance. (Maybe your prediction would be somewhat different,
depending on what your actual findings were.)
Testing The prediction you made in the last step can now be tested by other scientists in an effort
to verify your finding or to disprove it.

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
What is the role of imagination and intuition in the creation of hypotheses in the natural sciences?
What is the role of inductive and deductive reasoning in scientific inquiry, prediction and explanation?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Do other AOKs employ a method similar to the scientific method?
Which features of the scientific method help people to make knowledge in other areas?

This simple experiment helps to demonstrate the basic procedure of how scientists do science, but as it stands, it is
not nearly precise enough. There are two main problems:
• the hypothesis has two parts, rather than just one. We can’t effectively test two things at one time because we
won’t know what in the experiment affected which part of the hypothesis
• the prediction is too vague. It doesn’t specify how much water or how much dirt, or what kind of dirt. Sand might
not produce the same results as the kind of dirt which is used on farms to grow things, and possibly both of those
would produce different results from what would happen if red clay soil were used.
The fact that scientists would not make such a vague prediction underscores the very important point that scientists
don’t make claims which apply outside of the conditions in which they made the observations and in which they
conducted the test of the hypothesis. Scientists are concerned with making the most precise claims that they possibly
can, and in order to be able to do that, they must be very accurate about what they observe and what they think the
implications of those observations are.

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Underlying assumptions
The basic framework of the scientific method has its roots in a set of assumptions that scientists make. The
Geological Society of America published a brochure entitled ‘The Nature of Science and the Scientific Method’, in
which they detailed a list of those assumptions, including the following:
1 The world exists apart from our sensory perception of it.
2 Humans are capable of perceiving the real world accurately and attempting to understand the physical Universe.
3 Natural processes are sufficient to explain or account for natural phenomena or events. Scientists must, therefore,
explain the natural world in terms of natural processes. They must not explain the real world in terms of
supernatural processes, which cannot be observed or tested.
4 All human perceptions are shaped by our past experiences, which means that our ability to perceive is shaped by
those experiences. Our perceptions, therefore, may be inaccurate or biased.
5 Scientific explanations are limited. Scientists cannot observe every instance of any phenomenon; therefore,
scientific knowledge is necessarily contingent knowledge rather than absolute. This means that scientific
knowledge must be open to revision if new evidence arises. It is impossible to know if we have thought of every
possible alternative explanation or every variable. The technology available to us at any given time might be
insufficient for helping us observe all that is there, in the real world.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do the underlying assumptions which shape inquiry in other AOKs, such as mathematics or history,
compare and contrast to the underlying assumptions of the natural sciences?

Let’s consider these assumptions. The first two mean that the pursuit of scientific knowledge must be, first and
foremost, based in observation. Scientists are trying to observe what is really there, outside of ourselves, and to
understand it. We see those beliefs reflected in the first stages of the scientific method: that observation is the
starting place, and then a hypothesis is made based on observation.
The third assumption is quite interesting. It is purely an assumption which is based in the fact that we cannot observe
supernatural acts, test our ideas about supernatural acts or make predictions about what supernatural acts will happen
next. The nature of supernatural acts, if they exist, is completely different from the nature of observable physical
phenomena: by definition, omnipotent beings capable of creating the Universe, for example, can do anything and are
not controlled by forces outside of themselves. There is, therefore, no way to predict what they might do. This
assumption is reflected in scientific method in the fact that scientific knowledge must be predictive. If we cannot
take what we have observed and tested and make accurate predictions about what will happen the next time and in
all future times, then we do not have scientific knowledge.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How can it be that scientific knowledge changes over time?

The fourth assumption expresses an acknowledgement that humans (including scientists!) can make mistakes, and
the requirement that other people must be able to do the same experiment and get the same results is a reflection of
that awareness. Scientists are not satisfied with one person’s word that natural processes work in a particular way.
The process of scientists checking each other’s work is called replication.
The final assumption on the list above accounts for a number of features of the way that scientific knowledge is
generated. First, it contributes to the need for findings to be expressed in very precise knowledge claims. Since
knowledge in science is contingent, then it matters that we make transparent exactly what the conditions are under
which the knowledge claim is true. Good science does not consist of claims which cover a whole bunch of
circumstances – if scientists are not precise, then the knowledge claims they make are even more contingent and
even more likely to be overturned in the short term.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
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How do the underlying assumptions of the other AOKs shape the kind of inquiry, including methods and
tools, that is central to that AOK?

Secondly, this fifth assumption contributes to the need for peer review of scientific findings. We accept that
scientific knowledge is contingent, but we do not think that means we can be sloppy about work and careless about
claims and then just shrug when our claims are overturned. Quite the opposite. Scientists take care not to make
claims until they are thoroughly checked and established beyond reasonable doubt, under the conditions which
currently exist. Peer review is a way for scientists to check each other’s work, to validate the processes used to
generate claims, and to correct any errors in reasoning that may have marred the findings.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Objectivity
Another important reason for peer review is that scientific knowledge must be made as objectively as
possible. The aim of science is to find out about the world as it is, not as scientists think or feel or believe
or wish it to be. One function of the scientific method is to screen out as much as possible any bias or
subjectivity on the part of the scientist, and peer review acts as a final check for any such interference
with facts.

Another method which arises from the fifth assumption is the ongoing development of new technologies and
continuing research in fields about which we already know a great deal. The microscope and the telescope are both
examples of technological developments that allowed scientists to see parts of the physical universe previously
inaccessible to humans, given our limited eyesight. Both of those developments led to major changes in scientific
understanding. We don’t know what technological advances might yet open up the world, and so the effort to
develop them continues. With every new invention, scientists revisit past findings.
The fact that scientific findings are contingent also means that we cannot prove things in science the way that we can
prove them in mathematics. In creating proofs, mathematicians are able to account for every conceivable instance of
what they are studying. We saw in Chapter 8 that in proving the Pythagorean Theorem, Pythagoras was able to
demonstrate that the theorem accurately described every possible right triangle. Scientists cannot do the same thing:
for example, no scientist could ever observe every green plant that exists, let alone all the ones which might exist in
the future, to show that they use photosynthesis to create food for themselves from light.
Natural scientists, then, do not try to prove things, and when peers attempt to replicate an experiment to see whether
the findings were sound, they do not try to prove the original scientist right; instead they try to prove them wrong.
This process is called falsification. If an attempt to falsify a scientific claim succeeds, then the claim is wrong. If an
attempt to falsify a claim fails, however, then the original claim is strengthened. If the claim is repeatedly supported
by experiment, then it becomes stronger and, over time, may rise to the level of a theory, especially if the claim fits
in with knowledge about how related processes work.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Do other areas of knowledge have published sets of underlying assumptions like the natural sciences
do?
Are the underlying assumptions of other areas, such as the human sciences, significantly different from
the assumptions which underly the natural sciences?

Finally, this assumption is the reason that scientists call established frameworks ‘theories’, rather than ‘proofs’ or
‘facts’. Scientists don’t call anything a theory until enough evidence has been amassed to make the knowledge
virtually certain. But in science, because the process is inductive, rather than deductive (see the discussion of
certainty in Chapter 1 for a review), knowledge claims can never be absolutely certain, the way they can in
mathematics. Scientists are, as we noted earlier, concerned about precision. It would not be precise to call theories
proofs, because no matter how well established they are, they might be altered at some point in the future based on
new evidence.

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ACTIVITY
Which technological developments do you think have had the greatest impact on our ability to perceive
the natural world more accurately? Why?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Certainty
In the natural sciences, we can be absolutely certain only about things over which we have control,
which is to say, things which have been invented by humans. We are absolutely certain about the names
of species under Linnaean classification, because those names have been assigned by humans. If those
who have the authority to do so decided to, they could change some of those names, and then we would
be absolutely certain about the new names. This is what happened with Pluto in 2006. The International
Astronomical Union (IAU) redesignated Pluto as a dwarf planet (‘Pluto and Ceres’). The IAU is the group
with the authority to determine the classification of astral bodies, and so we are absolutely certain that
Pluto is not a planet, but rather is a dwarf planet. At some future date, the IAU might develop still more
categories and then there will be new names, and we will be absolutely certain about those names.
Notice that although we can say that we are absolutely certain about aspects of science that we invent
(which very often involves the naming of things), this does not mean that that reality will not change in
future. Where we can actually alter reality, we can be certain of the reality until we change it, and then
we will be absolutely certain about the change that we made. The same cannot be said of natural
objects and natural processes which are not invented by humans. By definition, they are those things
which would exist even if we were not around to observe them. We do not have control over how those
work; scientists are in the business of discovering them.
A theory, such as the theory of evolution, is a framework for explaining a natural process, or
constellation of processes, which is extremely well established. The basic existence of evolution as a
mechanism through which species develop and go extinct over long periods of time is thoroughly settled.
There is virtually no chance that the whole notion of evolution will ever be proven wrong. But the
existence of a theory doesn’t mean that learning stops. Scientists continue to study the details of
evolution and how it has played out in different species over millions of years. All of the increasingly
accurate understanding that has been developed in the last 100 years or so, however, has fit into the
paradigm of evolution. Nothing has occurred to cause any significant challenge to the understanding that
species develop through small genetic changes, and there is no reason to think that there ever will be
any finding that could undermine the idea of evolution in a significant way. The possibility, however
minute, exists though, and so scientists, acknowledging the truth of assumption number 5 on page 313,
use the term ‘theory’ to describe their most certain findings.

ACTIVITY
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Create a chart for yourself like the one below. Fill in the second column with notes about which aspects
of the methods scientists use to make knowledge are related to each of the assumptions which underlie
science.
Methods and tools in natural science related to
Foundational assumption each assumption
The real world exists independently of our
perception of it
Humans are capable of accurate perception of
the real world
Natural processes are sufficient to account for
natural phenomena
Our perceptions may be biased or inaccurate
Scientific explanations are contingent

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The scientific method in context

There is no one scientific method. The guiding principles and the general methods that we have looked at so far are
a framework which can be applied in a great many situations. However, what the method looks like differs greatly
from context to context. We do not have room in this book to explore many different contexts in detail, so we will
consider a few examples in order to give you an idea of the range of possibilities.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
How does the social context of scientific work affect the methods and findings of science?
Does the social context of the other areas of knowledge affect the methods and findings of those areas
of knowledge in similar ways? How so?

Observation means quite different things in different contexts. Biologists studying the behaviour of octopuses, for
example, have to get out into the ocean in areas of the world where the octopuses they wish to study live, such as
Indonesia, and then they have to actually follow the octopuses around in order to see what they do. Those
observations require the scientists to have access to boats and to be able to dive in order to get where the octopuses
are. Octopuses could, of course, be studied in captivity, but it would not be scientific to simply assume that the way
they behave in captivity is the same as the way they behave in the wild – maybe they do, but maybe they don’t.
Scientists could not make such a hypothesis until they had observations that could support it.
One particular kind of observation led teuthologists to hypothesize that octopuses are actually quite intelligent. Drs
Julian Finn and Mark Norman, marine biologists at Museum Victoria in Australia, observed an octopus in the
oceans of Indonesia using coconut shells as tools. You can use the QR code to see some of the footage that Dr Finn
shot of the octopus at work. This was the first time that any cephalopod had been observed using tools; previously, it
was thought that tool use required a large, complex brain. This extraordinary observation led to a new hypothesis
about the intelligence of octopuses.

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The kind of observations that Finn and Norman made are dramatically different to the kinds of observations that a
physicist interested in determining whether subatomic particles, such as the Higgs Boson exist, has to do. The
existence of the Higgs Boson has been theorized since 1964. The hypothesis was based on complicated observations
involving other particles and on knowledge of Einstein’s theory of relativity (Gray and Mansoulié). In order to try to
observe these particles, physicists had to build the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland. The LHC is a
particle accelerator, which is a machine that can separate atoms into their component parts. Particle accelerators are
used as an important technology in the pursuit of finding out what the smallest components of atoms are
(TechTarget).
The LHC is 27 km in circumference. It cost $4.5 billion and took a decade to build (Knapp). When the LHC was
run, the observations that were made were quite different from taking a scuba dive to make a video of an octopus
that can easily be seen with the naked eye. No one can see the tiny subatomic particles; they have to be detected by
tracking the energy which is released when particles collide with each other. Physicists, then, use complex statistical
analysis to demonstrate that what they are seeing is activity which results from the behaviour of particular kinds of
particles (Gray and Mansoulié).

We can see from these examples how important being able to observe the world is to the ability to create hypotheses
and to the ability to test them. What it is possible to hypothesize depends on the nature of what we have been able to
observe at any particular point. If an activity is truly scientific in nature, then new observations collected in aid of
trying to demonstrate the validity of a hypothesis – or to falsify it – generate more questions to be answered.

ACTIVITY

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One hypothesis about the nature of the Universe which we did not mention in the section on
perspectives in science is the idea that everything that we know and experience of the Universe is
actually just a simulation being run in a massive computer by beings who are vastly more intelligent than
we are (Moskowitz). This might sound like kind of a kooky idea; however, it has been given serious
consideration by some big-name physicists. In 2016, it was the focus of the annual Isaac Asimov
Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The debate was moderated
by Neil de Grasse Tyson, and featured physicists from MIT and Harvard, among others. Use the QR
code to read an article about the discussion, and then answer the following questions:
1 What evidence is offered in support of this hypothesis?
2 What arguments were offered in opposition to the idea?
3 Can you think of any way in which physicists might begin to test the idea through observation or
experimentation?
4 What does the idea suggest about the nature of mathematics?
5 What crossover into other areas of knowledge does this idea raise?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Evidence
Evidence is one of the 12 key course concepts in TOK, and evidence plays an essential role in the
natural sciences. What counts as effective evidence, however, varies dramatically depending on the kind
of scientific work being done. We saw with the study of the Indonesian octopus that the evidence was a
video of the octopus using coconut shells as tools. If you watched the video, you saw that a particularly
important piece of evidence was the fact that the octopus took his coconut shell with him – he saved it
for future use. In the case of the search for the Higgs Boson, the evidence consists of the statistical
analysis of readouts of data collected from the energy release of particles colliding with each other.
Astronomers trying to work out what happened in the aftermath of the Big Bang need evidence that is
roughly 14 billion years old. It is possible to view really old light. Light takes a known amount of time to
travel from one place to the other – the definition of a light year is the time it takes light to travel in one
year. If astronomers want to see light that is nearly 14 billion years old, they need to work out where that
light would be now. As our capabilities of observing light in galaxies which are very far away from us,
and moving away, have improved, scientists have been able to observe very old light.
One piece of evidence in support of the Big Bang theory is that if it happened the way astronomers think
it did, then they should be able to find photons generated in the aftermath of the Big Bang, and those
photons have, in fact been found. Their existence is known as cosmic background radiation (Nagaraja).
Other problems with establishing precise details about the Big Bang have arisen, however, from
increasingly detailed observations that have been made by extremely advanced modern technology.
One proposal for an explanation which solves some of these problems is that immediately after the Big
Bang, a short burst of inflation occurred. If that did indeed happen, then such an event would have
caused primordial energy to be unevenly distributed in the Universe. Astronomers have been able to
make observations which support that explanation (Nagaraja). So far, then, astronomers have been able
to collect evidence which demonstrates that the Big Bang happened, and that there was an inflationary
event which occurred immediately afterward, expanding the size of the Universe dramatically.
There is still a problem, however: if this inflationary event happened, something must have powered it,
and so far, scientists have no evidence of what that might have been. To get the evidence, astronomers
have to be able to look at the Universe from a time before photons were visible, and we have no
technology which allows us to do that. So, our technology has allowed us to collect some of the evidence
that we need in order to understand the Big Bang, but we do not have all of the evidence we need in
order to explain the event in detail. Without that evidence, we cannot say that we have satisfactory
knowledge about the origins of the Universe. We have a partial, but incomplete, explanation.
Scientific explanations must be based in evidence; until scientists have evidence, they don’t make
claims. They offer hypotheses, and they keep looking.
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CONNECTION TO CORE THEME
Case study of an individual scientist
As a final example of the way in which the scientific method is shaped by the study being done, we will
take a look at a rather extraordinary experiment. As you read, consider how the work reflects the five
underlying assumptions that we have already discussed, and how the various steps in the scientific
method are tailored to this study.
In 2001, a professor of entomology (the study of insects) at the University of California, Dr Jerry A
Powell, published a ground-breaking paper which both illustrated the remarkable fact that a particular
species of moth can remain in diapause for 30 years and explained how diapause works (Powell 2001).
Hibernation is an overwintering mechanism which allows insects and other animals to synchronize their
periods of feeding to the time during which their food source is abundant (Lee). Diapause, on the other
hand, is a state of dormancy during which the physiological development of the insect ceases
(Denlinger).

Additionally, diapause is not merely an overwintering strategy, but rather can last for more than an entire
year. Prior to Powell’s study, diapause was known to last in some insects for as long as 12 years (de
Faria). When the study was originally undertaken, the intention was to observe diapause in a species of
moth, to see whether it worked the same way in this species as in other species.
Powell’s study involved the specific species of yucca moth, Prodoxus y-inversus. This moth has a
symbiotic relationship with a yucca plant, in that the moths lay their eggs in the flowers of the yucca,

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and in so doing pollinate the plant (Moisset). In turn, the larvae of the moth are encased in the seed pods
which the yucca drops, and they develop there until ready to emerge, after diapause, as adults.
Powell collected some yucca pods in the mountains of Nevada in the spring of 1970 and carried them
with him back to his lab in Berkeley, California, where he set them up for observation. The pods were
kept in several different outdoor environments and temperatures at each site were monitored, as were
the number of adult moths that emerged each year (Powell 491). For quite a while, not much happened:
in 1972, 12 moths emerged, and in 1974, one additional moth emerged. Other than that, no moths
emerged from any of the pods at any of the sites, until suddenly, in 1985, after 16 years in diapause, 120
moths emerged, followed by 61 more in 1986 (Powell 491).
Such a dramatic occurrence needs an explanation, and the obvious question to be answered was: ‘What
caused the moths suddenly to emerge in large numbers?’ This is obviously not the sort of experiment
which is likely to be replicated by other entomologists – it had, after all, taken 17 years to this point.
Another barrier to replication is the fact that the conditions of weather and rainfall which existed over that
17-year period could not possibly be recreated, nor could the exact physical condition of the objects
under study: the larvae of the yucca moths. Dr Powell would have to work out an answer from the data
he had already collected.
The key to the answer came from an unexpected source which was not part of the formal experiment. In
an interview, Dr Powell explained that he opened his electric bill one spring day in 1985 (remember that
this was the era before email and internet, and paper bills came in envelopes through the postal
service!), and he read the electric company newsletter which was enclosed with his bill. The newsletter
contained the information that the preceding winter had, as a function of daily average, been slightly but
significantly colder than it had been for a number of years preceding it. He called the electric company
for more detailed information, which he subsequently included in his published paper. Powell explained
that he had not previously considered that colder temperatures could have provided the trigger for
emergence, because the winters in Berkeley were significantly warmer than the winters in Nevada. Upon
learning that there had been a significant difference in Berkeley’s 1985 winter temperatures from
preceding years, however, he began to think that maybe the larvae in diapause could actually acclimate
to the local temperatures and could then be triggered by a winter which was suddenly, by contrast,
colder.
He proceeded to test that hypothesis by controlling the winter temperatures of his yucca pods, subjecting
them to normal winters for four years and then, in the fifth year, subjecting them to much colder
temperatures. In so doing, he was able to force mass emergences at 20 years, 25 years and 30 years,
thus verifying his hypothesis.
Let’s think back to the cognitive tools we discussed in Chapter 2. Which tools were used in this study?
Any scientist working on any study is an individual knower. As such, they use all the same tools that you
use as an individual knower, including the various cognitive tools that we all have – reason, emotion,
imagination and so on. During the first 17 years of this experiment, the primary cognitive tool in use was
obviously sense perception in the form of sight: the yucca pods had to be observed directly and any
emergences seen. The temperature also had to be taken, which would have been done by reading a
thermometer. Sense perception was not the only necessary tool, however: language must have been
used for the recording of observations. Notice that while sense perception is fundamental, intuition is not
relevant in this context: the job of the scientist making observations is to record what actually does
happen, and not what they intuit ought to happen.
Following the observation stage, however, as Powell tried to answer the question of what mechanism
caused the sudden mass emergence of moths, additional cognitive tools had to come into play.
• Written language: this provided a critical piece of information in the form of the electric company
newsletter.
• Imagination: this was necessary for applying the information in the newsletter to the apparently
unrelated situation of the scientific experiment.
• Reason: this had to be used in order to test the plausibility of the hypothesis about the relationship
between temperature and emergence from diapause.
Finally, imagination, reason, observation and language all had to be used together to design the follow-
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up experiment and to run the test for the next 15 years. None of these tools was used in isolation:
consider, for instance, that imagination and reason had to work in tandem, both for developing the
hypothesis and for designing the experiment. Imagination which is not tempered by reason could not
provide a useful solution.
Finally, one additional cognitive tool played an important role in this study: faith. In order to complete a
study that requires 30 years of work – the first 15 of which produced nothing but negative results – one
must have faith in the scientific process. Faith that even negative information is a kind of knowledge, and
faith that just because we haven’t observed something doesn’t mean that something isn’t happening. In
2010, Dr. Powell was still monitoring the yucca pods. His reason? He thought that the pods were
probably empty, but cutting them open to see would kill any remaining moths, and since he didn’t know
for sure, he thought it was better to approach the problem scientifically and observe what actually is
rather than making assumptions about what he might be (‘Conversation with Dr Jerry A Powell’).

ACTIVITY
Dr Powell’s articles about the yucca moth study went through peer review before they were published,
but, due to the extraordinarily long time that it took to run this experiment, it is extremely unlikely that this
study will ever be replicated.
1 Do you think that we can consider the knowledge he gained to be sound without that step?
2 Why or why not?

In this section, we have examined the beliefs which shape the way that scientific knowledge is made. We have
looked at the basic features of the scientific method and explored the fact that, while the overall shape of scientific
inquiry has shared features, regardless of the situation, the specific steps taken and tools used depend on the specific
work being done. In the final section of the chapter, we will consider how ethical considerations also help shape
scientific inquiry.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is the depiction of the ‘scientific method’ traditionally found in many school science textbooks an
accurate model of scientific activity?

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Ethics
The overall aim of the natural sciences is the discovery of the precise nature of physical objects and physical
processes in the Universe. The material under study is the natural world, which, as we have seen, scientists assume
exists outside of ourselves. We cannot know what the natural world is like or how nature operates if we allow our
own perspectives, the limitations of our physical nature, or our inability to observe and analyse to get in the way of
the truth about that external world.
As you saw in the previous section, the methods of science have been shaped in such a way as to deliberately try to
stop any of those problems from happening. These methods are, then, a matter of ethics: the truths that scientists are
after are truths outside of themselves, and so there are right and wrong answers to scientific questions. Scientists
want to be as right as it is possible to be, and to correct any wrong, or inaccurate, ideas as soon as it is clear that
there are problems. A lot of what happens in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, therefore, is ongoing testing so that
scientists continue to amass data, and they continue to evaluate new evidence to refine their knowledge more and
more precisely.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Do scientists or the societies in which scientists operate exert a greater influence on what is ethically
acceptable in this area of knowledge?
In what ways have developments in science challenged long-held ethical values?

Learner profile
Principled
What, given the scope of the natural sciences, are the important principles for natural scientists to
adhere to?

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The ethical practice of science
We know that one specific mechanism used both by scientists doing lab experiments and by scientists doing field
observations is the hypothesis. Given the aim of the natural sciences, a hypothesis is necessarily a statement which
aims to reflect a real-world fact. A hypothesis is, however, also fundamentally a human construct – a person’s idea
about what the real world is like. Obviously, then, hypotheses can be wrong. If, moreover, a scientist was too
wedded to a particular hypothesis, they might design an experiment which was slanted in favour of that hypothesis.
They might interpret data favourably or ignore data which did not support the hypothesis. Such an experiment would
very likely result in a failure of the aim of natural science: if a scientist discovers what they want to discover instead
of what is really there, then that ‘scientist’ did not properly engage in science. We can, therefore, quite easily see
that it is a matter of ethical principle that hypotheses be rigorously developed and tested by processes which
eliminate as much as possible any potential personal investment or bias.
Indeed, we find that the expectation among scientists is just that: As Carl Sagan said: ‘If there’s something to be
explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might
systematically disprove each of the alternatives’ (Shermer and Linse 2). Sagan explains that the development of a
single hypothesis is insufficient; a professional, ethical scientist actively tries to find explanations other than their
own and must disprove all of those before they can be satisfied that theirs is the best answer it is possible to know at
the present time.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
How do the ethical standards of each AOK shape the methods and tools of knowledge making?
Which AOKs have ethical principles which are similar to the natural sciences? Which are more different?

An example of this process can be found in the work of Julian Finn and Mark Norman on the octopuses in
Indonesia. On observing an octopus stacking and carrying coconut shells to use as shelters, the research team
hypothesized that this was an example of tool use – something not previously observed among invertebrates. As a
matter of ethical practice, Finn and his teammates identified and negated these explanations for the octopus,
behaviour: stimulus response (such as ants using leaves to carry food) and simple behaviour around an object that is
present all the time (such as a hermit crab using a discarded shell as protection) (Finn, et al). They identified as
evidence of actual tool use the facts that: the octopus had to manipulate the coconut shells in a particular way
(stacking them inside each other) in order to carry them, the carrying of the shells over considerable distances,
despite the fact that ‘This unique and previously undescribed form of locomotion is ungainly and clearly less
efficient than unencumbered locomotion (ie, costly in terms of energy and increased predator risk compared with
normal walking or the faster jet swimming escape’), and the fact that the shell is carried for future use – which the
researchers observed (Finn, et al). At no point do the researchers claim that their idea is unequivocally right; they
offered a hypothesis and they gathered evidence that supports it, as well as trying to determine whether alternative
explanations might make more sense given that evidence. To violate this process would be ethically wrong because
it would result in ‘knowledge’ which did not describe or explain what actually happens in the real world.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Should scientific research be subject to ethical constraints or is the pursuit of all scientific knowledge
intrinsically worthwhile?

The formulation and testing of hypotheses in the natural sciences, in other words, are bounded by the ethical
principle that actual truth exists and that the charge of the sciences is to discover and explain it, not to distort or
misrepresent it.

ACTIVITY
If you review the discussion of the other stages of the scientific method from the last section of this
chapter, you will begin to see that the same ethical principles which shape the making of hypotheses
apply to the other stages as well.
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How does the need to make accurate statements about the world outside of themselves shape the way
that scientists gather evidence, analyse evidence, test findings and use peer review and falsification?

CASE STUDY
Scientific malpractice
Use the QR code to read about Professor Marc Hauser who had to resign his position at Harvard
University after having been found to have engaged in research misconduct. Dr Hauser was in the
psychology department but was conducting biological studies on some monkeys in order to establish the
evolutionary development of certain mammalian traits. At the bottom of the article, you can read a
statement from Dr Hauser in response to the findings from an investigation by the Office of Research
Integrity (ORI), in the US Department of Health and Human Services. He suggests that people should
not feel that all of his work has been laid open to question because some of his studies were found to be
flawed (‘Marc Hauser’).

Based on the ethical conduct of science, do you think that if a scientist is found to have engaged in
misconduct, all of their work needs to be rechecked, or can we be confident that all earlier work has
resulted in accurate knowledge? How could we know that a scientist who has at some point begun to
engage in practices which call into question the legitimacy of the claims made as a result of the work has
never done so before?

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Ethics and the application of science
Ethics can relate to scientific knowledge in other ways. One problem that arises fairly often in the process of trying
to make and share scientific knowledge is the way in which politics shapes the inquiry.
In the eighteenth century, people tried to use the classification of creatures in order to justify slavery. The argument
in favour of slavery was that the non-European races were inferior beings. People attempting to attack this argument
and those trying to support it turned to science. Abolitionists argued that the Bible, which says that mankind is
descended from Adam and Eve, supports the idea that humans changed from looking like Adam and Eve (who were
presumed to look like Europeans) into many other forms. ‘If Adam and Eve looked like Europeans, then obviously
the facial features of African people must have arisen subsequently; or vice-versa. Thus, from the very fact of human
variation, coupled with a single origin for the human species as recorded in Genesis, the earliest theories of
microevolution were deduced’ (Marks). Such an argument aims to demonstrate that all humans are part of the one
species created by God, and, therefore, no humans should be enslaved. People (including scientists) interested in
justifying slavery, however, argued that science showed that African people were related to apes. Science seemed to
link non-European races to apes through measurements of the skull and face, at least according to scholars
concerned with justifying the practice of slavery by dehumanizing African people (Marks.)
In the early nineteenth century, a new argument was offered by a medical doctor named Samuel Morton. He
collected human skulls from anywhere that he could get them, and he filled them with pepper seeds. From this
practice, he developed a claim that skulls from people of different races had consistently different volumes and that,
based on the assumption that greater volume meant greater intelligence, he could order five races in terms of
intelligence. ‘Morton believed that people could be divided into five races and that these represented separate acts of
creation. The races had distinct characters, which corresponded to their place in a divinely determined hierarchy.
Morton’s “craniometry” showed, he claimed, that whites, or “Caucasians”, were the most intelligent of the races’
(Kolbert). He then listed, in order, Mongolians, South East Asians, Native Americans and Ethiopians. Defenders of
slavery embraced Morton’s ideas as a means of supporting their claims that slaves were less than human (Kolbert).

ACTIVITY
Use the QR code to read the description of Samuel Morton’s experiment.
1 Did the experiment follow the scientific method?
2 If so, identify the different stages. If not, explain what was missing.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How was evidence misused in this particular experiment?

All of these arguments relied on interpretation of knowledge from religion and incomplete science, or
pseudoscience. There was no conclusive information to settle the question one way or the other; people were able to
choose the argument which served their purposes. In the early twenty-first century, however, when the actual
scientific project of mapping the human genome was completed, it demonstrated conclusively that there is no such
thing as race at the genetic level. Not only are all humans closely related to each other, but all humans are to some
degree African:
By analysing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now
live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of
central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in
the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races – whites, say, or blacks or
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 Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies,
who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa. (Kolbert)
All non-Africans are descended from people who left Africa approximately 60 000 years ago. The map on the next
page shows the migration over time, and establishes the fact of the descendance to Europe and the Americas from
older humans from Asia and Africa.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do ethical principles shape the use of evidence in history and the arts in the same way that ethics shape
the use of evidence in the natural sciences?

The ethical use of science requires that we make our claims about the relationships among people from different
races based on the most up-to-date science which is available. It also requires, however, that we use science which
resulted from studies that were properly conducted. Speculation about relationships among species based on the
Bible or on skull measurements did not result in scientific claims. We always need to be alert to attempts to claim
that something is true based on science. Rather than just accepting the claim, we have to know how the ‘scientific
knowledge’ was developed. If it was done in accordance with scientific methods, then we know we can trust it.

A more recent accusation of an ethically questionable use of science was made in an article by the evolutionary
biologist Colin Wright titled ‘The New Evolution Deniers’. In his article, Wright argues that the age-old objections
to Darwin’s theory of evolution from right-wing evangelical Christians (as discussed in Chapter 6 and on page 309
of this chapter) have been usurped by a new form of denial from the political left, in the form of ‘blank-slate
psychology’. An old question in psychology is whether humans are born as blank slates or whether they are born
with certain traits innately present; this is known as the nature vs nurture debate. Some social justice activists,
Wright argues, are committed to the blank slate idea – the idea that human traits, including gender and sexual
identity – are the result of each person’s exposure to their environment. In other words, he says, some social justice
activists want to promote the idea that all brains – male and female – start out identical to each other and then
change as a result of socialization (Wright). This ‘blank-slate psychology’ is, however, rejected by scientists:
the evidence for innate sex-linked personality differences in humans is overwhelmingly strong. But
experts also universally reject that this view demands we embrace biological essentialism, because the
environment does play a role, and observed sex differences are simply averages and overlap tremendously
between the sexes. Sex no more determines one’s personality than it determines one’s height. Sex
certainly influences these traits, but it does not determine them. For instance, most of us know females
who are taller than most males, and males who are shorter than most females, though we are all aware that
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 males are, on average, taller than females. In humans, the same is true for behavioral traits. (Wright)

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are findings of other areas of knowledge subject to controversy arising from political pressure in the
same way that some findings of the natural sciences are? Why or why not?

In other words, the human and natural sciences tell us that our traits are partly shaped by our biology and partly by
our environment. What is still unclear is the degree to which each one influences people.
Wright goes on to state that some activists have argued that biological sex is itself a social construct, the product of
environmental rather than biological factors. Traditionally speaking, humans have been considered sexually binary –
they are born with male sexual organs or they are born with female sexual organs. Gender identity, in contrast, is a
different proposition altogether. Gender identity is strongly shaped by environment, and biologists have made no
attempt to claim that physical biology determines a person’s gender identity. Wright suggests that social activists
have conflated gender and sex to make the case that all people – including transgender people – are the same, and,
therefore, deserve equal treatment under the law.
However, a closer look at some of the articles Wright is responding to suggests things might be a little more
complex. He refers to a number of articles and editorials from well-respected and ostensibly apolitical scientific
publications that argue that the traditional understanding of sex as a binary model is reductive and potentially
harmful to people born with hormonal, genetic or anatomical ambiguities that make it difficult to be classified
categorically as male or female. The most inclusive definitions suggest that as many as 1 in 100 people exhibit such
differences of sex development (DSD). ‘These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in
binary terms’, writes Claire Ainsworth, a science journalist with a PhD in developmental biology. ‘Few legal
systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person’s legal rights and social status can be heavily
influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female’ (Ainsworth). This means that parents of babies
with DSD are often forced to make difficult decisions about whether to bring their child up as a boy or a girl, a
decision that might involve surgical intervention to ‘normalize’ their baby’s genitals, and which might clash with the
child’s ultimate gender identity.
The truth of the matter, Ainsworth concludes, is that there is no one way to categorically define sex. ‘So if the law
requires that a person is male or female’, she asks, ‘should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or
chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash?’
It is clear that this is a complex scientific issue, one made all the more difficult by the strong political and emotional
responses inevitably provoked by questions of gender identity. It is important to note, however, that whatever
conclusions we draw, there is no scientific justification for discriminating against transgender people or people with
DSD. The question, rather, is whether science provides a basis for suggesting that sex is not the binary dichotomy it
is commonly believed to be, and if so, what implications this has, if any, for the social and legal statuses of
transgender, non-binary and intersex individuals. This is, however, still a question, not a resolved finding. Given a
discussion which is so far new and unresolved, and which is, as we have seen, quite complex, any attempt to make
dogmatic claims that science supports one particular political perspective on this question is a misuse of science, in
the same way that science has been misused to support the anti-vaxxer movement or to deny humans’ role in
accelerating global warming.

ACTIVITY

Read the article by Colin Wright and those he is responding to using the QR codes. Think about the
following questions:
1 How do we decide between the competing claims of qualified scientists?
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2 What evidence does each author provide for their claims? Is the evidence sourced to scientific
studies?
3 What are the strengths and weaknesses of each article?
4 Which author, in your opinion, is using scientific thinking in a more ethical way?

ACTIVITY
1 What do you think the forces are which work on people’s minds in such a way as to cause them to
prioritize something above reality? In other words, what kinds of things happen in people’s experience
to drive them to care more about what they want to be true than what is true?
2 In many cases, wanting something to be true can be a positive force, in that if the goal is achievable,
that desire can drive us to action. In other cases, however, goals are not achievable, but people try to
realize them anyway. How can people know whether what they want is reasonable and achievable
and when it is not?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do the values that influence the production of knowledge in the natural sciences compare to the
important values in mathematics?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Values
We saw in Chapter 7 how deeply intertwined political knowledge and values are. We have seen in this
chapter how deeply dependent the acquisition of scientific knowledge by non-scientists can be on other
personal values, which may either aid or impede the acceptance of that knowledge. The methods for
making knowledge in the natural sciences reveal that scientists in general value careful observation,
rational processing of data and caution in making claims, even when they are well-founded, because
some finding later might arise to alter those claims. Perhaps more than anything else, that caution
reflects the values of those who generate scientific knowledge: scientists value the idea that their
findings express the truth about the way the world works, as much as it is possible to achieve that goal.
This is why theories are called theories and not facts, even though they are well-founded, and this is why
the search for knowledge in all scientific arenas continues. Scientific knowledge is never ‘finished’. New
technologies, new findings in other fields and new ways of thinking about things can, at any moment,
cause scientists to revise or refine their knowledge.

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Conclusion
We have seen in this chapter that the truth that scientists aim to establish is accurate knowledge and precise
descriptions of the nature of physical properties of everything in the Universe, including how they function. We
have also seen that scientists acknowledge, as a matter of ethical principle, that they will never be able to claim that
they know with absolute certainty or that they will, at any point, know all there is to know, as we cannot ever claim
that we have access to all the evidence there is. Many scientific claims have been, and will be, established with a
very high degree of certainty, and that certainty is strengthened as time passes and more scientific knowledge
coheres with what is already known. However, because scientists value truth so highly, all findings are open to
reframing whenever new evidence arises that can increase our understanding by making them more accurate or more
precise.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do the natural sciences provide us with good examples of people who approach knowledge in a rigorous
and responsible way?

The scientific truths that we have established are good enough to allow for prediction, invention and control over
many aspects of our lives. These include technological development, medical advancements and increased
understanding of how to preserve this world for future generations, as well as to explore the possibility of other
worlds which might be developed should that one day become desirable. The truth of scientific claims must be
established rationally through observation and logical induction, and it is tested pragmatically, by the fact that the
claims work when we endeavour to use them in order to improve people’s lives.

In Chapter 8, we were introduced to the physicist Richard Feynman, who provided some insights into the nature of
mathematics by way of the contrast of mathematics and science. As a physicist, of course, Feynman used
mathematics as a tool to help him do science. As a scientist, he expressed the central ethic of the natural sciences in
a very simple statement: ‘If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong’. In that simple statement is the key to science:
‘It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the
guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it’ (Feynman).
This simple, elegant statement sums up the relationship between science and truth very beautifully. The guiding
principle of scientists requires them to determine what is rather than what they wish or imagine or hope things to be.
It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his
name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.
Richard Feynman

CONNECTIONS TO OTHER AOKs

• Scope: The scope of the natural sciences is widespread but is limited to the physical properties of the
universe. What other AOKs focus, at least in part, on the physical world? Does the scope of history
and the arts have any overlap with the scope of the natural sciences?
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• Perspectives: Sometimes differing social and ethical questions, such as the question of the gender of
human beings, affect the way in which scientific findings are interpreted and applied in the world.
Should social values shape scientific findings? Is the impact of social values on knowledge claims in
other AOKs a positive or a negative feature, in terms of developing accurate knowledge?
• Methods and tools: Knowledge making in the natural sciences has historically been very dependent
on technologies which have extended our ability to observe the physical world in greater and greater
detail, among other things. How important is technology as a tool in other AOKs? Is the knowledge in
the human sciences or mathematics, for example, as dependent on technology as it is in the natural
sciences?
• Ethics: In the natural sciences, ethical principles are integrally tied to the fact that the point of the
effort to make knowledge is to find out what is real, outside of our minds. Anything which interferes
with accurate, objective observation is therefore an ethical problem. How does that relationship
between aim and ethics compare to other AOKs?

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boson/#51a468c73948.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. ‘There’s No Scientific Basis for Race-It’s a Made-Up Label’. National Geographic. National
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Linder, Doug. 2004. ‘The Vatican’s View of Evolution: The Story of Two Popes’. The Vatican’s View of Evolution:
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Liu, Joseph. ‘Religious Groups’ Views on Evolution’. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. Pew
Research Center. 3 Feb. 2014. Web. 1 Aug. 2019. www.pewforum.org/2009/02/04/religious-groups-views-on-
evolution/.
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Aug. 2019. https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/09/hauser-research-misconduct-reported.
Marks, Jonathan. 2008. ‘Great Chain of Being’. Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. Encyclopedia.com. Web. 1 Aug.
2019. www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/great-chain-
being.
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Web. 28 Aug. 2016. www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/pollinator-of-the-month/yucca_moths.shtml.
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2016. Web. 31 Jul. 2019. www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/.
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Inc. Web. 29 July 2019. www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/divining-rod-
zmaz70ndzgoe.
Nagaraja, Mamta Patel. ‘The Big Bang’. NASA Science. NASA. 31 Jul. 2019. Web. 31 Jul. 2019.
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Interior. 8 Apr. 2019. Web. 30 Jul. 2019. www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/bearesa.htm.
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 ceres/.
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pg=fmribrain.
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multiversestephen-hawking-theory-big.html.
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https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/.

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10 The Human Sciences
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will be able to:
• identify and reflect on the differences between the natural and human sciences
• identify and understand some of the main perspectives available in psychology and economics
• reflect on elements of the ‘scientific method’ as it applies to human behaviour
• understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative data in the human sciences and reflect
on the effect of this distinction on the reliability of the AOK
• explore the role of models in economics and reflect on how well they apply to the world
• reflect how ethical values are an important part of the scope of the human sciences and how this might
constrain the development of new knowledge.

Learner profile
Reflective
Can we ever be completely objective in our study of ourselves?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do some AOKs have more ‘predictive power’ than others? How does this relate to the respective scopes
of those AOKs?

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Introduction
The growth and explanatory power of the sciences is extraordinary. From the furthest reaches of the Universe and
the most fundamental physical facts about the smallest elements of reality to the immeasurable benefits provided by
the biological and chemical sciences, the natural sciences are continually improving our ability to understand and
utilize for our benefit the natural forces found in the world. These benefits have fundamentally changed the human
experience both for the better and the worse: we are able to live longer, have more leisure time, travel the planet,
explore the solar system and share information in ways that were unimaginable to even our grandparents.
One of the great strengths of the scientific method is its predictive power. In 2004, the Rosetta Spacecraft was
launched into space. Ten years later, after travelling around Earth three times and past Mars (using the gravitational
pull of these planets to create speed and the correct trajectory), past two asteroids, entering a 31-month hibernation
and waking up again, it finally arrived at its target, the Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It orbited the comet, which
itself is orbiting Jupiter every 6 years and travelling at a speed of 135 000 km per hour. The ability of astrophysicists
and rocket engineers to make use of their knowledge and to use the natural forces of the Universe coupled with our
own tools and technology to make all this happen is extraordinary.

