ToK Prescribed Essay Titles MAY 2014

Changes to TOK

We signalled some time ago that there are going to be changes to TOK in the coming months.

In fact, those of you who start your IB Diploma studies this September 2013 (let’s call you the Class of 2013) will be the first group introduced to the changes which will be first examined in May 2015.

This is an important point.  Especially for those of you who are in your final year of the DP (let’s call you the Class of 2012).

 

There appear to be some websites and blogs out there suggesting that the TOK Prescribed Essay Titles for May 2014 will

 

a/ be released in September 2013 and

b/ assess your understanding of the NEW curriculum.

 

Please understand that a/ is CORRECT but b/ is INCORRECT.

 

The more likely scenario is that the Class of 2012 will be assessed according to the OLD assessment criteria in May 2014; the Class of 2013 will be assessed according to the NEW criteria in May 2015 (your Prescribed titles will come out in September 2014).

 

So be careful out there when browsing those TOK websites for information and maintain the spirit of questioning everything that you read – even this blog!

ToK Prescribed Essay Titles (November 2013): Question 5

“…Our knowledge is only a collection of scraps and fragments that we put together into a pleasing design, and often the discovery of one new fragment would cause us to alter utterly the whole design.” (Maurice Bishop)” To what extent is this true in History and one other Area of Knowledge?

 

Following on from the last post, imagine you’re a historian living a thousand years in the future and that you came across this remarkably well preserved written document:

Don't start me talking
I could talk all night
My mind goes sleepwalking
While I'm putting the world to right
Called careers information
Have you got yourself an occupation

CHORUS:
Oliver's army is here to stay
Oliver's army are on their way
And I would rather be anywhere else
But here today

There was a checkpoint charlie
He didn't crack a smile
But it's no laughing party
When you've been on the murder mile
Only takes one itchy trigger
One more widow, one less white nigger

CHORUS

Hong Kong is up for grabs
London is full of arabs
We could be in Palestine
Overrun by a chinese line
With the boys from the mersey and the thames and the tyne
But there's no danger
It's a professional career
Though it could be arranged
With just a word in Mr. Churchill's ear
If you're out of luck you're out of work
We could send you to johannesburg

CHORUS

And I would rather be anywhere else
But here today
And I would rather be anywhere else
But here today

If very little or no knowledge existed of that distant world, then you would have to piece together what knowledge you can from the ‘scraps and fragments’ which you possess – this document being one of those scraps.

However, can you see that the document in itself is built of ‘scraps and fragments’ which seemed important to the writer (look at the highlighted expressions)?  Presumably, at the time it was written, someone considered it to have a pleasing design – consider the rhyme and repetition implied by ‘CHORUS’, as well as the organisation of the words into four main blocks (excl. chorus).

What sort of questions need to be answered about the text?

How would you go about answering them?

Can you piece together some sort of meaning from the details you have?

Are the writer’s intentions an important consideration when reconstructing this meaning?

Of course, today you can easily google the key words and work out the meaning of the whole – you can even discover that the text is a song and when it was written and what inspired it.

Nevertheless, the key point about historical knowledge is that even then, the narrative of meaning you construct will always be open to further interpretation – a better, more refined narrative might come along at any point.  To this extent, any historical narrative is similar to a scientific theory that explains how the world works...

To read more about the recent political controversy regarding this song, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9940194/BBC-criticised-for-censoring-Elvis-Costello-lyrics.html

ToK Essay Prescribed Titles (November 2013): Question 5

“…Our knowledge is only a collection of scraps and fragments that we put together into a pleasing design, and often the discovery of one new fragment would cause us to alter utterly the whole design.” (Maurice Bishop)” To what extent is this true in History and one other Area of Knowledge?


 

Click on picture to go to 'Guardian' article on the novel


This novel explores the meaning of history and the role of scepticism in building historical knowledge.  Set over a thousand years in the future in the ‘ideal republic’ of London, a timeless city of made of light, Plato is an ‘orator’ (which includes being a speaker, a teacher, a lexicographer  and a compiler of historical documents) whose key job is to reconstruct the past through reasoned inferences based on physical relics or ‘scraps and fragments’ unearthed in the city.  The narratives Plato builds of past civilisations do not, however, always please him or the ‘Guardians’ of the city: while Plato doubts the truth of his historical storytelling, the Guardians fear that he’s corrupting the minds of the young with his outlandish tales.

 

There is especially one tale which threatens to disrupt the harmony of the City: Plato’s story of a journey he took into an underground cave which exists simultaneously to that of the world of light above.  Plato relates how he discovered a realm of dark shadows which appear to live their lives out from birth to death without question.  The experience makes Plato question the nature of reality: is the true reality the material world of the shadows in the cave, or the eternal world of light above?

The novel explores the paradox at the heart of this question – there’s an element of Alice through the Looking Glass in its reversal of Plato’s well known allegory of the cave.  In a further reversal of the death of Socrates, the novel's Plato is judged to be not guilty of corrupting the youth, because he's such a dreamer and fantasist.  Plato, however, passes judgement on himself.  True to the real Plato's ideas in the Republic, the novel's Plato insists that as a dreamer, he should (like Plato's artists) be banished from the city limits forever...

ToK Essay Prescribed Titles (Novemebr 2013): Question 2

“Technology both enables us to produce knowledge and limits the knowledge that is produced.”  Discuss with reference to two Areas of Knowledge.

