Theory of Knowledge

Knowledge, belief and opinion

On the one hand, people will say everybody is allowed to have opinions on anything they want and all opinions are right or true...for you. You can’t argue with anyone’s opinion can you? What’s the point? Well, perhaps to try to change the opinion? To persuade someone to think like you do? Now there could be various reasons why you’d want to do this.

On the other hand, you can argue about what people know, can’t you? How so? The common denominator is belief – the ideas in our heads that shape our thoughts and feelings about everything and, ultimately, have an impact on our actions. Some of these beliefs are acquired actively by sifting through evidence and by rational decision-making, others might be acquired passively through our parents, our culture or the media and remain with us without having the support of any evidence, though quite why that should be the case is often difficult to comprehend.

The key points to make are:

1. That unsupported beliefs remain subjectively true and have no value outside an individual’s or group’s perspective or system of beliefs – eg. humans have immortal souls – people might actually agree to believe this, but it still remains in the realm of subjectivity in spite of the consensus (this is why sometimes they appear as absolute truth).
2. Beliefs substantiated by evidence and acquired through tried and tested means take us into the realm of objectivity – eg. John Smith carried out the burglary on the bank – eye-witnesses might have different perspectives on this, but detectives piece together the evidence and come to an agreement about the event giving rational grounds for doing so. The important thing to remember is that even objective truths can be susceptible to revision and change – we might always find evidence to disprove our beliefs and reject our theories or change our theories and adjust them to describe the facts more accurately. Thus, objective truths are provisional and never 100% certain...

So let’s just list our assumptions:

• There’s no ‘absolute truth’ if by this we mean beliefs that are unchanging and ever-present.
• There is no ‘absolute truth’ if by this we mean truths that have 100% proof.
• Truths are subjective, if they are not supported by factual evidence, even if many people believe in them and agree on the truth.
• Truths are objective, if they are supported by factual evidence and rational argument and testing through a process which provides a framework for general agreement.
• The kind of evidence we require is not from any authority figure, but through an inter-subjectively testable process.

Theory of Knowledge

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth...

Having read so many TOK essays over the years, one common thread becomes apparent in students’ approaches to the issue of truth: confusion.

The word ‘truth’ often appears as part of a Prescribed Title or is implicit in a discussion of knowledge. Here, we’ll attempt to address the idea of truth and clarify how you could approach it in your TOK Essays and Presentations. The key concept you’ll have to get to grips with in this discussion is ‘evidence’ and how this can be used and abused in knowing truth.

Students tend to distinguish between two kinds of truth:

1. Absolute truth – aka. ‘universal truth’ which is somehow unchanging and always true regardless of what individuals might think or feel about it. An example often given is 2 + 2 = 4. Please avoid this clichéd example in your work; it is much too simplistic and doesn’t help to support an argument proposing the absolute nature of truth. Other examples provided are the so-called ‘truths’ of religion, such as the resurrection of Christ. If you ask a believer how he knows this truth, he might point to the evidence of the Bible. Now there are a few counter-claims you can make. We’ll consider two:

a. How can we trust the words of the Bible since they were written by so many different hands and often seem to contradict each other?

b. What about ‘truths’ believers are supposed to hold as absolute which do not appear in the Bible, such as the Assumption of Mary?

The first counter can be dealt with by arguing that we just have to have faith – that is, the evidence of the Bible is not ‘factual’ evidence that provides rational grounds for the belief, but that we must simply trust in the Word of God which was dictated to the writers of the Bible. The second counter follows a similar move: truths not based on Biblical ‘evidence’ are declared truths by an authority figure whose great wisdom in such matters guarantees or underwrites the nature of the truth and makes it absolute. This actually happened in the case of the Assumption of Mary.

Now these defences of Absolute truth are not entirely satisfying are they? They beg the question of how God actually goes about dictating truths to people? Moreover, why some people and not others? And what exactly goes on during this process of divine inspiration? These are not simply rhetorical questions. Theologians have attempted to answer them in a defence of religious belief, but we won't go into those answers here.

2. Relative truth – aka. ‘personal truth’ which depends on individual perspectives and is based largely on opinion. The usual move students make follows this routine:

a. We are all individual and experience the world in different ways so we only have a personal conception of truth.

b. Our sense of truth is limited by personal bias, our upbringing, our cultural or religious beliefs, our fundamental sexual and gender differences and so on.

c. We can never go beyond this personal sense of truth; it drives everything we think about, perceive, feel and do.