In 2008, the global economic markets fell into a deep recession. This happens from time to time, but the severity of
this recession was so great that people immediately wondered how this wasn’t predicted, particularly when an entire
academic discipline was devoted to using the methods of science (including observation, hypothesis, application of
theory and prediction) to describe exactly this sort of phenomenon. Economics is generally considered a ‘science’,
albeit a ‘human science’, but if the natural sciences are able to apply the level of predictive power needed to send a
rocket into deep space and find its target, why can’t economists identify and defend against recessions?
One answer to this is that the human sciences are simply not capable of the level of prediction offered by the natural
sciences. While we might be able to manage rockets in space, managing the economy is beyond us. The difference?
It is the ‘human’ element. Humans are just not very predictable. We are not very reliable when it comes to
consistency and trying to guess what others will do when faced with a choice is nearly impossible. Human scientists,
however, still give it a shot. They do this largely because of the success of the scientific method; its application has
given us huge amounts of knowledge and control over our environment. But it is precisely the use of the scientific
method, particularly in its use of mathematical modelling (very useful in astrophysics), on human individuals and
institutions that some suggest as the reason why many didn’t see the recession coming. The precision and
unassailable logic of the mathematical models used to describe the world’s economy provided the illusion of control
(Knowledge@Wharton). However, the economy cannot be controlled in the same way that rockets can. Rockets can
be controlled because the underlying forces of physics are not making choices, they just do what they do. People are
not forces – they make choices – and we cannot really predict what those choices will be.
What use, then, is the scientific method when applied to human beings? This chapter explores the ways in which
elements of the scientific method are applied in the human sciences and provides opportunities to reflect on that
application, the quality of the outcomes, the values inherent in such an application and the particular care needed for
the subjects of that application, human beings.

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ACTIVITY
What other factors or explanations can you think of to account for our limitations when it comes to
predicting human behaviour? Make a list with your classmates.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is it possible to discover laws of human behaviour in the same way that the natural sciences discover
laws of nature?

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Scope

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Not the natural sciences
Theory of Knowledge has been organized in a way that suggests that there are different types of sciences: the natural
sciences (discussed in detail in Chapter 9) and the human sciences.
The TOK student in you should immediately wonder about this. If they are both ‘sciences’, then why should we be
treating them as different categories of science? What are the differences and what are the roots of those
differences? Are those differences significant enough to suggest that they are indeed different things?

ACTIVITY
1 Create a grid like the one below. Fill it in with your initial thoughts about these two different AOKs.
The natural sciences The human sciences
Some disciplines included in this AOK are …
What does the AOK study?
What problems are solved by this AOK?
Are there any assumptions inherent in the AOK?
What are the weaknesses of the AOK?
How effective is the scientific method in this AOK?
2 Complete the table individually then compare your responses with a partner. How are your initial
views similar and different? How have your ideas changed in relation to your partner’s?

So, what is the difference between the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ sciences? We should probably start with the
obvious difference: each science focuses on a different object (what is investigated). As we’ve seen, the natural
sciences has as its object of study natural features of the world like bushes, rocks, atoms and stars, whereas the
human sciences study human beings. This is pretty obvious stuff.
But are humans not part of the natural world? Biology, physics and chemistry have all been used very effectively in
the study of human beings. Obvious examples might include how biologists have explained how our genes are
passed from generation to generation, or how chemists have developed healthy foods and medicines, while
physicists have worked wonders in understanding why we get sunburned and in developing X-rays and MRI
machines to see inside the human body to help treat illness.

In these examples, however, the elements being explored by these natural sciences have precious little to do with
what makes human beings human. They each treat humans as if they were objects and explain an aspect of the
physical body. Genes, chemical interactions and the effects of ultraviolet radiation on human skin are all the sorts of
things that don’t require any mention of human thoughts, beliefs or psychology. There are other questions about
humans, however, that require more than descriptions of physical interactions and processes. While biology might
be able to explain the mechanisms involved with inheritance, we still might ask whether our genes dictate our
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behaviour or our personalities. While chemistry can tell us what is in our food and (along with biology) what will be
healthy for us, we still might wonder why we eat so many things that we know are bad for us. While physics might
explain why our skin burns in sunlight, this nevertheless doesn’t really answer questions about why some people
might put themselves at risk of skin cancer by over-tanning. These further questions require an explanation that
relates to concepts describing human behaviour and beliefs.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How significant are the differences between disciplines within the human sciences?

For example, in the human science of geography (we will explore the different types of human science shortly), we
might be interested in the movement of people during different stages of a large city’s growth over time. Simply
pointing out that the city has grown or that it has grown in this or that direction is only half the story. A human
geographer would also need to appeal to why people moved as they have. Concepts like ‘economic opportunity’,
‘incorporate’, ‘smart growth’, ‘city planning’ or ‘housing markets’ all draw on the beliefs, desires and expectations
of individuals – concepts irrelevant when describing ‘natural’ geography (in most cases).

One difference, then, is that human sciences take as their object of study the relationship between human action and
human belief. Human scientists need to know facts about human bodies and their interaction with physical features
of the environment, but their questions are primarily about humans as agents, things which have beliefs, consider
choices, make decisions and engage in goal-oriented behaviour.
The human sciences, then, are focused on ‘agents’, that is, we act in relation to reasons and beliefs and the various
human sciences attempt to investigate that relationship.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Explanation
Various areas of knowledge provide different types of explanations. Here we are outlining a difference in
the types of concepts and ideas which would be appropriate in the natural sciences and the human
sciences. If we were to suggest that layers of sediment at the bottom of a river wanted to become rock in
100 million years to describe the process of rock formation, we would be accused of offering a poor
explanation because the concept of desire plays no role in the natural science of geology. The ‘reasons’
provided by the natural sciences refer to impersonal natural forces that act in the world. However, not
including the concept of ‘desire’ in the explanation of why different people spend their money on different
types of goods and services would equally be a poor explanation because ‘desire’ is a fundamental
concept in economics. Any ‘reason’ for an economic downturn, or some particular distribution of
resources would incorporate at some level the thoughts or beliefs of human beings.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What are the differences between the use of the concept of ‘cause’ in the human sciences and the
natural sciences?

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ACTIVITY
1 What other concepts do you think are fundamental in the various explanations offered by the different
human sciences?
2 What role would these concepts play in other AOKs?

Another difference between the human and the natural sciences is a direct consequence of the assumption that
human belief is the root of human behaviour. If beliefs are part of the explanation of human behaviour, and if
science is about recording observable phenomena, then how might the human scientist gather data about these
beliefs?
While we might be familiar with our own beliefs and have some awareness of how they relate to our behaviour, we
wouldn’t be able to observe another individual’s beliefs directly. We might infer their beliefs from how they behave,
but we do not have direct access to their own motives, beliefs or desires. Were we to observe a woman giving up
one job and moving to another city for another, more highly paid job, we might infer all sorts of beliefs: she wanted
to earn more money; she prioritized the new job more than her desire to live in the old city; she expected that she
would be happy in a new city. However, we can only speculate about those beliefs, we could not directly observe
them.
The human scientist would need to find direct evidence of which belief actually explained the behaviour. The
traditional way of doing this is through interviewing the subject or asking the subject. The answers to these
questions can then form part of the human scientist’s evidence.
The human scientists, then, will certainly use observation, like natural scientists, but in many cases human scientists
must gather a different sort of evidence, based on the testimony of the humans being studied. Once gathered, this
evidence can be said to be ‘observed’ in the sense that a human scientist might be able to evaluate and analyse this
information. This sort of data, however, raises questions of reliability due to its qualitative nature. We will explore
the nature of this sort of evidence and its effect on the reliability of knowledge claims in the Methods and tools
section of this chapter.

TOK trap
Speculation about other people’s beliefs or motives is not a reliable way to evidence claims about
behaviour. While we might think that some person acted for various reasons, and it might be plausible to
make this inference (as in the example of the woman moving cities above) the best evidence, the type of
evidence which supersedes the rest, is to have direct evidence of that belief in the form of the woman’s
own explanation or testimony. Therefore, in the context of TOK, to merely speculate about others’ beliefs
is to identify plausible claims about people, not reliably evidenced claims. Since TOK is partly about
learning how to identify more and less reliable claims, offering unreliable claims in TOK as part of your
analysis is not a good strategy.

So far, we’ve suggested that human scientists take as their object things (humans with beliefs, motives, goals, etc)
that are importantly different from objects in the natural world and must therefore use different methods to identify
and observe relevant evidence. These points help us make sense of the ‘human’ part of the human sciences, but what
about the ‘science’ part? What does it suggest that we call them the human sciences?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How would you characterize the relationships between the Scopes and the Methods and tools of other
AOKs?

This suggestion that the human sciences assume a difference between human behaviour and the events we observe
in the natural world, however, raises a challenging question. The difference rests on the assumption that we have
reasons and beliefs and that these are part of the explanation of why we act the way we do. The question is to what
extent those beliefs determine what we do. Given what we have learned about the ‘scientific method’, one might say
that the ‘human sciences’ attempt to apply the scientific method to understanding the relationship between human

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behaviour and belief.
Like natural scientists, human scientists will construct knowledge by:
• observing the behaviour of people (which might be individuals or groups)
• creating hypotheses about why they behave that way (appealing to the beliefs, motives, goals of those observed
and to the previous theories and ‘laws’ that have been developed in the field)
• developing experiments and predictions to see if the hypothesis can be confirmed
• evaluating the data from the experiments to see if their hypotheses have been confirmed or not.
These sorts of stages of knowledge construction are quite similar to those we suggested were at the root of the
construction of knowledge in other ‘sciences’. Following these steps is what it means to be ‘scientific’ and there’s
good reason therefore to accept that the human sciences are rightly called scientific. Whether the claims in the
human sciences are as reliable as those in the natural sciences, however, is a fundamentally different question. We
will explore this question later in the Methods and tools section of this chapter.

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Perspectives
The human sciences comprise an incredibly diverse range of different types of human behaviour. What they each
have in common is the application of the scientific method in constructing knowledge claims in relation to various
types of human behaviour. Table 10.1 on the next page shows what a possible list of such sciences includes.

Table 10.1 The human sciences

Human Area of study
science
Psychology The study of the human mind (thoughts, beliefs, opinions, etc) with particular reference to
its effect on human behaviour
Economics The study of the production, distribution and consumption of resources, goods and
services
Sociology The study of human social structures, including societies, institutions and groups, and
patterns of human interaction
Anthropology The study of human cultures and societies generally from a long-term historical
perspective, and in relation to physical character and environmental and cultural
relationships (anthropos = Greek for ‘human’)
Political The study of the state, systems of government and political activity
science
Human The study of human interactions with the physical environment, including the effects of
geography human activity on that environment

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do we decide whether a particular discipline should be regarded as a human science?

This incomplete list includes some of the disciplines which are traditionally considered as human sciences, but there
are others, such as philosophy, critical theory, literary criticism, linguistics, art history and law. These aim to
systematically study various other aspects of human behaviour, but they have a weaker connection to the scientific
method. Each of the different human sciences has as its focus a different aspect, but they all relate directly to human
behaviour.
One way of exploring the differences between all these disciplines and AOKs is to highlight the reductive nature of
science. It is traditional to offer a scientific explanation by pointing out the interactions between the most
fundamental elements of the system. Chemistry explores this by looking at the elements of the Periodic Table.
Physics is concerned with fundamental forces. Biology uses concepts like proteins, genes, cells and organisms as
building blocks in its explanations. The human sciences also aim to reduce complex phenomena to their smallest
features. Economics uses concepts like price, demand, supply and value. The fundamental features of human
psychology vary depending on the perspective taken: some might say Freud’s Id, Ego and Superego are the starting
points, while others might see neuro-physical features of the brain or its various cognitive functions (like attention or
memory), or language, intelligence or emotion as the fundamental concepts. Even Plato back in the fourth century
thought the human soul or psyche was constituted by reason, passion and desire, and behaviour could be explained
by the interplay between them.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do natural scientists use perspectives in similar ways to human scientists, or in different ways? What is
the significance of any differences for understanding the scope of those AOKs?

In this chapter we will be primarily focusing on two of the human sciences, psychology and economics. They serve
as good examples of the central issues in the human sciences and the questions and issues discussed in relation to
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them can be applied with relevant changes to the others.

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Psychology
Like other areas of knowledge, there are various ways of being a human scientist, each with a significantly different
approach to the subject. The object of each is broadly similar (the explanation of human cognition and its effect on
behaviour), but there are significant differences. Think back to the discussion of maps in Chapter 2, where we
explored why different maps of the world have different features contained within them. Sometimes they show
roads, sometimes cities, sometimes national borders, sometimes the natural features of the landscape. The
suggestion is that each map prioritizes certain information and understanding a map requires you to understand what
information the map is prioritizing. The different perspectives in psychology also prioritize different features of
human cognition.
Table 10.2 outlines the most prominent ones (Mcleod 2013).

Table 10.2 Psychological perspectives

Perspective Explanation
Behavioural • The starting assumption in behavioural psychology is that the environment
determines much of what we think and do
• Behaviourists will focus on observable human behaviours, seeing behaviour as
determined by the environment
• Conditioning is a key concept in behavioural explanations of human behaviour: this is
the thought that we have been conditioned to respond to stimuli in our environment
(Pavlov, who trained dogs to respond to bells, was a behaviourist)
Psychodynamic • Psychodynamic psychology considers the conscious mental life of human beings as
being only part of the human psyche
• Our conscious thoughts are the product of non-conscious processes, memories of
experiences and the dynamics of various elements. Sigmund Freud labelled these
other features the Id, Ego and Superego
• Carl Jung suggested our cognition was the product of ‘archetypes’ common to all
human minds which shape our thoughts and beliefs
• When we talk of ‘repressed childhood memories’ influencing our behaviour, we are
applying a psychodynamic approach
Humanistic • Humanistic psychology approaches human cognition in the context of the whole
being and the individual’s own self-image of themselves
• The humanistic approach leaves greater room for ‘free will’ or the ability for an
individual to take more control of their own mental states and flourishing
Cognitive • Cognitive psychologists prioritize understanding the processes in human cognition,
like memory, sense perception and attention
• Cognitive psychology focuses on how the mind processes information
• When we question the reliability of memory or eye-witness testimony, or consider
how various non-conscious ‘cognitive biases’ might impact our knowledge
construction, we are applying this approach because we are questioning the
processes involved in the construction of mental states (beliefs)
Biological • Biological psychologists start with an analysis of the physical nature of the brain to
understand human mentality
• The best explanation of human thoughts and behaviour from this view starts with an
understanding of how the brain works, so requires a deep understanding of
neuroscience
• Psychiatrists generally apply this approach, identifying the biological issues
underpinning mental illness and then offering medicines or direct treatment on the
brain
• When people are offered medication for things like psychosis or ADHD, a biological
approach is being applied
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Evolutionary • Evolutionary psychology offers explanations of human behaviour in terms of the
evolutionary pressures in the early development of the species
• According to this view, our general behaviours are the result of selective pressures.
Most of us have a natural fear of creepy-crawlies, for instance, because having such
a fear tended to keep us away from dangerous snakes and insects and kept us alive

One key feature of these different approaches is that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can be a
behaviourist and your friend can be an evolutionary psychologist and you both might offer viable explanations of
some behaviour. The charitable reading is that human cognition and behaviour are incredibly complex things and no
one approach can capture all the nuances. A less charitable view might suggest that the choice of a perspective is
little more than a matter of taste: it is interesting, for instance, to think about Jung’s archetypes in terms of human
storytelling (the similarities between various myths across cultures, or the power of these myths to illustrate the
features of common human experience), but having an interesting perspective is different from having a
scientifically valid perspective.

ACTIVITY
For each of the different perspectives in Table 10.2, consider the following questions (it might help to
keep thinking of each as a type of ‘map’).
1 What are the fundamental concepts and ideas that are applied in these approaches? Where do these
concepts come from? Are they borrowed from other disciplines?
2 What are the fundamental (most basic) facts of this view upon which other facts can be built?
3 Where do you see overlap in terms of the concepts and facts being used by the different
perspectives?
4 In what ways do you think the perspectives guide the thought processes of the researcher? What
questions will they ask? What types of answers will they provide?
5 What are the limits of these perspectives? Are there types of behaviours that they might not be well
suited to answer?
6 How grounded in observable fact do you think these approaches are? Can you rank them according
to how much their conclusions or explanations can be evidenced through observable events?
7 How would you rate these perspectives in terms of their being more or less suited to the job of
explaining human cognition or behaviour?

One way of offering some criteria about which perspectives are valid is to consider the links between the
perspectives and scientific research. The Freudian psychodynamic perspective for instance, postulates the existence
of some feature of our minds called the ‘Id’ (rhymes with ‘lid’), which is meant to be the seat of our biological urges
like the sex drive or the seat of aggression. Some would argue that treating these ‘urges’ as if they belonged to a
distinguishable feature is to add too much to a theory of human cognition. Instead, it would be simpler to explore
other explanations that didn’t require the existence of this unobserved and unobservable aspect beyond the
behaviour itself. As our understanding of the human brain progresses, or our understanding of human society and its
effects on individuals progresses, some of these perspectives might be able to better draw on them and incorporate
them into their explanations.

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Economics

What is the economy and how does it work? The term ‘the economy’ refers to all the decisions we make about
producing, consuming and allocating the goods and services that drive the world around us. On every day, in every
country on the planet, people are buying and selling, trading, creating, donating, making and using things they have
bought or sold. All these decisions and actions together are called ‘the economy.’ Both at the small scale of
individuals and larger scale of entire industries or countries, there are times when things are going well (when
people have good jobs, earning good wages) and times when things don’t go so well, and there is a lot of swinging
back and forth between these two situations, like a pendulum. These swings can be quite damaging to individuals,
companies and countries, so learning how they work is the job of the economist.
Trying to develop descriptions, explanations and predictions of these phenomena is incredibly challenging but the
human sciences have nevertheless made an attempt. The primary difficulty in this discipline is the same problem we
have seen elsewhere in the human sciences: it often is impossible to know precisely what an individual is thinking
when acting a certain way (even asking them might not lead to a truthful answer), and predicting a person’s
behaviour is equally challenging.
As with any of the other maps we apply to the world, choices get made over just what sorts of things should be
included in our descriptions and how to handle them. These various approaches, or perspectives, each has its own set
of values, priorities and assumptions.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Are predictions in the human sciences inevitably unreliable?
Is human behaviour too unpredictable to study scientifically?

Macroeconomics and microeconomics

One way of carving up the economic landscape results in the difference between what we call ‘macroeconomics’
and ‘microeconomics.’ As the names suggest, their difference has to do with the scale at which the researcher is
investigating. Microeconomics has to do with the behaviour of individuals, families or individual businesses; it is
like a map whose scale is very small and includes lots of close-up details. Whether you should buy last year’s car
during the end-of-year sales or whether you should hold out for a newer but more expensive model is a
microeconomic decision, as would be a decision of a company owner to give their employees a bonus, given the
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recent upturn in sales. Often in microeconomics the decisions directly affect a limited amount of people in close
proximity.
Macroeconomic research, however, is focused on economic phenomena at a much larger scale and doesn’t often
describe what individuals are doing. Instead of looking at what choices individual people are making with their
money, macroeconomics would describe economic trends in that individual’s wider community or country. Rather
than describing which car you should buy, macroeconomics asks about what is happening with the entire car
industry: how many new cars are being produced by all the car makers this year as opposed to last year? How have
social trends affected the growth of the car industry? In terms of the individual company owner, macroeconomics
would explore the trends related to the company’s type of business at the national or international level: how has
international trade influenced the industry? Has the national unemployment rate affected this industry harder than
others?
These scales of description are not entirely separate, obviously. Like any maps of different scales, they both describe
the world, but do so by highlighting and prioritizing different elements. For instance, a national bank raising interest
rates when the economy is strong (ie, there is a lot of money and resources being exchanged) is a feature of the
macroeconomic landscape. However, higher interest rates means that it is more expensive to borrow money
(because the borrower must pay back more in the long run). This means that a company might hold off on expanding
or an individual might opt for a cheaper car, which are decisions made in the microeconomic landscape.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do other AOKs have a ‘macro’ and a ‘micro’ element like economics does?

Just how the micro level relates to the macro level, however, is a challenge. Economists suggest that the
macroeconomy is the aggregate of the micro-level choices of individuals, meaning that the macro-behaviour (what
happens at the macro level) is the sum total of all the micro-level choices. However, developing a more ‘law-like’
relationship is a genuine challenge: just think of the difference in describing how your friends, behave individually
with how a whole crowd of people would behave. While describing your friends’ behaviour might be relatively
easy, describing how a stadium full of people will behave is far more difficult. It is not a question of just adding up
the choices.
The TOK point here, then, is twofold: how reliable are those descriptions at the micro level and do all those
individual choices ‘add up’ to anything at the macro level that you can then measure or describe reliably? ‘The
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economy’ at the macro level isn’t a thing or an object we can study. To even identify what we mean by ‘the
economy’ we must make decisions about what sorts of data we are going to use in the discussion. Do we use
information about how many people are at work? What sort of work: full-time? Part-time? Permanent contracts or
limited term contracts? Do we try to include undocumented workers? Maybe we measure the amount of capital or
the amount of debt? Like real maps, economists must decide what is going to feature in their descriptions and what
will be prioritized. These choices will affect the descriptions offered.
We’ll explore some fundamental assumptions in economic theory which are highly questionable after the next
section.

Neoclassical and Keynesian economics

This discussion about what sorts of things to prioritize in an economic description and what scale to describe them at
leads us to a central distinction in economic theory, the classical/neoclassical approach and the ‘Keynesian’
approach. These approaches are often called ‘paradigms’, but this is not the same usage as paradigms in the natural
sciences, as we’ll see.
Economic theory really started developing in the eighteenth century with the Scottish economist Adam Smith. In his
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith constructs a picture of ‘the economy’
which prioritized the production and supply of goods. The focus for the subsequent classical and later neoclassical
approaches was to see the economy in terms of producers seeking to promote their own profit by creating goods and
services and sending them to market. The neoclassicists emphasized the role of the individual making rational
choices. The central idea of this approach is that the economy may weaken or get stronger, but in the long-run the
economy will ‘right itself’ and that there needed to be no intervention by governments: leave the economy alone, let
people produce and spend money according to their rational choices, the accumulated wealth of the rich will ‘trickle
down’ through investment and employment to the poorer and all will be well.
However, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the world’s economy went into sharp decline. Companies were
unable to sell what they produced, wages dropped and people were unable to spend money. Unemployment grew
and the cost of goods rose. British economist John Maynard Keynes (pronounced ‘canes’) questioned whether the
neoclassical description was adequate – after a number of years, the economy certainly didn’t seem to be righting
itself.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are all AOKs (or disciplines) affected by world events in the same way that economics might be?

In 1936, Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money which advocated for a stronger
role of the government in the economy. Rather than letting the economy alone, governments should, in times of
trouble, increase its spending to make it easier for the consumers of society to spend money. Rather than the
neoclassical’s emphasis on producers supplying goods to the economy, Keynes argued that a healthy economy is
driven by demand (the consumers) and recessions happen when people are unable to purchase desired goods, no
matter how many of them are available.
These clashing positions in what constitutes the fundamental forces driving an economy have been called
‘paradigms’, meaning each draws on a different set of beliefs about how the economy works. They are not a true
scientific paradigm, however, because the two can co-exist: there is nothing in the economy being described which
decisively shows the other to be false. As we saw in Chapter 9, in scientific paradigms the evidence will ultimately
confirm one theory over the other and one cannot hold the earlier view unless one ignores the evidence.

CONNECTION TO THE CORE THEME

Values and interpretations
The neoclassical position and the Keynesian position amount to different interpretations of the same
landscape. The facts are simply that people are buying and selling, producing, trading and consuming,
but just how that dynamic is described is significantly different. An individual’s choice between the two
perspectives often draws on other non-economic beliefs. The neoclassical approach fits very well with
certain political views about the priority of the individual in the political sphere and the limited role of
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government, allowing the wealthier in society to continue to push for profit. This political view is also not
one which can be determined by an appeal to facts in the world; it is an individual value judgment. The
Keynesian approach fits with the political view that a government’s role definitely extends to a larger duty
to intervene in the economic affairs of the country and may result in the government offering more
protections for the poorer sections of society.
We can see therefore that the choice of economic theory might not simply be a choice based solely on
economic principles, but will also draw on our own political values and intuitions. The value of the
theories, like different maps, may depend on our individual interests, questions and goals.

ACTIVITY
1 Use the QR codes to read two articles about neoclassical economics and see if it is possible to
identify political, social or moral beliefs (ie, beyond simply economic beliefs) that you think might be
impacting the descriptions of the economic principles. Consider in what ways an individual’s pre-
existing political beliefs might impact the choice and application of ethical theory.
2 Do you think that economic theories and political theories can be separated?
3 In what ways do their scopes overlap?
4 Do all AOKs have overlapping scopes like this?

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Can paradigm shifts occur in the human sciences?
In Chapter 9 we saw that the natural sciences show genuine progress in our understanding of the world, in the sense
that whereas once we used to believe in all sorts of interesting theories to help us make sense of what we
experienced in the world, we have given up on many of those theories because they no longer make sense. Aristotle
(384–322 BC), for instance, taught us that all change could be attributed to how the essential elements of all objects
(earth, fire, water and air) interact to produce qualities of hot or cold and wet or dry. Depending on an object’s
qualities it would naturally change its state into another combination of hot/cold and wet/dry. In the eighteenth
century this theory was finally put to bed in favour of the explanatory power of Newtonian physics. While it might
be a useful Theory of Knowledge exercise to think about how Aristotle would explain changes we see today, at best
it would be an exercise in seeing how our understanding of the physical world has progressed; here are theories we
no longer believe, and here is why we no longer believe those theories.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do paradigm shifts function differently in the natural sciences? What does this suggest about the
nature of the AOKs?

In the human sciences, however, it is not at all clear that we progress in the same way. The concept of ‘paradigm
shift’ still exists in the human sciences, but the final stage of a shift, where the old theory is seen as no longer
appropriate, is not as clearly achieved.
Rather than the knowledge developing via paradigm shifts, where new theories are developed to account for
weaknesses in old theories, new perspectives in the human sciences are developed which interpret the data in
different ways. The different theories lack incommensurability, in that old theories might still be used alongside
new ones. There is nothing in the data gained from observation of the world that will show one to be decidedly false
and the other true: both old and new can co-exist. If this is true, however, then it is difficult to think of the human
sciences as progressing in significant ways like we might suggest the natural sciences have. This suggests that
human science is not cumulative, but interpretive; the different perspectives in human psychology, for instance, are
simply different ways of seeing things as opposed to theories that once were accepted but which have now been
shown to be false.
Paradigm shifts in the natural sciences result in new theories that are incommensurable with old theories: one cannot
believe Aristotle’s theory of the essential elements and believe in the theory which has identified the basic elements
of chemistry and the ways they interact as described by modern physics. It is not a matter of interpretation – the first
theory has been shown to be wrong or false.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
In what ways might we say that our knowledge improves over time? Would your answer differ in relation
to different AOKs?

In economics, for instance, we might take a ‘functionalist perspective’ and view the economy in terms of its ability
to maximize output and reward. The goal in this case is to provide participants in that economy the best
opportunities to make the most of their resources and their opportunities. We might, however, interpret the economy
as a system in which conflict is the main dynamic, where participants are attempting to (or should be left alone to)
maximize their or their own economic class’ opportunity and access to resources at the expense of others. This is
often a charge of Marxist critics against a capitalist perspective; that an economy is somehow unhealthy or unfair
when the society’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of an elite at the expense of those who are suffering as a
result of that inequality. In that case the privileged will always have an unfair advantage in the economic conflict
(Matresse and Lumen Learning).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
In what ways does the perspective of the knowledge producer influence the knowledge produced in
other AOKs? Are the human sciences especially affected by the perspectives of their experts?
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The idea here is that these are interpretations of just what ‘the economy’ is and how it works. No matter our
perspective, we will be able to identify examples of economic activity which seems to confirm our perspective, but
the other perspective will equally be able to interpret the data in relation to their own perspective. This suggests that
the data cannot decisively show one theory mistaken and the other true. We cannot do this with Aristotelian physics;
his paradigm has no bearing on any modern observations of the world.
On this view, then, prediction is not genuinely possible because any outcome will be interpreted in whatever way the
theory suggests it should be, and this interpretation will come after the fact. The world might not behave the way
that some theory suggests it should, but the theory will be applied to interpret the event in a way that makes sense, as
opposed to showing that the theory is false.

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Normative and positive claims in the human sciences
This might be a good time to introduce another key distinction in the human sciences, having to do with types of
claims often provided. On one hand, the human sciences use and describe objective facts. These are called ‘positive’
claims (not ‘positive’ in the sense of ‘good’ but meaning ‘descriptive’. Positive claims describe what is there). All
human science disciplines make positive claims. Economists can quantify the unemployment rate of a country or
recognize the value of a country’s currency against some other country’s currency. Human geographers can track the
numbers of people from various demographics moving into and out of cities. Anthropologists can agree on the age
of some artefacts found in an archeological dig. Psychologists can agree on the numbers of people who report
suffering from mental distress of some sort, or the fact that certain brain processes lead to certain mental states.
These are facts about the world, discovered through testing, and can, with evidence be shown to be false. In theory,
they can be fully agreed upon by the communities of experts involved.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do AOKs other than the human sciences have normative claims? How do other AOKs manage the
influence of normative values?

However, the human sciences also make other sorts of claims about what needs to be done in the face of these facts.
These other types of claims are called ‘normative’ claims. They provide guidance for our behaviour and often are
rooted in values rather than facts. If the rate of unemployment is high, and getting higher (a positive claim), a
Keynesian economist might suggest that the government needs to intervene in the economy to stop this, while a
neoclassicist economist might suggest that nothing needs to be done by the government, that the problems facing the
economy will eventually right themselves (both normative claims). The human geographers might agree that
affluent people are moving back into poorer neighbourhoods in a city, which is pushing up the rents in those
neighbourhoods. Some might see this as a problem in that the people living in those neighbourhoods are no longer
able to afford the rising rents, but others might see this as a process of ‘urban renewal’.
We see, then, that the scope of the human sciences (in their attempt to both describe and predict human behaviour)
drives experts in those fields to move beyond the facts and provide explanations and interpretations of the facts in a
way that often leads to quite different positions. These normative claims are not likely to be decided upon through
appeal to the facts, since they are interpretations of those facts and are grounded in values and judgment that often
come from outside the field (like the political beliefs affecting the choice of economic theory). Any attempt to
develop a policy out of a series of facts requires an economist to develop a claim about what is right or what should
be done in some situation. On one hand, this shows that ethical beliefs (beliefs about what actions are ‘good’ or
‘right’) are deeply part of economics, but on the other hand, it should make you wonder about just where those
ethical beliefs come from and how they can be justified.
Sometimes the normative statements are treated as if they are simple facts. Consider the dilemma when a low-
income neighbourhood encounters an influx of wealthier landowners or renters. With them comes more money,
which then results in a more affluent area, more shops, restaurants and perhaps city infrastructure. Some would
argue that this is obviously a good thing; it is a fact that rising rents and property values are a good thing, at least
from the perspective of the landlords and homeowners. However, if the incomes of the people who have lived in that
neighbourhood don’t rise along with the property values, then they might be forced to leave because the rents and
the prices of the goods for sale in that neighbourhood might rise. This might result in a loss of culture and more
difficulties making ends meet for those forced to move. So, while ‘property prices are low’ is a positive claim,
‘urban renewal is an important part of a successful city’ is not entirely obvious. After all, who defines what a
‘successful city’ looks like?

ACTIVITY

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After you have completed this activity you can check your answers by using the QR code. Decide
whether the following statements are positive or normative. If you think the statement is positive, indicate
what sort of evidence you think you would use to justify that position. If you think the statement is
normative, indicate on what values someone who believes it would base it.
• Appraising staff takes around 60 hours a year.
• This is an important task for middle managers.
• Men are generally more aggressive than women.
• Aggression is a good trait in business.
• Crime costs insurance companies $12 billion a year.
• We should always lock up criminals after one offence.
• Increasing the money supply leads to short-term unemployment.
• Medium levels of unemployment are a price worth paying for a growing economy.

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Methods and tools

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Observation
Earlier, we discussed the challenges faced by the human scientist in applying the steps of the scientific method. If
the object of investigation is human cognition and its relation to behaviour, then, the scientists must come up with
ways of observing this cognition. This is a challenge when thoughts, beliefs, attitudes or motives are known directly
only to the person having the beliefs. In addition, psychologists regularly point out that we often are mistaken in just
what we think our own beliefs actually are.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Is it possible to eliminate the effect of the observer in the pursuit of knowledge in the human sciences?
How might the beliefs and interests of human scientists influence their conclusions?

In this section we will largely be focusing on psychology as an example of human sciences, because it has a large
number of what we would consider scientific experiments which attempt to make human thoughts, values and
beliefs observable. For example, we know that we are sometimes biased in our dealings with other people, often
unconsciously, but the fact that they are unconscious makes it difficult for us to identify our biases and deal with
them.

CASE STUDY
Project Implicit

In an attempt to measure what psychologists call ‘implicit social cognition’, that is ‘thoughts and feelings
outside of conscious awareness and control’, three social scientists formed Project Implicit. It was
designed to identify an individual’s non-conscious attitudes and biases towards a number of different
characteristics, which has grown to include race, religion, favourite US presidents, weapons and body
weight.
One test explores the extent to which concepts like male and female are associated with other concepts
like career and family. Since the focus of the test is to uncover non-conscious beliefs, simply asking ‘are
you more likely to associate “male” with “career”?’ will, of course, not work. One reason for this is social
expectation: when asked sensitive questions about bias or prejudice we might not want to give genuine
answers, instead opting for what social pressure suggests we should say. In this case, presumably, we
would want not to be seen to consider ‘male’ and ‘career’ to be associated as this is a gender stereotype
which modern society is keen to overturn. Knowing this, Project Implicit instead asks participants to play
a word categorization game, where we are asked to classify terms under headings like ‘Family’ and
‘Career’. The terms are men’s and women’s names (like Ben, Julia, John, Rebecca) and terms related to
the workplace (like ‘employment’, ‘work’ and ‘salary’). Participants are asked to classify them to either
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Male/Female or Family/Work as quickly as possible. The time it takes to classify each term becomes the
observable data and the assumption is that people will find it easier and quicker to categorize terms in
line with their non-conscious biases. The time it takes to categorize the pairings is measured and the
quicker times are indicative of your biases.
Interpreting the reliability of this test is problematic. Taking this test at different times, in different
conditions, tends to yield different results. This suggests that the phenomenon being studied might not
be as observable as assumed. In fact, the test designers are aware of this and suggest that the data
provided in the test is valuable ‘in the aggregate’; that is, using the results attained by a large sample of
many people might tell us about a population, but might have little relevance if applied to individuals
(Lopez). They also suggest that the data should be used carefully in making decisions based on it in
reality (Project Implicit ‘Understanding and interpreting IAT results’). Just because you take it once, that
doesn’t mean that the results from that one test describe you well. You would have to take the test many
times, in different situations (in different physical contexts and at different times), in order to identify a
general trend about yourself.
This is one example of how human scientists have discovered clever ways of ‘making observable’ what
is going on in the minds of participants, even though those beliefs themselves are unobservable,
sometimes even to the participants themselves. We’ve seen in this case, however, that the results of
these experiments might not be reliable, or they are only reliable in certain situations and conditions.

ACTIVITY
Use the QR code to find out more about Project Implicit and take the test.
1 What do you think the point of a test like this is?
2 Are there values written into this test?
3 How might the results of a test like this impact our future behaviour?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How does new knowledge in other AOKs affect individual ethical values?

DEEPER THINKING
The Hawthorne Effect
This discussion of Project Implicit raises a challenge to the usefulness of some forms of data gathering
in the human sciences, called the Hawthorne Effect (or the Observer Effect). The general idea is that
people behave differently when they know they are being observed (or tested). In the 1920s and 1930s,
a series of experiments took place in a factory in Hawthorne (a city in the US) to see whether or not
lighting levels would have an effect on the productivity of workers in the factory. Researchers found,
however, that continually decreasing the light actually correlated with an increase in production. Could it
be that the darker it was the more effective the factory workers were? This seemed implausible. The final
conclusion was that the workers were not responding to the light at all, but rather were responding to the
fact that they were being observed and so worked harder, wanting to ‘do well’ (Kenton 2019a). You
might have experienced this if your school has ever been inspected by some outside body or your class
has been inspected by the principal or head teacher. You might have noticed that the lessons offered
while the teacher is being observed are significantly different than the day-to-day lessons and the

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students tend to behave better!
This highlights another important challenge to the human sciences, namely the humans involved can
influence the data if they know they are being tested. If they want to promote a certain conclusion, they
might behave quite differently. In the implicit bias test above, participants might not want to appear
biased, so they will try their best to avoid giving the impression that they are. This will have an effect on
the final data, even though the designers of the experiment have tried to avoid such an influence. One
way to overcome this problem is by instructing that the test be taken a number of times to provide an
aggregate. However, this suggests that data collected after a single experiment is not valuable. Another
way to avoid the observer effect would be to conduct the experiment in such a way that the subjects
being tested don’t know that they are the subject of an investigation, but this raises serious ethical issues
about whether or not the participants have consented to take part. One famous example of this is the
Milgram experiment, which we will discuss later in this section.

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Replicability
An important way of testing claims in the sciences is replicability (meaning to replicate or copy). The idea is that if
what some scientist claims is ‘true’, then another scientist can run the same experiment and come up with similar
findings. Successfully replicating results means that there were no hidden influences or biases or manipulation of the
results. If a different scientist with perhaps a different background and perspective arrives at the same results, then
the results are said to be reliable. However, being able to replicate studies in the human sciences can be a challenge,
given some of the reasons we discussed in the opening sections of this chapter: human beings are unique – each
brings with them their own set of background experiences, beliefs, goals and ideas. What might be true of one set of
individuals is not necessarily an indication of what is true of some other set of individuals in a different context.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What is the relationship between ‘replicability’ and ‘reliability’ in the scientific method? What are the
differences between how the human and natural sciences apply that method?

This is why in 2013, researchers at the University of Virginia, led by psychologist Brian Nosek, established the
Center for Open Science, whose aims state that ‘the challenges of disease, poverty, education, social justice, and the
environment are too urgent to waste time on studies lacking rigor, outcomes that are never shared, and results that
are not reproducible’ (‘Show Your Work’). The emphasis on reproducibility shows the importance of this for rigour
in the sciences. Unfortunately, the Center found that of 100 replication attempts of a wide range of psychological
studies only 39 of them were able to reproduce results similar to those of the original studies (Baker). Since 2013,
the Center has worked to raise the profile of reproducibility as a crucial step in the processes by which the sciences
make their claims more reliable. They produced a pamphlet highlighting reasons why reproducibility is necessary to
avoid a ‘crisis’ in the sciences (Figueiredo and Janz). In this case the focus is on research in the political sciences.

ACTIVITY
Use the QR code to research the seven reasons why replicability is important for robust scientific
knowledge.
1 For each reason, explain why replication in that instance will help make the research stronger.
2 What do you think are the reasons why replication is such an important feature of the construction of
knowledge in the human sciences?

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Quantitative versus qualitative data
One of the great strengths of the scientific method is its insistence on quantifiable data. ‘Quantifiable’ means
measurable by some objective standard, a standard that doesn’t depend on an individual’s tastes or opinions. Any
scientist using the same measurement techniques and scales should agree on the observed phenomenon they are
studying. This means that the data is ‘reliable’; in the strict scientific sense, a ‘reliable’ conclusion or measurement
is one that other scientists would also arrive at. To see this, just think of the measurements you make in your own
science classes.
The effects of a painkiller on a patient’s body can, in principle, be observed and described by any expert observer of
the human body and presumably these physical and chemical effects could be agreed upon. However, the extent to
which a patient’s headache (the ‘pain’ element) has reduced is only ‘observable’ by that patient. So, the claim that
the medication has ‘worked’ in the sense that the pain is gone, is something unobservable to scientists.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
In what ways do the human and natural sciences manage the challenges posed by qualitative data?
Do other AOKs use quantitative data as much as the human sciences? How might the historical method,
for instance, manage or use quantitative data?

In the human sciences, the investigations often require researchers to seek data that is subjective to the individual
(like pain) and this sort of data is a challenge to measure with any reliability. The effectiveness of a school initiative
on student well-being could measure some quantifiable data by measuring things like the numbers of students
visiting the school psychologist, the number of days missed or the number of students on the ‘vulnerable’ lists. At
some point, however, the data will have to include information gathered from the students themselves about how
they feel. This sort of data, which relies on an individual’s introspection or self-reporting internal states is called
‘qualitative’.
As an example, the World Health Organization studies the well-being of young people all over the world and relies
heavily on qualitative data in doing so. Rather than letting students make up their own responses, a series of possible
answers are offered. Use the QR code to see the full results and analysis of one such study.

Some of the questions they asked are shown in Table 10.3, together with the types of responses the participants
could choose from (Currie, et al).

Table 10.3 World Health Organization questions to determine health and well-being among young people
Types of questions Responses offered
How often they experienced a number of unpleasant A range from ‘about every day’ to ‘rarely or
symptoms in the last six months (eg, headache, never’
stomachache, feeling low, irritable or bad tempered, feeling
nervous, difficulties in getting to sleep, feeling dizzy)
How they would rate their ‘life satisfaction’ A ‘Cantril Scale’, where the top of the scale
represents the best possible (for the
individual) and the bottom represents the
worst possible (for the individual)
How they would describe the state of their health A scale offering ‘excellent’, ‘good’, ‘fair’ and
‘poor’ as answers
Whether they find ‘most of the students in my class(es) are A range of options ranging from ‘strongly
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kind and helpful’ agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’
How pressured they feel by the schoolwork they have to do Response options ranging from ‘a lot’ to
‘not at all’
How they perceive their teachers’ beliefs about their school Response options ranged from ‘very good’
performance compared to their classmates to ‘below average’
How many close friends of the same gender they have Response options ranging from ‘none’ to
‘three or more’
How easy they found it to talk to their parents, ‘about things Response options ranging from ‘very easy’
that really bother you’ to ‘very difficult’
How often they had taken part in the bullying of another Response options ranging from ‘I have not
student at school recently bullied another student at school in the
past couple of months’ to ‘several times a
week’

ACTIVITY
1 Consider the questions and types of responses shown in Table 10.3. Identify elements that you think
would refer to observable facts or facts which could be measured objectively (quantitative) and
elements which are known only to the participant (qualitative).
2 Make a list of the evidence a participant would need to use to justify their response. Is that evidence
valid?
3 To what extent do you think that these questions will lead to genuine data?
4 Do you think the types of questions and the available responses might limit the objectivity of the data?
5 Might there be contextual elements that would influence the responses? What if a young person took
the test after a fight with their parents? Or at a time when they were feeling particularly lonely?
6 Do you think those questions would capture genuine facts about the individual?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do other AOKs suffer the challenges posed by non-neutral questions to the same extent? What
differences in the scope and methods and tools of the AOKs can you use to explain your answer?

