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| Click caption to listen to Tom Lehrer's 'Periodic Table Song' |
One of the lessons being learned with the new TOK Essay marking criteria is the need for a clear and explicit attempt at unpacking the key terms of the title. Usually, this should be done concisely and precisely in the introduction, alongside the presentation of a thesis that sets the direction of your essay. By all means, go to a dictionary and remind yourself of the meaning of words, but avoid reproducing them wholesale in your essays: it takes too much TIME and involves much word wasting on definitions which have little or nothing to do with TOK.
So here goes:
Explanations involve giving reasons for why you believe
what you believe and can fall into two broad categories that tie in with the
TOK definition of ‘knowledge’ as ‘justified true belief’.
First, evidential reasons in the form of objective, empirical evidence,
data or statistics that help support or refute a specific knowledge claim. For
example, the observational data generated by Tycho Brahe which helped Kepler
formulate his mathematical calculations to explain elliptical orbits. Or, the preponderance of evidence gathered to
refute the claim that the Bermuda triangle is a place in which weird,
paranormal activities take place.
Second, non-evidential reasons in the form of subjective, personal
testimony based on emotion, intuition or faith, which help or hinder the
justification of our knowledge claims.
For example, the intensely felt experience of the ever present force of
Brahma is explained by Buddhists in terms of mindfulness, a form of
intuition. Or, the ideals of terrorists,
of whatever denomination, which are often grounded in extreme interpretations
of sacred writings, a form of faith.
‘Prerequisite’ implies
that there is a step by step order in the process of knowledge building, in
which certain steps come before, first or are a basis for, or ground or
foundation of other steps. Finally, in a basic sense ‘prediction’ means a best guess about the future; more
specifically, it involves making specific claims about future conditions or
events based on general laws or statements.
At least, if you’re aiming to be objective and scientific! So yes, you
can have predictions based on both empirical and non-empirical kinds of
explanation; and yes, you can have predictions made on nothing resembling an
explanation at all. It just depends on how
reliable you want your predictions to be and how you KNOW this…
This should give you the
KIND of thing you may do in your introduction.
The direction of your essay will then focalise on two AOKs, one of which
could be the Natural Sciences. Here’s an
example many of you will no doubt explore: Henry Mosely and the periodic table…
Mendeelev
invented the periodic table but the explanations for ordering them were largely
based on their perceived chemical properties and a subjective, intuitive sense
of their relative atomic masses. Mosely’s experiments provided a more
objective, measurable basis for explaining why elements should be ordered in
specific ways: the mathematical link between the protons in an element’s
nucleus with that element’s atomic number.
Now, the strange thing is, both Mendeleev and Mosely were able to
predict the existence of elements missing in their versions of the Periodic
Table. While Mendeelev’s intuitive based
prediction was that an element was missing from the table, Mosely’s more
experimentally based prediction could actually pin point WHERE in the Periodic
Table the gaps were…