Again, the idea that we can all believe whatever we want to believe because it’s all just a matter of opinion isn’t very satisfactory. How can we possibly counter this relative view of truth? Surely, your opinion about oxtail soup is your truth and my opinion about it is my truth and we should just get on with life. This might work in the case of oxtail soup, but what about more important situations like your opinion about abortion. Now we could counter the relativist position by pointing out that some of the things we believe to be true might, like belief in religious ‘truths’, have no supporting evidence: for example, the belief that a red sky at night means the weather’s going to be nice tomorrow. This isn’t quite a faith position like the religious believer but it could be argued that it’s a superstitious position. We could also point out that there are so many truths that we actually agree upon because they have a rational and evidential basis: for example, it takes roughly 24 hours for the earth to spin on its axis.

Now this kind of factual truth leads onto a discussion of how to think about truth in a TOK context...

TOK Event

TOK EVENT! TOK EVENT! TOK EVENT!

You may not know it but this is the one hundredth post of ibtokspot since we started posting in 2008 and to celebrate this century of blogs (and the fact that the Spring is finally making a breakthrough here in the UK), we're organising a grand Easter TOK Picnic.

Everyone is welcome and even though many of you who visit our site are based in the farthest reaches of the planet, I'm sure you'll be at the picnic in spirit!

So please bring a dish of something special to share; bring yourself and anyone else you care about to join in the day's revelry...oh yes, and a little bit of TOK discussion about the things that really matter.

We'll meet up with you in the Bandstand at the Pump Rooom Gardens in Leamington Spa at 12.00pm on Saturday 3rd April 2010.

There's no entrance fee and it's a great way of meeting up with people from different backgrounds who have one thing in common - a love for TOK!

Click the picture above to get a link to a map describing how to get there.

Look forward to seeing you there and please remember to bring something warm and perhaps even an umbrella - we're not going to allow a little bit of rain to stop us from tokking away!

PS. Put a comment on this post to let us know if you're coming, just so that we know who to greet...

Examples

Human Sciences and Education (Part 3)

In this trio of articles by Harriet Sergeant, written over a period of about a year, we are presented with some key arguments for why the education system in England is failing our students. It makes grim reading, but enlightens us as to how we can move forward and re-think our educational values:

1. 'Sorry, kids, you’re all going to Smoke-and-Mirrors High' (Timesonline, Feb 8 2009)

2. 'I've seen how our education system betrays children - it's enough to make you weep' (Mailonline, April 22 2009)

3. 'Schools are churning out the unemployable' (Timesonline, Feb 21 2010)

It's really the most recent of these articles that might hit home to you - esecially if you have aspirations of going to University and enhancing your unique qualities and skills for the world out there. Here are some real-life knowledge issues you might like to reflect on:

To what extent does your work ethic make you employable? How efficiently can you think for yourself and work to your own initiative? In what ways can you overcome your limitations as a learner and challenge yourself to excel? What do you value most in your learning experience? To what extent is your education fulfilling? How far should the goal of education be to create happiness?

That the answers to these questions are firmly in the negative, especially amongst young people from poorer backgrounds, is clear to see in the articles above. So why is this happening? What are the arguments to suggest that schools are not fulfilling their special purpose in our society?

There are three key arguments:

1. The 'political correctness' argument

According to this argument, schools must promote the values of liberalism and equality so that 'every child matters', as the Government initaitive would have it. No one child, nor any group of children, is discrimminated against in the delivery of education. A grand objective, but in practise, the urge for such equality means that there is a tendency that learning (and teaching) gravitates towards the lower end of the achievement scale. In short, there is what some people often refer to as a 'dumbing down' of standards; a suspicion and sometimes downright dismissal of anything that appears too academic, intellectual or abstract and 'difficult'. It leads to an attitude whereby students are infantilised and teaching becomes merely a duty of babysitting and patronising youngsters.

2. The 'Government ideology' argument

This is also known as the 'politicisation of education' argument, whereby Governments use their education policies to win votes and thereby stay in power. In fact, it is in their interests to promote actively, and not to interfere with the movement for, political correctness. Why? If standards are reduced, the Government, either existing or waiting in the wings, will be in a better positin to control the minds of the young - in words which a student of ours put it extremely succintly, 'if we're kept stupid, we're more likely to vote for them'. Government ploughs money into education so as to build an edifice that will make them look good. This means, more often than not, that the needs of students become secondary to political point-scoring.