The questions above all rely on ‘self-reporting’, meaning that the students were asked questions that required them
to disclose information about themselves and there are some very subjective elements to them. Consider the question
about what they think their teachers think about them. This question is ripe for subjectivity. What if the question was
being answered after a particularly bad day at school when the student received a poor grade from a teacher? The
student is very likely in that case to think that the teacher doesn’t think they are as good as other students, but this
might simply not be true. Similarly, the question about talking to a parent about ‘things that really bother you’ would
surely depend on just what the student is bothered by: some things they might talk to their mother about, but some
other things they would not.
The last question in Table 10.3 also raises an interesting challenge for human scientists gathering qualitative data.
That question asks about whether the student considers themselves to be a ‘bully’. A bully is generally not
something a student wants to be thought of as being, so asking whether someone is a bully might make them want to
answer ‘no’, regardless of whether they are or not.

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One thing to keep in mind when evaluating the value of qualitative data, especially data that has been collected
through self-reporting, is what the goal of the research is. In this case, the World Health Organization (WHO) is
interested in the well-being of young people, so whether or not it is true, if a student believes that their teacher really
doesn’t think they are very smart, it will very likely have a negative effect on their well-being. In other words, the
facts being captured by these questions are sometimes not really what they appear to be about. In Theory of
Knowledge we consider the ‘scope’ of areas of knowledge, meaning we investigate what types of facts are being
investigated or what problems are being solved by the AOK. In this case it’s worth keeping in mind the ‘scope’ of
the investigation, which is about how students feel about themselves rather than whether those feelings reflect the
truth.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does non-neutral language affect knowledge constructed in other AOKs as much as it might in the
human sciences?

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Questionnaires
Using questionnaires, like the one by the WHO, raises another methodological problem in the human sciences: how
to ask the right sorts of questions. Imagine you were asked, ‘How old are you?’ This question is straight forward, it
is asking a question about a quantifiable fact about you. You can appeal to objective facts (the date of your birth) to
answer it. Now imagine a question at the opposite end of the spectrum, ‘Have you stopped kicking your dog?’
Suppose that you are not a dog-kicker. The question, then, is worded in a way that makes it impossible to answer,
due to the assumption that you have been a dog-kicker in the past. If you answer yes, then you’re admitting to the
charge, if you answer no, then it seems you’re still doing it. In other words, the question is not ‘neutral’ because
there are hidden assumptions guiding your response.

Learner profile
Communicators
How does the way we ask questions affect the responses we get?

This is an extreme example, but consider the following: ‘In what ways have you been discriminated against because
of your race?’ This question is clearly assuming that you have been discriminated against, and, if you cannot think
of a time when you’ve been discriminated against, it makes it difficult to answer. Consider, ‘How important is the
support of your parents in your academic studies?’ This seems neutral because you might say ‘not at all’, but the
assumption is that parental support is the sort of thing that should be an important part of your academic studies.

In a real-life example, a recent survey in New Zealand gathered data about people’s attitudes towards a law which
prohibits smacking or spanking their children. Voters were asked, ‘Should a smack as part of good parental
correction be a criminal offense in New Zealand’ and received a ‘no’ response in an overwhelming majority of
responses (87.6 per cent responded with ‘no’). There were criticisms of this vote however, given that the survey was
conducted by a group explicitly aimed at overturning the law, suggesting that the motives behind the survey were
negatively influencing the collection of the data. The complaint focused on the wording of the question; the
suggestion was that elements of the question would have unfairly swayed the respondents towards a ‘no’ response.

ACTIVITY
Consider the following questions and explain whether you think elements of each might be worded in a
non-neutral or leading way. For those that you think are leading the respondent, can you formulate a
more neutral question that still genuinely captures the same sort of data? Don’t get caught up in a
discussion around what the answer should be, rather you are investigating whether the question’s
wording leads you towards a particular answer or shapes how you think about the issues.
1 Are you enjoying school?
2 Do you have any problems with any of your teachers?

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3 To what extent has India’s exposure to the global market weakened its long-term protection against
recession?
4 How would you respond to the accusation that your implicit bias means you are a racist?
5 Don’t you think that the school is doing all it can to help you learn?
6 What sorts of long-term damage do you think that psychological experiment inflicted on the
participant?
7 What do you think of your country’s attempts to provide shelter for the homeless and equal access to
financial goods?
8 Most respondents agree that sustainability should be a priority for the school. Do you?
9 How much do you support your school’s policies on inclusion?

ACTIVITY
Use the QR codes to carry out some research on how to avoid leading questions and how you can
promote neutral questions. You might find that you think that some of the advice given is still leading or
non-neutral, but that’s fine – it just means that you’re applying your knowledge!

ACTIVITY
Construct a survey for an end-of-year TOK feedback survey
At the end of many courses in school, teachers ask the students to fill in a survey about their learning
experiences in a particular class. This is valuable qualitative data which could help your teacher and
your school develop a better TOK Programme.
1 Undertake some research about the learning experiences of those on the TOK Programme. Construct
a feedback survey, using the knowledge you’ve developed from your research, and give it to the TOK
students leaving the programme.
2 Write an evaluation of your questionnaire and the data collected. Did you collect the right data (and
how did you decide which data to collect)? Was the data something you think your teacher might be
able to act on? In what ways did the responses you decided upon influence the neutrality of the
questionnaire?

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Experiments
One of the strengths of psychology is its use of experiments to test its hypotheses. Find a psychology textbook and
look at the references and you’ll find literally hundreds of studies referenced. Some of them have to be extremely
clever to uncover beliefs and attitudes the participant doesn’t know they have; some are more obvious. The Stroop
Effect was named after John Ridley Stroop, who asked participants to name the colour of a coloured word on a page.
It turns out that it is a real challenge to do this quickly and accurately due to something called ‘cognitive
interference’. The point being made is quite interesting from a TOK perspective, but the experiment amounts to just
having a participant saying the colours in which words are printed as fast and accurately as they can.

You can take an online version of the test by using the QR code on the right.

One very famous experiment in the history of psychology is the Milgram experiment from the 1960s. This
experiment is very popular to discuss in TOK, but very often is not fully developed or analysed from a TOK
perspective. A thorough discussion is offered here.

CASE STUDY
The Milgram experiment
In January 1942, a Nazi officer by the name of Adolf Eichmann was charged with the task of sorting out
the logistics of the mass deportation of Jews living in Europe to extermination camps in eastern Europe.
After the war, Eichmann evaded capture, but in 1960 he was finally found in Argentina by the Israeli
secret service. He was brought back to Israel for trial, was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to
death. He was executed in 1962. Throughout the trial, Eichmann insisted that he was not responsible for
the intention to murder Jews, nor was he part of any decision-making hierarchy of the Nazi leadership;
he insisted he was merely following orders. However, he also admitted to never letting his emotions,
including sympathy for the individuals who were on the trains he had organized, interfere with his work.
He insisted he was a product of his times and that only those responsible for the decisions should be
responsible for the crime (Kershner).
Should we accept such an excuse? Is it really plausible that individuals, in the full knowledge of the pain
and suffering they cause, can shrug off responsibility for horrific actions against others, simply because
they were ‘following orders’? Or, was this plea simply an excuse? Surely someone who otherwise
harboured no animosity to an individual could never be persuaded to harm or kill that person simply
because they were ordered to do so by someone in authority. From a TOK perspective, we might use
the experiments and their results to explore our beliefs about authority and how authority works from a
knowledge perspective.

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To test Eichmann’s excuse and to see whether normal people could be ordered to do horrible things to
others, Stanley Milgram, a psychology professor at Yale University in the US, devised an ingenious
experiment in 1963, which has become one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time.
Milgram recruited individuals, telling them that they were needed to act as teachers for a study on
learning. They were to be ‘teachers’ and would be working with a ‘learner’ who was in a separate room
to the teacher. The learner would be attached to an electrode and the teacher would ask questions over
a headset; if the learner got the questions wrong, the teacher would administer an electric shock. The
teacher was told that they would be helping develop data on how punishment influences the ability to
learn. The teacher was then sat before a machine by which he could raise the voltage of the shock with
each wrong answer. The voltage was small at the beginning and would only produce a mild shock.
However, the teacher’s machine allowed the teacher to raise the voltage progressively higher and higher
until they would be administering lethal shocks for incorrect responses, electric shocks that would kill a
human being.

As it turned out, there was no learner. The teacher was the test subject and the scientist issuing the
orders was an actor. As the teacher pushed the button, thinking that he was administering shocks, a
recorded voice from the other room would scream in pain and terror and beg the teacher to stop the
experiment. When the voltage reached a high enough level, the shouting stopped altogether, as if the

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learner had died or passed out. When the teacher would query whether giving these painful shocks was
the right thing to do, the ‘experimenter’ (usually dressed in a white lab coat to look like a scientist) would
merely say things like ‘the experiment requires that we continue’.
In 65 per cent of the cases in the main experiment, the ‘teachers’ continued to raise the voltage with
each wrong answer, administering what they knew to be lethal electrical shocks. All participants carried
on to 300 volts, which is astonishing, given that electrical plugs in the US have 110 volts, with the rest of
the world at about 220 volts. Milgram concluded, that ‘the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost
any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most
urgently demanding explanation’ (Milgram).
Use the QR codes to find out more about the Milgram experiment. The first is a video with Milgram
explaining the experiment in his own words, with footage from the original experiment. The second video
is a recreation of the Milgram experiment by British mentalist and illusionist Derren Brown. The third QR
code links to an episode of the podcast Radiolab, in which the conclusions of the Milgram experiment
are shown to be less clear than we might think.

Milgram says that the main finding, that adults are willing to follow the command of an authority almost
‘to any lengths’, demands explanation. The conclusion that we are likely to follow orders even to the
detriment of others is a psychological claim, that is, it is a claim about human psychology. So, what can
we make of it from a Theory of Knowledge perspective?
We might consider the results from the perspective of what other knowledge or background beliefs the
participants were holding which might explain their behaviour beyond the straightforward claim that
‘people obey authority’.
As it turns out, the results of the Milgram experiment are far less clear than we might expect. The rate at
which the participants would administer high-voltage shocks were highest in those conditions which are
the most famous: where the participant sits at a bank of switches, overseen by a ‘scientist’ in a white
coat, and where the ‘learner’ is being shocked in another room, all on the campus of a hugely prestigious
university.
One requirement for following orders to the extent that the participants did would be that the participants
must already accept or believe in, the legitimacy of that authority. Milgram required that his researchers
(the ‘scientist’ in the room) be costumed in the traditional white coat. This produced in the minds of the
participants an awareness of both the expertise of the ‘scientist’ (an authority: a source of scientific
knowledge) and an awareness of his being in authority. In the initial experiments, Yale students and
people from the surrounding city were brought into the university to perform the experiments. This
environment would have also reminded the participants that something important was going on. Finally,
that it was a scientific experiment, would have suggested that the work itself was important; they were in
the search of ‘scientific knowledge’. Together, these factors produce an environment which activated a
number of pre-existing beliefs in the minds of the participants having to do with the legitimacy of the
‘scientist’, the prestige of the institution they were in and the general importance of the work. It is not at
all clear that it was simply a tendency towards obedience that motivated the people to administer fatal
shocks; it was also due to a set of beliefs about what sorts of things we should be obedient towards.
Milgram changed the conditions in a variety of ways and the results varied dramatically. When the
experiment was held outside prestigious Yale University, the rate of obedience fell to 50 per cent. When
the ‘learner’ and participants were in the same room (so the participant saw the actor getting a shock),
the results dropped to 40 per cent. If the ‘scientist’ is on the phone or didn’t show genuine interest in
whether the participants obeyed or not, or if the scientist was thought to be a non-scientist, the rate
dropped to 20 per cent. If there were two scientists who disagreed about whether the participant obeyed,
the rate dropped to zero (‘The Bad Show’, Radiolab 2012 and Mcleod 2014).

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ACTIVITY
1 During one day at school, make a list of all the elements of the environment of your school that remind
the students that what happens here is important, and for which your general ‘obedience’ is required.
2 What pre-existing beliefs (knowledge) do you have that leads you towards generally doing what the
school and your teachers ask of you?
3 Where do you think you would draw the line if your obedience required you to act in a way that
conflicts with what you think is ‘right’ behaviour?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do other AOKs have more or fewer ethical constrains on the construction of knowledge than the human
sciences? What do you think explains your answer?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Power
Another interesting TOK-related element of this experiment are the prompts of the ‘scientist’ during the
experiment. Their language had drastic effects on the behaviour of the participants.
There were four scripted responses to be used by the ‘scientist,’ when the participant showed reluctance
to continue:
• ‘Please continue.’
• ‘The experiment requires that you continue.’
• ‘It’s absolutely essential that you continue.’
• ‘You have no other choice but to continue.’ (Mcleod 2017)
You can see that the language of the second and third prompts remind the participants of the necessity
of the experiment. However, when the ‘scientist’ used the final prompt, reminding the participant of the
role of choice in their actions, none of the participants continued with the experiment. Every one of them
refused, once reminded of choice. It seems that the basic belief that we have a choice of how we should
behave is strong, even in the face of authority. Once reminded of that choice, participants made their
choice and stopped the experiment.
The fact that Milgram was careful enough in his design of the experiment to think about how language
might influence the results shows just how important getting the language of interaction in psychological
experiments right really is.
Another well-known experiment which underscores the significant effect language has on eyewitness
testimony is provided by Loftus and Palmer in their 1974 experiment. They asked participants to watch a
video of a car crash, then asked participants to estimate the speed at which the cars were travelling
when they collided. However, when asked about the collision, different words were used to describe the
impact.
The variant questions were ‘about how fast were the cars going when they
smashed/collided/bumped/hit/contacted each other?’ It turns out that the choice of word in the question
influenced the speed estimated, with the average estimate of ‘smashed’ being 10 miles per hour faster
than ‘contacted’. Additionally, although the videos of the collisions showed no broken glass, participants
who had been asked about the cars ‘smashing’ into one another were more likely to report that they had
seen broken glass in the video (Mcleod 2014).

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This again raises a challenging question for human scientist researchers, one we have considered
above: just what language should be used when trying to collect data from individuals? Is it possible to
use language in a ‘neutral’ fashion, one which doesn’t impact the responses provided by the
participants? Consider the activity where you created the feedback survey for students at the end of the
TOK course. Would the choices you made regarding the language in those questions have shaped the
responses? If so, would the data be reliable?
It seems, then, that the complex relationship between a person’s beliefs about authority and the
contextual elements of the experiment are hugely important when it comes to whether people will follow
another’s order. Later psychologists suggest that people follow authority when they believe in and accept
the importance of the knowledge being produced. One commentator on the study says, ‘People will only
obey orders to harm others when they identify with those orders and believe the good outweighs the
harm. In Milgram’s experiments, participants obeyed when they believed the good of the scientific cause
outweighs the harm being done’ (Oxford Psychology Team). The participants who administered high-
voltage shocks, in other words, were engaged in an activity which they felt was right; they felt they were
doing the right thing for the construction of important data. The participants’ own acceptance of the value
of the experiment was crucially important.
It seems, then, that Milgram’s claim that his study shows the ‘extreme willingness of adults to go to
almost any lengths on the command of an authority’ is highly oversimplified, especially given the lessons
learned from his own variant experiments.

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Models
Any discussion about how to describe the complexity of human behaviour leads naturally to an investigation of the
role of models in the human sciences. Models are analogies that help us make sense of the complexity of the real
world.

Economics makes heavy use of models. The AD–AS model is one such example. This is a model because it is a
human construction which is meant to illustrate some phenomenon in the world. It is a graphical representation of an
interpretation of real-world phenomenon: the aggregate (total) demand (AD) and the aggregate supply (AS).
The curves also function as analogies in that the curves are mathematical in nature (graphs are mathematical tools)
and can be the source of discussions about what happens when you alter the values represented in the graph. The
equation for the aggregate demand is:

You don’t need to understand any of the details to understand that by changing one variable in the equation (e.g.
government spending (‘G’)) , the other variables will necessarily change as well. This is the internal logic of the
model.

DEEPER THINKING
What is an analogy?
An analogy is a way of comparing two seemingly unlike situations. Like metaphors and similes, they can
offer a new perspective to something by comparing it in surprising ways to unlike objects. Metaphors and
similes are different, however, in that they offer static comparisons, meaning that they don’t necessarily
involve a logical progression. Therefore, in using a metaphor and saying that ‘the old man was a
buzzard’, the emphasis remains on the old man, and the purpose of likening him to a buzzard is to bring
out some characteristics of his personality. We don’t have to think much about the buzzard to make the
application.
Analogies are slightly different in that they generally contain an internal logic. When saying that situation
A is analogous to situation B, we mean that there is a series of logical relationships within situation A
that we want to use to uncover certain dynamics in situation B. There is an argument or a description or
an explanation of situation A, that is then applied to situation B, but B might not be fully explained. We
explored a famous analogy in the Perspectives section of Chapter 6, where we discussed the design
argument for the existence of God (pages 193–5). The idea was that situation A (the complexity found in
a pocket-watch requires the logical assumption of a designer, the watchmaker) is analogous to situation
B (the complexity of the world indicates the existence of a designer, God). The point is that the argument
really only occurs in situation A. We have to understand the logical progression in A and then we apply
that understanding to B, but the evidence that the logic works only comes from situation A. The claim
that the logic works in situation B is only an assumption. One way to think of this is that in the use of
analogies, we really only learn more about situation A. The assumption is that it applies to B is only that,
an assumption.

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The logical relationships in the graph and the changes in the values represented by the graph are then assumed to be
analogous or assumed to model the changes in the relevant events in the real world. However, the models are
necessarily simplified and represent only particular elements of the complex world of economic phenomena. The
graphs, curves and models are not themselves the economic phenomena; they merely represent or are assumed to
represent a simplified version of the real world. Imagine the complexity of the equation that provided a variable for
every component of the aggregate demand – it would have to include variables for every person and every economic
choice that that person made, added to all the other people in that economy. It would be infinitely large and useless
as a model.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What models are used in other AOKs? What makes a good or bad model? In what ways do the models
used impact the knowledge being conveyed?

ACTIVITY
Understanding and using the AD and AS curves (or any other mathematical model) requires an
understanding of the mathematical and logical relationships within the graph. However, the relationship
between producers, consumers, buyers and sellers in the real world are not mathematical, they are
social.
1 Knowing this, do you think that the analogy between the changes described in the AS and AD curves
represent genuine phenomena in the real world?
2 Does the use of these models affect how one justifies, or explains, economic phenomena in the real
world?

Assessment advice
The AS–AD model is an important model in economics and its effectiveness could be analysed in the
context of a TOK essay, provided the question allows it. Many of the AOKs use models to explore the
world and you might be able to build strong comparisons by evaluating how effective the different
models are.

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Assumptions

ACTIVITY
1 How do you think the inclusion of mathematical modelling in economics influences the reliability of the
subject? Does it become more or less reliable?
2 While it might be a mathematical fact that shifting the values on the graph around will result in other
values shifting, what relation does that fact have to events in the real world?

As we’ve discussed above, the economy is an incredibly complex phenomenon with innumerable interconnected
parts. How best to approach the study of it? We might consider the economy as being similar to something like a
hurricane. Hurricanes are nothing more than a system of incredibly complex and interconnected natural phenomena.
If we knew everything about each component of that system (wind velocity, fluid dynamics, ocean temperature and
currents, etc.), then we could presumably predict the behaviour of hurricanes exactly, like we can predict the arrival
of a solar eclipse in 10 000 years’ time. It is just physics; run the numbers (if you know how!) and see what you get.
The only problem is that the calculations are infinitely complex. Any unpredictability comes from our lack of a
complete understanding and inability to deal with that number of variables.
The economy (and human behaviour in general), however, has as its subject the unpredictable creature that is a
human being. We are not like the physical objects and forces involved in a hurricane, but rather complex creatures
whose decisions and behaviour is often unpredictable (even at the micro-level).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What assumptions underline the methods used in the human sciences?

In order for there to be any hope of developing a ‘science’ of the economy (where economists identify and articulate
‘laws’ which individuals within the economy follow), there must be a set of core assumptions which simplify the
erratic behaviour of humans. In economics those assumptions take the varied and multi-dimensional human beings
and turn them all into the same sort of thing: ‘a rational decision maker’ or a ‘rational agent’, someone who makes
decisions based on reason and whose decisions can therefore be predicted.

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do other AOKs rely on assumptions in similar ways to the human sciences?

The suggestion is that when faced with decisions, an individual will make decisions based on reason rather than
emotion. If you cannot really afford a new phone, no matter how many of your friends have it, or how fantastic that
phone is, you won’t buy it. You would consider your disposable income, your current financial commitments, weigh
up your need or demand for the phone against other goods and services that you need and make the best decision.
What constitutes the ‘best’ decision is determined by the second main assumption in economic theory, namely, that
people seek to maximize their profit. In this case, then, you would want to make sure that buying any other phone
wouldn’t leave you with more money and/or more satisfaction. (Economists calls this ‘opportunity cost’.) You
would pass on the really bad phone and buy the expensive one, even though the bad one might have been the
cheapest, because the bad phone would lower your overall satisfaction. But if there was a phone with exactly the
same functionality but half the price, you would feel dissatisfied by buying the expensive version because you
would know you paid too much. There are two key assumptions at work, therefore; first, that you will be making a
rational decision, and second, that you will make it to maximize your profit-to-satisfaction ratio.
As we see time and time again, though, people don’t really act like the rational machines they are assumed to be. We
see people pouring coins into gambling machines because they think the next spin simply must be a winner since all
the previous were losing spins. We buy things that we know are wildly overpriced because we cannot bear to wait
until we can find the cheaper versions and we know that everyone else will have it too. We buy things we know we
don’t need, and at prices we know are too high for all sorts of reasons, few of them ‘rational’.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What assumptions about human beings are made by other AOKs?
Do other AOKs also have to assume that human beings act rationally if they hope to construct
knowledge about the human world?

ACTIVITY

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Think of a big purchase you have made with your own money.
1 To what extent was that decision based on rational calculation of your need and the cost of the
product? What emotional elements were involved in that decision?
2 Was the desire or the desire for the product the result of what other people were doing or buying?
Was the desire the result of emotional advertising? To what extent was that desire for the product
genuinely your own?
3 Now think about a purchase that someone else has paid for. Would you have been willing to pay for it
yourself?
4 What do you think your answers suggest about this core assumption at the heart of economic theory –
that we make rational decisions when it comes to spending our money or allocating our resources (or
spending other people’s money)?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Interpretation
The sciences use a similar language when talking about what they produce. Concepts like ‘law’ and
‘theory’ are both used in the natural and human sciences, but their meanings are slightly different. In
each case they refer to regular patterns that are observed in the world.
Laws in the natural sciences are descriptions of regular and repeatedly observed phenomena; they
describe a regularity in the world. In physics, these laws are often depicted in mathematical terms. Laws
are developed when repeated observations are obtained and described, for example, the law of gravity
or a law of thermodynamics.
There are laws in the human sciences, too. In economics there are laws like the law of demand (the
higher the price, fewer people will want it), the law of supply suggests that as the price of a good goes
up, producers will tend to make more of it. Say’s law (which Keynesians dispute) suggests that as
production of a good increases, so too does the aggregate demand for it.

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Evolutionary psychologists might suggest that there is a law which states that behavioural adaptations
are the result of evolutionary pressures (kissing, for instance, has an evolutionary explanation). In the
human sciences, however, the laws are less observations and descriptions of phenomena and more
interpretations of events, or definitions. The law of demand, for instance, doesn’t describe an event (it
cannot, since it purports to describe a collection of events, happening at different moments in time), but it
does create an interpretation to make sense of events. A law in economics provides a definition which
then provides the conditions under which we can measure or observe, while laws in the natural sciences
generally start with observations and the generalizations follow. The law about behavioural adaptations
mentioned above in psychology is like a policy statement, which says ‘this is how we are going to
understand this behaviour’; it applies a perspective, it doesn’t derive it.
The meaning and use of ‘theory’ is also slightly different in the natural and human sciences. Theories
provide natural scientists well-documented and evidenced explanations of phenomena; rather than
saying that objects behave in regular ways, a theory will explain through appeal to a system of laws. In
the case of the law of gravity, appeal to Einstein’s theory of general relativity is what explains why
objects are attracted towards each other in the way described by Newton’s Law. Theories in the natural
sciences are generally extremely well evidenced and have very little valid counter evidence. One cannot
simply shift from theory to theory, because the prevailing theory (the ‘normal science’ stage in Kuhn’s
stages of paradigm shifts) is thought to be the ‘true’ one. This is why critics of scientific theories like
evolutionary theory are completely misunderstanding the term when they say evolution is ‘only a theory’.
Gravity is ‘only a theory’ as is ‘atomic theory’. As we saw in Chapter 9, the word ‘theory’ in the natural
sciences is more synonymous with ‘all reliable evidence and all other things we know about the world
say that this is true’, not ‘this is just a guess’.
In the human sciences, however, ‘theories’ can be seen to be more like interpretations; a set of beliefs
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which define the terms and create the concepts that will be applied. For example, cognitive
psychologists are loyal to a theory which says that you should treat human cognition a certain way and
provides the concepts to do so. But they might understand that a behavioural psychologist might
approach the same behaviour from a different perspective. Theories here are not necessarily mutually
exclusive. This is the same point we made with regard to ‘paradigms’: in the human sciences, different
experts might still hold different theories, and appeal to evidence won’t provide definitive ‘proof’ one is
better.

ACTIVITY
Compare and contrast the development of laws and theories in the human sciences and the natural
sciences. You should research Kuhn’s notion of ‘paradigm shifts’ to do this.
1 Create a list of reasons why paradigms will shift in the natural sciences and see if you can identify
similar shifts in the human sciences.
2 What do the similarities and differences between the AOKs suggest about their scope? Are they trying
to answer similar questions?
3 Are their methods similar enough for them both to be called ‘science’? Does your answer depend on
which discipline within the human sciences you’re considering?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
If two competing paradigms give different explanations of a phenomenon, how can we decide which
explanation to accept?

Another fundamental assumption at the heart of economics is the assumption of ceteris paribus, which is a Latin
phrase meaning ‘all other things being equal’. (You might recognize ‘ceteris’ as being similar to ‘et cetera’ which
means ‘and others’.) While the rational agent is part of the starting point of economics, ceteris paribus is an
assumption which helps economists make and test predictions. What it means is that the economist can assume that
all the other variables in a system remain the same, so they focus on only one variable at a time. It is the same move
that a natural scientist will make in their lab when they only change one variable to see its effect.
However, this assumption has a downside:
Like prices, many other factors that affect the economy or finance are continuously in flux. Independent
studies or tests may allow for the use of the ceteris paribus principle. But in reality, with something like
the stock market, one cannot ever assume ‘all other things being equal’. There are too many factors
affecting stock prices that can and do change constantly; you can’t isolate just one. (Kenton 2019b)
The difference is that the market or the ‘economy’ is a wonderfully complex system with untold numbers of
variables, any of which might be having an effect on the outcomes. When economists construct models to
understand how certain variables relate to one another, they will pin down all of the other variables that they are not
interested in so that those variables don’t affect the results. This is very helpful for economists as it helps them
explore cause-and-effect relationships (generally with a model). They can develop predictions related to one variable
and see if their predictions come true. However, the models are not reality, so, in effect, those other variables are
still exerting whatever influence they will naturally exert, meaning that the model’s predictive power is hampered.

ACTIVITY
1 Given these pretty fundamental assumptions at the heart of economic theory, how reliable do you
think it is as a ‘human science’?
2 Mathematics has become a large part of the ‘language’ of economics. What role do you think that the
inclusion of mathematical principles in the laws of economics plays in how reliable it is?
3 Does mathematics play a similar role in other AOKs?

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What are the core assumptions in other AOKs? Does recognizing them challenge how reliable or
convincing you find that AOK?

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Ethics
Ethical values about what is ‘right’ or ‘good’ or what should be explored heavily affect the human sciences. Given
that the main subject of investigation of the disciplines within the human sciences are human beings, this should
come as no surprise, but this does raise an interesting question about the knowledge in these subjects. There is a
tension here between the science element attempting to describe a world of objects and explain things, but also the
impact of social and ethical beliefs.

Learner profile
Caring
How do ethical considerations affect our study of other human beings?

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Values in economics
Earlier, we discussed the difference between positive and normative statements, where normative statements have
some suggestions of value or significance that is not in the objective features of the world. We might say that, ‘all
the buying and selling in an economy contributes to the gross domestic product (GDP)’ is a positive statement:
given the definition of GDP, the statement is true. However, saying ‘a strong economy is one with a high GDP’ is to
make a value judgment – a judgment about what is good and what should be valued. This is a normative statement.
We also discussed earlier one of the fundamental assumptions of economic theory, namely that economic agents
(people who participate in the economy by making decisions about buying and selling products) should seek to
optimize their profits or economic standing. This is a normative statement valuing economic growth, but why should
this be the case? Why would the most rational economic agent be constantly seeking more money or profit? Growth
need not be the only assumed good thing about an economy.
Since the nineteenth century, people have been producing more and more and this has been valued, but in doing so
we have consumed much of the world’s resources, polluted the environment, contributed to climate change and
ignored the vast majority of people in the world for whom ‘economic growth’ is not a liveable option. This raises
genuine ethical questions about the nature of this focus on growth: do we need to seek greater and greater profit?
Perhaps there are other things to value or to aim for in our economy? One argument is that the rational thing for an
economic agent to do at this point is to recognize the damage we do in the name of profit and growth and try to
construct normative judgments, values and goals that seek to address or avoid some of the problems we’ve
encountered in the traditional view.

ACTIVITY
If an economy isn’t designed to maximize profit, what else could it be designed to achieve?
1 Use the QR codes to watch Dan O’Neill’s TEDx talk and Kate Raworth’s TED talk. They each present
a different vision for what values economic theory should be designed to achieve. What are those
visions? Do you think they are realistic?
2 What character traits and motives in human beings do you think might make adoption of these
different visions a challenge? What new motives (other than ‘maximizing profit’) would need to take
their place?
3 Do you think it is appropriate for a human science to make these sorts of value judgments?

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Ethics in psychology
We might also recognize that ethical values are key to the construction of knowledge in psychology as well,
primarily in the application of the method. For any IB Psychology student who has tried to design an experiment, the
ethical implications of their research are paramount to that process. Two ethically dubious experiments are described
on the following pages.

CASE STUDY
Little Albert
One particularly heart-wrenching example is the case of ‘Albert B’ or ‘Little Albert’. In the 1920s, Dr John
Watson of Johns Hopkins University wanted to test the theory that by exposing an infant to
environmental pressures he could create psychological states like fear. He was confident that the
environment was the main determiner in our behaviour and thought that he could show that he could
condition human behaviour. He claimed:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I
might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even a beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
(Smith 2017)
Watson was building on the work of Pavlov, who showed that he could get dogs to salivate at the sound
of a bell by ringing it a number of times while presenting food. He did this until the dogs would salivate at
the sound of the bell even when no food was present. In Watson’s case, he started with a baby (Little
Albert) who had no particular fear of animals or white fuzzy things. He stood behind Albert with a
hammer and bar and would strike the bar at the same time as presenting Albert with a white rat. Albert
would be startled by the sound and burst into tears. Very quickly, he learned to associate white rats with
loud frightening noises and soon would cry and try to get away from white rats even without the loud
noise. So effective was this conditioning that Albert seem to be afraid of many animals and even soft
fuzzy things that were not animals, like fur coats. Watson had confirmed his initial hypothesis.

However, the trauma on Little Albert seems a high price to pay in constructing this claim. Our ethical
discomfort here is multiplied when we learn that there was no attempt to ‘de-condition’ Little Albert after.
Presumably, this fear of soft fuzzy things lingered for some time. What happened to Little Albert after the
experiments is not known for sure (Smith 2017). Use the QR code to read a description of classical
conditioning and to watch a video of Little Albert.

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This case underscores the close link between any human science that conducts experiments on human
beings and ethical principles. We generally believe that we should treat human beings with a high level
of respect and do our best to avoid harming them unnecessarily or unjustly, but what happened to Little
Albert seems simply cruel. It may be argued that the knowledge constructed is useful, but we must
remember that the cost of this knowledge, for Little Albert at least, was pretty high.

CASE STUDY
UCLA Schizophrenia study
Another case shows that even when the participants are not directly harmed, they nevertheless need
protecting, especially in terms of how much they know about what is going to happen to them during the
experiments. In a study which began in 1983, UCLA doctors wanted to find out how patients with
schizophrenia would respond to having their treatment withdrawn: what would be the effects and how
serious would they be?

Patients were informed that the point of the experiment would be to withdraw their medication and that
their conditions might ‘improve, worsen or remain unchanged’, but they were not told about how severe
any relapses might be, how soon a relapse might come or how long it would be until they would return to
their medication. One patient suffered a particularly severe relapse and threatened to kill his parents,
and another relapsed and ultimately committed suicide. Researchers defended the study, saying that
they didn’t drive patients into relapse (so not directly harming them), but others suggest that the fact that
the basic aim of the study was to have patients regress and that the patients themselves were unaware
of possible consequences means that the study was unethical (Hilts).

In an effort to hold psychological researchers to a high ethical standard, the American Psychological Association has
provided the ‘Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct’ which provides the guidelines and rules
designed to protect participants and researchers from unethical research practices. Central to the code is the notion of
informed consent, which means that participants need to be made aware of all aspects of the research which may
affect their decision to take part, including any short-term harm or possible long-term consequences. Before
consenting to take part, participants must understand:
• the purpose of the research, expected duration and procedures

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• participants’ rights to decline to participate and to withdraw from the research once it has started, as well as the
anticipated consequences of doing so
• reasonably foreseeable factors that may influence their willingness to participate, such as potential risks,
discomfort or adverse effects
• any prospective research benefits
• limits of confidentiality, such as data coding, disposal, sharing and archiving and when confidentiality must be
broken
• incentives for participation
• who participants can contact with questions (Smith 2003).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
To what extent are the methods used in the human sciences limited by the ethical considerations
involved in studying human beings?
Do other AOKs have similar ethical limitations on the construction of knowledge?

ACTIVITY
Research other questionable experiments involving humans, but which were genuine attempts to
construct what could be useful knowledge about human beings. You might consider the following:
• The Tuskegee and Guatemalan Syphilis experiments
• The Neubauer triplets experiments
• The Monster stuttering experiment
• The use of prisoners as test subjects
• The case of Henrietta Lacks
• The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study.
These are common examples and many more can be found in an internet search. Try to develop a clear
TOK-style analysis by exploring the value of scientific knowledge in relation to the ethical principles that
you think are being violated. In some cases, you might analyse the role of the participants’ beliefs and
the circumstances surrounding their decisions to participate, or any justification that the research had for
choosing that particular population of test subjects. Does it matter that a small number of people were
harmed (sometimes being unaware of that harm), when the knowledge gained will benefit many others?

ACTIVITY
1 To what extent do you think there is a conflict between the search for genuine scientific knowledge
about human behaviour and human psychology and the expectation that patients be treated according
to some code of ethical behaviour?
2 What value do you think research might provide, even if the methods by which it was gained violate
an ethical code?

TOK trap
Don’t try to argue whether these examples are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. That is a philosophical debate. Your job
as a TOK student is to identify and explore the ethical implications of those examples of knowledge
construction, whatever the ethical judgments.

TOK trap
Notice that the horrific experiments conducted by the Nazis on their prisoners is not included in the list.
This is because too many students automatically default to Nazis whenever these sorts of questions
arise. They are good examples, but often students simply refer to these experiments to illustrate their
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point without analysing the dynamics involved. When you are seeking examples, try to find those that
might not be used by many others. Some of the examples above are actually quite common, but you can
nevertheless turn them into good examples by offering precise and clear analysis.

ACTIVITY
Finally, discuss and debate the following question with your classmates:
Do you think that knowledge in the human sciences is hindered by ethical constraints?

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Conclusion
We’ve seen that there are a lot of similarities and differences between the human and natural sciences. The human
sciences seem trapped between two worlds. On one hand, they try to join the world of objects: identifying and
describing and explaining the patterns we see in the world around us. Human beings are, after all, objects in this
world and it turns out that we often exhibit patterns of behaviour which can be explained. On the other hand,
however, and especially at the individual level, we tend to be unpredictable. We have the conscious ability to make
choices and sometimes we make them in ways that others might find unreasonable, irrational or unjustified. Some
people think that human beings actually do not have a choice in how they think or behave. They think that our
behaviour is determined, meaning that all our thoughts and choices are physical effects of the physical elements of
our bodies and the world around us. This position is called determinism and means that if we can develop a full
understanding of all physical facts in the world, then we would also have a full description and understanding of
human behaviour. If this is the case, then there is a lot of hope for a full natural scientific description of everything
about us, in terms of neuroscience and the biology, chemistry and physics beneath it.
On the other hand, many philosophers and people believe that we have free will, meaning that our experience of
choice is a real feature of the world and that it cannot be reduced to other facts about brain cells or biology. If that is
the case, then applying a deterministic, cause-and-effect paradigm on human behaviour will always fall short. At
best, it will be able to describe how we tend to act at a large scale but could never apply that description to the
individuals at the lowest scale.
The choice between free will and determinism is one that ultimately cannot be made by appealing to evidence
because an individual can appeal to their own beliefs as explanation for their behaviour as evidence for free will, and
we can appeal to their brain and the power of natural science for determinism. The human sciences are trapped, it
seems, between two powerful perspectives, either there are no human sciences (it is all natural science), or the
human sciences comprise a distinct and valuable addition to human knowledge systems.
Which do you think is true?

CONNECTIONS TO OTHER AOKs

• Scope: Human scientists put human beings at the centre of their investigations, but individual human
beings are rarely as predictable as objects in the world, and human beings have all sorts of motives for
their behaviour. Do you think other AOKs related to human beings (like history or the arts or the
natural sciences) do a better or worse job in their exploration of human activity?
• Perspectives: The human sciences make use of a number of perspectives which are not necessarily
mutually exclusive. What about the human sciences allow this when this might not be possible in the
natural sciences in the same way? Does it make sense to say that there are better perspectives to
take? How should human scientists make decisions about what perspective to follow?
• Methods and tools: Some human scientists apply the basic methods of the scientific method, but
human beings don’t necessarily behave in predictable ways. Does this mean that the human sciences
cannot achieve the same level of reliability as other AOKs? If human beings want to learn about
themselves, shouldn’t the human sciences be the most important AOK?
• Ethics: Many ethical concerns in the human sciences arise from the fact that the experiments and
their findings impact individual human beings and their lives. The knowledge gained through
experiments, however, can genuinely help people. Do other AOKs have deep conflicts between the
value of the knowledge and possibility that the knowledge might negatively impact people’s lives?

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Works cited
Baker, Monya. ‘Over Half of Psychology Studies Fail Reproducibility Test’. Nature News. Nature Publishing
Group. 27 Aug. 2015. Web. 24 Aug. 2019. www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-
reproducibility-test-1.18248.
Chappelow, Jim. ‘The ABC on GDP: All You Need to Know About Gross Domestic Product’. Investopedia.
Investopedia. 27 Jun. 2019. Web. 30 Aug. 2019. www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gdp.asp.
Currie C, et al (eds.). 2012. ‘Social Determinants of Health and Well-Being among Young People’. Health
Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Study: International Report from the 2009/2010 Survey. World
Health Organization. Web. 31 Aug. 2019. www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/163857/Social-
determinants-of-health-and-well-being-among-young-people.pdf?ua=1.
‘Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct’. 2017. American Psychological Association. American
Psychological Association. Web. 4 Sep. 2019. www.apa.org/ethics/code/.
Figueiredo, Dalson, and Nicole Janz. ‘Seven Reasons to Work Reproducibly’. Seven Reasons to Work Reproducibly.
The Center for Open Science. 6 Aug. 2019. Web. 24 Aug. 2019. https://cos.io/blog/seven-reasons-work-
reproducibly/.
Hilts, Philip J. ‘Agency Faults a UCLA Study For Suffering of Mental Patients’. The New York Times. The New
York Times. 10 Mar. 1994. Web. 7 Sep. 2019. www.nytimes.com/1994/03/10/us/agency-faults-a-ucla-study-
for-suffering-of-mental-patients.html.
Kenton, Will. ‘What Is the Hawthorne Effect?’ Investopedia. Investopedia. 24 Jun. 2019. Web. 25 Aug. 2019.
www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hawthorne-effect.asp.
Kenton, Will. ‘What Is Ceteris Paribus?’ Investopedia. Investopedia. 30 Jul. 2019. Web. 4 Sep. 2019.
www.investopedia.com/terms/c/ceterisparibus.asp.
Kershner, Isabel. ‘Pardon Plea by Adolf Eichmann, Nazi War Criminal, Is Made Public’. The New York Times. The
New York Times. 27 Jan. 2016. Web. 25 Aug. 2019. www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/world/middleeast/israel-
adolf-eichmann-holocaust.html.
Knowledge@Wharton. ‘Why Economists Failed to Predict the Financial Crisis’. Knowledge@Wharton. 13 May
2009. Web. 7 Sep. 2019. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-economists-failed-to-predict-
the-financial-crisis/.
Lopez, German. ‘For Years, This Popular Test Measured Anyone’s Racial Bias. But It Might Not Work after All’.
Vox. Vox. 7 Mar. 2017. Web. 25 Aug. 2019 www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit-association-
test-racism.
Matresse, Cathy, and Lumen Learning. ‘Theoretical Perspectives on Economics’. Self-Check: Economic System.
Lumen Learning. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/alamo-sociology/chapter/reading-theoretical-
perspectives-on-economics/.
Mcleod, Saul. 2013. ‘Psychology Perspectives’. Simply Psychology. Simply Psychology. Web. 1 Sep. 2019.
www.simplypsychology.org/perspective.html.
Mcleod, Saul. 2014. ‘Loftus and Palmer.’ Simply Psychology. Simply Psychology. Web. 31 Aug. 2019.
www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html.
Mcleod, Saul. ‘The Milgram Experiment’. Simply Psychology. Simply Psychology. 5 Feb. 2017. Web. 25 Aug.
2019. www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html.
Milgram, Stanley. 1973. ‘The Perils of Obedience’. Harper’s Magazine. Web. 20 Oct. 2019.
https://harpers.org/archive/1973/12/the-perils-of-obedience/.
Oxford Psychology Team. ‘Think You Know All about Milgram’s Obedience Experiments?’ Oxford Education
Blog. 20 Jun. 2017. Web. 31 Aug. 2019. https://educationblog.oup.com/secondary/psychology/think-you-
know-all-about-milgrams-obedience-experiments.
Project Implicit. ‘Understanding and Interpreting IAT Results’. Understanding and Interpreting IAT Results. Project
Implicit. N.d. Web. 25 Aug. 2019.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ireland/background/understanding.html.
‘Show Your Work. Share Your Work. Advance Science. That’s OPEN SCIENCE’. The Center for Open Science.
N.d. Web. 24 Aug. 2019. https://cos.io/.
Smith, Deborah. 2003. ‘Five Principles for Research Ethics’. Monitor on Psychology. American Psychological
Association. www.apa.org/monitor/jan03/principles.
Smith, Laura. ‘Experiments on This Infant in 1920 Were Unethical, but Became a Staple of Psychology Text
Books’. Medium Timeline. 22 Aug. 2017. Web. 4 Sep. 2019. https://timeline.com/little-albert-fear-

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 experiment-9152586f245.
‘The Bad Show’. Radiolab. WNYC Studios. 9 Jan. 2012. Web. 24 Aug. 2019.
www.wnycstudios.org/story/180092-the-bad-show.

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11 History
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, students will be able to:
• understand the definition of historiography
• appreciate the differences between ‘historical facts’ and ‘historical narratives’
• recognize the nature and value of individual ‘perspectives’ in history
• identify and evaluate the different stages of the historical method
• recognize and appreciate the role of selection in the construction of historical knowledge
• appreciate the specific nature of ‘bias’ and know when to apply it to historical narratives
• understand the role and appreciate the power of a shared understanding of common histories in
various communities
• show awareness of the role of journalism and censorship in the wider context of history
• appreciate how a shared history can provide individuals and communities with meaning, direction and
value
• appreciate and reflect on their own history curricula and how it might shape their perspective on the
world.

Learner profile
Open-minded
How does the appreciation of different perspectives enrich our understanding of history?

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Introduction
On 30 December, 1890, at a Native American encampment on the banks of a little river called Wounded Knee, in
the southwest corner of South Dakota, USA, this happened:

… or maybe it didn’t. Perhaps this is what happened:

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The events of that wintry day in 1890 are gone and they cannot be repeated. Trying to understand what happened,
then, poses something of a problem. In the natural sciences, if we want to know more about a natural phenomenon,
we can often recreate it in experimental conditions and observe what happens. If we want to make sure that we have
characterized our observations correctly, we can run the experiment again and observe it again.

ACTIVITY
These accounts and images all relate to the same event.
1 What are the differences?
2 What differences can you see in the details and facts provided?
3 Do you think some are more or less reliable than others?
4 What knowledge do you think the differences and similarities between these resources raise? Write
these issues down and keep track of them as you read through the rest of the chapter.

The historian, however, does not have this privilege. The events that are being described, like the events at Wounded
Knee in 1890, have disappeared into the past, never to be seen again. The places might exist, for a time the people
might still exist (the last of the soldiers present died in 1964 (McNally)), but the event itself no longer exists. Those
were one-off occurrences which have disappeared into time. How, then, are we able to say anything about what
happened and how are we to be sure that what we say happened is an ‘accurate’ reflection of what really happened?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is it possible to have knowledge of the past?

ACTIVITY
1 What did you do a week ago last Saturday? Where did you go? Who were you with? While your own
memory might be a convincing method by which you can determine what you were doing, do you have
any other evidence to which you could appeal to prove that you were, in fact, doing what you
remember doing? You might compile a statement from a witness who saw you there. You might have

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 receipts from what you bought on the day, perhaps an admission ticket or a public transport receipt.
2 Gather as much evidence as you can and present it to a partner who was not involved in what you
were doing a week ago last Saturday. Ask your partner to write a one-page summary of what
happened to you on that day, based only on the evidence you provide. Can your partner faithfully
reconstruct your day? What is different from your memory of the day and your partner’s
reconstruction? Has your partner made any claims beyond a chronology of facts, like why you did
what you did, or what the later consequences were?
3 What conclusions about the nature of history does this make you think about? Are there facts or
events that your partner missed? Why do you think that is? Do you think an event-by-event chronology
of the day is enough to capture what, from your perspective, was important or significant about the
day?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do other AOKs rely on the choices made by individuals as much as history? How does this affect the
quality of the knowledge produced?

How accurate would you say that your partner’s account is? Given the evidence that you provided to your partner,
was it complete? We mentioned that the events themselves were gone and that a historian cannot recreate the events
(in a way that natural scientists can). Historians are left to build an understanding of the events through evidence.
Eye-witness accounts, physical artefacts, other references and other accounts are what the historian must use to piece
together the events of the day. The historian cannot recreate the event to gather new evidence but is instead limited
to what evidence happens to exist. This is a significant difference between history and natural science that we’ll
explore shortly.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is it possible in other AOKs to describe the same phenomenon in such different ways?

However, a chronological account of events is not the only aspect of what a historian does.
Consider this: Would you agree that the account your partner gave of your day was even adequate or are there
important elements missing, like why you did the things you did, or how you felt doing them, or what the results of
what you did were? Perhaps instead of arbitrarily choosing some day in your own history, we had asked you to think
about a day of significance to you, perhaps a family wedding or reunion, or a special visit to an important place.
Would a moment-by-moment list of what happened be enough to capture that day?

ACTIVITY
1 Think back through your life. What would you say is your most important day? Of all the days you
have to choose from, try to think of one that you think has been the most important. We are not going
to define ‘important’ for you, but to complete the task, you will need to make a decision about what
criteria you will use for a day to be more or less important.
2 How did you choose what was going to be important? You must have had to consider that day in
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 relation to later events; a day cannot really be important if there are no subsequent consequences. Did
you have to take into consideration things which happened before that day as well?

One of the things which you probably came across in that activity was the idea of cause and effect. In other words,
something about that day had huge effects on your future life and identifying and articulating the importance of that
day (explaining why it was important) required you to link that day to later days, and possibly even earlier days.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do the terms ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ have different meanings in the sciences, history and mathematics?

By way of introduction to history as an area of knowledge, then, we have considered two very important elements of
doing history:
• Firstly, the historian is interested in finding out what happened, that is identifying facts about the events that
happened in the past – this might be captured by the idea of chronology mentioned above. Without these facts,
historians would really be nothing other than fiction writers.
• Secondly, historians move beyond this list of events which we accept happened and move to a discussion of those
facts in relation to one another. It is not enough to simply point out that X and Y and Z happened on some day;
rather, historians seek to argue that Z happened because of Y, or that Y was a consequence of X, or that X was the
origins of Y and Z. In other words, the events that a historian studies happen generally for reasons, they are not
(or not always) accidents. In your previous study of history, you might have come across questions like, ‘What are
the origins of the Second World War?’ or, ‘What explains the success of the Spanish conquest of South America?’
These questions take for granted the idea that the Second World War or the Spanish conquest of South America
didn’t happen by accident; there were a number of events which had to happen first, in order for those events to
happen, and historians work to understand those reasons.
Our discussion so far has drawn on a very important starting point in the discussion of history as an AOK. There are
different ways we might use the term ‘history’. We might use it to describe those things which happened in the past.
When we say that we ‘all have our own histories’, we are using the term ‘history’ in this way, simply to refer to the
obvious fact that things have happened to us in the past. ‘History’ can also refer to ‘what professional historians do’.
History is an academic discipline wherein historians look into the past, identify events and explore, reflect on and
articulate the relationships between those events. This latter sense of the word ‘history’ is what concerns us in the
world of TOK. Professional historians call this ‘historiography’, which means, broadly, the study of how we
describe the past. It is a naturally critical process, meaning that responsible historians take great pains to create
reliable or credible descriptions of the past, ones that are well tied to established facts. Otherwise, the product is
merely fiction.
We are perfectly willing to accept that things happened in the past and this is one form of knowledge. But the
historical knowledge that we in the TOK classroom are most concerned by, the questions and the tensions which
arise, begin the moment we try to describe what happened. Even if we accept that things happened to us in the past,
it is not entirely clear how we can or how we should access those events.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is it easier to identify a fact in other AOKs than in history?

The suggestion is that even attempting an ‘impartial’ examination of the evidence requires some element of
interpretation. As we will see later in the chapter, historical events do not speak for themselves: historians select
evidence, they categorize it and they relate events in a way that transcends the mere events. From their perspective,
historians can see the causes and consequences in a way that the people involved in the events could not. ‘Hindsight
is always 20/20’ suggests just this fact: that from where we stand, we can see more than what the people in the past
could have seen.
We hope to convince you that history as an AOK is one of the most important elements of the TOK course and one
which could be the most useful as you are thinking about modern culture and the current state of our political
landscape. Being skilled in developing a reliable and credible historical analysis is a guard against what has come to

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be known as ‘fake news’. Without these skills, we are susceptible to being led by our noses into whatever those who
control information wish us to believe.
As Walter Lippman, a US journalist in the early twentieth century, suggested:
Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of
agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo … can flourish only where the audience is
deprived of independent access to information. (Alterman)
The historical method provides a process whereby individuals can evaluate evidence, reflect on the credibility and
reliability of claims and develop their own evidence-based claims.
Over and above just identifying reliable claims, however, history provides narratives that matter to us in ways that
are profound, deep and sometimes non-conscious. Taking the time to think through how we construct our histories,
how we teach each other our histories and the use we make of them is crucial and cuts to the heart of who we think
we are in the present.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do you think other AOKs impact the ways in which people think of themselves or self-identify in the
same way?

History is not a straightforward chronology of events leading to now, for as we saw earlier with the events of 30
December 1890 at Wounded Knee, there are any number of ways we might describe an event. That there was an
event is one thing – how we describe it is another, and how it guides us, is yet another.

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Scope
In the Theory of Knowledge syllabus, history has always been given its own special place as a stand-alone area of
knowledge. This suggests that there are distinctive elements of the study of history which make it importantly
different from other AOKs. History stands outside the sciences because what it studies no longer exists, making it
impossible to justify claims through prediction and experimentation. It is, nevertheless, reliant on evidence,
suggesting that some level of objectivity is required. In this section we will try to carve out some of history’s unique
characteristics and explore the significance of them in terms of truth, reliability and credibility.
One way to explore the nature or scope of history is to ask:
• What does a historian look at?
• What types of events does a historian attempt to describe?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Is truth the goal of historical inquiry? Do other AOKs treat the concept of ‘truth’ differently than History?

DEEPER THINKING
Historical ‘facts’
Throughout this chapter we will be discussing historical facts, sometimes distinguishing them from what
historians write (histories) and sometimes distinguishing them from other types of facts (eg, scientific
facts). But what is a historical ‘fact’?
Generally, a fact is some way that the world is. Our claims about the world are true or false depending
on whether or not they actually describe a fact. In most cases we would agree that it is a fact that Brazil
is south of Guatemala – that is just how the world is. The claim ‘Brazil is south of Guatemala’ is true
because it corresponds with this fact (for more on this, see the section Knowledge, belief and opinion in
Chapter 2 – page 42).
Consider now the following facts which you might see in the AOK of history:
• Singapore became an independent republic in 1965.
• The Japanese army laid siege to Allied forces in Kohima in 1944.
• Montezuma II was an Aztec ruler in the sixteenth century.
• In the UK, women were given the same right to vote as men in 1928.
These facts are ‘historical’ in that they are about events that happened in the past, but you wouldn’t want
to confuse these with what history as an AOK really is. The historian will certainly seek out these facts,
but a simple list of such facts does not amount to a history. Such facts can be considered ‘building
blocks’ which the historian uses to construct historical narratives that link such facts together into
genuine histories. For instance, while it is a fact that Singapore gained its independence in 1965, a
historian would be more interested in what the causes of this event were.
Consider the differences between the facts listed on the left and what the historian might be more
interested in:
• How did British colonialism impact the role Singapore played when it was a state in the Malaysian
federation from 1963 to 1965?
• To what extent did the events at Kohima contribute to the overall Allied victory over Japan?
• In what ways did Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés use local mythology to effectively weaken the
Aztec position in Mexico?
• What actions by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters were the most significant in the women’s
suffrage movement?
These questions, and their answers, are not factual in the same way as the others. They are built of
facts, and the answers to these questions cannot be separated from such facts, but their answers are
debatable in a way that the others are not. While the facts in the first list on the left might be debated to
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some extent, they can be evidenced by memory, documents and other artefacts to such a degree that
they are considered beyond doubt. The answers to the questions, however, require historians to make
arguments and ultimately remain debatable. This is largely because they seek to make claims about
cause and effect relationships and connections between facts, which cannot be seen or tested, but also
because they require interpretation by the historian. Given a set of facts and a question, historians must
make choices, apply theories and interpret facts in a way that provides connections between them. The
strength of an historical interpretation depends both on the amount and strength of the facts the
interpretation is based on, and the general plausibility of that interpretation. It would be implausible, for
instance, to think that British colonialism had no impact on the relationship between Singapore and the
rest of the Malaysian federation, given the British role in creating the economic strength of Singapore in
the region.
How best to articulate the answers to the set of questions? It won’t do to simply list further facts because
concepts like ‘most significant’, ‘effective’, ‘to what extent’ and ‘impact’ require a different form of writing.
We usually call this form ‘historical narrative’ to bring out the nature of historical writing. The idea is that
the historian creates a narrative which links the facts together. The term ‘narrative’ might bring to mind
novels (and we will consider the relationship between historical narratives and fictional narratives
shortly). However, the term here is meant to point out that historical writing comprises an internally
coherent set of connections which link facts together into a story that provides a message, an argument
or a standpoint, in a way that facts cannot. Writing histories, then, also requires a level of creativity which
a TOK student might consider when thinking about the reliability of historical knowledge. Keeping with
the facts-as-building-blocks theme, the facts are the blocks and the history is the house built with the
blocks.

However, this role of interpretation and the creative ways in which historians must step beyond simply
listing facts in chronological order when developing a historical narrative raises many questions which
this chapter seeks to address.
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As suggested earlier, there are facts that historians cannot avoid and which are central to the task of the historian.
Things happened in the past whether or not we know that they happened and regardless of how much we know
about them, and it is partly the historian’s job to explain these facts. These facts are the stuff of chronology. For
example, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd on the battlefield in Gettysburg Pennsylvania in what has
become known as the ‘Gettysburg Address’. We know quite a few facts about this event. At the other end of the
spectrum, there are also a number of facts surrounding the moai, the human figures on the island of Rapa Nui
(Easter Island), but we know far fewer of them. We believe that they were carved sometime between AD 1250 and
1500, but don’t really know by whom, or why.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What counts as a fact in history?

There is a sense in which these facts are objective in that they are the way they are, they cannot change, no matter
what we think of them. The trouble with these facts, however, is that there is an infinite amount of them, and most
have left no trace. Consider all the facts surrounding the most banal interactions between people since the beginning
of time: all the dialogue and all the moving about which has never been recorded and which has been immediately
forgotten. While there certainly are facts regarding these events, they are utterly lost to historians today, even if they
were interested in them. One can imagine a historian making the following claim: ‘In the Spring of 1653, William,
living in Market Harborough, England, said “Good Morning” to his mother.’ Perhaps it is a true claim, but it is a
claim which has no hope of ever being evidenced. This element of evidence is the crucial element of how historians
deal with the infinite number of these sorts of facts: without some element of evidence that the claim is true, the
purported fact it captures is insignificant.
Facts – events which happened – are therefore absolutely crucial to the historian, and evidence for these facts are a
necessary element. Without the evidence for some fact, the use of that fact is nothing more than fiction in the mouth
of a historian.
As we suggested earlier, however, the facts themselves are not all that a historian deals with. Simply listing a
chronology of facts, one thing happened after another, is a framework for the historian, but historians are far more
interested in the relationships between those facts. Rather than saying, for instance, that the Rapa Nui people carved
the human figures we find on Easter Island at a certain time and place, the historian wants to know why they did so.
What was happening before their decision to build them and what happened as a consequence of their building
them? Similarly, with Lincoln at Gettysburg: why was he standing in that field giving the address? What had
happened which led him to be standing there rather than in his office in Washington DC? Why did he choose those
words and what were their significance to those who were listening?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are other AOKs limited in what can be known in the way history might be?

These questions of why people did the things they did are a different sort of historical fact, however. Unless we find
some sort of inscription where someone explains the human carvings or we find a diary entry where Lincoln spells
out every element of his Gettysburg address, historians are tasked with constructing for themselves the reasons why.
These types of claims are a challenge in that, while they are based in evidence, they do go beyond the types of
historical facts mentioned above.

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Collingwood’s inside/outside distinction
One way of thinking through these different types of historical claims is through a distinction developed by historian
RG Collingwood (1889–1943) between the inside and the outside of an event.
Collingwood accepts something like the distinction we’ve set out above. He uses as his example Julius Caesar
crossing the Rubicon (a river in northwest Italy) in 49 BC, marking Caesar’s deliberate challenge to the authority of
the Roman Republic and beginning a civil war that resulted in Caesar’s rise to Emperor. Collingwood suggests that
there are two related but distinct elements of that event – the outside and the inside – both of which are necessary to
the job of the historian.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
If ‘all history is the history of thought’, would knowledge derived from the human sciences make for a
better historian? In what ways do experts in one AOK use the knowledge from others in developing more
reliable knowledge?

By ‘outside’ he means ‘everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements’
(Collingwood). In the case of the event of ‘Caesar crossing the Rubicon’, then, this would be a description of the
soldiers, their number, their formation, their speed and direction. The outside of the event is just a description, in
other words, of what could be empirically observed were we to be witnesses to the event. It is what we could see,
what might be recorded were we to be there with our smartphones or video cameras.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do the natural sciences speak literally when they describe animal behaviour using terms like the
‘desires’ or ‘goals’ of animals?

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The historian, however, doesn’t stop there. The historically important elements of the event are what Collingwood
calls the inside of the event, which he says are those elements of the event which can be described in terms of
thought. This is the why element we’ve been discussing above, but it’s not a practical why, as in ‘Why did Caesar
cross the Rubicon? Because it was on the way to Rome.’ Rather the inside of the event is what Caesar was thinking
about which caused him to cross the river. He crossed the river because he had particular desires, particular plans
and particular goals in mind. The historian’s unique job, according to Collingwood, is to explore the inside of the
events.
All history is the history of thought.
RG Collingwood

We might think back to the opening event of the shooting at Wounded Knee to apply this distinction. A description
of the outside of the event would focus on the numbers of cavalry and Native Americans, the various movements of
the soldiers and villagers, the firing of a rifle and the subsequent running and shooting of the soldiers and villagers.
We would be making claims like:
• ‘On 30 December 1890, the 7th Cavalry was camped above a Native American village at Wounded Knee.’
• ‘Colonel Forsythe made the order for his soldiers to confiscate the weapons in the village.’
• ‘Big Foot lay ill on a pallet on the ground.’
• ‘The medicine man began to chant.’
These facts are all focused only on ‘bodies and their movements’ or what we might observe were we standing on the
bluffs that morning watching the scene unfold.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is empathy more important in history than in other AOKs?

The inside of the event, however, would be populated with another sort of fact altogether, one which focuses on the
thoughts, motives, desires, fears, plans and reasons of those present:
• ‘Colonel Forsythe resented the Native Americans and believed that Big Foot’s tribe was inherently hostile.’
• ‘Big Foot wanted a peaceful return to the Government’s reservation.’
• ‘The medicine man wanted his ancestors to come and destroy the Army.’
• ‘The US Army’s goal was to forcibly return all Native Americans to reservations.’
• ‘The deaf Native American warrior didn’t understand the commands he was given.’
While the outside of events can be described in terms of what we would observe (much like a scientist might
describe what is observed in an experiment), the inside of events requires a different sort of description. It requires a
description of thoughts. The historian, according to Collingwood, must ‘re-think’ the thoughts of the individuals in
the historical event. To develop a genuinely historical account (as opposed to a scientific account) of an event, we
must think the thoughts of the characters involved: we must understand (though not necessarily agree with) the
logical connections between the thoughts and the actions. The historian, then, in trying to understand the events at
Wounded Knee would rethink the thoughts of Forsythe as he gave the order to open fire on the village.
Understanding his command would be to understand his beliefs about the wider progress of the US Government’s
war on the Native Americans, understand his prejudice against the possible good intentions of the tribe before him
and understand the experience of anxiety and fear he was undergoing when that fateful shot rang out. Understanding
these thought processes is what a historical understanding amounts to.
Given that historical events have these two elements, Collingwood suggests that the historian’s role is to explore
each in relation to the other, albeit prioritizing the inside. He suggests that there is a difference between knowing
what happened (a scientific understanding) and understanding what happened (a historical understanding). The
historical story being told is one about people’s motives and reasons for acting the way they did, not merely a story
about what happened. A description of Caesar’s journey to Rome wouldn’t, in this view, be a ‘history’, any more
than a list of how people moved about would be a history. Through such descriptions we might know what
happened, but it would take an examination of the thoughts that motivated the actions for us to understand them.

ACTIVITY
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1 With a partner, identify and research a historical event of interest to you. Try to identify elements of
the event which Collingwood would characterize as the outside and the inside of the event.
2 When describing the inside, try to articulate what you think would be the actual thoughts being
exhibited in the behaviour of the historical characters you are studying.
3 How confident are you that you can identify the thoughts of the individuals?
4 Are you able to step outside your own perspectives and beliefs in order to charitably understand the
thoughts of the individuals you are hoping to understand?
You might like to use a table like this:
Inside – described in terms of Outside – described in terms of bodies and their
thought movements

TOK trap
Having described and explained a TOK point, many students leave their analysis there, without exploring
the significance of that TOK point. In the context of an essay, it is one thing to explain Collingwood’s
distinction and apply it to a case: this shows a certain level of quality TOK thinking. The best students,
however, will then use the description of the TOK elements to develop an analysis of those elements.
You might consider this a ‘so what, who cares?’ moment – why is this distinction important to the over’all
discussion? What follows here is an attempt to show why Collingwood’s distinction is helpful in a more
general analysis of history as an AOK.

Why might this distinction be important for the TOK student? Collingwood’s distinction helps us understand the
differences between the AOKs of history and science, which then helps us further understand the nature of history as
a way of knowing the world. According to Collingwood, our understanding of nature does not require anything like
an inside to an event. The events that science describes are only described in terms of bodies and their movement;
from tectonic plates shaping the world’s landmasses, to the infinitesimally small electron shells at the subatomic
level, the natural sciences describe how bodies interact. Any ‘why’ questions asked about interactions between
bodies will only refer to natural forces, not anything like independent human thought:
In the case of nature, this distinction between the outside and the inside of an event does not arise. The
events of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientist endeavors to trace …
Instead of conceiving the event as an action and attempting to rediscover the thought of its agent, the
scientist goes beyond the event, observes its relation to others, and thus brings it under a general formula
or law of nature. (Collingwood 214)
The general formulas or laws of nature sought by scientists that Collingwood is referring to are laws that apply to all
cases. The historian, however, recognizes that the thoughts and reasons which are in the minds of the agents they are
exploring are unique to the situation and constitute a one-off circumstance. Understanding the event is to understand
those unique circumstances.
The human sciences also study human behaviour, so what makes history different from the human sciences? The
same thing applies here; the goal of the scientist (natural or human) is to try to develop ‘general formulas or laws of
nature’. Human scientists, unlike historians, will try to explain human behaviour by developing law-like
generalizations which suggest that all humans would behave in a certain way because they are humans. That is, the
reasons why people behave the way they do is because of some characteristic which is common to all human beings.
The historian, in Collingwood’s view, however, recognizes that no humans share all their beliefs and each carries
within himself or herself a unique set of beliefs, motivations and desires which are relevant for this one moment in
time. Rather than seeking a ‘general’ law then, the historian is attempting to uncover and articulate the specific
reasons that were impacting the people involved at that moment.

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
If historians are not trying to find generalizations that explain how all human beings act in certain
situations, then what is the value of history?
Are historical claims less useful for understanding human beings than claims in the human sciences?

The thought that the historian must in some sense re-think or re-enact the thoughts of the people they study raises a
couple of challenging questions for the historian. Firstly, how can the modern historian guarantee that they are able
to properly understand exactly what was going through the minds of the people they are considering? Historians are
people too and carry with them a whole series of beliefs, expectations and perspectives which will become part of
their attempt to understand the thoughts of the individuals they study, but those individuals are themselves part of a
different cultural context. Trying to recreate thoughts of individuals who are from an entirely different time and
context and trying to do so charitably (in a way that takes the other culture seriously) might be a real challenge.
Collingwood also raises the point that in recreating the thoughts of the individuals being studied we are naturally
critical of those thoughts. Being critical here doesn’t necessarily mean opposing the ideas, but rather testing and
reflecting on them. When we, for instance, put ourselves into the mind of Colonel Forsythe of the 7th Cavalry in
order to understand why he might have commanded his soldiers to open fire, we can understand that a person
holding Forsythe’s beliefs would act in the way he did. In doing so, however, we naturally relate Forsythe’s beliefs
(the inside of the event) to our own. We might, for instance, accept that Forsythe’s command to fire is consistent
with his beliefs, but at the same time, judge Forsythe’s beliefs about the Native Americans as prejudicial and
bigoted. This suggests that the historian’s own views about the topics being studied are always present in their
analysis of the past. The extent to which this means that the historian’s claims are reliable or not will be considered
in later sections.

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Perspectives
Consider the following quotation from historian Ramachandran Guha in an article called ‘The Historian and
Chauvinism’:
Traditionally, history writing was dominated by upper-caste males, and, of course, this had to be
challenged. You needed Dalits and women to write histories too. At the same time, it is equally important
for high-born historians to transcend their privileged identity, to acquire what the poet Keats called
‘negative capability’, the ability to empathise with a different perspective or point of view. For, a historian
must never become a prisoner to his or her identity. Historical truth crucially depends upon the success
with which the historian transcends the chauvinism of identity. (Guha)
Guha raises an important point about the nature of historical inquiry. History is written by individuals and
individuals, no matter how similar an education or experience they have had, will carry with them their own unique
outlook on the world around them. These outlooks, or perspectives, are built up of a lifetime of experiences with the
society around them and can become embedded in ways that we might not recognize but which might influence
what we consider ‘true’ or ‘real’.
In the AOKs of mathematics and science, these perspectives will have objective facts to be weighed against:
mathematics utilizes the rules of logical inference which are arguably the same for everyone and the sciences use
facts gained through direct observation of the phenomenon being investigated. In history, however, the events being
considered have disappeared and are thus unavailable to the historian. Historians are only left with the documents,
testimonies and other artefacts which have withstood the ravages of time to end up on the historian’s desk.
The primary task for the historian is to identify and articulate the connections between the left-over artefacts – to tell
a story about how they are related. This is a task which takes the historian beyond the confines of his evidence,
however. For instance, if one is presented with facts about the conditions of factory workers in pre-First World War
Czarist Russia and then is presented with facts about the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, one might wish to make a
connection between these sets of facts and construct a narrative about one causing the other.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Do you think experts in other AOKs are as influenced by the pressures of culture, caste, class, religion,
etc., as historians? Why or why not? How does your answer help illuminate your thoughts about the
nature of those AOKs?

The issue Guha raises has to do with just how an individual historian constructs such connections and whether or not
the connections being developed are reliable. The point he makes is that each individual historian has a personal
history. They have been raised in a certain cultural context, they have been educated a certain way and they have had
certain experiences, and these circumstances will form the context in which the individual thinks. Often these
personal experiences and circumstances will form a ‘perspective’ from which the individual naturally views the
world. There is nothing wrong with this, it’s just a fact about individuals. However, Guha points out that sometimes
we might be unaware of how these perspectives influence the way we interpret historical facts and the way that we
construct historical narratives.
‘Perspective’ comes from the Latin for ‘seeing through’. We ‘see through’ a perspective in a way that we might see
through the lenses of our glasses or a window. Extending the metaphor, the idea is that historians see through a
perspective in a similar way. Guha is not suggesting we avoid these perspectives entirely; this would be impossible.
But he is suggesting that different people with different backgrounds and experiences might bring a new perspective
to topics that have previously been explored only from one perspective. He suggests that Dalits and women should
be writing histories too, suggesting that each group might bring a new approach or a new set of questions – which
perhaps have not been thought of before.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How do different AOKs manage the influence of individual perspectives when evaluating knowledge in
that field?
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ACTIVITY
1 Imagine that you are a professional historian writing about a topic. What do you think would be the
‘blind-spots’ in your own perspective? In other words, which characteristics or beliefs do you hold that
might affect your own historical conclusions in a way that might be considered non-objective?
2 Consider this question in relation to the following different types of historical subject-matter. Would
your own characteristics or beliefs impact these topics differently?
• The causes of a regional or world war.
• The impact of Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech (1963) on the United States Civil
Rights Act (1964).
• The role of memorials or statues dedicated to slave owners, or people or institutions who profited
from the slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (eg, Cecil Rhodes and the
University of Cape Town).
• Women’s suffrage movements around the world.
• The impact of the Stonewall riots (1969) on current LGBTQ+ rights and legislation.
• The growing role and impact of women legislators in your country.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is it unfair to judge people and actions in the past by the standards of today?

Guha suggests that ‘a historian has beliefs and prejudices, which, like his or her personal identity, cannot ever be
entirely suppressed. But one must continually be aware of them and seek to limit their influence on one’s work’
(Guha). It is possible, then, that one’s perspective both informs our interpretation of historical facts, but it might also
limit our ability to interpret them fairly. There must be some awareness of the impact of a historian’s own
perspectives, accompanied by an honest effort to limit their impact on their interpretations if they are to transcend
the chauvinism of their identity.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
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Objectivity
These issues raise questions about whether history can be objective. The short answer is ‘not really’.
Historical facts such as ‘Colgate started the mass production of toothpaste in 1873’ might be considered
objective in the sense that all rational observers would agree that the evidence settles the question.
However, we have distinguished historical fact from genuine history and the interpretations and
perspectives involved in the development of a historical narrative suggests that we cannot achieve
objectivity. Perhaps the goal should be (if such a goal is desirable) consensus. In other words, with the
understanding that historical analyses are not analyses of objects equally observable by all parties,
historians should be aiming for well-justified interpretations, which are compelling in the presentation of
their claims.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is objectivity more or less difficult for the historian than experts in other AOKs?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How might the existence of different historical perspectives be beneficial to historical knowledge?

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Revisionism
Guha’s quotation suggests that new perspectives on historical questions add value to traditional historical
understandings. He suggests, for instance, that women and people from social classes other than the privileged
should be writing histories because they bring new ideas to the discussion. Bringing new ideas to old topics is a form
of what is called revisionism, the idea being that with the application of new perspectives to old questions we are
encouraged to revise our understanding of previous ideas. This is undoubtedly a healthy process in any AOK: the
examination of old questions in a new light, perhaps from a new perspective or with new evidence.
One example of this is the publication of Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History in 1973. In it she explores the
role that women played during a number of revolutions in the past 300 years, a topic that had not really been
considered by traditionally male, traditionally capitalist historians. Her argument that the history of women is best
understood through the perspective of social oppression and the struggle for social emancipation provided a new
way to consider a number of socialist movements since the seventeenth century. Her new perspective created a
revised understanding of these movements.
‘Historical revisionism’ as a term, however, is often used in a negative way, particularly when the revision being
argued for is an upheaval of generally accepted views, sometimes accompanied by an unjust application of the
historical method. When historians are purposely trying to overturn a generally accepted view of the past, motivated
by a modern ideological debate, very often this goal overrides a reasonable selection of evidence and a reasonable
interpretation of the evidence.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Are all AOKs subject to the same revisions as history? Do historians treat past knowledge in the same
way as other AOKs? Is questioning previously held beliefs as important in other AOKs as it is in history?
Why or why not?

One such debate surrounds the religious beliefs of the United States’ Founding Fathers and whether or not their
beliefs are consistent with modern conservative Christian beliefs. Some historians, for instance, attempt to interpret
the Founding Fathers of the United States as holding the same types of deeply conservative religious beliefs that are
held by modern evangelical Christians, and therefore we should be able to interpret various elements of the
Constitution (1789) in light of modern Christian understanding. Others argue that given the philosophical and
religious trends of the time (and the writings of the Founding Fathers themselves), the differences between these and
the modern evangelical beliefs means that they would not have been recognizable as having a faith anything like
modern evangelical Christian beliefs. To suggest they were could be called historical revisionism: the attempt to
reinterpret established historical views in order to further modern ideologies and for modern political or religious
ends.
Use the QR code to read a longer discussion of this issue.

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Methods and tools

In March 1945, Mahatma Gandhi was asked how Indian historians could best serve the soon-to-be independent
country. How best to describe the history of India? Gandhi replied: ‘He can serve by writing a true and original
history of the people. If there is progress he will describe the process; if he finds there is decline he will record the
decline’ (Guha). What Gandhi is suggesting here is that the historian’s main role is to be honest – to describe and
record what is there – and not create fiction. This is not as easy as it seems for reasons we’ve described above: the
threat of applying uncritical or unconscious assumptions and perspectives is ever present in the historian’s work.
Given, then, that the historian must walk a fine line between admittedly working from a perspective on the one hand,
while identifying and interpreting material fairly and accurately on the other, how does a responsible historian
manage their work?

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The historical method
Just as scientists use a ‘scientific method’ (see Chapter 9), historians use what can be called a ‘historical method’.
There is no set or definitive list of precisely what makes up the process which every historian must use, rather there
are a series of activities and concepts that they will use in order to try to develop reliable claims. As an attempt to
outline these broad categories we will offer the following five steps (Schneider 201) and develop an analysis of
each:
• Selection of a subject or topic
• Identifying relevant facts and ideas
• Critically reflecting on the source materials
• Synthesis
• Presentation.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do historians have similar constraints on the methods by which they produce knowledge as experts in
other AOKs?

Selection of a topic
In order to begin the process of developing a historical narrative, the historian must find a topic which interests
them. John Dewey, a philosopher of history whom we will discuss in more detail later, argues that all historical
claims have their origin in the observations of the historian in the present, stating that ‘some present state of affairs
is always the occasion of the reconstruction of the past event’ (Dewey 224). The historian often begins with a
question arising from some experience of some present fact or observation and uses a historical analysis to develop
an answer (see page 383 for more on Dewey’s understanding of history).
That the process of history, which deals with events which are lost in the past, might begin with an immediate
observation from the present, may seem contradictory at first glance. However, think about what is happening when
we speculate about the history of some far-off event, say, what was happening 5000 years ago in the city of Ur
(which lies about 300 km upriver from the ocean on the Euphrates river in modern day Iraq). Of course, we cannot
see what was happening, but what can we see? Indeed, why do we think there was a city at all?
One thing that we can observe is the Ziggurat of Ur, which rises out of the desert by around 30 metres – you can’t
really miss it! It was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century by British archeologists and was excavated more fully
in the early twentieth century. While a historian cannot see what was happening during the construction, they can
see the product of that construction and interpret what must have happened for it to exist. Indeed, the Ziggurat sits
within a site which has been identified as the ancient city of Ur, which archeologists believe to have existed for over
5000 years. There is a wealth of artefacts which have been found there; the point being that these are what the
historians are observing here and now in the present, as they develop historical claims about the city and its people
over 5000 years ago.

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DEEPER THINKING
Motives and interests
It is unlikely that a historian who wants to write about the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia would
accidentally find themselves standing in the middle of the desert looking at the Ziggurat of Ur. In other
words, the observations which begin the process are generally preceded by some interest or some other
experience which gives rise to the initial question.
A genuine TOK analysis of the preceding motives, interests or questions, however, would not stop
simply at the claim that the historian is motivated by some question, since analysis of why an individual
has the motives and interests that they do is a question within the field of psychology, not TOK. A TOK
student might instead analyse the motive to determine whether it will be impacting the later process
unfairly. We all have motives, but TOK students need to wonder how those motives impact the reliability
of the subsequent claims. For example, if our interest in Ur is to prove that it is the ancient birthplace of
Abraham (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of who Abraham was), and we are setting out to prove that the
biblical account of Genesis is historically accurate, then others might suspect that our motives are going
to colour the later development of the historical analysis. We clearly have the goal in mind: ‘Genesis is
historically accurate’. We might instead set out to see what it is possible to confirm, whatever that might
be. We might instead ask, ‘Archeologists have uncovered a city called Ur and the Genesis story of
Abraham says he came from a city called Ur. Could they be the same city?’ This question is far more
neutral, in that it doesn’t pre-judge what we are hoping to conclude.
The previous interests, moreover, might be themselves the result of earlier observations. We might be
interested in the Ziggurat because of some other experience or observation we have had, perhaps in a
textbook, or online. The question, ‘What is that and how did it get there?’ might not sound like a historical
question, but to answer it we must create a historical narrative, describing the object sitting in the desert
of Iraq today, with the object as it was 5000 years ago when it was constructed. Thinking back to
Collingwood’s inside/outside distinction, the outside would be a narrative about the object itself (stones,
mortar, building techniques), while the inside would be why it was built, the knowledge of the designers,
the motives of the builders and whoever commissioned its construction.

Identifying relevant facts and ideas

Once a historian has made some initial decisions about what sorts of things they are interested in and what sorts of
topics they want to discuss, they then must seek out material that will help them develop their ideas. But what facts
should they be seeking? What facts are relevant to the topic or question?
John Dewey, a philosopher writing in 1938, argued that ‘all historical construction is necessarily selective’ (Dewey
235, emphasis ours), meaning that a historian must sift through evidence related to the event being discussed. All the
historian is left with, however, is whatever has been left behind by the event itself: personal testimony, artefacts,
records, documents, photographs, etc. None of these are the event itself, only remnants of that event.
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The task of the historian, therefore, is to develop a question to ask of the evidence, and the questions being asked of
the evidence are those which are immediately and presently relevant to the historian at the time they are asking
them. Depending on the questions that are on their mind, the historian may select some items as ‘evidence’ and
leave other items out of the equation. We might, for example, be interested in the role of women in the early
Christian church and wonder, ‘What does this inscription [the one that is immediately present to us] which has been
uncovered in an archeological dig, add to my understanding of this topic?’ (Borschel-Dan). There are other artefacts
related to the archeological dig, but because they are not relevant to our question, we won’t select them as part of
our evidence. Or we might be interested in German foreign policy in the run up to the Second World War and
wonder, ‘Does the Hossbach Memorandum [facsimiles of which we can easily access online] faithfully represent
Hitler’s own views?’ (Hossbach Memorandum). (The Hossbach Memorandum was a summary of a meeting
between Hitler and his military and foreign policy leadership held in Berlin in 1937.) There is a whole slew of other
documents created by Hitler’s command during the 1930s, but again we wouldn’t select them as they would be
irrelevant to our question.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Are the criteria for what counts as good evidence different for the historian than for the mathematician or
scientist?
Can the historian be free of bias in the selection and interpretation of material?
Historians have to select evidence based on the types of questions they wish to answer. Do experts in
other AOKs have similar choices to make at the beginning of their processes? How might those choices
influence the reliability of the knowledge produced?

Assessment advice
The examples we’re using here (the Ziggurat of Ur, the inscriptions on a church wall and the Hossbach
Memorandum), are artefacts – objects that are human-made – and they might be the sorts of things that
you can use as part of your internal assessment exhibition. There you must identify three human-made
objects and use them to offer a response to one of the IA prompts listed in the subject guide and used in
this book.

Dewey suggests that there are two ways in which selection affects the historian as part of the process by which they
identify relevant facts.
Firstly, the people being studied provide one layer of selection in that they select in some ways the sorts of things
that will survive to become evidence for the historian. In our examples above, for instance, someone decided to
create the inscription and the paintings for the church walls. They didn’t have to write anything on the walls, nor did
they have to write what they did. But they ‘selected’ what they did and stuck it to the walls of the church. Clearly
this choice was because they felt that the inscriptions and paintings were important. The Hossbach Memo didn’t
have to be written, but it was. Nor did it have to be written the way it was, in terms of content. But it was written
that way and this is a form of selection. We might also consider the accounts of the event at Wounded Knee with
which we opened the chapter. The first selects certain facts to portray to the reader. Regardless of what actually
happened on that morning, those facts were what the writer decided to record.
The historian, then, is faced with the consequences of the actions of the people they study, in that these people in the
past have already made a number of decisions which influence the body of evidence available to historians. The
Egyptians decided that their Pharaohs and the afterlife of the Pharaohs were more important than the workers
building the tombs. Therefore, the tombs were built of stone or carved into stone, which would presumably last
forever, while the workers’ houses were built of mud or wood, which they knew would decay over time. And decay
they did, so we have little evidence of what the workers’ homes were like. The ancient Vikings selected items to
place into their burial tombs which suggests that those items captured beliefs and ideas that were important to them
and which the historian can try to recreate. The front page of any newspaper is a selection of events which the editor
of that newspaper has selected as ‘important’ enough for the front page. A historian in one thousand years’ time
trying to understand our world might therefore have only those events to base their understanding of our time upon.

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
What role does circumstance or luck play in the use of evidence for the historian? Is this similar to other
AOKs?

ACTIVITY
1 Consider your own social media feed on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. What decisions have you
made in relation to what you put on your feed? Consider the types of things you could have put on
your feed. (You might even put the fact that you’re reading your TOK textbook at the moment!) Why
didn’t you put these other events onto your social media feed?
2 Consider now what you have put on your feed. What sort of impression of you do all the items you
have posted say about you to an observer? If you were a historian studying the individual who posted
all this material, what sort of impression would you have of that person? Is that historical impression
the same as what you intended?
3 Think about others whose social media feeds you follow. To what extent do you think that the
impression you’ve gained of that person through their presence on social media actually captures
what they are genuinely like?

Secondly, we have a layer of selection we’ve already hinted at: the selections made by the historian. If history is a
‘reconstruction of the past event’ based on a question in the mind of the historian, then it is possible that not every
element of evidence is relevant to the question being asked. If the historian is interested primarily in the living
conditions of the workers who built the Pyramids at Giza, for instance, then we can imagine a historian ignoring the
huge pyramids at their back as they examine more closely the scant remains of the workers’ houses at their base. If
another historian is interested in the lives of women in Native American culture, the fact that the Bismarck Weekly
Tribune doesn’t mention women, might mean that the historian would not consider the account of Wounded Knee as
evidence at all. Dewey argues that ‘from this selection there follow selective appraisals as to (1) the relative weight
and relevancy of materials at his disposal and (2) as to the way they are to be ordered in connection with one
another’ (236), by which he means that the historian is required to make choices about how much weight (if any) to
give evidence and the connections between the evidence.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Evidence
Evidence is the bedrock of knowledge. It creates the conditions under which fiction can be distinguished
from fact, or speculation can be distinguished from truth. What counts as evidence and how much is
needed are both questions we should be asking of the historian. As we’ve seen, what might be evidence
for one historian might not be for another. Where the historians are investigating different topics, this
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might not be a problem, but if the historians are asking similar questions and identifying different
evidence, or using the evidence in different ways, then care must be taken to evaluate the reasons why
some evidence is being used while some is not. Much historical debate revolves around just what is
relevant to the question and what should count as evidence.