3. The 'target culture' argument

Over the last two decades, we have been steeped in a state of mind that is unquestioning in its belief that the only way to guage success or failure is by measuring performance against targets. It has infiltrated nearly all forms of life from business, to hospitals and now into our schools. The argument goes something like this: we need a method of measuring students' progress, of judging whether a school and its teachers are fulfilling the educational needs of our young students, so that we can build up a series of data that tells us which are the best performing schools and which schools require help to raise standards. Like in business and the health service, it is argued that setting students targets and measuring their (and hence their teachers') performance against these is the best way forward. At present, the measuring scale is something called 'Current Value Added' (careful, it's a 74 page document!), the complexities (and vagaries) of which even the most logical of mathematicians will have troube in decoding. The problems of this approach are nicely traced in Harriet Seargeant's article. What we are interested in is that making targets the singlemost important purpose of a child's education means that teachers often lose sight of what teaching is all about.

What is teaching and learning really all about...?

Examples

Human Sciences and Education (Part 2)

'Shut up and put up!' - is this our Brave New World?

Following on from the recent post on educational values, here's an extremely interesting article in the timesonline about about another of our important public domains: health.

It's called, 'Use your initiative? Far too dangerous' and appeared on Thursday 11th February 2010.

The article focuses on the same issue as our post: what happens when Government shapes the values according to which public institutions such as State Education and the NHS should be run?

We argued that the resulting impact is mediocrity in the standards of education; the blind, unswerving adherence to rules and the letter of the law which eschews all creativity and imagination and finally, the promotion into power of people who have no sense of vocation and who simply push through the educational legislation of the Government without questioning what they're doing.

The above article presents a tragic case-study of the consequences when Government values and the target and rule-based systems which are designed to promote them are allowed to function without common sense and some element of questioning and sceptical scrutiny.

It begs a really big question: to what extent should education and health be organised in the same way Government agencies are organised?

And a related big question is this: how far should Government be allowed to dictate the way in which health and education is organised and run?

This is not to advocate the wholesale (or even minimal) privatisation of education and health services. It is to suggest that alleviating these institutions from Government interference might help to promote values that have a less tragic impact on young lives and are longer lasting. But is this a strong enough argument? What further evidence is there that Government-led institutions are really NOT organised with the interests of the public in mind? What significant reasons can we find to argue that these institutions would function better WITHOUT the stamp of Government.

Examples

Human Sciences (Economics)

Money as Debt 1



Money as Debt 2



Money as Debt 3



Money as Debt 4



Money as Debt 5



Some time ago, we posted an entry on the nature of money and how money is created. Here’s a follow up entry with some clips from youtube entitled ‘Money as Debt’. The film is extremely illuminating, especially in the context of the present economic crisis, since it explains the practises of the so-called ‘Banksters’ which, it has been alleged, helped to cause the crisis in the first place.

If you can see the connection between the debt problems around the world and the risks which banks take in creating money through the fiat system, perhaps you’ll also see how the working people suffer most when Governments bail out failing banks: it’s public money, our hard-earned tax revenue, that is used to pay off the debt which banks have incurred in the process of creating money.

Think about how this economic state of affairs has an impact on those principles on which we base our dearly loved democracy: liberty and equality.

What do you think is the moral imperative that drives the behaviour of banks, of governments and of the people (us) who allow this situation to continue? Why does education actively promote this practise of money creation and remain silent on its disastrous impact?

Websites

http://www.ibtoktutor.com/

If you're approaching your TOK Essay deadline for this year (May 2010), here's a website that might be of help. We'll let it speak for itself:

"Are you struggling with your TOK studies? Just can't make head or tail of what TOK is all about? Worried sick about ever being able to write that essay or stand up in front of the whole group and do a presentation?

We are here to help all you IB students out there with your TOK essays and presentations and other related issues regarding your IB studies.

We don't know of any other help site like this - click 'Our Services' to see the full range of help we offer..."

It's a paysite, so you'll have to be ready to invest in your education. From the look of the sample marking, however, it appears as though the one-to-one on-line essay tuition on offer is excellent value for money. Let us know.