Primary and secondary sources

One of the most relevant factors in choosing which facts or evidence to rely on when developing a historical
narrative is the primary/secondary source distinction. ‘Secondary source’ refers to sources that are at some distance
from the events that they describe, whether they be recordings of what people have heard about some event (such as
testimony from someone who wasn’t at an event but heard about it). ‘Primary source’ generally refers to direct
accounts of events recorded by the witnesses themselves. The assumption is that, when the eyewitness is reliable,
then the direct testimony of someone who was there will be more reliable than some second-hand account, though of
course this might not necessarily be true. You might find an account of an event (perhaps like the account of the
Bismarck Weekly Tribune on page 367) which is itself highly prejudicial or biased. In those cases, even primary
sources must be used carefully.

Learner profile
Reflective
What measures can you take to overcome your own biases?

TOK trap
Not all historians are biased. All this talk about the inevitability of historians having a perspective and the
role of selection in the historian’s identification of relevant facts, seems to lead many students to the
conclusion that in some sense ‘all historians are biased’.
However, this is not a fruitful critique for the reasons outlined on the next page.

‘Bias’ in the context of TOK refers to the ways in which information is used or interpreted. To be biased
means that you are inclined to interpret the facts presented in a way that is some how unfair or
unjustified. The classic example of this are conspiracy theories, where proponents of a theory will never
accept evidence against their position, instead always interpreting the evidence in a way that supports
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their initial beliefs. They’ve already decided on the conclusion they wish to reach, and they will interpret
the evidence in such a way to support it, no matter what. To call someone ‘biased’, therefore, is a
critique of the way in which they are using and interpreting evidence.
To take the more general point being discussed here (that historians often interpret evidence or develop
analyses from a certain perspective) and call it bias is spreading the term too thinly. It is, what we might
call an ad hominem argument, which attacks the speaker, rather than the ideas they are presenting.
The ‘all historians are biased’ claim is basically saying that because they are historians, they must be
biased. This, then, paints all historians with the same brush and doesn’t allow us to reserve genuine
critiques against those particular historians who really do manipulate evidence and ignore responsible
historiography, or those who consciously manipulate and twist evidence towards their own ends. In
other words, we lose a tool by which to differentiate reliable historical accounts from those that are
unreliable.
Understanding the process of selecting relevant evidence might help us think through those instances
where we want to suggest that a historian is biased. We can now ask whether the historian’s selection of
the evidence is warranted, justified or ‘correct’. If not, then we might accuse them of bias; if the selection
being made is warranted, then we might say they are not biased (even if they have a perspective).
Some historians, for instance, might be interested in understanding the role of the US Government in the
current state of Native American culture in North America, but decide to entirely ignore the events at
Wounded Knee in 1890, or, perhaps, only use the material from the Bismarck Weekly Tribune
mentioned at the start of this chapter. Given the wealth of evidence available to the twenty-first-century
historian, deciding that Wounded Knee was irrelevant, or selecting only the Bismarck Weekly Tribune’s
account (and actively ignoring the rest) would be seen as irresponsible. If, in addition, the historian has
already decided that they are going to make a particular point and have therefore decided to consider
only certain evidence and disregard the rest, we would say that this historian is biased. In other words,
the historian’s application of the method was unjust, unwarranted and ‘broke the rules’ of being a
responsible historian. Instead of allowing the evidence to guide their historical interpretations, they fit the
evidence to the story.

The responsible historian is, therefore, in a difficult position. On the one hand, they must use their own interests and
questions as a way of sifting through the evidence to decide what is relevant and what is not. On the other hand, they
must make sure that they are being fair in considering what actually is relevant and not ignoring important
information. They must also make sense of the evidence in a way that doesn’t pre-judge what they think the
evidence will say or force the evidence into a narrative that they have already decided to tell. They must let the
evidence guide their interpretation.
Recognizing that there are better and worse ways of selecting and interpreting evidence in history is an important
step for the Theory of Knowledge student and allows you to explore better and worse selections of evidence. We can
then praise as ‘reliable’ a good selection of evidence, and ‘unreliable’ a poor one.

ACTIVITY
Review the discussion of cognitive bias in Chapter 1 (pages 22–24) and discuss the following questions
with your classmates.
1 How do you think these sorts of non-conscious biases might affect the reliability of historical claims?
Where in the historical method do you think it would have the most effect?
2 How might a historian challenge these non-conscious biases?
3 How much responsibility do you think a historian has to self-reflect?
4 Should historians be required to undergo the psychological tests which are meant to uncover these
biases?

Assessment advice
Curation is the process of selecting items and grouping them in a way designed to create a particular
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impression. Your social media feeds are a curated exhibit of you, built up of images, videos and text all
designed to provide the viewer an impression of what sort of person you are. This notion of curation is
central to both of the assessment tasks but in different ways.
• For the essay, you will need to curate the ideas you’ve had on the topic presented in the prescribed
title (rather than just spilling out any old idea that happened to drift through your mind). The essay
needs to stand as a singular and crafted response.
• The exhibition requires you to identify three objects and discuss them in relation to a response to one
of the Internal Assessment prompts. For this you will need to choose or select three objects which can
each act as a response to that prompt. Again, you have the ability to choose from any number of
objects, but you must select three, and have good reasons for your selection.

Critically reflecting on the source materials

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
On what criteria can a historian evaluate the reliability of their sources?

Once the historian has identified material to use, they must remain critical and reflect on any bias or prejudice which
may be in the source itself. They cannot take it for granted that everything in the source is reliable. Even in the case
of primary sources, historians must remain on guard for ways in which the information being offered is unreliable.
Source criticism (something all history students will be very familiar with) requires students to ask questions like
those listed in Table 11.1.

Table 11.1 Critically reflective questions to ask as part of source criticism

Aspect Questions to be asked
The source’s provenance or • Where does the source come from?
production
• What do we know about the source and/or its author?
• Is the author otherwise reliable?
• Why was it written?
• Who is the audience?
The source’s context and • What is the nature of the source?
form
• What is the purpose of the source?
• What sort of source is it?
• What cultural, legal or social context is it a part of?
The source’s content • What is the source actually saying?
• What is the source arguing for?
• Does the source offer evidence or quality arguments?
• What assumptions or values are reflected in the message of the
source?
• Does the source interpret events or record events?
The source’s relationship with • How does the source fit with other information or knowledge?
other evidence
• Does the source offer a message which is consistent with or
contradictory to other knowledge of the topic?
• Is there other material which might corroborate the messages of the
source?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Consider the critical questions outlined in Table 11.1. In what ways might you as a student in other
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AOKs apply these questions to the sources you find? Is there a need to be as critical of the sources in
other AOKs?

The list of critically reflective questions in Table 11.1 is certainly not exhaustive, but it does provide a framework by
which the historian can evaluate the material from which they hope to derive a historical analysis.
Even in cases of simple eye-witness testimony, the historical researcher must take care not to assume that what is
being said is not also inaccurate in important ways. Stories of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic told by survivors
reported that the ship had risen up some 45 to 90 degrees before crashing back down as it sank in the North Atlantic
Ocean. Later, mathematicians and physicists working on the debris found that this would have been physically
impossible. The strength of the ship wouldn’t have allowed it to rise any more than about 12 degrees (Finton).
Famously, Loftus and Palmer in 1974 provided further evidence that eye-witness testimony can be altered simply by
asking questions using different words. Use the QR code for a more in-depth account of this study.

These examples suggest that the responsible historian must spend considerable time and energy on this element of
the historical method. On one hand the historian must remain sceptical and apply all that he knows about the topic to
this reflection. We’ve seen here that a thorough knowledge of the background of the topic is needed, plus an
understanding of the psychology of eye-witness testimony. On the other hand, historians must, at some level, trust
their sources once a bona fide attempt has been made to uncover any unreliability.

Synthesis
Suppose now that the historian has chosen a topic and a general question, identified and gathered relevant evidence
and facts and exposed that evidence to a robust critical examination to ascertain its reliability. What next?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is the relationship between personal experience and knowledge different in history than in other AOKs?

The next thing for the historian to do is to develop what might be called a ‘synthesis’, meaning that the historian
determines just what the evidence actually suggests. The facts and sources do not ‘speak for themselves’ in that they

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do not themselves provide their own interpretation in light of the questions being asked. Granted, if our question is
something like, ‘Who signed the Declaration of Independence?’ and we find the actual document which tells us this,
then the evidence does really speak for itself. However, we’ve suggested that these singular facts are the building
blocks of history, not history itself. If our question was instead ‘Why were there so many signatories to the
Declaration of Independence?’, having the document before us could not provide a full answer.
This is the moment that the historian and the scientist really diverge in their task. The historian now has to interpret
the evidence in light of their initial question and provide a narrative which links the evidence together into a
coherent and well-justified account. Collingwood suggests that the historian’s task in this way is similar to the
novelist’s as they are both in some ways works of imagination. Clearly the novelist is using their imagination to
conjure up the elements of the story, but the historian too is imagining what must have been the case, or what was
likely to have been the case, given the evidence. Think back to the account of the events at Wounded Knee with
which we started the chapter. While we don’t have a clear statement of why Colonel Forsythe ordered his troops to
open fire (or even if it was a clear order), we might imagine what the reasons were. Collingwood, however, argues
that there is a pretty big difference between the historian’s task and the novelist’s, namely that the historian’s is
meant to be true (Collingwood).
This is the whole point of building a narrative on evidence. The novelist need not adhere to anything like a fact, but
the historian must have facts every step of the way. Where there is no evidence, there can be nothing but
imagination and claims of this sort belong to literature, not history.
This element is where the historian is most vulnerable to their own biases and prejudices. Historical facts are not like
Lego bricks which have built into them the methods by which they must be connected. Instead, historical facts are
like oddly shaped tiles – they need some principles to show how they should be put together. In this example,
something which says ‘the outcome should be something along these lines’ for a flat tiled bathroom floor. We must
therefore put the tiles together in a particular way (keep them flat, don’t overlap them, keep the distance between
tiles the same).
In other words, historical synthesis needs a context, a paradigm which suggests how events link together. Given the
same evidence, different historians may yet come to quite different conclusions, argue for different motives and
causes and emphasize different forces at work, largely depending on the ‘perspectives’ that we discussed earlier. A
Marxist historian, for instance, would interpret the evidence in a way that would highlight the impact of social class
and economics on the actions and events under consideration and would assume that social and economic class is
always one of the driving factors in human affairs (but not the only one). A feminist historian would explain the
connections between events in terms of the perspective of women, again assuming that gender dynamics are always
one of the driving forces in human dynamics. These perspectives might have also impacted the earlier selection
process.
As discussed above, these perspectives need not amount to bias, but they do colour the interpretation of the facts.
Where one historian might see a connection or a dynamic between events (e.g. a Marxist would start investigating
the causes of war by thinking about social and economic forces), another might instead focus on something else. The
responsible historian won’t ignore their own perspective, but they will take care to not let it dictate the possible
interpretations available to them.

ACTIVITY
Consider the opening newspaper report of the events at Wounded Knee (page 367).
1 Identify the language which you think carries an emotional impact. Do you think the writer was aware
of this impact? Why do you think the writer would have chosen to write the account in the way that he
did?
2 Do this first individually, then share your findings with a partner. Do they have similar or different
emotional reactions to the language? Why might this be? What might this suggest about the
challenges of constructing historical narratives and reading historical narratives?

Presentation
The topic has been chosen, the evidence gathered and critically assessed, and the interpretation has been developed
and justified. The final stage in the overall method is when the historian actually presents the history, ie, writes
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down the synthesis or interpretation of the facts. Here, too, the historian must walk a fine line between a cold, hard
adherence to facts and the art of writing well. No historical narrative will be compelling if the historian cannot
‘weave a good tale’. However, when developing the language with which to express the narrative, the historian must
take care that the material is not misinterpreted.
For example, when discussing an army’s manoeuvres in the face of an enemy, do we call it an ‘attack’, or a
‘charge’? Charge certainly has far more romantic connotations. Each word might be legitimate, but the historian
might choose one over another if they are to capture and maintain their audience’s interest.
Now let’s consider this account of the final moments of the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, when General George
Armstrong Custer and his men were defeated in their attack/charge against the Sioux in what is now Montana:
What a sight it must have been, especially for George Armstrong Custer, who was – probably – at that
instant leading his men toward the spot on which Crazy Horse stood. Behind Crazy Horse, Custer would
have seen the thousand warriors, all painted, many with war bonnets, some holding spears high in the air,
their glistening points aimed right at Custer … The ponies were painted too, with streaks and zigzags and
other designs … They snorted and pranced, caught their second wind, and were ready for battle. (Ambrose
440)

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does it matter in other AOKs how the knowledge is presented to others? Shouldn’t the knowledge simply
speak for itself?

This passage is full of genuinely emotive and powerful imagery, and a fair bit of speculation. However, the facts
presented (the archeological evidence of the battlefield, facts about how the Sioux conducted battle and their battle
costumes, the documented behaviour of the Sioux’s ponies) are all well evidenced. The imagery and behaviour
illustrated would be entirely consistent with all the facts about the battle. However, Ambrose has woven them into a
narrative which creates a powerful scene, one that is far more engaging from a human perspective. Granted,
Ambrose is a ‘popular’ history writer, one who writes not necessarily for the community of expert historians, but for
the ‘lay historian’ (someone who is interested in history but is not academically trained as a historian). This provides
some leeway for the writer in terms of style and approach, but it still does not license him to stray from what can be
considered factual.

ACTIVITY
Compare and contrast the information about the Battle of Little Bighorn presented by Ambrose in the
excerpt on page 389 and the battlefield diagram above.
1 Which of the representations of the Battle of Little Bighorn do you think conveys the most information?

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 Each might be said to be a ‘map’ of the event, but are they setting out to map the same information?
2 Do you find one more reliable?
3 Do you find one more effective?
4 What do you think the primary objective of the historian is: to communicate reliably or effectively? Are
these necessarily different?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
What role does the language used to convey knowledge impact the acceptance of that knowledge in the
various AOKs? Are some AOKs susceptible to the impact of language? How do different AOKs manage
the impact of language?

Aside from maintaining the reader’s interest, however, the language used might genuinely alter the meaning and
intent of the piece. You may have noticed that throughout this chapter we have used the slightly awkward phrasing
‘the events at Wounded Knee’. This phrase is odd in that it is overly neutral and has little descriptive power – it
merely suggests that something happened at Wounded Knee. This is purposeful because the language in which those
events are usually described undoubtedly convey a particular perspective on the event. Generally, the events are
described as ‘the Wounded Knee Massacre’, connoting unjust killing. The events there have also been called ‘the
Wounded Knee Battle’ or ‘Clash’ or ‘Conflict’, and these connote something more like a pitched battle between two
foes. The point is that the words used to even identify a historical event can colour the event in the mind of the
reader. Historians must keep this in mind and justify their use of the terms. In this instance, we would prefer to use
“massacre” in identifying the events at Wounded Knee, given the evidence provided by sources.

ACTIVITY
There are many examples of how language might colour how an event is understood.
1 Research the following terms and historical events and consider the role that specific use of language
plays in the historian’s attempt to construct a justified and reliable historical account of the events. Do
you think the language used is neutral? Do you think the language used should be neutral?
• Korean comfort women
• The Rape of Nanjing
• The July Fourth Incident
• The War of Northern Aggression
• Resettlement policies in South Africa.
2 Consider the history of your own country or region. Are there other, more personal examples of the
importance of language in history?
3 Do you think that a historian would be justified in using some of the more connotative language (like
‘massacre’) in order to bring out a deeper truth about the events which might be smoothed over by
less connotative language? What might your answer suggest about the nature of history?

DEEPER THINKING
Bias and knowledge consumption
Theory of Knowledge often prioritizes the construction of knowledge in the various areas of knowledge.
However, a fruitful direction of analysis is to consider the consumption of knowledge by individuals who
have not been part of the construction of that knowledge. You are a consumer of knowledge every time
you read a book, listen to the news, listen to a podcast or browse someone’s Instagram feed.
Given all that we’ve said here about how a historian must be on the lookout for their own prejudices,
preconceptions and biases when constructing historical knowledge, how do you think your own
prejudices, preconceptions and biases might impact your consumption of knowledge? Have you ever
read something and immediately felt it must simply be false? Was this because you considered it or
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because you held certain assumptions and were unwilling to let go of them and consider new
perspectives? Similarly, have you ever been surprised by some historical fact? If so, then this might be
an example of you bringing assumptions and pre-existing ideas to the table but showing a willingness to
allow them to be challenged.
As we consume information, we cannot help but bring with us a whole set of background beliefs,
experiences and knowledge through which we access and engage with new information. What
responsibilities do you think we have as consumers, knowing that we too are affected by our own
prejudices and preconceived notions of the world?

ACTIVITY
Consider again the scientific method described in the Methods and tools section of Chapter 9 (page 311)
and this section on the historical method.
1 What similarities between the two can you find? Do you think that they use broadly similar processes?
2 How might any similarities between the historical and scientific method apply to the question of
whether, or to what extent, historical claims can be reliable?
3 Now consider the differences between the historical and scientific method. Why do you think these
differences occur?
4 What is it about the nature or scope of science and history that might account for these differences?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is bias equally inevitable in the production of knowledge in different AOKs?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Responsibility
Understanding that the historical method is open to malpractice, historians are under some pressure to
guarantee that both their source material and their own analyses are beyond reproach. Moreover,
understanding the importance that communities place in their own shared histories, the role of the
historian in helping to define group identity shouldn’t be underestimated. (For more on this topic, see the
Ethics section that follows.) Our histories tell us who we are to a great extent. This suggests that
historians must take care when constructing knowledge, remaining self-aware in order to root out any
manipulative perspectives. We should reserve accusations of bias for those historians who perhaps

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ignore this responsibility and try to manipulate the evidence or manipulate their readers.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Truth
If knowledge construction is about finding out and articulating what is ‘true’ about the world, what, then,
are we to make of the concept of truth, given all that we’ve said? To review, historians often select
evidence and different historians may select different facts and evidence depending on their own
perspectives. Despite there being a broad historical method, there are still many worries about the
reliability of the historical endeavour. There can be no ‘re-running’ of an historical event in order to find
out what really happened; instead historians have to rely on whatever evidence happens to exist, and
much of this evidence might be subject to manipulation and bias. Historians themselves might be subject
to non-conscious bias which could manipulate or shape their own interpretations, not to mention the
historians who try to manipulate their reader’s understanding by crafting their own narratives to suit their
purpose. It is not even clear how best to refer to various events without imposing an interpretation.
These worries don’t seem to bode well for the notion of historical truth.
In many respects, historians simply have to accept these problems and nevertheless continue applying
the method in the struggle towards reliable knowledge. The historian (like the scientist) might do well to
reflect on their use of the word ‘true’ and instead consider using terms like ‘reliable’ or ‘confirmed’. This is
not to suggest that we cannot fully endorse particular claims as undoubtable or certain. Calling a claim
‘true’ in the context of history, then, might be more like, ‘This claim is well-justified by the available
evidence. The interpretation of the evidence shows care and critical reflection and, while it might be
speaking from a particular interest or perspective, it nevertheless maintains academic integrity and a
responsible application of the accepted method.’ It is a bit long-winded but captures the important
elements of what makes ‘good’ history.
There is a danger here of reflecting on the nature of historical truth. We do not want to fall into the trap of
first suggesting that ‘there is no truth’ in history, and risk opening up a hole which can be exploited by
conspiracy theorists and ‘truth-deniers’. We are not denying truth by suggesting that the concept of truth
must be carefully considered in the AOK of history.

What we are suggesting is that ‘truth’ is attainable, but the focus should be on ‘reliability’ and the
reliability of a historical claim is tied directly to the quality of the evidence and interpretation. Thinking
about historical truth in terms of the appropriate use of the historical method, does not mean that
conspiracy theories like ‘there was no Moon landing’ or (far more importantly) Holocaust denial, can be
‘true’. It means rather that the holders of these conspiracy theories are very poor historians. They appear
to have allowed their own ideologies (such as a pre-existing deep distrust of government, racism or a
wilful lack of intellectual humility in ignoring convincing counterarguments) to impact their application of
the method. They ignore or wilfully misinterpret evidence, or develop interpretations that stray away from
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evidence and drift into fiction. They consciously produce texts and documents that exploit people’s
ignorance and fear to drive home a point. Whether or not some of them are morally corrupt is one thing,
but the analysis here shows that they are very bad historians.

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Ethics
The existence of harmful conspiracy theories and the misuse of history suggests that the work of the historian is
important, not just in developing reliable claims about the world, but in providing a context in which we can
understand the world and ourselves in it. There is, in other words, an ethical dimension to constructing historical
knowledge. We’ve already discussed the responsibility that individual historians have to follow a method in a good
faith attempt to weed out various cognitive biases. However, history also has an impact on individuals in profound
ways. In this section we’ll look at the importance of a free press and the damage censorship might play in
developing later historical understanding of a period or time. We’ll also be considering the role that a shared
understanding of history might play for a community’s or individual’s understanding of themselves.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do historians have a moral responsibility to try to ensure that history is not misused and distorted by
people for their own ends?

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Journalism, censorship and history
One of the most popular discussion points in TOK is the question of censorship. Censorship is the deliberate limiting
or constraining of information for some principle or ideological reasons. Censorship is about limiting people’s
access to knowledge which might be otherwise available. Examples of censorship include the movie ratings systems
with which we are all familiar: some movies, because of their content, are rated as being only appropriate for people
of a certain age. For individuals younger than the film’s rating, this system limits the information available to those
individuals. Many students will be familiar with the experience of a film being rated for one age in one country, but
then another age in a different country.
Film rating systems, however, are not as controversial a form of censorship as others (nor does it have as much to do
with history as an area of knowledge as other forms of censorship). Governments are often the main censors when it
comes to access to knowledge. For instance, individuals working within a country’s government will have different
levels of security clearance and know more secret information about what their or other governments are doing than
the general population. In many cases this seems perfectly reasonable: in any organization there is information
which is perhaps best kept to those in charge of making the relevant decisions, rather than giving that information to
everyone in the organization or country.

However, there are instances where individuals feel that their access to information is unjustly limited – these are
what we traditionally are worried about when we worry about censorship. One form of censorship is when
journalists are censored, meaning their work is not allowed to be disseminated or when they are simply kept from
reporting on or writing about certain events. This form of censorship means that knowledge of events which are
happening in the world are kept from the general population. In most liberal democracies the ‘freedom of the press’
is a basic right and expectation. This is the idea is that journalists should be able to write about and say whatever
they like (so long as they are not lying or simply making things up) and that this is one way that keeps governments
from acting in irresponsible ways. If a journalist can write about, for instance, the human rights violations of a
government, then people will learn about this and challenge the government with legal action or vote the responsible
officials out of office.
What does the freedom of the press or censorship of journalists have to do with history as an area of knowledge or
the ethical consequences of history? Though they are, of course, quite different in nature, the work of the journalist
and the work of the historian have a lot in common. Journalism, in fact, has often been referred to as the ‘first rough
draft of history’ (Shafer).
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 Journalism is the first rough draft of history.
Jack Shafer

ACTIVITY
1 Why do you think journalism might be considered as ‘the first rough draft of history’? How might a
historian use the journalism of the past in their work? What do you think the words ‘rough’ and ‘draft’
add to the idea? In what ways do you think the historian should exercise caution when reading past
news reports in their research?
2 Now extend your thinking and consider how important you think the journalist’s work is in relation to
providing future historians with material. What would happen if journalists were told what to write, or
were unable to write what they wanted because of government constraint? How might that affect a
historian in the future?

The work of the journalist supports the work of the historian to a large degree. Consider the opening of this chapter:
the report for the Bismarck Weekly Tribune has provided us as historians an account of an event which we can then
use in our creation of the historical understanding of those events. In the terms offered by Collingwood, we can use
the journalist’s work as a way of uncovering both the outside of the event (a description of what happened) and the
inside of the event (the motives and thoughts of the individuals involved). Journalists, in other words, create
evidence which later historians might use in their own historical narratives. Journalists record events, create and
gather eye-witness testimony and provide initial interpretations of events which become part of the ‘historical
record’ which later historians can use.
Like historians, journalists are meant to take an objective stance, that is, their work must be based on facts
accompanied by a reasonable and non-prejudiced interpretation of them. Journalists cannot make up facts and they
are expected to make a reasonable effort to consider the influence of their own individual biases and prejudices.
However, journalists, like historians, also make choices, deciding in many cases what needs to be reported, thereby
imposing their own interests and goals. A journalist could cover anything they wanted to, but they may find some
topics more interesting or more important than others. Some journalists have made names for themselves by actively
seeking to tell very particular types of stories.
Censorship of the press, then, can be seen as an attempt by the censors to remove evidence or facts which later
historians can use to develop historical narratives. Historians need facts to ground their narratives in truth and
censorship is a direct challenge to truth.
Imagine now a situation where a country either dictates or refuses to allow journalists the freedom to report on what
they see fit, or so constrains their work that they are unable to honestly report the facts as they see them. The effect
of this is that the events which would have been reported on are no longer part of the historical record for later
historians to make sense of. There are undoubtedly an uncountable number of events which have left no historical
record, and which therefore cannot be part of any historical account, but imagine if certain events were never
recorded. Or they were recorded in a way that only one party to the events wanted it recorded.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How are other AOKs prone to censorship and what effect might this have on the general population’s
knowledge of truth in that field?

CASE STUDY
Marie Colvin
Marie Colvin died in February 2012 in Homs, Syria while covering the civil war there. She died in a
rocket attack instigated by the Syrian government, who claimed that the city of Homs had only been
populated by rebel forces. Colvin knew better. She and her photographer colleague, Paul Conroy, had
pushed through Syrian lines into a neighbourhood Colvin knew to be populated by civilians to report on
their plight. She and Conroy were in a make-shift media centre, from where she made contact with CNN
and Channel 4 News to offer reports of what was happening.

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These transmissions were picked up and traced by the Syrian government which, through a purposeful
targeting strategy, finally pinpointed their location. Colvin and a French reporter Rémi Ochlik were killed
in the blast and Conroy was injured. He escaped six days later with the help of local residents, many of
whom would not escape Homs. They told Conroy, ‘Your friends are dead, our friends are dead, their
families are dead, most people are dead, the world isn’t listening; if you get out, tell our story.’ Conroy
says, ‘I made a promise to tell their story, and I take that seriously’ (Moss).
Colvin’s reports and Conroy’s images and videos are not ‘history’ in the sense that they were not
producing what professional historians produce. However, they were creating what we’ve called the ‘first
draft of history’ in the sense that they were recording facts that historians can later use in the production
of genuine historical narratives. Colvin made her career in seeking out and recording stories that
otherwise would not have been told, stories that she felt needed to be told. This is similar to the choices
that historians make when choosing to ask certain historical questions. Journalism, however, can lack
the emotional distance, or the rational objectivity that is common to a historical account. But in some
cases, like the types of stories Colvin wanted to tell, the historical facts speak for themselves. Colvin’s
recording of facts was purposeful and sought to directly engage with the politics of the time. For
instance, in 1999, East Timor held a referendum on independence from Indonesia and Colvin’s reporting
of the subsequent crack-down from the Indonesian military put huge pressure on the UN to support East
Timor’s independence, which it finally gained in 2002 (Hilsum). Because the facts about the military
quelling of dissent in East Timor and the direct military targeting of civilians in Homs speak for
themselves, journalists like Colvin hold an incredible amount of power and purpose.
Use the QR code to view Colvin’s final report for Channel 4 News on the horrific details of the war.

This would create a historical record that was either incomplete because of the omissions or manipulated because the
facts are not honestly presented.
Journalists recording facts can be thought of as the construction of a collective memory, which is crucial to the
construction of truthful histories and cultural identities. ‘The memories that are public and enduring, not private and
transitory’, said John Dewey, ‘are the primary material within which conscious and deliberate historians do their
work’ (Dewey 235). This underscores the power of the historian – by seeking out facts and creating narratives about
those facts, societies have a process by which the individuals within that society might reflect on what sort of society
it is and what sort of society they wish to live in.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is knowledge in other AOKs as important to know as it might be in history or politics?

ACTIVITY
There are often stories of journalists being harassed or targeted for the stories that they are trying to
cover. Find such an article in a newspaper or online and research the story.
1 What facts is the journalist attempting to record?
2 How important do you think those facts are for future historians?
3 What do you think the impact of losing those facts might be?
4 What do you think are the motives and goals of trying to censor those facts?

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History as myth
The preceding discussion of the power of historical narratives is an important one to discuss. A historical narrative
can serve as the glue which binds certain communities together. We saw in Chapter 5 on Indigenous knowledge
systems that people form communities around a common understanding of their shared experience. However, this
role of history as a way of bringing communities together is not limited to Indigenous cultures. Consider your own
country’s ‘national day’ such as Independence Day (The Fourth of July) in the United States or 9 August in
Singapore.

ACTIVITY

Use the QR code to watch Singapore’s National Day 2019 official video for the theme song ‘Our
Singapore’.
Look for the ways in which the song, its lyrics and the images bring to mind the common understanding
of Singapore’s own history in the minds of its people.
1 What do you think the main goal of the video is? Is it simply a catchy tune or does it seek to do
something more?
2 What role do the references to the country’s past play and how does this link to the messages about
Singapore’s future?

Using the Singapore 2019 National Day theme song as an example, we can see how a common view of history can
serve as a cultural glue which binds the community together. Singapore is still a relatively young country, having
established its independence from Malaysia in 1965. It was previously part of the British Empire, and members of
the ‘Pioneer’ generation (those who were alive during the transition to independence) are still alive and well.
Maintaining a common vision of the struggles and difficulties of forging a new, modern and multicultural country
out of the post-Second World War destruction and chaos has become central to Singapore’s vision of itself. The
National Day video makes this clear in its imagery (the black and white opening, the inclusion of a diverse range of
people, but all clothed in the national colours) and lyrics (which remind listeners of the struggles, the goals and the
successes they’ve enjoyed: ‘And now we look around us and we see / A nation built with love for you and me / a
land to treasure right down to the core / Our Home, Our Heart, Our Singapore) (National Day Parade 2019 Theme
Song – Our Singapore).
This role of a shared view of a community’s history is not to suggest that there is anything false about that view.
Historians create their narratives from the facts they are able to identify and interpret, but sometimes that
interpretation is aimed at providing emotional connections between individuals in a way that unites them. The
Singaporean song doesn’t necessarily offer facts, but a common vision about the nation’s history, and serves to
remind the community of how to view those facts.
Sometimes the historical facts themselves can serve as a binding agent to a community. In her 2017 book Why I’m
no longer talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge opens with a long and detailed account of the
historical facts about the black community in the UK. These facts are highly selective, but consciously so; she is
aiming to tell a very particular story, which as we’ve seen is a common feature for historians. The book is not itself a
‘history’, but the historical survey in her opening chapters provide a common framework composed of statistical and
cultural facts which remind the reader that this is what has been happening to the black community.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Do other AOKs provide a cultural narrative in the same way or in similar ways as history? If history tells

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us who we are, do the human and natural sciences simply tell us what we are? Is there a difference?

What we are suggesting here is that a community’s history, told honestly but in a particular context, can take on a
different role than simply interpreting what has happened in the past. Furthermore, this speaks to the power of
history. History can take on a mythological status and by ‘myth’ we do not mean ‘false stories’. In Chapter 5 (pages
169–172) we discussed one feature of myth as providing a community with a common narrative that both reminds
the individuals of that community of who they are, but also provides a set of values that are common to the
community. History can serve this function too. The linking of history to the concept of myth is to highlight the role
that a shared understanding of a community’s history can play in providing a set of values and goals for individuals
by which they can orient themselves and help them find their place. These values and goals, developed through a
shared understanding of its history, can provide a community with strong ethical values and guidance.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can knowledge from other AOKs influence a group’s identity as much as historical knowledge might?

CASE STUDY
The Donner Party

Another example of how history can take on a mythical status might be the tale of the ill-fated Donner
Party. In 1846, a group of settlers set out for California from the midwestern United States. They were
trapped by severe weather in the mountains of eastern California and were forced to spend nearly four
months of the winter snowbound with little food or other supplies. Of nearly 90 settlers, only 48 survived
the winter, and some survived only because they had resorted to cannibalism.
While a clearly documented historical event, the history of the Donner Party did more than just teach
generations of young Californians about the state’s history. It highlighted a number of key values and
beliefs that Americans were meant to exhibit: a sense of adventure, a struggle for individual merit,
perseverance, commitment to the group, the inherent significance and value of struggle and an almost
sacred regard held for the settlers of the west. In other words, the teaching of historical fact managed to
take on a mythical dimension: Californian school children weren’t taught this just for the sake of it, they
were taught this to help guide them in life – it gave them an identity.
In the context of other stories of early US colonization and westward expansion, American school
children developed an approach and identity which is in some ways quite different than other countries
around the world. This regard for the settling of the west for many is at the expense of other stories from
the Indigenous people who already lived in the area. Their stories are often simply not taught because
they cast quite a different light on the stories of the American settlers.
Historians then, in their choices of content and emphasis also make value judgments. They therefore
have something of an ethical obligation to reflect on the narratives they choose and to consider the
consequences of their selections.
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With today’s globally mobile world there has arisen a new group of people some call ‘Third Culture Kids’. These
are young people who don’t ‘fit’ into any one culture, but often have lived in many different places and sometimes
have parents from two different cultures. The challenge for young people like this is that they don’t have deep
connections to any one community’s history, so they find it difficult to identify with any one cultural or historical
narrative. This underscores the point we are making here: that deep connections with and acceptance of a
community’s history provide a sense of identity and grounding which helps individuals fix themselves in an ever-
changing and multicultural world. Having such a connection certainly isn’t inherently better than not but does
emphasize one role that knowledge of history provides.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Values
Human values are developed in a variety of ways and the point here is that a shared understanding of
the history of your community (or communities) can provide another source for them. These histories
embody the knowledge of a community, but it is a sort of knowledge or a way of knowing that is never
meant to have the same status of unambiguous scientific description. We don’t tend to develop
communities around facts pertaining to the velocity of objects sliding down a frictionless plane, or
‘identify’ with the respiration rate of algae in ponds, or the varying rate of exchange between currencies.
However, individuals do use historical facts about, for example, the treatment of minorities, to develop
their view of who they are, or use historical facts about the process of imperialism to develop their
values.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do other AOKs influence culture as much as historical knowledge does?

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The role of curriculum

ACTIVITY
Review your school’s history curriculum. Keeping in mind that no history curriculum can ever cover ‘all’
of history (ie, it has to make choices and be selective), note what choices the curriculum developers
(whether it be your teachers or an exam board like the IB) have made and reflect on those choices.
1 Are the curriculum developers prioritizing certain facts over others?
2 Are there particular values being emphasized over others?
3 What types of individuals, events or trends are being focused on?
4 Now consider what facts or elements are not being expressed. How would a student of history think
differently about the past were those facts offered instead of others?
5 What might this suggest about the non-conscious messages offered by the selection of material to
present in history?

Learner profile
Inquirers
How has your school’s history curriculum contributed to your identity?

That a school history curriculum can impact one’s general perspective on the world is well illustrated by a
controversy that arose when the College Board exam board altered their Advanced Placement US History
curriculum in 2015. The College Board suggested the new curriculum provided a ‘clearer and more balanced
approach to the teaching of American history’ with ‘statements that are clearer and more historically precise, and
less open to interpretation or perceptions of imbalance’ (‘The 2015 AP US History Course and Exam Description’).
Nevertheless, when it was published, many politically conservative writers suggested that the curriculum maintains
an ‘underlying bias’ to politically liberal values, citing the following example:
… it variously downplays, omits, and distorts the significance of the assimilationist ethos in American
history. Instead of conveying the nature and importance of assimilation, the College Board projects a
contemporary multiculturalist perspective onto earlier eras. This does an injustice both to the facts and to a
theme that rightly serves as a foundation for successful civic education: assimilation. (Fonte and Kurtz)

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Do the curriculum choices made in other AOKs matter as much as they might in history? Consider the
choices your own school has made in the curriculum being offered in the sciences, or the arts or
mathematics. What choices were available in developing the topics being taught? Do the choices made
matter in the same way as they might in history?

In relation to previous versions of the curriculum, one local school board member suggested that history materials
‘should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority
and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard
of the law’, which they felt were over-emphasized in the content on the civil unrest of the civil rights movement
(Ganim). This brings out explicitly the fact that the very teaching of history can support wider ideological and
political agendas, providing a framework for communal values by which we might live, and again underscores the
ethical obligation historians have to reflect on the consequences of the choices and selections that they make.

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This sort of controversy affected the United Kingdom as well. In 2013, the coalition Conservative and Liberal
Democrat government sought to change the history curriculum taught in schools from the ages of 4 through to 16.
Critics, this time from the left, suggested that the curriculum was too focused on British history, prioritizing a rose-
coloured view of British imperialism and history, without due consideration of other major events and themes in
world history (Mansell).
About the proposed curriculum British historian Simon Schama argued:
History is not about self-congratulation. It’s not really about chasing the pedigree of the wonderfulness of
us … Nor is it about chasing the pedigree of the reprehensible awful nature of us…History is meant to
keep the powerful awake at night and keep them honest. (Furness)
History is meant to keep the powerful awake at night and keep them honest.
Simon Schama

ACTIVITY
1 What do you think Simon Schama means by this quotation? Can you think of an example of work that
you’ve done in a history class, or from your own learning, that might be dangerous to ‘the powerful’?
2 How might the work of this Theory of Knowledge course provide you with an awareness or skills which
might be ‘dangerous’ to those in power?

What does this discussion suggest about the nature of history as an AOK? Not only do historians make choices
about what topics they wish to write about and select among the evidence they wish to use, but the curriculum
developers themselves also must make choices about what sorts of historical facts to teach you and what sort of
context to place them in. These choices are all part of a wider perspective and they form a picture that is far from a
neutral list of facts. The histories we learn and teach to those in our community provide a framework for developing
the values of that community and an orientation for what those individuals will consider important or significant.
The challenge is to develop this framework justly, that is, in a way that is the result of critical reflection and
awareness of the impact on individuals in that community.

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Conclusion
History as an AOK is an incredibly rich and powerful way to illustrate the main themes and approaches developed in
the TOK course. We accept that history deserves its own area of knowledge, despite the fact that many see it as a
version of a human science. Human scientists attempt to identify general laws or trends which, in a deterministic
way, dictate our behaviour. Historians, however, construct narratives and explanations of the relationships between
events in our past, sometimes between them and other past events, sometimes between events in the past and the
present. History has far more freedom from anything like a rigid scientific method, though the responsible historian
must still maintain what Collingwood calls ‘a peculiar relationship to evidence’ (Collingwood), meaning that the
historian must ground their interpretation with reference to reliable historical facts.
Still, history moves well beyond those facts in developing connections and interpretations of those facts. The
historian’s goal is not to list or explain every fact, but rather to identify an issue or a topic and select facts relevant to
that topic in order to show why that topic is important to us today. This link to value and meaning is one of the most
powerful elements of history. While the subject matter of history is events from the past, we bring our histories with
us into our present and extend them into our futures. We look to the past – to who we were and what we did – in
order to help us understand who we are now. Thinking about it in the opposite direction, we also can use who we are
now to re-examine and develop new understandings of where we come from and how we have changed and how we
might continue to change. We cannot alter the facts of our past, but, as historians, we can revisit them and re-
examine them in the light of new experience.
History is important. It supports us and guides us. It tells us who we are and who we need to be. Rick Williams, a
member of the Lakota tribe, whose ancestors were at Wounded Knee, puts it this way:
Wounded Knee happened yesterday. For Lakota people, Wounded Knee is today. Wounded Knee
represents all the frustrations of those years and years and years on the reservation. Even though it
happened in 1890, it’s fresh in Lakota peoples’ minds and in their hearts. That tragedy, that destruction,
that devastating thing that happened to them, it exists today. It exists in our hearts and our minds, the way
we think when we see about, when we talk about Indian-White relations, that’s the first thing that comes
to mind. We’ll never forget Wounded Knee. (‘Like Grass Before the Sickle’)

CONNECTIONS TO OTHER AOKs

• Scope: Given that there are so many challenges to the production of reliable historical knowledge, is
there any hope of anything like an objective historical record? If not, then what is the purpose of
history? Does the relative objectivity of some other AOKs mean that they are better, or does history
capture something more important that the others?
• Perspectives: History seems particularly susceptible to the bias of the knowledge producers and a
responsible use of the historical method is meant to manage this impact. What is the effect of the
personal circumstances of the knowledge producer on the knowledge in other AOKs? Are some AOKs
better or worse at managing this influence?
• Methods and tools: Are the methods available to the historian enough to meet the challenges posed
by the impact of bias? Do other AOKs suffer the same sorts of challenges? Are their methods better
suited to weeding out bias and pre-judgments in the construction of knowledge?
• Ethics: The way we construct, record and transmit our own culture or group’s history to ourselves and
others impacts who we think we are. Do historians have a special responsibility in preserving a
culture’s or a group’s identity and transmitting it faithfully to future generations? Should knowing our
group’s history matter in knowing ourselves? Do other AOKs have the same impact on self-knowledge
as history might?

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Works cited
Alterman, Eric. ‘The Decline of Historical Thinking’. The New Yorker. The New Yorker. 6 Feb. 2019. Web.
www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-decline-of-historical-thinking.
Ambrose, Stephen E. 2003. Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors. London.
Pocket.
Bismarck Weekly Tribune. 1891. National Endowment for the Humanities. Library of Congress. Image 1. N.d. Web.
27 Jul. 2019. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042588/1891-01-02/ed-1/seq-
1/#date1=1890&index=5&rows=20&words=KNEE%20Knee%20Wounded%20WOUNDED&searchType=basic&sequence=
Borschel-Dan, Amanda. ‘1,600-Year-Old Church Mosaic Puzzles Out Key Role of Women in Early Christianity’.
The Times of Israel. N.p. 7 Nov. 2017. Web. 30 Jul. 2019. www.timesofisrael.com/who-run-the-world-
sometimes-women-1600-year-old-church-mosaic-shows/.
Collingwood, RG. 1994. The Idea of History. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Dewey, John. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York. Henry Holt and Company.
Eddo-Lodge, Reni. 2019. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. New York. Bloomsbury
Publishing.
Finton, Jeannine. ‘The Story of the Titanic: Activity Guide Titanic Science’. Maryland Science Center. N.d. Web.
27 Jul. 2019. www.titanicscience.com/TSci-ActivityGuideFinal.pdf.
Fonte, John, and Stanley Kurtz. ‘AP US History Bias Still Runs Deep’. National Review. National Review. 22 Sep.
2015. Web. 18 Aug. 2019. www.nationalreview.com/2015/09/ap-us-history-bias/.
Furness, Hannah. ‘Hay Festival 2013: Don’t Sign up to Gove’s Insulting Curriculum, Schama Urges’. The
Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group. 30 May 2013. Web. 18 Aug. 2019. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-
festival/10090287/Hay-Festival-2013-Dont-sign-up-to-Goves-insulting-curriculum-Schama-urges.html.
Ganim, Sara. ‘Making History: Battle Brew Over Alleged Bias in Advanced Placement Standards’. CNN. Cable
News Network. 24 Feb. 2015. Web. 18 Aug. 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/20/us/ap-history-
framework-fight/.
Guha, Ramachandra. ‘The Historian and Chauvinism’. The India Forum. N.p. 16 May 2019. Web. 17 Aug. 2019.
www.theindiaforum.in/article/historian-and-chauvinism?
fbclid=IwAR3_H7m3aNFvll8QA3znL8yMPy1BO8-kmqrZvnabH1Hyqv6ME1PoDA1Sf5w.
Hilsum, Lindsey. ‘Marie Colvin – the Making of a Myth’. Financial Times. Financial Times. 6 Feb. 2019. Web. 18
Aug. 2019. www.ft.com/content/c72c571c-260f-11e9-8ce6-5db4543da632.
‘Hossbach Memorandum’. 2008. The Avalon Project: Hossbach Memorandum. Lillian Goldman Law Library. Web.
30 Jul. 2019. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/hossbach.asp.
‘Like Grass before the Sickle’. 2001. PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. Web. 27 Jul. 2019.
www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/program/episodes/eight/likegrass.htm.
Mansell, Warwick. ‘Michael Gove Redrafts New History Curriculum after Outcry’. The Guardian. Guardian News
and Media. 21 Jun. 2013. Web. 18 Aug. 2019. www.theguardian.com/education/2013/jun/21/michael-gove-
history-curriculum.
McNally, Frank. ‘Indian Winter – the Down Man in the Battle of Wounded Knee’. The Irish Times. The Irish Times.
13 Dec. 2015. Web. 27 Jul. 2019. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/indian-winter-the-down-man-in-the-battle-of-
wounded-knee-1.2463524.
Moss, Stephen. ‘Paul Conroy on Marie Colvin: “Her Curiosity Overtook Any Sense of Staying Alive”’. The
Guardian. Guardian News and Media. 1 Feb. 2019. Web. 8 Aug. 2019.
www.theguardian.com/media/2019/feb/01/paul-conroy-marie-colvin-syria-curiosity-overtook-sense-
staying-alive.
National Day Parade 2019 Theme Song. Our Singapore. Composed by Dick Lee, Creative Director of National Day
Parade 2019. N.d. Web. 15 Oct. 2019. www.gov.sg/microsites/ndr2019.
Rowbotham, Sheila. 1973. Hidden from History. London. Pluto Press.
Schneider, Donald. 1963. ‘The Historical Method in the Teaching of History’. Peabody Journal of Education. Vol
40, number 4. Web. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/1490814.
Shafer, Jack. ‘On the Trail of the Question, Who First Said (or Wrote) That Journalism Is the “First Rough Draft of
History”?’ Slate Magazine. Slate. 31 Aug. 2010. Web. 8 Aug. 2019. https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2010/08/on-the-trail-of-the-question-who-first-said-or-wrote-that-journalism-is-the-first-rough-
draft-of-history.html.
Shipp, E.R. “1619: 400 Years Ago, a Ship Arrived in Virginia, Bearing Human Cargo”. USA Today. Gannett

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 Satellite Information Network. 8 Feb. 2019. Web.
www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/02/08/1619-african-arrival-virginia/2740468002/.
‘The 2015 AP US History Course and Exam Description: AP Central – The College Board’. AP Central. N.p. 27
Jun. 2018. Web. 18 Aug. 2019. https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-united-states-history/2015-ced.

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12 The Arts
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, the student will be able to:
• provide an effective definition of art
• appreciate the broad scope of the arts
• understand the role that art plays in human experience and culture
• explain what kinds of knowledge we can get from the arts
• understand the relationship between the artist, the artwork and the audience in terms of generating
meaning
• understand the complex ways in which judgments about what constitutes quality in art are made
• appreciate the role of truth in the arts
• recognize the wide-ranging methods of making art and the important methods of interpreting art
• understand the role of ethics in the making of art
• understand the role of art in helping to form ethical viewpoints.

Learner profile
Communicators
How and what does art communicate to an audience?

ACTIVITY
1 Put each of the objects shown in the photographs into one of two categories: ‘art’ and ‘not art’. Each
object must go into one or the other of the two categories, but not both. Be sure that you can explain
your reasoning when you are done – what feature or features did you use to differentiate between
things which are art and things which are not art? For the purposes of this activity, consider the object
in each photograph, not the photographs themselves. If the photograph is of a painting, you must
consider the painting, rather than the objects in the painting.
2 Compare your two lists with those of some of your classmates. Share the decision you made about
how to differentiate between things that are art and things that are not art.

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Introduction

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The activity required you to make two categories, but it is sometimes tempting to try to claim that what is art is a
matter of opinion, and, therefore, everything is art. That argument is not very compelling, however, because if we
try to claim that everything fits into some category, then we negate the category. If everything that exists could be
called ‘cat’, for example, then we would not need a word to distinguish cats from all other things that exist. One
important function of words, as we saw in Chapter 4, is that they have meanings which help us to know what things
are and how they are different from each other. The fact that we have a word for art, then, means that there is a
concept of what art is and that some things are not art.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Are the arts best seen as a system of knowledge, a type of knowledge or a means of expressing
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knowledge?

In trying to determine which kinds of things do belong in the category called ‘art’ and which do not, we have to
figure out what particular characteristics define art and differentiate it from other things. One feature that we often
associate with art is beauty. If, however, we try to categorize the objects above into ‘art’ and ‘not-art’ based on
whether they are beautiful or not, then we have two problems: first, we would have to include the cat, and possibly
the tree, as both can be seen to be beautiful. Trying to categorize a cat or a tree as art is problematic because they are
not things which are created by humans. The word ‘art’ is related to the word ‘artificial’, which is a word for things
which are not natural – not part of nature – but which are created by humans. Dating back to the fourteenth century,
the word ‘artificial’, in both the Old French and Latin referred to things which ‘belonged to art’ (‘Artificial’). Given
the idea that only objects which are artificial, or created by humans, belong in the category of art, we can eliminate
the cat and the tree from the set above. We are still left with the question of whether beauty can be the determining
factor.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Subjectivity
What makes the use of ‘beauty’ as a differentiating factor problematic is that beauty is a highly subjective
concept, and all 12 of the objects on page 403 could be seen as beautiful by different people. Perhaps
the lawnmower or the child’s painting might be the two objects which people might find difficult to call
‘beautiful’. However, many people do find machines to be beautiful – a fact which is easier to see with
the classic car, which has been restored to a gleaming treasure from the past. The lawnmower is also in
pristine condition, shiny and new. It has a pleasing colour combination of black and orange. It also has
what we might call sleek lines. The child’s painting is not ‘beautiful’ in the strict sense of being visually
attractive, but we can easily understand that to the parents of the child, the painting would naturally be
beautiful as a reflection of their child’s vision of the world.
The subjectivity of the concept of beauty means that ‘beauty’ cannot be used as a defining characteristic
when we are trying to figure out how to tell whether something is art or whether it is not.

Another problem with trying to use the concept of beauty as a determining factor for deciding whether something is
art or not is that we can also think of many objects which would be classified as art, but which are not physically
beautiful. Consider this painting by Georges Braque, called The Portuguese (1911).
The painting is in the Cubist school. Cubism is a style which was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
The focus is on flattening out objects so that the three-dimensional world is displayed in two dimensions. The image
is not traditionally beautiful, and, although it is more than 100 years old, it is still considered to be one of Braque’s
masterpieces. It is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland.

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Many other works are accepted and appreciated as art although they are not traditionally beautiful. Use the QR code
on the next page to listen to Delia Derbyshire’s composition for the original theme of Doctor Who, written in 1963.
The music might be quite familiar to you now, as the show has become iconic, but it is electronic music, and atonal.
It was revolutionary in the time in which it was composed (Sherman).

ACTIVITY
Do some research and find some recognized artworks in a variety of genres – including dance, poetry,
and sculpture – which are not traditionally beautiful.
1 When were these works of art created? Are they all modern?
2 Can you find some art which is not traditionally beautiful from any time prior to 1900?
3 How do you know that these artworks are examples of art?

We have now made some progress in defining art: we know that art is something which is created by humans and
that beauty, because it is too subjective, is not a defining characteristic. Where do we go from here?

In his essay ‘What is Art and If We Know What Art Is, What Is Politics?’, Tom Robbins defines art as that which
has been created for the express purpose of appealing to our sensory receptors (Robbins 200):
That is not to say that a work of art can’t convey other, additional values, values with intellectual and/or
emotional heft. However, if it’s really art, then those values will play a secondary role. To be sure, we may
praise a piece for its cultural insights, for the progressive statement it makes and the courageous stand it
takes, but to honor it as ‘art’ when its aesthetic impact is not its dominant feature is to fall into a philistine
trap of shoddy semantics and false emphasis. (Robbins 199)
Art exists, in other words, primarily, if not exclusively, for the sake of our desire to share our perceptual experiences
with each other, to find out how the world seems to be to other people, and to determine whether what we
experience is like what others experience or whether it is different. The work of art is the medium for this
communication, and the perceptions it endeavours to convey are hard to pin down in direct, assertive statements.

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KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do any of the other AOKs rely in such an integral way on the personal world view of the person who is
working on generating knowledge? Why or why not?

Try, for example, to explain exactly how it feels to be absolutely thrilled to have achieved some goal – winning a
race, or scoring the highest possible mark on an important test, or receiving a gift of something that you really
wanted but did not expect to get. To use direct statements – such as ‘I was absolutely thrilled!’ – does not convey the
intensity or the nuance of the feelings. The reader of that statement will know, intellectually, that you were happy,
because you said so, but he or she will not experience that moment perceptually. The best way to ensure that the
audience of a work of art experiences the feeling is for you, as artist, to provide an image or scenario or a metaphor
or some other indirect means by which the audience will be able to experience vicariously (indirectly) some of the
same happiness that you experienced.
One way to describe this kind of feeling is to say that art appeals to the aesthetic. ‘Aesthetic’ is a somewhat difficult
concept. Most dictionaries will tell you that ‘aesthetic’ refers to things of great beauty, but as we have already seen,
beauty is not a good standard for determining whether something is art or not – although many works of art are, of
course, very beautiful! ‘Aesthetic’ is therefore not a very good adjective to describe the experience of engaging with
art. A more nuanced definition of ‘aesthetics’, however, is that it is our ability to appreciate a work of art – or any
object (Mastin), which includes our ability to judge whether it is beautiful or not.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty …
John Keats

We can also expand our understanding of what ‘beauty’ means. In his poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, John Keats
famously said, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty …’ That line gives us the insight that beauty does not have to be
physical. We can experience a work of art which is not physically attractive and find in it something that we can
connect to. That connection might be a revelation about human experience, insight into a mind which is like ours or
which we can admire, or a truth about life. We can, therefore, find that work of art beautiful because of that
connection. We can appreciate art, in other words, for many different reasons, not all of which have to do with the
degree to which it is attractive to look at or listen to.

CONNECTION TO THE CORE THEME

Art, sense perception and emotion
The question of what ‘aesthetic’ means also requires an understanding about how you, as an individual
knower, experience art. When Tom Robbins talks about art being something which is created specifically
to appeal to the senses, he shows an understanding of how our senses and our emotions are related.
William James, a nineteenth-century philosopher, first defined the connection between sense perception
and emotions:
If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the
feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind-stuff’ out of which
the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all
that remains. (Damasio 129)
James explained that in order to experience any emotions we must first have a physical response to
some stimulus. The brain translates that physical response into an emotion. Robbins was correct,
therefore, because the emotional response that we experience – empathy, revulsion, horror, joy,
suspense – when we experience any work of art has its roots in a perceptual reaction to stimulus. We
see or hear a work of art, or possibly we can touch it, and our bodies react, physically, to the sensory
information that we collect. We might get goose bumps, or our heart might start to race a little, or some
of our muscles might tense up. Sometimes we might be moved to tears. Our brains translate those
responses into emotions seamlessly, and what we generally notice is the emotional feeling, not the
physical feeling.
If you understand the nature of an aesthetic response, you also understand something significant about
how sense perception and emotion work to help us make knowledge in the arts. Other cognitive tools
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are also involved in that process, so it would be wise not to think that you only use your senses and your
emotions in interpreting a work of art, as we shall see later in this chapter when we explore methods and
tools.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
A sense of the aesthetic is important in the arts. Does it have the same kind of importance for knowledge
generation in any other areas of knowledge such as mathematics or history?

We will take, then, Robbins’ idea that art is that which exists primarily or solely for the purpose of fulfilling our
aesthetic needs as our definition of art. Given that definition, we can see that some of the 12 objects in the photo
collection at the start of this chapter are quite different from the others, in that they serve functional purposes. Table
12.1 shows how we can consider all 12 of the objects in terms of their utility.

Table 12.1 Utility of objects

Living Objects created for practical or social Objects created for aesthetic reasons
things uses only
Cat Lawnmower Aboriginal painting
Tree Car Surrealist painting
Sydney Opera House Portrait of a young woman
Indian wedding clothes Landscape painting
Child’s painting
Statue of Buddha

ACTIVITY
Speak to your classmates. Do you agree with this definition of what constitutes art? If not, how would
you define it? The ability to define what is and what is not art is important because until we can know
what art is, we can’t know what kind of knowledge we get from it.

So far, this categorization seems clear, but some of the items don’t seem to sit easily in their columns. We can make
an argument that the Sydney Opera House, the wedding clothes and the religious statue of Buddha were all created
for a functional purpose. However, all of them also feature artistic elements not needed in order to make them
function as they are intended to.
The purpose of building an opera house is so that it can be used for the staging of operas. The Sydney Opera House
hosts a wide variety of events including plays, dance, symphonies, musical theatre and films. The opera house does,
however, certainly have architectural features which go well beyond the simply functional. Sydney could have
decided on a design for an opera house which was quite plain, so long as the acoustics inside were effective for
music and the theatre was large enough to accommodate an audience. Instead, they chose a design which:
‘was inspired by nature, its forms, functions and colours. The designer, Danish architect Jørn Utzon, was
influenced in his designs by bird wings, the shape and form of clouds, shells, walnuts and palm trees. He
looked upon nature for guidance when designing, as nature over time combined both efficiency and
beauty, hand in hand’. (Ryan)
Many people think that the opera house looks like billowing sails on boats, an effect which is emphasized because of
the position of the building out on a point in Sydney Harbour.
It is, of course, the shell design of the roof which makes the opera house so striking and memorable. Not only was
that design not necessary for the opera house to function as intended, it also posed a huge problem for construction.
Engineers struggled for years trying to figure out how to construct the shells. It was Utzon himself who finally
worked it out, and the solution was revolutionary in architecture (Sydney Opera House). He claimed that his solution
was inspired by peeling an orange. If combined, all 14 of the separate roofs would form a sphere (Ryan). This
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design, and the successful implementation of it, reveal that the builders of the Sydney Opera House cared about
more than simple functionality, and its recognition, in 2007, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site suggests that people
around the world appreciate the building for more than its function as well.
The wedding clothes are designed to be worn during a Hindu wedding ceremony. They are functional in the same
way that all clothing is functional, to help preserve people’s dignity and privacy and to keep them warm and safe
from the elements. They have also been designed with features which are intended to make the clothing especially
suited to the particular occasion and to ensure that it reflects long-held cultural traditions. The bride’s gown is called
a lehenga and it is very often red, because red is a symbol of happiness and good luck. The groom wears a tunic,
called a sherwani, over trousers, called churidas. The turban is called a Safa, and the brooch on the turban is a Kalgi,
and symbolizes respect (‘Today’s Bride’). The clothing helps to create the traditional ceremony which then connects
the bride and groom to the long history of brides and grooms which came before them. It is also beautiful and helps
to make the bride and groom the center of attention on an occasion that they will never forget. Wedding clothing in
many cultures performs the same function, and it is generally never worn again. The money and effort spent in
creating and acquiring wedding clothes reflects people’s value for those clothes beyond the merely useful.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the relationship between functionality and the aesthetic feature in any other AOK as part of its
scope, or as part of any other aspect of the AOK?

The statue of the buddha is the Phuket Big Buddha in Thailand. It was granted the name of Phra Phutta Ming
Mongkol Akenakakiri by the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand in 2008. The name means ‘Happiness on Top of
Nagakerd Mountain’ (Limrudee). The statue was built because some friends were hiking through the Nagakerd Hills
and came upon the mountain top, which has spectacular views in every direction. It was a perfect viewpoint, and as
time passed, they thought it would make a perfect place for a statue of the Lord Buddha (‘Phuket Big Buddha’). The
purpose for creating the Buddha, then, was reverence – to celebrate the Lord Buddha in an exceptionally beautiful
natural site. The large statue is also dedicated to King Bhumibol, and so the site functions also to express respect and
admiration for the king. Finally, it has become an important tourist destination in Thailand, with as many as 1000
visitors a day (‘Phuket Big Buddha’). Visitors to the site can pay a fee to leave messages in memory of loved ones
who have passed away. The Buddha has been designed with an artistic ideal in mind. It is made out of concrete and
then layered with Burmese white jade marble to reflect the light.
All three of those objects – the Sydney Opera House, the Indian wedding clothes and the Phuket Big Buddha –
feature strikingly artistic characteristics, but all of them have specific functions other than the aesthetic. One is a
place for entertainment, one provides physical protection and symbolic significance during a ceremony and one is
the object of reverence. In Table 12.1, we have put the first two in the middle column based on the idea that the
practical functionality of the object is greater than the artistic function, while we put the Buddha in the last column,
based on the idea that reverence is an aesthetic experience, and so the functionality of that work of art is mostly, if
not entirely, aesthetic.

TOK trap
It can be tempting, when writing about the arts for your TOK essay, to claim that everything is art if you
want it to be art. Such an overly-simplified claim is likely to lead to weak arguments. You will do much
better if you can make a more sophisticated argument based on a clear definition of what makes
something art. We have offered one here: art is that which functions only as art.
We have seen that, while many objects can easily be classified as either art or not art using that
definition, some objects are still more difficult to classify. Remember, when you are classifying things
according to a particular definition, there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers; instead, your job is to define
your category and then justify your choices as to what belongs in the category.
Perhaps you would prefer to categorize the Sydney Opera House as art because of its extraordinary
architecture, or perhaps you would prefer to classify the Phuket Big Buddha as functional because of the
tourist industry it has inspired. You must present in detail the thinking which justifies your decision. The
most sophisticated answers will demonstrate your understanding of the reasons that the classification is
a problem by pointing out the tension between the characteristics that would seem to make the object art
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and the characteristics which would seem to make it a functional object.

ACTIVITY
After you have completed this activity you can check your answers by using the first QR code.
Now that you have read the discussion about how to define a work of art, classify each of the following
things in terms of whether it does or does not fit the definition of art. Be sure to explain your reasoning.
• Advertising jingle (use the second QR code).
• T-Mobile dance (use the third QR code) – consider the dance itself and the video of the dance.
• Totem pole – consider the totem pole itself and the photograph of the totem pole. You may need to do
a little research on the role of totem poles in Native American societies such as the Alaskan Tlinget
people.
• Concept graphic – animals in clothes.

One final observation is that we have been considering here the question of what art is. The question of whether
something is good art is a separate question altogether. We will consider that question in the Perspectives section
later in this chapter.

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Scope

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What kinds of things are art?
We have seen already that the arts encompass many different genres, including painting, sculpture, dance, theatre,
music, literature and so on. Within those various forms, there are also many different media. Music, for example,
ranges from religious music to rap music, to classical music, to musical theatre and many more. Drawing and
painting includes work in ink, pastels, pencil, charcoal, watercolor and oil paint.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is the question of what constitutes the scope of any other area of knowledge contentious in the same
way that it can be contentious in the arts? Why or why not?

We have seen in Chapters 8 to 11, that mathematics, the natural sciences, the human sciences and history each have
a particular content focus, a particular aspect of the world and human experience which the practitioners of those
areas of knowledge try to understand. In natural science, for example, the focus is on physical characteristics of the
Universe, while in history, the focus is on the facts and connections among events which have happened in the past.
The scope of each of those areas helps to shape the nature of the inquiry and the methods that practitioners use in
order to make knowledge in those areas.
When we come to consider the scope of the arts, however, it is harder to identify a particular segment of the
Universe or of human experience on which the arts focus. Table 12.2 lists some works of art and their subjects – the
content on which the artworks focus. Use the QR codes to find out more about each work:

Table 12.2 Works of art and their subjects

Artwork Content
Film: Life of Brian by Monty Python Religious satire
(England 1979)

Novel: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Imaginary dystopian society in which there are only a few
Atwood (Canada 1985) fertile women and they must serve wealthy men, whose
wives cannot bear children

Poem: ‘The Cat’s Song’ by Marge Piercy Cats and the relationship between cats and people
(USA 1992)

Poem: ‘Pi’ by Wislawa Szymborska The number pi – mathematics

(Poland 1976)

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Play: Rosmersholm by playwright Henrik Politics, marriage, guilt and suicide
Ibsen (Norway 1886)

Painting: The Roll Call by Elizabeth Soldiers after a battle in the Crimean War
Southerden Butler (England 1874)

Painting: Lady with an Ermine by Portrait of the mistress of an Italian Duke; an animal
Leonardo da Vinci (Italy 1489–90)

Sculpture: The Thinker by Auguste Rodin Human form, representation of what it’s like to think deeply
(France 1880)

Music: The Flight of the Bumblebee by Sounds which represent bumblebees

Rimsky Korsakov; played by Wynton
Marsalis (Russia 1900)

Opera: Rinaldo by George Frederic Christian crusade of 1099; battles, love affairs, an
Handel (England 1711) enchanted palace and spirits

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
The scope of the arts ranges through many of the other AOKs. Does the same thing happen in history or
the human sciences?

This very small collection of ten artworks in eight different media from eight different countries and four different
centuries shows us that the subjects of artworks range across many different topics and experiences. This little
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collection includes art about war, religion, mathematics, human relationships, insects, politics, human psychology
and cats.

ACTIVITY
1 Looking at the list of artworks in Table 12.2, could the subject of all of those be explored in other
genres? Could, for example, an exploration of mathematics such as the one that Wislawa Szymborska
did in her poem ‘Pi’ be done in music or sculpture?
2 Are there some subjects which can only be explored through a particular kind of art?

ACTIVITY
Can you think of any object, experience, emotion or other element of our internal and external
experience which an artist could not use as an inspiration for a work of art?

Artists make art about things that they observe and things that they experience. The movie American Beauty features
an artist, a young moviemaker, who makes a film of a plastic bag blowing in the wind. He describes his observation
as the ‘the most beautiful thing I ever filmed’ and says it is the moment at which he realized that ‘… there was this
entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be
afraid’ (American Beauty). The scope of art, it would seem, then, includes anything that it is possible for an artist to
observe or experience.

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Why do we need art?
In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a set of human needs which, he claimed, described the needs
which are fulfilled in humans who are psychologically healthy. He presented them in a hierarchy, demonstrated by a
pyramid, in which he put the most basic needs – those we need to survive – at the bottom. We touched on the
hierarchy briefly in Chapter 1 (page 8).
As you go up the pyramid, you can see that Maslow also included the kinds of needs that make people happy, rather
than just those which help people survive. Near the top of the pyramid are the aesthetic needs. Humans have a need,
in other words, to pursue sensory stimulation and an understanding of what beauty is and means. Engagement with
the arts comes under that heading. Another relevant step on the hierarchy is what Maslow called ‘self-actualization’
needs – the need each individual has to fulfill his or her unique potential (Vinney).

Artists pursue art because of their unique personal desire and ability to produce art. But people who do not
themselves create art can also be seen to pursue engagement with the arts as part of fulfilling their own unique
potential. The arts stimulate the intellect, the imagination and the emotions, and many people find that complex
response to be exciting, energizing and fulfilling. Although the arts are not necessary for what Maslow identified as
being the most basic needs for survival – biological and physiological needs and safety needs – we can see how
much time, money and effort is expended in pursuit of artistic experience. Let’s consider music as an example.

Learner profile
Reflective
How do both artists and audiences use art to help them reflect on their lives and beliefs?

As reflected by the amount of money they spend on it, fans in North America and the United Kingdom appear to
place a high value on live music. In 2015, music fans in the UK spent more than £2 billion (approximately US $3.1
billion) on concerts and music festivals (Sayid). Concert ticket revenues in the US and Canada have risen from
approximately $1 billion in 1996 to $8 billion in 2017 (Watson 2018). A Taylor Swift tour in North America earned
$277 million in 2018 (Watson 2019). In Canada, more than half of all music spending in 2016 was for live music
events (IQ Live Music Intelligence). In 2019, English songwriter Ed Sheeran’s Divide tour broke the all-time record
for earnings on a music tour, making a total of $776.2 million. More than 8.5 million people saw him perform,
across 258 shows (nypapers.com).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the amount of money spent in the arts relate to the knowledge which is made in the arts in the
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same way that the amount of money spent in the sciences does? Why or why not?

In Japan, music also generates tremendous revenues, but in that country, most of the money spent is on physical
media – CDs and vinyl. There are 6000 music stores in Japan, as opposed to only about 1900 in the United States,
and only 700 in Germany, which has the third-largest number in the world. Nearly 80 per cent of music sales in
Japan are for physical media; in 2016, Japanese music consumers purchased approximately ¥254 billion ($2.44
billion) worth of music a year – most of it in the form of CDs (Looi). This makes the Japanese music market the
second biggest in the world, after the US.
In Brazil, music streaming services have brought Brazil back to the top ten in music expenditure, after a decade of
decline (Darlington). In that country, 70 per cent of music sales goes to streaming services.

ACTIVITY
1 Do you think that the amount of money spent on music and musical experiences is a good indicator of
the importance of music in our lives?
2 What do you think accounts for people’s desire for engagement with music?
3 Do you and your friends spend a significant amount of time and/or money on music or other art
forms? What do you personally get from your engagement with the arts?

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Culture
One important aspect of the scope of art is that it is a reflection of culture. The kind of art which is
created and loved reflects the features and values of the culture in which it is created. Art very often
plays an important role in cultural rituals such as weddings, festivals, holidays, religious services and
other cultural ceremonies. Art can also become a historical record of events that occurred in a particular
culture. In 1941, painter Jacob Lawrence, for example, painted a series of 60 paintings which illustrate
the experience of what was known in the United States as the Great Migration – the moving of a million
African Americans from the deep south to the industrial north after the start of the First World War. Use
the QR code to view the series. Be sure to hover your cursor over the introduction to read about the
collection.

South African playwright Athol Fugard wrote a play in 1982 called ‘Master Harold’… and the boys which
is set in South Africa during apartheid. Apartheid was a legal system of racial separation which lasted
from 1948 to 1994, and by which the majority population of black Africans was controlled economically
and physically by the minority white population, descended from the seventeenth-century Dutch settlers.
The play has a very strong personal focus: it explores deeply the effect of this inherited power on 16-
year-old Hally – on his judgment, his emotions and his best relationships – but it also serves as a
powerful condemnation of the institution of apartheid and provides viewers with a rich insight into what it
was like to live with those restrictions.

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Preserving the historical record is not, of course, the only cultural function of art. Much art contributes to
celebration and to the binding of people together.

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What can we know through art?
We have seen, now, that art can explore and represent many different objects, ideas and experiences. This leads us to
the question of what those explorations and representations mean in terms of knowledge.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can art change the way we interpret the world?

Artists aim to share their worldview and to shape the worldviews of others. In the Methods and tools section, we
will explore in more detail how this happens. For now, we can just consider that a work of art is the product of an
artist – or, in some cases, a group of artists. That product is shaped by the artist’s personal experiences and
worldview, and by their values, beliefs, ideals, and hopes. Some kinds of art convey a message, an idea which can
be put into words. Other works of art create a feeling which is harder to put into words.

Use the QR code to listen to poet Clint Smith perform his poem ‘A letter to five of the presidents who owned slaves
while they were in office’. The text of the poem is also on the webpage. This work of art has a specific purpose: it
challenges the version of US history which has been taught to children for the past 200 years. Smith explains his
view of his purpose at the end of the performance when he says, ‘And this is my Brief But Spectacular take on
complicating the history of the United States’ (PBS NewsHour). In the poem, we can see how the poet’s own life
experience has shaped his ideas about the history of the United States and how it is badly taught and how it ought to
be taught better. We can consider this poem in terms of what the author intended for us to think about and even,
possibly, in terms of what he would like his audience to do as a result of reading or listening to his poem.
Not all art has such a clear purpose, however. Consider the photograph below.

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It is difficult to say what this photograph might ‘mean’. We don’t have a story to consider. We just have two
familiar things – a bird cage and a woman – which are presented in a completely unexpected way. The woman is not
entirely caged, and we don’t know whether the cage is coming on or coming off, or whether she has put herself in
the cage and is holding it on deliberately, or whether she is trying to remove it. The knowledge that we can get from
such a work is probably going to be knowledge in the form of an emotional reaction, more than it is going to be
knowledge in an intellectual form which we can express in words. Perhaps this image makes you feel
uncomfortable, because the woman seems trapped. Perhaps it makes you feel hopeful – maybe she is escaping from
the cage, rather than going into it. Whichever of those beliefs you have depends largely on you and your past
experience, and whether you tend to be more hopeful or more pessimistic. The interpretation of this photograph is
quite a different process from interpreting Clint Smith’s poem.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Interpretation is an important concept in the process of making knowledge in the arts; how does
interpretation function similarly and differently in history and the natural sciences?

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson describes the importance of art in an article entitled ‘Why art has the power
to change the world’. He contrasts the effect of art on viewers with the effect of a lot of data and statistics. He
suggests that statistics and data can overwhelm us, making us less able to process what is happing around the world
– even with regard to big problems like global warming. He says that art, on the other hand, has the capacity to help
us understand the world better:
Giving people access to data most often leaves them feeling overwhelmed and disconnected, not
empowered and poised for action. This is where art can make a difference. Art does not show people what
to do, yet engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make
the worl felt. And this felt feeling may spur thinking, engagement, and even action. (Eliasson)
This description of the power of art is very similar to what we saw with Tom Robbins’ definition of art. Both
suggest that one kind of knowledge that we can get from art, in other words, is visceral, a sensual understanding of
the reality of the world around us. Eliasson says that what artists strive for is to touch the emotions of the audience.
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We often use the term ‘moved’ to describe the effect of something which touched our emotions deeply. Eliasson
suggests that that term can be seen as literal as well as metaphorical: we can be moved to an understanding that we
have not ever had before. Art, he says, is a transformative experience (Eliasson).

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Art as social commentary
So far, we have seen that some of the knowledge we can get from art is intellectual – ideas about the world around
us – and some of the knowledge we can get from art is emotional, as with the intuitive reactions we might have to a
photo such as Mayer’s Portrait of a Young Woman with Cage, and as described by Olafur Eliasson. That
consideration of what kind of knowledge we can get from the arts focused on the personal – what an individual
might get from the arts. We can also consider what kind of knowledge a group or a society might get from a work of
art. One very common feature of art is social commentary. If art creates a comment on society, that comment is
usually to some degree critical, and the desire of the artist is very often to encourage change for the better.
Eliasson’s idea that art can change the world focuses on the effect that art can have when it changes one person at a
time, making each member of the audience more aware of the world and more aware of his or her feelings. Many
works of art, however, seem to have a more direct desire to change the world – not just the feelings of an individual
viewer, but the actual conditions of a given society or culture.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the role of art in making social commentary relate to the kind of social role of natural science that
we saw in Chapter 9?

In 1910, British playwright John Galsworthy wrote a play called Justice, which depicted the cruelty of the penal
system and the effect it had on prisoners who were completely broken down by that system. Home Secretary
Winston Churchill and Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, then Chairman of the Prison Commission, attended the opening
night of the play, and the play influenced their decision to reduce the amount of time prisoners could be made to
spend in solitary confinement (Nellis 61). This event provides us with a rather striking instance of the power of art to
cause social change. Interestingly, though, the changes that resulted from the play occurred because it reached two
influential men. The art gave two individuals insight into a truth about the society in which they lived, and those two
men had the power to make a change. The play did not necessarily have to reach a wide audience or to change the
minds of many people in order for it to have a social effect. Had Churchill and Ruggles-Brise not seen the play,
perhaps no change would have come about, even if many audience members felt empathy for the plight of prisoners.
It is more difficult to come up with examples of artworks which first affected many members of a society who then,
as a result of their exposure to the art, agitated for change and put pressure on those in power to effect those
changes.
That does not, however, mean that art cannot have an effect on a society at large.

CASE STUDY
Hamlet in the Soviet Union
Hamlet is the story of a young man whose father was murdered and whose right to the throne was
usurped by the murderer – his uncle. Hamlet spends the play observing what is going on in the court,
seeing what others apparently either do not see, or do not want to acknowledge. He is also famously
indecisive – trying to figure out what is real and what is right before he acts. In the end, of course, he
overthrows the usurper – although with tragic results all around.
Artists in the Soviet era saw much opportunity in this story to comment, subtly, on the authoritarian rule
in the Soviet Union. Boris Pasternak, who translated most of Shakespeare’s work into Russian, saw
Hamlet as a Christ figure. His translation emphasizes Hamlet as the person who challenged those in
power, and his assassination as a politically motivated murder which made Hamlet a martyr (Conroy 25).
Stage productions could be understood to be equating Stalin with Claudius, usurping Lenin’s role and
eliminating rivals such as Leon Trotsky (Sillito). Audiences could attend performances of Hamlet and see
in them their own feelings about the oppressive government, sharing their fears and frustrations silently,
without having to risk saying anything publicly which could bring down retribution. There was a long
history of this kind of communication between authors, directors, performers and audiences, known as
‘Aesopian language’ in Russia. ‘Aesopian language’ is the use of allegory, allusion or satire as a means
of avoiding direct social criticism (Carmeli).

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The state of affairs with Hamlet as a sort of communal silent protest did not last, however. In 1941, an
‘offhand remark’ by Stalin about a rehearsal of Hamlet was enough to shut down that production
altogether: ‘the very idea of showing on the stage a thoughtful, reflective hero who took nothing on faith,
who scrutinized intently the life around him in an effort to discover for himself, without outside
“prompting”, the reasons for its defects, separating truth from falsehood, the very idea seemed almost
“criminal”’ (Mendel 733–4). Stalin’s ‘remark’ led to a 12-year hiatus during which Hamlet was not
performed – though not officially banned – until Stalin’s death in 1953 (Pitzer). Following his death,
productions of Hamlet flourished. ‘After Stalin’s death, there was a veritable “Hamlet-mania” in the USSR
and productions sprang up making pointed comparisons between the “prison” of Denmark and the
Soviet Union and between Claudius and Stalin’ (Conroy 28). Between 1954 and 1957, there were 300
productions of Shakespeare’s plays in the Soviet Union (Samarin, et al). Many of these productions also
used allegory or satire to comment on the state of the government: for example, a 1954 production of
Hamlet in Moscow directed by Nicolai Okhlopkov depicted Denmark as a prison behind an iron curtain.
The stage set consisted of eight massive iron boxes with gates which could be opened or closed
(Kennedy 191–2). When the gates were closed they would look like a solid iron curtain. The eight boxes
or segments represented the eight satellites of the Soviet Union.

Hamlet did not cause any social change in the Soviet Union, but Stalin was uncomfortable enough with it
that he caused it to be banned in a de facto way, if not formally. Perhaps he was afraid that it might
have the power to influence people to rise up against his rule. Although it did not lead to a revolution, the
play did help people to form a bond of shared experience. In the years after Stalin’s death, the near
universal love of Shakespeare’s work and Hamlet in particular could be seen in the many productions,
as mentioned previously, but also in people’s names.
In Armenia, many people have the first name Shakespeare. A famous Armenian football player is named
Henrikh Hamlet Mkhitaryan. In Lithuania, rock star Andrius Mamontovas played Hamlet from 1996 until
at least 2012 (Sillito). Shakespeare’s work is beloved throughout the former Soviet Union. In part,
Stalin’s failure to ban it outright sent a message to the people that Shakespeare could not be banned –
he was bigger than Stalin, a symbol of freedom. That love continues today.

The question remains: can art ever change the world through a sort of mass movement in response to an artwork? Or
is art inherently personal, changing minds one at a time? At the very least, we can see that art can serve as a cultural
icon, and the knowledge it can give people in a whole society is the knowledge that there is always hope.

EE links
The exploration of the function of artists in the Soviet Union could be a good research study for an

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extended essay. You could develop a question such as: ‘How and why did Stalin control the output of
artists during his reign in the Soviet Union?’

We have seen, now, that the scope of the arts is both broad and deep. Art can take many different forms, and it can
encompass any subject. It serves both cultural and historical purposes, and it plays a significant role in helping
people achieve emotional and psychological health. In the next section, we will consider different perspectives on
art, in terms of what counts as art and what counts as good art, as well as in terms of what individual works of art
mean.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Is knowledge in the arts useful in the same way that knowledge in the sciences or mathematics can be
seen to be useful?
Is the role that having or not having background knowledge plays in making knowledge in history similar
to or different from the role it plays in the arts? Why?

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Perspectives

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Artist and audience
Two important perspectives in terms of making knowledge in the arts are those of the artist and the audience. You
may have learned in your Language A class that making knowledge in the arts is an indirect process. You almost
never have access to the actual artist to speak to or ask questions of; you have to try to discern their meaning through
the work of art itself. The meaning of a work of art is constructed by the audience of that artwork (we will examine
this process in much more depth in the next section), who tries to work out what the artist intended. Importantly,
though, the meaning that you get from a work of art may or may not be close to what the artist intended – and you
will have no way of knowing how close your understanding is to the artist’s.
In the arts, the knowledge that is attained by the audience is a matter of interpretation: it is a blending of what the
artist knew and wished to convey and of what the audience members can understand, based on what they bring to
the interpretation of the work. The audience, in other words, actively helps to create meaning, which is not what
happens with, say, natural science, or history, or mathematics.
In the arts, as in no other area of knowledge, this dynamic is perfectly acceptable, so long as you, as an audience
member, do not distort the artwork by ignoring parts of it or by deliberately misinterpreting what it says, looks like
or sounds like.
The diagram on the right illustrates the relationships between the artist, the audience and the artwork. The dotted
lines indicate the fact that the artist and audience endeavour to communicate with each other but cannot do so
directly. The solid arrows indicate that there is a direct connection between artist and the artwork that they created
and between the audience and the artwork which they can experience directly. The artwork is the representation of
whatever was in the mind – and maybe heart – of the artist when they created it. We receive the artwork and accept
it as representative of the artist’s thinking and feeling.

As an example of how this dynamic results in knowledge, let’s take a look at a poem by WD Snodgrass: ‘Returned
to Frisco, 1946’.

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On first reading, it seems that the speaker of the poem must be a soldier coming home from war to San Francisco.
The title, ‘Returned to Frisco’, indicates that he is coming back. The reference to ‘our first life’ in line 3 and the
girl’s voice singing ‘you’re home once more’, certainly seem to back up such an interpretation.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How does this relationship between art, artist and audience contrast to the relationship of the general
public to scientists and scientific knowledge or mathematicians and mathematics?

For someone who did actually grow up in San Francisco, however, there is a problem with this interpretation. San
Franciscans do not call San Francisco ‘Frisco’. To them ‘Frisco’ is an insult. This poem was published in 1957, and
in those days, when you wanted to call someone and didn’t know the number, there was no internet to use as a
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resource. You dialed 411, which was the number for directory assistance, and a live operator looked the number up
for you. If, in those days, you called 411 and asked for a number in Frisco, the operators, perfectly seriously, gave
you the area code for Frisco, Texas. San Franciscans did not have a sense of humour about – or a lot of patience for
– people calling their city ‘Frisco’.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can a work of art have meaning of which the artist themselves is unaware?

You may very well not have known that about San Francisco before you read that last paragraph. For you, then, as a
reader of ‘Returned to Frisco’, an interpretation of a soldier from that city being returned there after the war would
make good sense and would be a valid interpretation that took into account the words of the poem. Now, however,
you have new knowledge. You are, in effect, a new reader of this poem. Now you have to work out what to do with
the fact that this soldier is being ‘returned’ to a city whose proper name he does not know. Maybe he is not from
there, and when he says he is being returned, he means more generally that he is being returned to the US, and that
‘Frisco’, which is the slang name he knows for it, is the place he happens to be dropped off. Maybe he is from there,
and the use of the term Frisco suggests that the city he is coming back to is not the city he left – or that he returns to
his home a stranger. Possibly you can think of other explanations for why the speaker uses the term ‘Frisco’ in the
title.
What is interesting, though, is that our interpretation of the text based on our knowledge that ‘Frisco’ is a term that
only a non-native of the San Francisco Bay Area would use, does not depend on what Snodgrass meant. Maybe
Snodgrass didn’t know that San Franciscans don’t call it Frisco. Snodgrass himself was born in Pennsylvania, 3000
miles from San Francisco. He served in the Navy, and earned a Masters degree from a university in Iowa. After that,
he lived, and died, in New York (‘WD Snodgrass’). He might not have realized, then, that this city in which he
never lived, would not be called Frisco by locals. Maybe he did know, however, and wanted his readers to wrestle
with that idea of a stranger being sent back – or sent home. We have no way of knowing what Snodgrass actually
knew when he wrote the poem. We can only interpret the poem based on what we know about the meaning and
implications of the words in it. Our interpretation is valid, regardless of what Snodgrass knew. The only way we
might have to call our interpretation invalid would be if we knew that ‘Frisco’ is not the proper name for San
Francisco and then we decided just to ignore that fact and treat ‘Frisco’ as the name that natives would use. That
would be a denial of knowledge, and any interpretation of any artwork based on a denial of knowledge or a willful
refusal to take into account all the facts is a failed interpretation.

ACTIVITY
How has your personal knowledge shaped your understanding of art? Discuss at least three different
examples.

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, Lady Percy speaks to her husband, Hotspur, asking him why he has been acting
so strangely. Hotspur is one of a trio of rebels who are plotting to overthrow the king and seize the crown. His wife
is unaware of this plot at this point in the play. Let’s read the speech first, imagining that our perspective as a reader
is a woman whose husband is in the military and is scheduled to go to a conflict zone such as Afghanistan or Iraq
very soon. What would most strike such a reader? How would she interpret the implications of Lady Percy’s
speech?

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A reader such as the one we have imagined might be most struck by all of the signs that Hotspur is worrying about
going to war. Lines 11–24 describe what Hotspur has talked of in his sleep, and they are filled with details of a
battle. Such a reader might connect strongly to Lady Percy’s concern for her husband, and she might interpret the
speech as a declaration of fear – Hotspur’s fear associated with the coming battle, maybe, and Lady Percy’s fear for
him, both now and then.

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Now let’s read it again and imagine that the reader is someone who has dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD), either themselves or because someone in their family or a friend has suffered from it. Which lines would
jump off the page for that reader?
Such a reader might be expected to be most struck by the description of Hotspur’s physical and mental condition. In
recent years, some significant critical work has been done analysing the portrayal of soldiers in Shakespeare’s work,
and this speech is one which has been shown to contain a constellation of symptoms which together constitute the
medical standard for PTSD (Bennet). Jonathan Shay, in his book, Achilles and Vietnam, has taken Lady Percy’s
speech line-by-line and identified the official medical term that we now use for the symptom she describes. Table
12.3 shows a few examples (Shay 165–6).

Table 12.3 Links between the language in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 and symptoms of PTSD
Line Language Medical term
1 ‘… why are you thus Social withdrawal and isolation
alone?’
4–5 ‘… what is’t that takes Somatic disturbances; loss of ability to experience pleasure. (‘Somatic’ is
from thee/Thy an adjective that relates to sleep. The phrase ‘somatic disturbances’
stomach, pleasure’ means that Hotspur’s sleep is restless and interrupted. A few lines later,
we find that he also sometimes suffers from insomnia – he can’t sleep at
all)
8 ‘Why has thou lost the Peripheral vasoconstriction (‘Peripheral vasoconstriction’ means that the
fresh blood in thy blood vessels are constricted and so not sending blood normally to
cheeks?’ Hotspur’s face)
22– ‘That beads of sweat Night sweats
23 have stood upon thy
brow/Like bubbles in a
late-disturbed stream
…’
Shay identifies several more descriptions in the speech which align with what, today, we know as symptoms of
PTSD.
Several points can be made about differing perspectives with regard to this example from Henry IV Part 1. Firstly,
we have seen how the life experiences of two very different readers would shape the understanding that those
readers might have of this speech. Both readers took the text as it is, but they thought differently about what was
important. One thought about the speech from the perspective of its speaker, Lady Percy, while the other thought
about the speech from the perspective of the man it describes: Hotspur. Both of those interpretations are rational and
reasonable.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
How does this artistic knowledge of PTSD compare and contrast with the knowledge of PTSD that has
been made by natural and human scientists? Is this artistic knowledge the same as knowledge a
historian might make?

Secondly, we have taken the trouble to consider the speech from two different perspectives. We have therefore
gained a more complex understanding of the meaning of the speech than we would have been likely to get had we
considered only one perspective – or if our own perspective, being different from either of the two we considered
here, led us to see the speech in yet another way. This shows us that having different perspectives on a work of art
can increase our understanding and appreciation of the richness of that art – and can increase the knowledge that we
gain from it.
Thirdly, what we have understood from the speech is not likely to match exactly what Shakespeare intended when
he wrote it. For one thing, Shakespeare, of course, could never have heard of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact,
the psychological sense did not come into use until 1955 (Etymonline). We can, however, consider that we share

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Shakespeare’s perspective this far: it seems quite clear that he knew soldiers who had suffered trauma in battles – or
in repeated battles – because he recognized the symptoms that he saw those soldiers exhibit clearly enough to be
able to describe them accurately and in detail. Our knowledge and Shakespeare’s knowledge, then, do not match, but
they do intersect.
Let’s look at one more example in a different art form.

ACTIVITY
After you have completed this activity you can check your answers by using the QR code.

Examine the photograph of the pomegranates. Make a list of the details that you notice.
1 What do you think these details suggest in terms of the meaning of the image?
2 Do you think there is a meaning of the sort which you could explain in words, or is the image one
which can better be understood just as a sensory experience?
Once you have answered these questions, use the QR code to carry out some research on the different
symbolic significances of the pomegranate. Then come back and answer the questions again.

We have considered how the background experience and knowledge of the different audience members for a work
of art affect the kind of knowledge that each person can get from it. In the next section, we will be looking at the
methods and tools that are used to create and interpret art. One important tool that every person engaging with art
has for developing knowledge from that work of art is their personal knowledge and experience. As your knowledge
and experience continue to change and grow over the course of your life, you will find that your understanding of
many works of art will also change and grow. This is one reason that we can revisit the same work of art again and
again over the course of our lives and still enjoy it – a sophisticated work of art allows for new understanding over
time.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is the knowledge made in the arts more open to interpretation than the knowledge made in mathematics
or history? Why or why not?

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Perspectives on the quality of art
There are at least three different perspectives for judging what counts as good art: the judgment of individuals, the
judgments of experts and the judgments of society. Let’s look at an example.
If you are the parent of the child who made this image on the right, you are very likely to love it. Looking at it could
fill you with feelings of love for your child and a kind of nostalgia for the idea that their hand is small now but will
not always be so. You are likely to be impressed by the fact that they managed to use so many colours. You may
treasure this painting and frame it to hang on your wall or keep by your bedside or in your office by your desk where
you can look at it often.
An art expert is not likely to be impressed by the finger paint handprint. This is a kind of art that every human being
is capable of making – and which many thousands (maybe millions) will make sometime in their early childhood. It
has little originality and requires little skill, design or craft.
Society as a whole is unlikely to consider the handprint to be high quality art for much the same reason that the
experts are unlikely to consider it so. It is too common, and strangers feel little or no emotional connection to the
paint handprint of someone else’s child. The handprint isn’t likely to move many members of society in important
ways, and so is not likely to generate acclaim.

The reason for the differences in these judgments is that each of those different kinds of audience cares about
different things.

Individual judgments
For individuals, ‘is this a quality piece of art?’ is a question for which opinion is the appropriate and effective means
of determining the answer. If you, as an individual, are moved in some memorable way by a work of art, then you,
individually, will experience it as being of high quality. It doesn’t matter if no one else does; the individual
experience with art is an important one, and your personal judgment is valid because it is personal.

Expert judgments
Experts have a completely different perspective on the kind of art for which they have developed expertise. One
becomes an expert only after long study and many years’ experience with something. Through long exposure,
experts simply learn more about their subject than people who don’t have that kind of exposure possibly can.
Consider this painting, Basket of Fruit, by Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (commonly known as
Caravaggio).
Many individuals won’t know much about this painting, or still life paintings in general, and won’t know what to
look for in terms of symbols which might convey meaning. Some people will like it because they find the colours
pleasing or they appreciate the composition of the fruit basket taking up the bottom half of the painting. Maybe
some individuals will like the painting because it makes them appreciate the bounty of nature. There might, of
course, be many other reasons that individuals can appreciate this work of art.

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Experts in still life and the Renaissance will see the painting from an entirely different perspective to that which
most individuals who are not experts will have. With regard to this painting, experts in the art of still life agree that
it is indicative of Caravaggio’s characteristic desire to see reality as it is (AHA). The painting, at first glance, looks
like a beautiful display of fruit, but if we look more closely, the arrangement is much more complex, revealing a
cycle from fresh, living fruits and leaves to those which are decaying. It is a portrait of the processes, rather than just
the products, of the natural world. You can use the QR code to read a more detailed analysis of the elements of this
painting. Interestingly, the analysis appears in a journal of infectious disease, and the analysis of the painting reveals
its relationship to that topic. The expert opinions help us literally to see things in the painting that we might not have
noticed on their own, and they help us to understand and appreciate better Caravaggio’s effort.

Experts bring a perspective to the appreciation of art which can help us to know more than we can know on our own.
As we saw with the discussion of ‘Returned to Frisco, 1946’ and the speech from Henry IV Part 1, we can gain a
deeper appreciation for the meaning and value of a work of art – our knowledge of any given work can be better – if
we are willing to share ideas and listen to the perspectives of others. Holding doggedly to the idea that ‘it’s only
good art if I like it’ is an attitude which is likely to keep us from expanding our ability to gain all the kinds of
insights into the world which can be gained from engaging with art. There is certainly no reason that you should
allow experts to convince you that the painting your child made for you in their first year in school is not quality art.
That painting has deep emotional significance for you, and always will. But there is equally no good reason that we
should reject the opinions of experts out of hand; they have studied art in ways that we have not, and so they have
perspectives to offer which can help us expand our experience with art.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Who determines what art is valued, and on what criteria?
Should your judgments about art be given the same weight as those of an expert?

CAS links
You could develop a CAS activity by contacting a local art museum and arranging for you and some

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classmates to visit, or to have one of their experts come to your school, to talk to you about the meaning
of some of the artworks in the museum’s collection. Ask the person who will act as your guide to choose
works of art that are difficult to understand or which are often misunderstood.

ACTIVITY
Many experts go to university in order to become experts in their field, but we all develop a certain
amount of expertise about things we are interested in because we engage with them frequently over a
period of years. You may have already developed some significant expertise with an art form if you have
exposed yourself to it over a long period of time. Think of the music that you like to listen to, for example.
1 Is there a kind of music which you enjoy and appreciate but which your parents or teachers cannot
understand and so think is not of value?
2 What could you explain about that music to help those people without your level of expertise to
understand and appreciate it better?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can we individually develop expertise in other areas of knowledge the way we can in some branches of
the arts, just from personal experience? Why or why not?

Societal judgments
Selections of what objects go into art museums tend to be made by experts who work for the museums. Your child’s
handprint painting is not going to be chosen for such a purpose, and you don’t have the ability to be able to ensure
that their painting ends up in a museum – unless you are wealthy enough to create your own museum without
needing outside funding and without needing visitors to pay entrance fees!
However, a lot of art becomes part of a culture – and part of a cultural heritage – simply by widespread acclaim of
the people in that culture. This art doesn’t necessarily go into museums (though some of it may be in museums), but
it is studied and enjoyed and remembered and, very often, is passed on from generation to generation. These large-
group judgments perpetuate traditional dances and music, for example.
Often these judgments are signaled by the willingness of many people to pay to experience the art. In August 2019,
the Eagles’ Greatest Hits album surpassed Michael Jackson’s album Thriller, as the best-selling album of all time,
with 36 million copies sold (Clark and Lynch). Earlier in the chapter we considered Ed Sheeran’s phenomenal
Divide tour. We can say with confidence that the quality of his art has been attested to by widespread acclaim.
Sometimes that kind of acclaim leads to art being valued over many decades or centuries. The Beatles caused a
sensation when they came to the attention of the international music scene with their first studio contract in 1962,
and their music is still widely loved, although the group had broken up for good by early 1970 – nearly 50 years ago.
At the time of writing this book (2019), the Beatles have sold more than 600 million records, tapes, and CDs
(Hotten) – the greatest number by any group ever. Beethoven’s music is still beloved by millions of people around
the world, although the composer died in 1827, nearly 200 years ago. On the assumption that the reason people pay
for music is that they find it to be of high quality, all these examples show how people from around the world make
a combined judgment about what makes quality art.

ACTIVITY
1 What artworks do you personally consider to be of high quality?
2 What artworks in your community or country have achieved widespread acclaim?
3 Do you agree with the cultural judgment that these are quality works?
4 Which contemporary artists or works of art from your culture do you think are most likely to prove to
transcend time? Why?

Other examples of art which has have valued by widespread popular acclaim are the works of Shakespeare, the
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street art of Banksy and the ‘Despacito’ music video by Puerto Rican singers Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. It
premiered on YouTube in January 2017, and at the time of writing, has garnered more than 6 billion views, making
it the most-viewed video on the platform (Lacoma and Martindale). While expert judgments may play a role in
promoting these artists, in that individuals may have their attention drawn to the art by experts who help them
understand it, very often love of the particular artwork is passed from individual to individual. Certainly, experts
alone cannot ensure that any given artist or work of art can continue to be seen as quality work for hundreds of
years.

CASE STUDY
Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci
The most expensive painting ever sold is Salvator Mundi, which has been attributed to Leonardo da
Vinci.
The painting sold at auction in November 2017 for $415.3 million (Jacobs). Amazingly, the same painting
sold in 1958 for only $60 (Weaver). The reason for this incredible change in the value of the painting is
that for centuries it was believed that the painting was by Bernardino Luini, one member of the large
group of artists who worked in da Vinci’s studio (Weaver). In fact, there are fewer than 20 paintings
which have been confirmed to have been painted by da Vinci’s own hand, including the Mona Lisa and
The Last Supper.

The sale price of Salvator Mundi raises an interesting and somewhat thorny question about the value of
art. Certainly, the quality of the painting itself didn’t change between 1958 and 2017, but in that 50-year
period, the experts changed their minds about who painted it. The simple fact that it is now attributed to
da Vinci himself is responsible for the change in value. The judgment that this painting is high quality art
is not an individual judgment. It is the judgment of experts, but it is also a judgment based on societal
agreement. Society – and the market – supports the idea that work by Leonardo da Vinci himself is more
worthy than an equally well-crafted painting by someone else.

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CONCEPT CONNECTION
Truth
As we noted early in the chapter, the word ‘art’ is related to the word ‘artificial’. Art is a creation of
humankind and there are many different perspectives when it comes to interpreting art. Any given piece
of art could mean something different to different viewers, and if meaning in the arts lies at the
intersection of the artist’s intentions and the audience’s experience and knowledge, and if some art is
overtly called ‘fiction’, then what can be said about the role of truth in the arts?
For an answer to that question, we have to go back to the important aims of the arts. Any work of art is
the reflection of the thoughts, understanding, feelings and worldview of the artist. The aim of the arts is
for the artist to be able to express those insights and then to be able to share them with an audience.
One of the most important kinds of knowledge that an audience gets from art is insight into the mind of
the artist. As viewers of or listeners to art, we connect with the artist – even if that artist lived centuries
before us or continents away. One kind of truth that we get from the arts, then, is the recognition and
experience of shared humanity.
Beyond that fundamental kind of truth about human connection, art must convey some kind of truth, or
we can’t respond to it.

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Methods and tools

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Methods and tools of the artist
Art can be created with and out of an enormous variety of materials. Paintings can be made using brushes of many
sizes, trowels, sticks and even hair as means of applying the paint. Visual artists can use paint, chalk, charcoal, ink,
pencil and pastels, among other things. Sculptures can be made out of clay, marble, iron, steel, copper and wood.
Sculptures can even be created out of existing objects. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp made a found-art sculpture he
called Fountain out of a urinal. Italian artist Marco Evaristti created a display of live goldfish in blenders. Even the
human body has been made into art: Canadian artist Rick Gibson made a pair of earrings out of freeze-dried human
fetuses, which he acquired from a British anatomy professor (Gibson), and Andrew Krasnow, an artist from the
United States, has used skin from men who donated their bodies to science to create a variety of sculptures,
including a map of the United States (Johnson). Music has been made with traditional musical instruments from
every culture, as well as from buckets, washboards, blades of grass and the edges of wine glasses.

ACTIVITY
Earlier in the chapter, we asked you to consider whether there was anything at all which could not be the
subject of a work of art. Now we would like you to consider whether there is anything at all which could
not be used as part of the materials in the creation of a work of art.

A fundamental feature of the arts is that they are creative. They are bounded only by the imaginations of the world’s
artists, which means that the materials and methods used in the creation of art are also bounded only by those very
same imaginations.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How does the role of imagination in the arts compare and contrast to the role of imagination in
mathematics?

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Methods and tools for interpreting art
Fountain is a famous sculpture by Marcel Duchamp and is an example of a ‘found’ sculpture. Duchamp purchased a
urinal from a sanitary supply company, added a signature to it, as by an artist, and submitted it to the Society of
Independent Artists, which he himself helped to found (Tate). The artwork generated tremendous consternation on
the part of the art world. The board of the Society of Independent Artists first barred the work from being exhibited,
despite the society’s avowed policy of open-mindedness and lack of judgment, and then, when there was an uproar
over that, defended its decision by issuing this statement: ‘The Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, but
its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art’ (Tate). By the definition of art which we
have proposed in this chapter, Fountain is a work of art, because the artist intended it to be a work of art and because
the urinal was not being used for its function as a urinal, but as a provocation to the aesthetic.
In the century which has passed since its initial introduction to the art world, Fountain has become an icon of
modern art. It continues to generate a tremendous amount of controversy – which also means that it generates a
tremendous amount of reaction. People feel strongly about the work, but they feel something about it. The question
remains, then: how are we to interpret this work of art? What methods and tools are available to us?

One important method for making knowledge in the arts is discussion with other people with different perspectives,
as we have seen in the section above. Just such a discussion was organized by the Tate. You can watch a video of
the discussion by using the QR code here on the right.
If you watch the video, you will see that the meaning the group is finding in the piece is less in the piece itself than
in the reaction it generates. Fountain does seem to have resulted, just in those three minutes, in a lot of ideas about
what art is, about who gets to decide what is good art, and about the difference between personal judgments and the
judgments of experts – many of the ideas that we have explored in this chapter.

ACTIVITY
The Tate museum, which owns one of 12 replicas which Duchamp made in 1964, has on its website a
lengthy article about Fountain. The article discusses the history of the piece, its effect on the art world
and its meaning, and what might be seen in it by the careful viewer.
In this article, you will see that another important method for interpreting art is the careful observation of
the details of the work itself and the consideration of what those details might mean, literally or
symbolically. It turns out that there is a whole history behind the name of the fake artist that Duchamp

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chose for Fountain. He had some specific ideas in mind about why ‘R Mutt’ was the right name. There is
also consideration of the significance of the fact that the urinal, when displayed as art, has been rotated
onto its back, rather than being displayed hung on a wall, as it would be in an actual bathroom. A third
element which contributes to the interpretation of this work is that its shape resembles some familiar
forms. The analysis also finds some symbolic meaning in the fact that the artwork has been replicated
and is no longer unique.
Before you use the QR code to read the article, answer these questions:
1 What does the name ‘R Mutt’ suggest to you?
2 Does the shape of the artwork remind you of anything with which you are familiar? If so, how might
that similarity contribute to the meaning of the work?
3 What do you think it might mean that the artwork is oriented differently from the way the urinal would
be? Is there any symbolic significance to this shift?
4 Usually we think of art as needing to be unique. What comment do you think Duchamp might have
been making by recreating not one but 12 Fountains nearly 50 years after the original disappeared?

Learner profile
Thinkers
Is it fair to say that the arts engage our critical thinking skills as much as they engage our creative
thinking?

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is the kind of observation needed to make knowledge about a piece of art more similar to or more
different from the kind of observation necessary in the natural sciences and the human sciences?

Careful observation of the details of a work of art is a second important method for engaging with any artwork, not
just for sculpture. Rap is a form of music which has often generated as much controversy as Fountain does. Many
people will argue that rap is not music – claiming that it is just an excuse to use a lot of profanity. Others say that rap
is just noise. People who know rap music well, however, are able to see the complexities of the music and to
appreciate the talent of the artists for language use, expert use of their voice and a deep understanding of rhythm, all
in addition to the ideas which are expressed in the lyrics. One example of an extremely detailed analysis of a rap
song by Eminem can be found using the QR code on the right.

The analysis reveals the complexity and subtlety of the way the song has been constructed and demonstrates the
kind of close, careful observation that people who don’t like rap have likely not undertaken.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS

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How are the justifications for claims in the arts similar to and different from justifications in other areas of
knowledge?
Does our knowledge of the arts depend on our interactions with other knowers more than it does in other
areas, such as history? Why or why not?

You have probably had some experience with interpreting literature from your Group A course in Studies in
Language and Literature, and your other literature courses from previous years, so you will know that literature, too,
can be interpreted by close observation of detail. We’ll explore, by way of example, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, by
Robert Frost, a poet from the United States:

If we look closely, we can see a good many literary techniques at work, even in such a short poem. Table 12.4
provides a list of some of them.

Table 12.4 Literary techniques in the poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ by Robert Frost
Line Literary element
1 Paradox: ‘green is gold’
1 Imagery: nature’s first green is literally gold: if you observe a plant when it just comes out of the
ground, it is yellow. It has not been exposed to sunlight, and sunlight is what is needed for
photosynthesis to take place
1 Metaphor: we often use the word ‘gold’ to indicate something of great value. In this case, valuable
because it is very rare
1–2 Rhyme
3 Paradox: ‘leaf’s a flower’
3 Metaphor: the leaf (which will be green after photosynthesis takes hold) is gold, like a flower is
4 Description: ‘only so an hour’. This is likely also literally true; it probably takes an hour or less for
the sunlight to do its work and the pale golden plant to turn green
3–4 Rhyme
5 Paradox: ‘leaf subsides to leaf’ – if it is already a leaf, how can it sink back into being a leaf? The
answer, of course, is that it is a leaf when it is gold, and then, when it turns green, it sinks back into
being a regular leaf. The implication of ‘subside’ is a sinking back, so that the green is not as
special as the gold
6 Religious allusion to the Garden of Eden; this gives us something to think about, because we don’t
necessarily think of Eden lasting only an hour, and we don’t think of Eden sinking into grief
because of sunlight. The comparison, however, is interesting because in cosmic terms, Eden only
lasted an hour – or even less. And what put an end to Adam and Eve’s life in Eden was the
gaining of knowledge, which is very often symbolized by light
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5–6 Rhyme
7 Comparison: the turning of the leaf from gold to green is now compared to the dawn turning into
morning
8 Extrapolation: the poet draws a conclusion here, based on the three things he has now compared
to each other. His conclusion is that we must always lose that which is gold. We might see this as
a rather depressing conclusion, or we might see it as an observation that one of the reasons that
we see things as golden – special – is that they are rare and fleeting
7–8 Rhyme

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do literary concepts such as metaphor, paradox, comparison and extrapolation function as tools to help
make knowledge in other areas such as the human sciences or mathematics?

In general, then, when we engage with a work of art in order to try to understand its meaning, we must observe
closely, consider the potential significance of the details that we observe and then draw conclusions. We are
accustomed to thinking of the making of art as a creative act, but we can now see that the interpretation of art is a
creative act as well.

ACTIVITY
After you have completed this activity you can check your answers by using the QR code.

Examine the painting below and try to interpret it using your own existing knowledge. Note the details.
Which ones seem to you to be the most important? If you have an opportunity to do so, speak to a
classmate about their ideas after you have developed some of your own, and see if together you can
strengthen your interpretation.

It is not our aim, in this book, to teach you all of the literary or visual techniques that are used in works of art, and
which, if you know about them, can help you to interpret artworks in a more sophisticated way. If you are interested
in a more detailed look at how to analyse, you may wish to read Textual Analysis for English Language and
Literature and Literary Analysis for English Literature, both by Angela Stancar Johnson and Carolyn Henly and
published by Hodder Education. The first of those books includes good advice on how to interpret artworks which
are not text-based, such as advertisements, propaganda posters, photographs, political cartoons and paintings.
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Finally, in an earlier section of this chapter, we explored the way in which our personal knowledge and background
shapes how we interpret art. It is worth realizing that what that means is that all of our personal experience and
knowledge are tools to help us interpret. When you come to try to understand a work of art, you have to bring
everything you know to the table. We saw, for example, that a poem can be about mathematics. A number of years
ago, the IB Literature exam in English included a poem whose central metaphor was the double helix of DNA, and
so rich understanding of the poem required knowledge of biology. ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ required us to know
about plants just coming out of the ground – photosynthesis – and the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
How does knowing more about the social, cultural or historical context of a work of art have an impact on
our knowledge of the work itself?

Notice how all three of these methods come together: which details we notice and how we can interpret their
significance will depend on our knowledge and worldview, and speaking to others about an artwork will give us
access to more knowledge and perspectives. All of these methods will help us to make knowledge in the arts.

CONCEPT CONNECTION
Evidence and objectivity
Throughout this section, we have looked at the methods for interpreting art. Interpretation is another of
the 12 central course concepts, and an important point about the interpretation of art is that, although
differing interpretations are possible, not just anything goes. Art works do not just mean whatever the
audience wants them to mean. Artists made choices, and we are bound by those choices. We cannot
just look at a painting or sculpture, or listen to a song, or read a poem and then say ‘it means whatever I
want it to mean’. If you want some particular meaning based on your own personal wishes, then you
don’t need a work of art; you can just go off on your own and contemplate the ideas you wish to
contemplate. The act of interpreting a work of art is, to the degree that it is possible, a joint effort
between artist and audience. As a member of the audience, when you offer an interpretation of a work of
art, you must provide evidence for your interpretation. The evidence comes from the work of art.
If the work is visual, a painting or sculpture, for instance, your evidence will be physical features of the
work of art – colours or placement on a canvas or the shape of the lines in a sculpture. If the work is a
song, the evidence will come from the words, notes and rhythms. If you read the analysis of the Eminem
rap song, you saw that that person gave us a great deal of evidence in the form of the rhymes being
used, the instances of assonance, and the use of rhythm. If the artwork is a piece of literature, then, the
evidence comes from the words in the text. Accurate identification of the evidence in a piece of art
requires you to be objective.
When it comes to art, whether the work appeals to you or not is a matter of your opinion. However, when
it comes to developing an interpretation – an argument as to what the artwork means – reasoned
justification is required. There may be multiple reasonable interpretations, but there are wrong
interpretations. It would not be rational for someone to read ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ and claim that it is a
poem about slavery in the United States before the Civil War. There just is no way to make the poem
mean that without ignoring what it really does say. Such an interpretation would be entirely subjective
(and irrational, in that it ignores what words mean). Interpretation of a work of art, then, requires
imagination, but also objectivity.

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Ethics

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The ethics of making art
In most areas of knowledge, ethical practice is shaped by the aim of the endeavour, as well as by the nature of the
materials under study. In science, for instance, the aim is to understand the physical nature of the Universe, and,
among many other things, one object of study is the human body. Ethical standards related to human rights and
dignity forbid scientists from extraordinary experiments on living humans. Scientists could not, for instance, chop
off people’s arms to see what happens in the body as a result of the physical shock to the system.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the aim of the arts shape the ethical obligations of artists and users of art in the same way that the
aim of the sciences shapes the ethical obligation of scientists? Of historians or mathematicians?

The aim of the arts is not as easy to define as the aim of the natural sciences is; however, we can safely say that one
aim is for artists to be able to express a personal vision of some truth about human life and experience through a
medium other than objective proposition. The material that artists work with is not circumscribed as is the material
with which scientists work: where the latter must focus on physical objects in nature, the former can focus attention
on literally anything that interests them. As we have seen, art can be about physical objects, mental abstractions,
maths, history, religion, personal relationships and much more.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Do the arts have the power to challenge established moral values?

We have also seen that the mechanisms artists employ are similarly unlimited. Dancers use their physical bodies to
make art, musicians use sound, either from vocal chords or from physical objects, visual artists use just about
anything from paint, clay, chalk or pencil to old tin cans, bicycle tyres or a urinal, and they use these materials in a
whole range of ever-expanding ways. Anything an artist can think of can be rendered into a work of art, and
anything an artist can use to convey their thoughts can be used in whatever way the artist devises. Given the
virtually unlimited materials and methods open to the artist, one might think that the aims and materials do not
constrain the artists by imposing ethical standards as they do in the natural sciences. Artists, are, nevertheless,
constrained in significant ways.
First of all, the arts are deeply, essentially, personal. Any work of art is a reflection of the individual vision and
viewpoint of the artist. When art has a powerful effect on an audience, it is because that person experiences a mental
and emotional connection to another human being: the artist. Hisham Matar describes the moment of discovery: ‘the
most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself,
when I read a sentence that perfectly describes something I have known or felt all along. I am reminded, then, that I
am really no different from anyone else’ (Matar). Matar uses literature as his example, but the point applies to all art.
We respond to art which reveals to us in a visceral way that another human being is fundamentally like us in some,
perhaps unexpected, way. Art must, therefore, be original. Forgery is unethical, in part, because forgeries decrease
the artist’s financial reward for their work; however, the more significant reason that forgery is wrong is that it
appropriates the personal discovery and creation of the artist. It betrays both artist and audience by making a
mockery of that human bond.

The recognition that to share and shape worldview is inherent in the aim of art is behind the argument over whether
‘artists’ which are not human can truly make art. In Thailand, for example, paintings made by elephants are sold to
tourists who are amazed at the sight of elephants apparently drawing recognizable objects – such as elephants
(UK/Scotland). Zoologist Desmond Morris explains what really happens: ‘… you will notice that, with each mark,

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the mahout tugs at his elephant’s ear. He nudges it up and down to get the animal to make a vertical line, or pulls it
sideways to get a horizontal one … So, very sadly, the design the elephant is making is not hers but his. There is no
elephantine invention, no creativity, just slavish copying’ (Desmond Morris). You can use the QR code in the
margin to view a video of an elephant ‘painting’. You will be able to notice that the keeper, who we know is present,
as he gives the elephant the brush, is carefully hidden from the sight of the camera and of the tourists.
While such endeavours are not as obviously unethical as forgery, they nevertheless violate the aims of art because
they lack the individual insight into the world. The ‘art’ thus created is purely mechanical. We might enjoy the
novelty of the process and we might marvel at how similar the actual product is to objects created by great human
artists; however, there is no possibility of our experiencing that powerful moment of connection to another mind.
(The buyers of the art are, of course, also being cheated because they are being lied to about how the painting is
made.) Perhaps one day elephants will be shown to be sentient and able deliberately to express an idea or emotion in
a work of art, at which time, we can talk about elephants as artists. Until then, however, without the potential for the
meeting of minds between artist and audience, knowledge cannot be made from the art.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Is the production and enjoyment of art subject to ethical constraints?

One ethical principle at work in the arts, then, is the value that it matters which mind generated the art. This principle
is what ultimately accounts for the fact that the da Vinci painting, Salvator Mundi, is worth so much more now than
it was when it was not known who really painted it. The world has, since the fifteenth century, placed a very high
value on da Vinci’s particular genius and creativity. The fact that the same painting painted by someone else does
not hold the same value as when we know it was painted by da Vinci reflects the fact that one of the very significant
functions of art is to connect the audience to the artist in a very personal way. Anything which interferes with or
distorts that process is unethical.
A final consideration is that social and ethical mores also constrain the making of knowledge, and practitioners can
be punished or even imprisoned for art or science which too far transgresses social codes of ethics. Legal constraints
limit how scientists can use animals in their work. Rick Gibson was famously arrested and fined for offending public
decency with his work ‘Fetus Earrings’ (Dow). The director of a museum in Denmark was fined 2000 kroner for
cruelty to animals after displaying Evaristti’s exhibit of fish in blenders, though the fine was later overturned in
court (‘Liquidising Goldfish’). No society would stand for the actual murder of a person for the sake of pursuing
knowledge in either the arts or the sciences. (Consider the controversy that still exists over the scientific knowledge
gained by the Nazis during the Second World War.)
The ethical constraints imposed by societal values on the making of knowledge in all areas of knowledge are real
and significant. They provide the most obvious ways in which ethics shape knowledge-making; however, the
constraints imposed on methods by the nature of the areas of knowledge themselves are equally real and significant.
The practitioners of each area of knowledge have a set of standards to which they must adhere if the knowledge
generated is to be considered viable. That which is ethical in the areas of knowledge, in other words, is that which
allows for the aims to be met. In the arts, that primarily means that that which is unethical is that which interferes
with the artist’s proper right of ownership of their creative and intellectual work and the ability of the artist to
communicate with an audience.

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Cultural appropriation
We have considered that literally anything could be the subject of or inspiration for a work of art. Just because
something can be the subject of art doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be. One contemporary ethical problem
that arises with regard to the arts is the problem of cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation in the arts occurs
when an artist of one culture produces art in the style of, or using the materials or instruments of, another culture but
without having sufficient knowledge of or right to that culture’s traditions. Usually the idea of cultural appropriation
is only relevant and offensive when majority members of a society usurp aspects of the culture of minority members.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
What moral responsibilities do we have regarding art that has been created or published by other
people?

One fairly well-known example of a figure who has spawned a lot of controversy over cultural appropriation is
rapper Iggy Azalea. She is a white singer born in Australia who has made a huge success of rapping. She has
become one in a long line of musicians – including Elvis Presley – who have appropriated music from the African
American musical tradition in the southern United States. The problem is that historically, white singers have taken
the music and then effectively erased the history, leaving the originators with no credit while the white singers
become famous (Zimmerman). Iggy Azalea has been accused of fitting right into this historical trend:
Iggy’s alleged crime is twofold: she gets to profit off of her white appeal while simultaneously selling a
black sound. She is making a huge career for herself by mimicking the vocal patterns and phrases of a
southern black girl – in effect … stealing that nameless black girl’s own success in the process.
(Zimmerman)

Learner profile
Principled
What principles are the most important ones in helping to determine what constitutes the ethical practice
of art?

Another example comes from the Indigenous people of Australia. Christopher Sainsbury, a Dhurang composer
working in Sydney, writes about the problem of non-Indigenous composers borrowing elements of Indigenous
music ‘Without appropriate engagements with Indigenous peoples’. Sainsbury argues when non-Indigenous
composers ‘reference’ Indigenous music without interacting with, or giving credit to, the source of the music, those
composers disenfranchise the Indigenous composers.
This problem is very similar to the problem of the white artists in America usurping the music of African American

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artists and taking credit for the work at the expense of the original artists. Sainsbury argues for genuine
collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous composers, as well as true cultural support – including
funding – for Indigenous composers, so that they are treated just as the non-Indigenous musicians are. ‘And of
course we recommend hanging out with Indigenous people. I worked at the Eora Centre for Aboriginal Visual and
Performing Arts Sydney for about 25 years, and noted that no composer from the Sydney University Music
Department, which was 300 metres away, ever visited us’ (Sainsbury). Sainsbury has founded the Ngarra-burria
First Peoples Composers programme to pursue genuine appreciation of and recognition for the music of Indigenous
people.

ACTIVITY
How can we know when a work of art is an example of cultural appropriation and when it is an example
of paying homage to other artists’ work?

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The moral character of the artist
In October 2017, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was accused by multiple women of rape and sexual
assault. He was fired, and in the months that followed, a great many other public figures, including some working in
artistic fields, were similarly accused. Some had to resign or were fired, and in some cases, their work was pulled
from broadcast. These include a director of opera, an orchestra conductor, a ballet dancer, a creator of a famous
radio programme, a television director and writer, five actors and a circus clown (Almukhtar, et al). Perhaps the
most famous of these is Kevin Spacey, arguably one of the finest actors of his generation, who starred in such roles
as Dave Harken in Horrible Bosses, Lex Luther in Superman Returns, Prot in K-Pax, Jack Vincennes in L.A.
Confidential, and Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects. Spacey has nearly 130 credits as an actor, director or
producer. When the allegations came out – more than 30 different accusations over several decades (Romano) –
Spacey was fired from his current show, House of Cards, and was released from several other projects in the works
(Almukhtar, et al). At the time of writing (2019), he has been formally charged and arraigned on at least one count
of sexual assault (Romano).

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the problem of knowledge appropriation occur in other areas of knowledge such as the natural
sciences and history?

This kind of immoral behaviour is not limited to Hollywood or film actors. Pablo Picasso appears to have been a
cruel misogynist. His granddaughter wrote of him, in a memoir: ‘He submitted them [women] to his animal
sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many
nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them’ (Lee). Some of Picasso’s art
depicted the Minotaur, a mythological creature half-man and half-bull, which can, from one perspective, be seen as
preparing to assault a woman. From another perspective, the art world has praised these drawings as being symbols
of virility and power (Lee). Bad behaviour, of course, can extend well beyond misogyny and sexual misconduct.
Ernest Hemingway – among many others – was a well-known anti-Semite. He was also a womanizer who, after his
first wife confronted him about having an affair admitted to it and then blamed her for damaging their marriage by
trying to discuss it. He was called, by various people who knew him, selfish, callous and cruel (Kogan). TS Eliot
was another writer known to be anti-Semitic, and Theodore Geisel – Dr Seuss – was a well-known bigot (Morris). A
little research would turn up many more examples.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Can we separate the moral character of the artist from the value of the artwork?

This leaves us with an ethical dilemma: do we discount the artwork of artists who have shown themselves to be, to a
greater or lesser degree, unethical, immoral or evil?
In the contemporary crisis of the series of revelations of sexual misconduct, the employers of many of the men who
have been accused have demonstrated their answer to the question by firing the men. Whether those employers are
truly outraged by the behaviour, or whether they are just worried that the public will boycott any movie, play, opera
or television series in which those men appear is unknown, and ultimately, irrelevant. The market has spoken: a
judgment by society has been made, at least in the short term.
A number of difficult questions remain: if these men are bad enough people that their work is tainted beyond repair,
then why isn’t the work of men from earlier times equally shunned? Is it a matter of knowledge? In the twenty-first
century, knowledge of such charges can be disseminated around the world instantaneously. In the 1920s, when
Hemingway was writing and Picasso painting, news did not travel so far or so quickly. Are the moral standards of
the twenty-first century significantly different from the moral standards of the early twentieth century? Perhaps what
we now believe, culturally, sets a higher standard for the modern artist than artists used to have to meet. If that is the
case, however, should modern readers not reject Hemingway’s work, and modern viewers of art, Picasso’s?

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What about artists whose bad behaviour and objectionable opinions are simply not known? Do we have a
responsibility, as consumers of art, to find out which artists have sufficiently good character for their art to be
recognized and valued? Jim Morris, an advertising executive and self-styled crusader against intellectual laziness
argues that if we really knew about the lives and feelings of artists, few would escape our condemnation on some
offence – even if minor. He states that to claim that we can reject those artists who deserve rejection is hypocritical,
when we aren’t willing to do the work to find out about the rest. He also argues that to reject all art that was created
by people who have done some wrong is to impoverish our experience in an important way (Morris). He calls on us
to consider that the arts should not be treated any differently from any other field:
Not that you asked, but for me, a work of art is great or not, the political achievement or technological
innovation or scientific discovery is great or not, entirely separate of whether it was produced by a saint, a
despicable human being, a robot or a hippo. I don’t need to know anything about the creator of the work to
be affected by that work and make my own judgment of its value or worth. (Morris)

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the same question about the relationship between the moral character of the artist and his or her
work arise in other AOKs?

The opposing argument is that if art is indeed a reflection of the artist, and if part of the purpose and the wonder of
art is our ability to connect mentally and emotionally with an artist, then it does matter who makes the work – a
position that we have argued earlier in this chapter.
It seems quite obvious that a good person can create a bad piece of art, but can a bad person create a good work of
art? We have no answer to this thorny question. Ultimately, it will be answered by individuals and by society at
large. If you are uncomfortable enough with the person, once you know the ways in which their character has been
demonstrated by behaviour, to be uncomfortable with their art, then you will reject the art. Perhaps, even if you feel
that the art does stand separately from the artist, when you try to watch The Usual Suspects again, you will find that
it is tinged with the revelations of Kevin Spacey’s off-screen life, or that if you look at Picasso’s portraits of women,
they are now shadowed by the painter’s real-life cruelties. If society at large speaks by boycotting the work of artists
who have become notorious for their immoral behaviour, then that work will not be shared and passed along for
future generations. In either case, the opinion of experts will not decide this question. Like the judgment of art itself,
judgment of the artist will occur on many different fronts.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the character of knowledge-makers in other areas of knowledge raise similar questions as to the
value of the knowledge they create?

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Art’s influence on ethics
We saw in Chapter 11 that one role that history can play in a community is to provide a set of values and goals
common to the community. Historians do that indirectly by documenting events and their causes and effects, which
then allow us to see where we fit in the historical traditions of our culture, as well as to understand how we might do
things better than they have been done in the past. The arts can play a similar role in helping to develop our sense of
right and wrong.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
Do the arts play a role in the development of our personal value systems?
How important is the study of literature in our individual ethical development?

Some works of art are overtly moral, with an intentional aim of helping the audience recognize right from wrong.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet played just this role in the former Soviet Union, where the play helped to bind the people
together in an understanding of their shared struggles. Photographs, such as the one below, are meant to cause us to
feel empathy and both to encourage us to do something about this situation or similar ones, and to discourage us
from ever treating animals in this way.
Folk singer Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ is a powerful criticism of the destruction of nature, which
is still relevant today. You can use the QR code on the right to listen to the song.

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The arts also have the capacity to inspire us to have faith in the goodness and beauty around us, and any move away
from cynicism can be seen as a move toward a higher moral purpose: if we believe in a better world, we can help to
achieve a better world. The image above, for instance, suggests just this.
Love poems, such as ‘I loved you first: but afterwards your love’ written by nineteenth-century English poet
Christina Rossetti, have the power to make us believe in the possibility that relationships can sustain us and bring us
happiness:

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A dancer, such as Polina Semiova, can make us appreciate beauty – not just physical beauty, but the beauty of
movement and the capacity of the body to interpret music. Use the first QR code on the right to see some of her
work with the Staatsballett Berlin.

An impeccably rehearsed troupe using brooms can inspire us to believe in the capacity of humans to achieve
perfection through hard work and true collaborative effort. Use the second QR code on the right to watch a clip from
Stomp Live! Be sure to turn up the volume.
All of these are examples of artworks which have the power to affect the way we see the world in terms of what is
right and what is wrong, and to inspire us to believe in and to reach for what is good. When we asked the question,
earlier in this chapter, of whether art has the power to cause change, we were asking an ethical question. The answer
would appear to be that, at least one mind at a time, it does, indeed, have that power.

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Conclusion
We hope that, having completed this chapter, you can now appreciate the ways in which the arts, as an area of
knowledge, are similar to and different from the other areas of knowledge studied in the Theory of Knowledge
course. The kind of knowledge that we can gain from the arts is fundamentally different from the kind of knowledge
that we can gain from, say mathematics or the natural sciences, in that it is much less objective. The arts aim, in fact,
to provide us with a subjective view of the world – with many subjective views of the world – and in so doing they
have the power to connect us to people across barriers of time and space, and to help us understand our fundamental
humanity.

CONNECTIONS TO OTHER AOKs

• Scope: The scope of the arts is virtually unlimited, taking in all that exists and has existed, and all that
might exist, though it does not exist now and never has. How does this contrast with the scope of other
AOKs? What is it about the purpose of the arts which means the arts can include in their range so
much more than other AOKs can?
• Perspectives: We see that in the case of the arts, it is possible for individuals to have knowledge
about an individual work of art which diverges from the knowledge that experts have or that are the
result of societal judgments. Is the distinction between individual judgments and expert judgments a
functional one in any AOK other than the arts? Could we, for example, say that it’s fine for an
individual to have a personal opinion about events in history which differs from expert judgment?
• Methods and tools: In the arts, the methods and tools are limited only by what artists can imagine
could be used as a method or tool. The methods and tools have expanded over time to include
processes and items that were not imaginable in past centuries. Is that process of change
fundamentally different from the way that methods and tools develop in other AOKs? Or is the
telescope, for example, in some way related to the electric keyboard as an agent of changing ability to
make knowledge?
• Ethics: The personal lives of artists seem to carry greater significance in terms of the degree to which
their art is taken seriously than the personal lives of practitioners of other AOKs – psychologists or
mathematicians or historians, for example. Although Jim Morris makes the claim that the arts should
be treated the same as the sciences or politics or technology in this regard (see page 432), the
personal nature of the arts seems to leave us with greater attention to the person who makes the art
and who, therefore, conveyed to us some knowledge of the world. Do you think that this differentiation
is real, or is it just a matter of unfair focus on one kind of knowledge-maker over another?

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Works cited
AHA. ‘Food Glorious Food! Fruit in the Works of Caravaggio’. Art History Abroad. Art History Abroad. 27 Nov.
2017. Web. 22 Aug. 2019. www.arthistoryabroad.com/2017/05/food-in-the-baroque-examining-depictions-
of-fruit-in-the-works-of-caravaggio-2/.
Almukhtar, Sarah, et al. ‘After Weinstein: 71 Men Accused of Sexual Misconduct and Their Fall From Power’. The
New York Times. The New York Times. 11 Nov. 2017. Web. 24 Aug. 2019.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/10/us/men-accused-sexual-misconduct-weinstein.html.
American Beauty. Dir. Sam Mendes. Paramount, 2017. DVD.
‘Artificial (adj.)’. Index. Etymonline. N.d. Web. 13 Aug. 2019. www.etymonline.com/word/artificial.
Bennet, Glin. 2011. ‘Shakespeare and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder’. British Journal of Psychiatry. Vol 198,
number 4. Royal College of Psychiatrists. 2 Jan. 2018. Web. 22 Aug. 2019.
www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/shakespeare-and-
posttraumatic-stress-disorder/83B74F4CF26F69F09DC71AD223B9A468.
Carmeli, Audrey Ellen. 2002. Allegory and Metaphor: Soviet Productions of Shakespeare in the Post-Stalin Era.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. PhD Dissertation. N.d. Web. 21 Aug. 2019.
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Clark, Travis, and John Lynch. ‘The 50 Best-selling Albums of All Time’. Business Insider. Business Insider. 23
Apr. 2019. Web. 16 Aug. 2019. www.businessinsider.com/50-best-selling-albums-all-time-2016-9.
Conroy, Tiffany Ann. 2009. ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’: Political Dissent in Grigory
Kozintsev’s Shakespeare. Northeastern University. PhD dissertation. 21 Aug. 2019.
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Darlington, Shasta. ‘Why Brazil’s Music Industry Is Booming Again’. Billboard. Billboard. 22 Apr. 2019. Web. 20
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streaming.
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nude-modigliani-2018-5?r=US&IR=T#1-painting-attributed-to-leonardo-da-vinci-salvator-mundi-4503-
million-16.
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Web. 23 Aug. 2019. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/body-art-literally-1690128.html.
Keats, John. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. N.d. Web. 14 Aug. 2019.
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn.
Kennedy, Dennis. 2001. Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-century Performance. Cambridge.
Cambridge University Press.
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 Digital Trends. 24 Jul. 2019. Web. 22 Aug. 2019. www.digitaltrends.com/web/most-viewed-youtube-videos/.
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Behavior?’ Dragonette. Dragonette. 29 Jan. 2018. Web. 24 Aug. 2019. https://www.ritadragonette.com/blog-
content/2018/1/25/should-we-judge-a-persons-work-through-the-lens-of-their-character-flaws-and-bad-
behavior?rq=should%20we%20judge%20a%20person.
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Record.’ Niagra Frontier Publications, 29 Aug. 2019. Web. 13 Feb. 2020.
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3 Feb. 2017. Web. 16 Aug. 2019. www.pbs.org/newshour/show/shouldnt-forget-u-s-presidents-owned-slaves.
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Aug. 2019. www.phuket.com/magazine/big-buddha.htm.
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failures-nabokov-meyerhold-stalin-hamlet/#.XVxEC-hKiUk.
Robbins, Tom. 2006. Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins. New York. Bantam.
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www.technologystudent.com/prddes_2/nature1.html.
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time-to-properly-acknowledge-and-celebrate-indigenous-composers-115839.
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Texts. Eds. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library. 21
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Sherman, Maria. ‘Forebears: Delia Derbyshire, Electronic Music’s Forgotten Pioneer’. NPR. National Public Radio.
16 Oct. 2017. Web. 13 Aug. 2019. www.npr.org/2017/10/16/557556328/forebears-delia-derbyshire-
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2014. Web. 24 Aug. 2019. www.thedailybeast.com/the-cultural-crimes-of-iggy-azalea.

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Glossary
Absolutely certain: To believe that something is the truth and there is no possibility at all of its ever being found to
be wrong. This phrase has a very particular meaning. You will read about the difference between ‘certain’ and
‘absolutely certain’ in detail in Chapter 1 of this book.
Academia: Describes the whole community of any institution involved in education. It is usually applied to higher
levels of learning which are involved in education for education’s sake.
Accord: To match or fit with something. When people say that their views accord with another person’s views, they
are saying that their views fit together well.
Accurate: In the sciences, ‘accurate’ and ‘precise’ have two distinct meanings. To say that some measurement is
accurate is to say that it matches reality.
Acquiesce: To go along with. It has the connotation of allowing someone else to do something that you might not
entirely approve of, but you let it pass for some reason or another. In this case, whether the parents and students like
the government or not, they have decided to go along with the political decisions without complaining because they
will get an education out of keeping quiet.
Ad hominem: Latin for ‘against or towards the man’. This means you accuse the individual of some short-coming
in order to discount whatever it is they are saying, while ignoring the actual arguments that individual is offering
Aesthetic: An adjective that describes our response to sensory input. A person with a sophisticated sense of the
aesthetic is seen to have excellent taste in any number of aspects of society, especially the arts, as well as an
understanding of how to behave in company in such a way as to draw admiration.
Albeit: A word that indicates that the writer is acknowledging an idea which might seem to be a contradiction to the
main point being made. In this case, the sentence is saying that honey bee communication is limited, so the ‘albeit’
signals that despite this fact, the subject about which the bees can communicate is very important to the bees.
Algorithms: Sets of rules which lead to purposeful behaviour. In computers these are the programs.
Ambiguous: Something that is not clear. More precisely, an ambiguity is a word or phrase or sentence which is
capable of more than one interpretation, so that the listener or reader cannot make out what was actually intended.
Analogy: A way of explaining or clarifying something by comparing it with something else that has similar
characteristics.
Animism: The belief that unseen spirits exist in objects, places and creatures in the environment and often form part
of the explanation of natural forces. The word is derived from the Latin word anima, which means ‘life’ or ‘spirit’.
Often religious leaders will try to communicate and influence the behaviour of these spirits though ritual, prayer or
visions.
Aphorism: A fairly short, succinct and widely-repeated saying that purports to convey some universal truth about
human experience.
Apocalyptic: As described in the book of Revelation in the Christian Bible, the apocalypse refers to the complete
destruction of the world. The idea of an apocalypse has come to refer metaphorically to any catastrophic event
which would destroy civilization as we know it.
Appropriate: To take something for your own use without permission. We do not generally use the term to apply to
theft, which is illegal. Appropriation is not necessarily illegal, but it is highly questionable and sometimes downright
unethical.
Assumption: A belief that someone holds because there is no way to test it. Assumptions are formed based on
experience, so they are not wild guesses. With regard to the belief that reality exists outside of our minds, we cannot
get outside of our heads in order to test the proposition that what we experience inside our heads matches what is
outside.

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Atheism: The belief that there is no god.
It differs from agnosticism in that the latter describes the middle ground in between religious belief and atheism.
Agnostics take the position that they do not know whether or not God or a god or some gods exist.
Banal: Lacking in originality or importance.
Benevolent: Wishing good things. It is the opposite of malevolent which means ‘wishing bad things’. Volare is
Latin for ‘wanting or desiring’, bene is ‘good’ or ‘well’ while ‘male’ (mah-lay) is ‘evil’ or ‘bad’.
Callous: Unfeeling.
Censure: Formally denouncing a particular behaviour; it often carries serious penalties.
Census: A formal counting of people who live in a particular area. In the United States, there is a legal mandate for
a complete census of the entire country to take place every 10 years. The results of the census have important
implications for such things as determining how many members of congress each state is entitled to.
Charlatan: Someone who falsely claims to have knowledge and manipulates others because of this presumed
knowledge.
Chauvinism: An excessive support for a particular position or perspective. For example, a person who assumes
uncritically that their own perspective is the only possible right position, could be accused of being ‘chauvinistic’.
The focus here is on excessive, meaning a person does not consider or refuses to take into account other possible
views. You might consider your own view correct, but to avoid being chauvinistic you would consider other views
and perspectives before coming to your final position.
Chronology: A list of events ordered by time.
Codified: Something which has been ‘codified’ has been written into law or otherwise overtly stated as a
requirement of social and governmental practice.
Colloquial: Describes language used by everyday people outside of professional, academic or technical contexts.
Colloquial language functions well for normal communication, but very often does not have the same meaning as
technical uses have.
Compelling: Convincing.
Concur: To agree with. Concur relates to the word ‘concurrence’, which means something that happens alongside
something else.
Conflate: To combine two things in order to suggest that they are fundamentally alike. Generally, when we use the
word ‘conflate’, it is to suggest that the two things should not have been connected. In this case, biology cannot be
conflated with psychology. The things that biologists study are quite different from the things that psychologists
study, even though, as you will see in the next chapter, there are some ways in which natural science can aid
psychologists in making knowledge in their area.
Connotation: The meaning of a word which is implied, though not stated. Politics has a neutral meaning when it
refers to the system by which people in groups make decisions about how they will live together, but when seen
through the perspective of people who have been subject to the misuse of power, the word ‘politics’ takes on a
negative connotation.
Conscientious: To proceed in as careful and ethical way as possible in order to avoid mistakes and
misunderstandings. Conscientious means something different from ‘conscious’; to say that we undergo a ‘conscious’
process means that we are aware of what we are doing.
Consequent: Means that one thing has caused another, which follows. In this case, the point is that where traditional
transmission occurs, there is an inevitable result that time is required for learning to take place.
Constellation: In this instance, a metaphor for the idea that a group of things can go together to create a group
which functions together in a particular way, which is recognizable, and which can be named. You are probably
familiar with the word ‘constellation’ as it refers to clusters of stars which create shapes that are recognizable and
named.
Contingent: Means that something depends on the circumstances. When we say that scientific findings are
contingent, we mean that they are based on conditions that exist at the time of the finding.
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Convention: A procedure which is done because people have agreed to do it that way. Something which is
conventional is something which is done the way people expect it to be done. Conventions, like mnemonics, are not
individual to mathematics. The order of operations is a mathematical convention, but all the rules of grammar are
also conventions. Conventions can change from situation to situation; the conventions of grammar are not the same,
for example, in all languages.
Cumulative: Increasing by one addition after another. To say mathematical knowledge is ‘cumulative’ is to say that
it builds up, so that all the earlier knowledge continues to exist alongside the newer knowledge.
De facto: A Latin phrase meaning ‘in effect’. In this case, although there was no official ban on performances of
Hamlet, Stalin’s dislike was enough to cause people to choose not to produce it for fear of angering him, so in effect
there was a ban on Hamlet for the remainder of Stalin’s life.
Delineate: To explain the features of something. Although similar to the word ‘describe’, it implies a more detailed
kind of description than we generally mean when we just say that we will describe something.
Democracy: People in a country can vote for the representatives, the politicians, who will make most of the
decisions. In a true democracy, the citizens of the country would vote on all issues that needed to be decided. Most
democracies in the modern world are too big for direct input of all citizens, and so most modern democracies,
including those in the UK, Canada, the United States and Australia, are representative democracies.
Denigrated: To make fun of something or to indicate that it is foolish or unworthy of consideration.
Dichotomy: A choice between two positions, of which only one can be true.
Discern: To be able to tell apart.
Disenfranchise: To take power away from people by depriving them of rights.
Disinterested: Refers to an observer who has no particular goal in mind when evaluating evidence. They are willing
to accept whatever the evidence suggests and are not manipulating their interpretation of the evidence in favour of a
desired outcome.
Disinterested: To be able to view a situation objectively without considering whether any particular outcome would
be better for oneself than other outcomes. The word ‘disinterest’ uses an old meaning of the word ‘interest,’ which
refers to having a stake in something.
Doctrine: Official teachings of a theory or perspective which are at the core of the system.
Dogma: Refers to the core beliefs in a religion which all individuals are expected to hold.
Editorial: An article in a publication expressing the opinion of the editor. In academic or scientific publications,
editorials may not be subject to the same peer-review process as the other articles.
Efficacy: Means effectiveness in terms of solving the particular problem that needed solving. Vaccines are
‘efficacious’ because they eliminate disease.
Encompass: To include something or to contain something within; for example, Africa encompasses many
countries, including Ghana, Morocco, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire.
Enculturated: To learn the basic rules, beliefs and practices of a culture. Most of us are enculturated to our native
culture just by growing up in it. Some of us move to a new culture and have to learn the basic beliefs and practices
of that new culture.
Enlightenment: A historical period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. It was characterized
by significant shifts in the role of individual reason and inquiry in the formation of knowledge, and the breakdown
of authority. The natural sciences stepped out from the realm of philosophy and became a discipline in its own right.
Eradicate: To wipe out.
Eradicated: Wiped out.
Erroneous: The adjective form of the noun ‘error’; to say that something is erroneous is to say that it is wrong.
Etatist: A person who is in favour of authoritarian control of government, in which one person makes the decisions.
This contrasts with democracy, for example, in which governmental decisions are guided by input from citizens.
Ethics and morals: Related concepts about how we know the difference between good and evil. Morals are the

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underlying values about what is right, while ethics are the rules we put in place to try to ensure that people behave in
accordance with the moral values of the community in which they live and function. See the online ‘Introduction to
Ethical Theory’ for more information.
Ethnology: A branch of anthropology (the study of human cultures) focusing on the different characteristics
between human populations and cultures and the historical relationships between these populations.
Exonerate: To absolve a person of any guilt for having done an action; people who are found innocent of crimes
have been exonerated of those crimes.
Exploit: To use someone or something for your own good.
The idea of exploitation has a negative connotation – if you exploit the resources in your area, for example, you use
them up without regard to the consequences.
Extrapolate: To extrapolate is to extend a known idea to surmise or work out something unknown. In this case, if
we understand how different perspectives help us to better understand reconstruction, we can work out that different
perspectives will help us understand many situations better.
Extraterrestrial: ‘Not found on Earth’.
Foundational: A text (or belief) that serves as the most basic justification for all other beliefs. In this case, the Torah
(and the Qur’an) are the starting point for all other beliefs. Nothing can justify the authority of the foundational
texts, but everything else should be justified through what is said in these texts.
Founding Fathers: A term relating to the men who developed the United States Declaration of Independence, the
US Constitution and stood as the early political leaders.
Freeloading: People who are freeloaders are those who take advantage of other people’s work so they don’t have to
work themselves. They get benefit for ‘free’ and they are themselves a ‘load’ on others around them.
Fundamentalism: A form of belief where the basic fundamentals of a faith, generally expressed in the sacred texts,
are held as the most crucial elements of that faith.
Geocentric: The idea that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe.
Gross domestic product (GDP): The total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services
produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period (Chappelow).
Heliocentric: The heliocentric model of the Universe puts the Sun at the centre of the Universe.
Hierarchy: A structure in which some things are higher up than others. There is a natural progression from bottom
to top in a hierarchy, and in general, those at any given level have power over those below them.
Historiography: The process of reflecting on the methods the historian uses when writing. The questions we ask in
TOK regarding history are historiographical.
Iconic: Something that is widely recognized as being representative of its type because it is a perfect, or nearly
perfect, example. To say that something is iconic implies admiration of that thing.
Immaterial: Something is not made up of matter; it has no physical mass. Plato meant that numbers and other
mathematical ‘objects’ exist in the same kind of plane as the human soul. The word ‘immaterial’ has another
meaning, which is ‘irrelevant’ or ‘unimportant’, but that definition is not the one which is relevant here.
Impiety: Describes the actions of someone who violates God’s word. It is the opposite of ‘piety’, which describes
an appropriate degree of humble adherence to God’s word.
Inalienable: Something that cannot be taken away from us. It is related to the word ‘alien’, which means something
different, or apart from us. If something cannot be made alien, then it is inevitably and permanently a part of
ourselves. To call a right ‘inalienable’ is a powerful claim about what is owed by birth right to all human beings.
Incommensurable: Mutually exclusive. One cannot, for instance, think ‘today is Monday’ and ‘today is Tuesday’ at
the same time.
Inerrant: Something that is not contrary to facts. It is very close in meaning to infallible but is slightly different.
Inevitably: Something that will happen; it is unavoidable. In this case, an unavoidable result of refusing to accept
reality will be that the person who denies reality will eventually suffer some negative consequence.

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Infallible: Something that cannot be wrong.
Infinitesimal: Related to the idea of ‘infinite’, which means without boundaries. To call something infinitesimally
small is a little ironic, then, because it suggests that the thing is small ‘without boundaries’. The idea is that
something which is infinitesimally small is the smallest thing you can imagine.
Infrastructure: Refers to the physical structures which people in a given city or country need in order to be able to
carry out the regular business of their lives. This includes things such as bridges, roads, power supply and
communication networks.
Innocuous: Something that is of virtually no importance and which has no meaningful consequences. In this case, a
change from allowing scientific models to project change to the end of the century to allowing them only to project
change for the next 20 years doesn’t seem very significant; however, the appearance is deceiving.
Instigated: Begun. It refers to what begins a process.
Integral: Something that is essential that cannot be separated from the other thing. In this case, to say that our
culture is integral to our political beliefs is to say that the two cannot be separated.
Intellectual gymnastics: Refers to the need to twist one’s thinking in all sorts of ways in order to get a claim to
appear ‘reasonable’. This is another example of how ‘reasonable’ is not synonymous with ‘true’ or even ‘reliable’.
One can make a ‘reasonable’ argument for any conclusion, provided one cleverly chooses one’s premises.
Irreconcilable: A word used to describe a situation in which two different perspectives are so fundamentally
different that there is no way to find a compromise between them.
Jingo: A person who supports a policy favouring war, especially in the name of patriotism (it is now considered an
out-of-date term).
Karma: Hindus and Buddhists believe that our actions in this world have consequences for our future well-being.
This is the Law of Karma. If we commit bad deeds, we will suffer the bad consequences of that behaviour later
(perhaps in the next life).
Loaded: To say that a word or idea is ‘loaded’ is to say that it has a lot of emotional associations and tends,
therefore, to be controversial.
Mesopotamia: The name given to the areas in modern Iraq in and around the Tigris and Euphrates river systems.
Minute: This use of the word ‘minute’ refers to a very small amount, as opposed to the unit of time.
Misogynist: Someone who hates women.
Mnemonic: A word or phrase used as an aid to memory. Mnemonics are not limited to mathematics; you will find
them in other areas of knowledge. A very common form of mnemonics is to use the first letters of words to form a
new word or phrase.
Mores: Rules which govern what is acceptable within a given society.
The word is related to the word ‘morals’, so ‘mores’ imply a value of right and wrong, or good and evil. Social
mores determine how members of a particular social group will view certain behaviours and whether they will judge
those behaviours as being right or wrong.
Mystic: Someone who claims to receive various visions and special revelations.
Obfuscate: To deliberately hide something from others.
You may be familiar with the word ‘obscure’, which comes from the same root. When someone deliberately tries to
make something less clear, that person is obfuscating. In this case, Stalin was obfuscating the true history of the
Soviet regime’s rise to power.
Onus: Another word for ‘responsibility.’ If the onus is on you to do something, that means that you have to take the
responsibility for getting it done.
Open-minded: The willingness to listen to other people’s perspectives, which may have the power to help us
change our worldview.
Open-mindedness is probably familiar to you as one of the IB Learner profile traits; it is similar, but not quite the
same thing as objectivity, which is the capacity to take in information and to make judgments in as disinterested a

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way as possible.
Overt: A word used to describe something which is made obvious on the surface of something.
If there is an overt effort to persuade someone, then the persuasion is obvious and the language that the persuader is
using directly refers to the act of persuasion so that there can be no confusion.
Pernicious: Something that causes damage but in a gradual or subtle way.
Phenomena: Things which actually happen. The word suggests that they happen naturally, that is, not because
people controlled them deliberately.
Preconceptions: An idea or concept that is formed before appropriate research is done. A preconception might
shape the way in which a person looks for an answer, so that they get the answer they thought they were going to
get.
Predicated: Based or founded on something else. In this context, we are saying that the whole TOK course is
founded upon the very important belief in a knowable reality outside of ourselves.
Propagate: A verb meaning to pass on or distribute more widely an idea or concept.
Proponent: Somebody who argues in favour of something.
Purveyor: A purveyor of something is a person who promotes or spreads ideas. In this case, a purveyor of
knowledge is a person who helps to share knowledge among many people.
Quantifiable: Refers to data that can be measured objectively. We discuss more thoroughly the distinction between
quantifiable and qualitative data in Chapter 10, The Human Sciences.
Recession: An economic downturn characterized by higher unemployment, greater inflation and lower rates of
industrial production.
Recourse: The options that exist to fix a problem.
Relatively: Assessed or considered by comparison with something else. In this case, when we use the phrase
‘relatively rare’, we mean that there may be a large number of whatever it is, but that compared to all the other cases
– which we do not call ‘rare’ – there are very few.
Repository: A place in which one puts things for safe-keeping or storage. In this instance, a book is an object which
stores human knowledge.
Resurrection: To be raised from the dead. It is a central dogma in traditional Christianity that after the Romans
crucified Jesus in Jerusalem in about 33 CE, God raised him from the dead. This is different from the Hindu and
Buddhist belief in reincarnation, which is the belief that after death your spirit or soul moves on to live a life in a
different body.
Sacred: Refers to an inherent ‘holiness’, something which is connected to the divine and therefore deserves special
respect. Here it is used in opposition to secular.
Scientific reductionism: The belief that all phenomena can be broken down and investigated at the level of
fundamental entities and forces. Thunderstorms, for instance, are best and fully explained when explained with
accepted scientific concepts like humidity, air currents and electrostatic discharges.
Secular: Describes beliefs which have nothing to do with religion.
Sinful: Evil or improper behaviour. The word ‘sin’ is derived from a Greek word meaning ‘to miss the mark’. In
other words, a sinful act is an act which ‘misses the mark’ or goal set out by God.
Smidgen: A tiny amount of something. It does not indicate a specific amount, so you have to understand it in
context. If someone asks you for a smidgen of cake, then, you would give them a very small piece. In the context in
which the word is used here, however, ‘smidgen’ indicates a much, much smaller amount than a very small piece of
cake. A ‘smidgen’ of variance in a 90° angle refers to an amount so tiny that we couldn’t see it at all.
Solemnity: The noun form of the more familiar adjective ‘solemn’, it means seriousness and is used to describe the
mood of a particular event or gathering. In the case of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the signers
were, of course, committing treason against the king and were well aware that should their efforts to achieve
independence from Britain fail, all the signers would be hanged.

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Solipsism: A belief that the only thing that can be known to exist is the self.
Subatomic: Smaller than an atom.
Subversive: The adjective form of the verb ‘to subvert.’ To subvert something is to undermine its function or
purpose. In this case, when we say that the promotion was a subversive manipulation, we are saying that it
undermined the goals of the company, ie, to put the best person forward for each job so that the company would
function effectively.
Symbiosis: The relationship between two biological creatures in which each one helps the other achieve something
it needs.
Teuthologist: A scientist who studies cephalopods, such as octopuses.
Theocracy: A form of government in which the leaders of government are also leaders of the predominant religion,
and they are considered to be led in their decision making by divine guidance.
Theology: An academic discipline which focuses on applying a philosophical analysis of the nature of God or of the
divine and the nature of religious beliefs and practices. A theologian is someone trained in this discipline.
Trinity: The Christian idea that God has three forms, though is only one being – God as transcendent creator, God
as the human Jesus Christ and God as the ‘Holy Spirit’ which exists in the hearts of all human beings.
Truism: A claim that is obviously true and doesn’t therefore claim to say anything new or anything that wasn’t
already known.
Unassailable: Something which is unassailable cannot be successfully attacked and defeated.
Unscrupulous: People who are willing to take advantage of others for their own betterment.
‘Scruples’ is another word for the brakes we have on our consciences; your scruples are the values you have
internalized which keep you from behaving badly, particularly with regard to how you treat other people.
Upper caste: In traditional Indian society there are various social classes, where many professions were tied to
various castes. ‘Dalit’ (or ‘schedule castes’) refers to the lowest of the castes.
Utility: Usefulness.In this case, we are categorizing the items in terms of whether they are useful to humans for
some practical purpose, as a tool, essentially, or not.
Vanquish: To defeat. Vanquished is a word that is used to describe the losing side in a war.
Visceral: An adjective which describes a kind of knowledge which is felt, rather than understood in your mind. The
word ‘visceral’ relates to the word ‘viscera’ which is the name for all of your internal organs. The suggestion that
you know something viscerally is the suggestion that you feel it, as you sometimes feel something in the pit of your
stomach.

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Index
A
ability knowledge 50–1
absolute certainty vii, 3–7
academia 20
accuracy
barriers to 22
of maps 61–2
see also truth
adultery 211
aesthetics 8–9
Aldrin, Buzz 266
algorithms 86, 93–4, 96–8
Allegory of the Cave 56–8
AlphaGo 89
ambiguity
in language 115
in mathematics 285–6
American Revolution 1776 238
animals, and language 118–20
animism 156
anthropology 177
see also Indigenous societies
anti-vaccination movement v–vi, 11, 66
aphorisms 141
apocalyptic views 231
Apollo 14 16–17
apprentice, as metaphor for learning 55–6
apprentices
see also expertise; knowing
Arab Spring 2011 28
arbitrariness of language 114–15
Arenstorf, Richard 283–4
arguments
deductive reasoning 5–6, 47
the existence of God 203–8
see also justification; reason
Aristotelian classification 306–7
Aristotle 81
Armstrong, Neil 266
artificial intelligence (AI) 85–7, 105–8
arts 403–35
artist and audience 416–17
cultural appropriation 430–1
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 defining 404–5
ethical considerations 428–35
and expertise 422
and interpretation 17, 425–8
as language 120–2
moral character of artist 431–3
quality of 421–2
and subjective knowledge 23–4, 48
utility of objects 406–7
works of art 409–10
see also culture
Asimov, Isaac 106–7
assumptions 33–4
see also beliefs
atheism 26
Augustine of Hippo 199–200
Austen, Jane 125
autonomous cars 106–8
Azalea, Iggy 430

B
backgrounds beliefs 66–8
Ballou, Sullivan 135–6
beauty 404–6
see also arts
Behe, Michael 193–5
beliefs
backgrounds beliefs 66–8
defining 43–4
and evidence 12–13
versus knowledge 44–5
see also justification
benevolence 184
Berinmo culture 162
bias
cognitive 22–3
confirmation 22, 249–50
gender 94–6
social 95
and technology 94–6
unconscious 67
Bible 209
Genesis 195, 200, 209
Big Bang theory 304–5, 318
big data 96–7
biology 297–9
Bletchley Park 237
Bolshevik Revolution 1917 238
Brexit 248–9
Buddhism 184–5, 191, 209
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C
Caravaggio 422
cars, autonomous 106–8
Catechism of Catholic Church 185
categorization 150
Catholic Church 185
and the heliocentric universe 10, 14–15
role of Pope 208–9
censuring 31
census viii
certainty 3–7, 18, 34, 141, 315
absolute 3–7
in mathematics 287
and reasonable doubt 6, 45
see also ambiguity
Challenger Space Shuttle 229
chemistry 299–301
chess, computers playing 86–8
Christianity 183, 185, 191, 196–8, 200, 208–10, 211
see also religion
chronological accounts 369–70
claims 42–6
unconfirmed hypothesis 194
unfalsifiable hypothesis 194
see also beliefs; knowledge
climate change
and myth 171
Paris Agreement 235–6
and politics 235–7
Clinton, Hillary 19
codification 26
cognitive ability, and language 122–4
cognitive bias 22–3
cognitive needs 8
cognitive tools 69–71
coherence theory 45–6
colloquialisms 2, 6, 15, 134
see also language
communities
and cognitive tools 70–1
holding knowledge 40–1, 51–6, 73–4
the internet as 102–3
computers 86–90
see also artificial intelligence (AI); technology
concurrence 31
confirmation bias 22, 249–50
Confucianism 191
conjoined twins ethical dilemma 71–3
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Copernicus 10, 14–15, 17
correspondence theory 45
cosmological arguments 206
critical thinking 47
cubism 404
culture 8–9
anthropology 177
and art 412
cultural appropriation 430–1
and interpretation 17, 69–70
and knowing 40–1
and language 126, 128–9, 139–40, 162
and natural sciences 310–11
and objectivity 22–3
and politics 230
storing knowledge 102–3
and vocabulary 126
see also Indigenous societies
Cushing, Frank Hamilton 178

D
Darwin, Charles 15
Darwinian evolutionary theory 193
data 82–3, 348–51
big data 96–7
scope of 99
storing knowledge 101–3
da Vinci, Leonardo 424
Declaration of Independence 11–12
deductive reasoning 5–6, 47
democracy 230
see also politics
dialect 144
dichotomy 25
Dick, Philip. K. iv
dictionaries 79
dilemmas, ethical 21, 71–4, 107–8
disinterestedness 21, 22, 209
see also objectivity
displacement 116
divine command theory 217–18
doctrine 200
dogma 212–13
driverless cars 265
duality of language 116

E
Easter Island 163
Euclidean geometry 274–5
education
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 higher 235
and politics 232–5
Einstein, Albert 48
emotion
and the arts 406
and knowing 47, 69
Enigma machine 276
Enlightenment
knowledge systems 153–4
paradigm 177
scientific perspective 155
enlightenment 190
epistêmê 81, 86
epistemology 81
Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) 67
etatism 27
ethics 8
and the arts 428–35
codes of 31
ethical dilemmas 21, 71–4, 107–8
ethical knowledge 26
ethical theory 74–6
and the human sciences 360–4
and Indigenous societies 175–6
and language 141–2
and mathematics 285–8
and natural sciences 321–5
and politics 250–3
and religion 217–18
and technology 103–5
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) 48–9
evidence 318
and belief 12–13
doctoring of 231
facts as 9–11
historical 17, 27–8
in the natural sciences 17
observational 98
physical 11–12
and proof 12
evolution
in schools 234
theory of 15, 309–11
exoneration 19
expertise 54–5, 422
expert opinion 43
explanation 13–16, 205
and justification 19
and mathematics 284
see also theory
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exploitation 29

F
facial recognition software 104–5
facts
availability of 17, 42
correspondence theory 45
as determining factor 11
and evidence 9–10
interpretation of 16–17
versus opinion 10
faith 199–200
religious 69
as trust 69
see also religion
‘fake news’ 93, 249
Fermat’s Last Theorem 140
Feynman, Richard 326
Flat Earth Society 67
Flew, Antony 187–8
formal arguments see arguments
freedom
religious 26
and responsibility 31
of speech 93
French Revolution 1789 238
Frost, Robert 426–7
fundamentalism 210

G
Gagarin, Yuri 266
Galileo 15
games, and technology 86–9
Gandhi, Mahatma 381
gatekeepers, of the internet 103
gender bias 94–6
generalization 52
Genesis 195, 200, 209
Getty kouros 68
Glorious Revolution 1688 238
God
existence of 203–8
nature of 188–90
see also religion
Goldberg, Rube 113
Goodall, Jane 138
Google
and big data 96
market share 98

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 voice recognition 96
Google Translate 90, 94, 112, 133
Gould, Stephen Jay 192, 195
guessing 46–7
and theories 15
Gutenberg, Johannes 101
Gutenberg Bible 102

H
Haidt, Jonathan 227
Hamlet 415
heliocentric universe 10, 14–15
Henry IV 418–20
hierarchies 221
hierarchy of needs 8
higher education 235
Himba culture 162
Hinduism 184, 189, 191, 209
history 367–400
Collingwood’s inside/outside distinction 374–8
doctoring of evidence 231
and facts 372–3
and perspective 26–8
and physical evidence 17
rewriting of 231–4
homosexuality 211
honey bees 119–20
human rights 10, 91–2
human sciences 332–65
areas of study 337
ethical considerations 360–4
experiments 351–2
methods and tools 345–70
psychology 337–45
Hume, David 75
hypotheses 194, 296

I
IB (International Baccalaureate) mission statement 25–6
illusion 56–9, 70
imagination 69, 281–2
impiety 10
impossible trident illusion 70
inalienable rights 10
Indigenous societies 147–79
animism 156
cultural assumptions 151–2
defining 150–1
knowledge systems 152–4
languages 160–3
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 myths 169–72
perspectives 155–8
rituals 164–9
visions 173–5
induction, problem of 4
inductive conclusions 3–4
inerrancy 210
inevitability v
infallibility 210
influences, on our knowledge 60, 65–7
information
as knowledge 84
as processed data 83
reliability of 92–4
infrastructure 241
institutional politics 224–9
intellectual gymnastics 67
internet
access to 90–2
gatekeepers 103
reliability of information 92–4
interpretation 69–70, 359–60
of facts 16–17
and translation 132
see also sense perception
intuition 67–9, 281–2
Islam 183, 184, 191, 209–10, 211, 214

J
James, William 406
Johnson, Katherine 266
Judaism 183, 185–6, 191, 209, 211
Julian of Norwich 215
justification 19–21, 202
in academia 20
convincing others 47–8
and ethical dilemmas 21
of knowledge claims 46–8
in politics 250–3
and rationalization 19
self-serving 19, 21

K
karma 189
knowing
‘how’ versus ‘that’ 49–51
‘individual knowers’ 40–1, 53–60, 65–6
see also knowledge
knowledge

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 ability 50–1
access to 90–2, 98
versus belief 44–5
and certainty 3–7, 34
as a choice 47
claims about 42–6
defining 84–5
dissemination of 101–3
and emotion 47
and expertise 54–5
impacts and uses of 29–30
maps as metaphor for vii–viii, 60–6
myths as 172
nature of vi–vii
and objectivity 22–4
and perspective 25–6
and ‘post-truth’ x–xi
as power 29
propositional 49–50
recording and storing 99–103
religious 25–6
and responsibility 31–2
sources of 47, 56–9, 69–71
and subjectivity 22–4
types of 81
see also evidence; justification; knowing
Kuuk Thaayorre 130

L
Lake Titicaca 167
Lakota people 173
language 112–44
and ambiguity 115
and animals 118–20
arbitrariness of 114–15
the arts as 120–2
and cognitive ability 122–4
colloquial 3, 6, 15
and culture 126, 128–9, 139–40, 162
defining 114, 122
dialect 144
dictionaries 79
displacement 116
duality 116
dying languages 132
and ethics 141–2
Google Translate 90, 94, 112, 133
Indigenous societies 160–3
languages of the world 128
learning a foreign language 137
mastering 134–6
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 and mathematics 122
meaning and knowing 53, 69, 70, 113, 127–31, 138–40, 162
political correctness 222–3
and power 134–5, 143–4
productivity of 116–17
recording and storing knowledge 99–103
semantics 114
text messages 137
traditional transmission 117–18
translation 132–3
vocabulary 124–7
voice recognition 96
laws and law-making 239–41
Linnaean classification 307–8
Little Albert 362
Locke, John 158
logic, validity of 5–6
lying 22, 142–3
in politics 247–50, 253–4
see also truth

M
Magna Carta 237
maps
accuracy of 61–2
as metaphor for knowledge vii–viii, 60–6
of the world 61–5
Marovo Lagoon 158–9
Maslow, Abraham 8, 411
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 8, 411
mathematics 258–89
ambiguity 285–6
applied 275–6, 282–5
ethical concerns 285–8
as invention or discovery 277–8
language of 122
mathematical proofs 5, 284
origins of 261–2
perspectives on 271–8
pure 271–5, 278–82
Pythagorean Theorem 279–81
Roman numerals 262
Mayangna 161
memory
and knowledge 69
unreliability of 47, 70
metaphors see Allegory of the Cave; maps
microscopes 98–9
Milgram experiment 352–5
misogynism 431–2
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mnemonics 260
Moon landings 266–7
Moon rocks 16–17
moral arguments 206–8
Moral Foundations theory 227–8
moral licensing 14
morals 8
mores 8
mysticism 215
myths 169–72

N
Native Americans 147–50, 173–4
natural law theory 218–19
natural sciences 293–327
applications of 297–304
Aristotelian classification 306–7
Big Bang theory 304–5, 318
biology 297–9
chemistry 299–301
ethical considerations 321–5
and evidence 17
experiments 294, 312
and justification 48–9
Linnaean classification 307–8
objects of study 296–7
perspectives on 304–11
physics 301–3
pseudoscience 194, 293–5
scientific method 312–20
and technology 98
theories in 15–16
see also human sciences
natural selection 15
news
fake 93
via social media 93
Newton, Isaac 15
Nineteen Eighty-Four 231
North Korea, Three Generations of Punishment rule 240
Nyanja dialect 112

O
Obama, Barack 235–6
obfuscation 27
objectivity 22–4, 44, 73, 314, 380, 428
barriers to 22–3
cognitive bias 22–3
preconceptions 22
observational evidence 98
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Olympic Games 168
ontological arguments 204–5
open-mindedness 23
OPERA experiment 48–9
opinion
as appropriate determining factor 10–11, 21
and belief 12–13
defining 41–4
expert 43
versus facts 10
and justification 21, 48
as transferable to others 48
see also personal knowledge; subjectivity
Orwell, George 231

P
Paris Agreement 235–6
Pascal, Blaise 201–2
Pascal’s Wager 203
Periodic Table 299
perspective 25–8
historical 26–8
Indigenous societies 155–8
and the ‘individual knower’ 56–60
irreconcilable 26
and language 128
and privilege 54
and social media 28
phenomena viii
phrónesis 81
physical evidence 11–12
physics 301–3
Plato 57
Pluto, lost status of planet 4
politics 221–54, 227–8
beliefs versus knowledge 224, 242–3
and culture 230
democracy 230
and education 232–5
ethical justifications 250–3
funding 237
hierarchies 221
history of 237–8
infrastructure 241
institutional 224–9
and knowledge 225, 231, 242–50
law-making 239–41
and lying 247–50, 253–4
Moral Foundations theory 227–8
perspectives on 226–32

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 political correctness 222–3
political scientists 243
polling 247
theocracy 230
post-traumatic stress disorder 420–1
‘post-truth’ x–xi
Powell, Jerry 318–20
power 29–30
and the human sciences 354–5
and the internet 92
and language 134–5, 139, 143–4
and mathematics 266–7
and responsibility 31
Pratt, Richard 148–9
preconceptions 22
premises, truth of 5–6
Pride and Prejudice 125
privilege 54
problem of induction 4
proofs
mathematical 5, 284
syllogism 5–6
validity 5–6
see also evidence
propositional knowledge 49–50
propositions 42
see also claims
Psalter world map 184
pseudoscience 194, 293–5
psychology 337–45
see also human sciences
puppet masters 56–9
pure mathematics 271–2, 278–82
Pythagorean Theorem 279–81

Q
quantifiable data 84
Qur’an 209, 214

R
racism, and unconscious bias 67
Rapa Nui 163
rationalizations 19, 202
reality
Allegory of the Cave 56–8
aspects of 34
assumptions about 33–4
defining iv–v
denial of v

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 facts about 9–10
as illusion 56–9
and solipsism 33–4
reason 69, 73
and religion 185, 203
see also reasoning
reasonable doubt 6, 45
reasoning, deductive 5–6, 47
recession 333
redemption 190
relativity vii
religion
and authority 208–9
creation 193–5, 200
defining 182–5, 189
design argument 193–5
divine command theory 217–18
doctrine 200
dogma 212–13
enlightenment 190
ethical rules 217–18
and evolution 309–11
existence of God 203–8
faith 69, 199–200
and freedom 26
Genesis 195, 200, 209
and knowledge 25–6, 182–219, 186–92
and language 195–8, 211
natural law theory 218–19
nature of God 188–90
‘non-overlapping magisteria’ 192
parable of the gardener 187–8
perspectives on 192–5
questions within 189–90
and reason 185
redemption 190
religious communities 53
religious experience 213–17
resurrection 196–8
revelation 213–17
sacred texts 209–10
salvation 190
sin 185, 211
theology 185
trinity 200
responsibility 31–2, 159, 254
resurrection 196–8
Returned to Frisco 416–18
revelation 213–17
revisionism 380
rights
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 inalienable 10
and opinions 10
to participate 91–2
rituals 164–9
Robbins, Tom 405, 406
robots 105–7
Asimov’s three laws 106–7
see also artificial intelligence (AI)
Roman numerals 262
Roosevelt, Eleanor 31, 92
Rossetti, Christina 434
rules
knowing versus doing 87
mores 8
Russian Revolution 1919 27

S
salvation 190
Sámi people 170–1
Sateré-Mawé initiation rites 165
Saudi Arabia, as absolute monarchy 238
schools, and politics 232–4
science
scientific method 312–20
scientific reductionism 153
scientific theory 15–16
see also Enlightenment; human sciences; natural sciences
scruples 29
secular beliefs 184
self-actualization 8
self-driving cars see autonomous cars
semantics 114
sense perception 69, 70, 406
Shakespeare, William 124, 142, 415, 418–21
Shintoism 184, 209
Sitting Bull 173–4
Snodgrass, W.D. 416–17
social bias 95
social media
as news source 93
as primary sources 28
social mores 8
solemnity 11
solipsism 33
Soloman Islands 158–9
soundness 5
Sputnik 266
Stalin, Joseph 27, 231
stereotyping 52
Stroop Effect 352
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subjectivity 22–4, 43, 404
subversive manipulation 222
Swinburne, Richard 216
syllogism 5–6
symbiosis 320

T
Talmud 185–6
Taoism 191, 210–11
Tao te Ching 210–12
technê 81, 86
technology 78–108
and bias 94–5
big data 96–7
and creation of knowledge 98–9
and ethics 103–5
and language 137
military 105–6
and political knowledge 244–6
teleological arguments 205–6
text messages 137
theocracy 230
theology 185
theory
concept of 15
in the natural sciences 15–16
theory of evolution 15
‘thin-slicing’ 68
Three Generations of Punishment rule 240
Tillich, Paul 189
Torah 186, 209, 218
Torlino, Tom 147–50
transcendence needs 8
trinity 200
truisms 104
truth
claims and propositions 42–6
coherence theory 45–6
correspondence theory 45
defining 42
and language 142
and mathematics 270
nature of 33–4
see also certainty; evidence; knowledge; proofs
Turing, Alan 237, 276

U
unconfirmed hypothesis 194
unconscious bias 67
see also cognitive bias
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unfalsifiable hypothesis 194
utility of objects 406–7

V
validity 5–6
values 35–6, 190, 226, 276, 286, 326
see also ethics
viewpoint see perspective
visions 173–5
visual perceptions 84
vocabulary 124–7
see also language

W
war and conflict
development of technology 108
and politics 237
uses of technology 105–6
Wikipedia 103
Wiles, Andrew 140
Winter’s Tale, The 142
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 151, 195–8
Wounded Knee massacre 367–9
written knowledge 99–103

Y
YouTube 93–4
yucca moths 318–20

Z
Zuni people 178

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Acknowledgements
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