(The 'God Helmet' tested by Michael Shermer)

 

Here’s an example that potentially provides a scientific explanation for mystical experiences such as out of body experiences, but not without the help of EEG technology (there’s also a link to Q4 in that the example also turns on neuroscientific knowledge about our ‘sense of who  we are’.)

Dr Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist has come up with a testable hypothesis which goes some way towards explaining the nature of some kinds of religious belief like near death experiences.  The hypothesis is based on the idea that all human experience stems from electrical activity in the brain which is also the seat of our ‘sense of who we are’.  Persinger utilises a modified motorcycle helmet to stimulate particular electromagnetic field patterns in a subject’s brain which create ‘micro seizures’ in the temporal lobe area which in turn appear to cause ‘spiritual’ or ‘supernatural’ experiences such as the feeling of being outside the body, or sensing a presence in the room.

Working on the assumption that our ‘sense of self’ is maintained by the left hemisphere of the temporal cortex of the brain and in normal circumstances this is a function of the harmony between the systems of the left and right hemisphere temporal cortices, Persinger argues that the ‘micro seizures’ put these hemispheres out of phase with each other.  During such an event, the left hemisphere interprets this out of phase activity as ‘sensed presence’ or ‘another self’ outside of the body: or a ‘God experience’ (it isn’t surprising that the technology has become known as the ‘God helmet’)

What are the limits of this knowledge?

For science: if we can measure accurately the electrical wave patterns in the brain when, for example, we experience drinking wine, we can record and replicate this pattern in another brain so as to give another person the same experience.  Of course, the hypothesis becomes more interesting if we consider that using the helmet, we can, in principle, give a non-believer in spiritual experiences a first hand experience of the Divine...

For religion: if we can explain God in terms of electrical patterns in the brain, then ‘God’ presumably becomes a man made projection which we can draw upon at will or not at all if we so choose...

ToK Essay Prescribed Titles (November 2013): Question 3

“Every attempt to know the world rests on a set of assumptions that cannot be tested.” Examine this assertion in relation to two Areas of Knowledge.

 ‘Fringe’, Season 5 Episode 5

“You don’t even know what you don’t know”

Just listen to the dialogue and follow the use of the verb ‘to know’ – even without knowing the context of the conversation or knowledge of the characters (Peter is about to torture the bald man strapped to the chair for information about how to reverse engineer a tool that could help to save the world), the assumptions about how emotion, perception and intuition are involved in finding out what someone knows are fascinating.

Peter ultimately believes he got the knowledge he wanted from the bald man – as he puts the machine together in an apparently trial and error way, he watches the bald man’s reactions to get clues as to whether he’s on the right track. These attempts to ‘read’ the bald man’s mind is, methodically, a cross between a lie detector test (monitoring heart rate and eye dilation), the Turing test (asking a range of questions to work out if the response is human or machine), the ‘poker test’ (reading the ‘tells’ of an opponent during a game).  If he were a psychic, he might have done a bit of ‘cold reading’ (asking a few generalised questions so as to home in on a specific truth).

The scene ends poignantly with the imprisoned man mocking Peter’s sense of superiority, urging him to think of the limitations of his human mind and knowledge: he makes the analogy of an ant who doesn’t realise that the dark cloud descending upon it is the sole of the bald man’s shoe: a strange parallel to the idea of the machines in ‘The Matrix’ who think of humans as ‘parasites’.

But the scene from ‘Fringe’ also points to a reversal of the ‘meno paradox’, explored in Plato’s discussion of virtue in The Meno.  When asked if he knows what virtue is, Meno poses the conundrum: how can you begin to define ‘virtue’ if you don’t know what it is? And if you did come across an example of it, how would you recognise that it was virtue in the first place?

Socrates’ solution is to argue that knowledge is a process of recalling what we already know through the kind of questioning that is exemplary of the Socratic dialogue.  Knowledge is ultimately a function of memory and is innate to the knower.

This implies, however, subscribing to a peculiar belief in the human soul and its transmigratory habits...

Are you prepared to do this?

ToK Essay Prescribed Titles (November 2013): Question 4

“Knowledge gives us a sense of who we are.” To what extent is this true in the Human Sciences and one other Area of Knowledge?

 'Game of Thrones', Season 2 Episode 3

One of the perennial quotations to come up in TOK essays (usually in a very trivial way) is ‘Knowledge is Power’ (attributed to Francis Bacon who began the work of explaining the nature of science).  This is the perfect Q to explore the quotation in a wholly relevant way, since one of the insights we can gain from it is a ‘sense of who we are’ as powerful political agents.  The key knowledge issues are, however, what is the nature of this power and how far does it help or hinder our pursuit of self knowledge?

The clip from ‘Game of Thrones’ neatly foregrounds the nature of political power in terms of perception: your power is a function of how others perceive you.  Historically, and in dictatorial regimes, this has lead to an almost cultish development of a ‘cult of personality’ in which the head of state projects himself to be at once revered and feared by the public.  An ethical dimension to this idea is the way in which such tyrants claim to know and protect a whole moral code to which the masses have no access (think of the pigs and the ‘Seven Commandments’ in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.)  The implication is, of course, that the dictator makes you dependent on him for everything - including your sense of right and wrong. Authority worship is everything. Resistance is futile.

Of course, such a conception of power need not always lead to an abuse of it.  Consider, Gandhi’s non-violent ‘passive’ resistance to the English oppressors in the colonial regime of India and Martin Luther King Jr’s development of this precept in his own resistance to the US policy of segregation.  Some might argue that these two figures also commanded a cult-like following or promoted a cult of personality – but did they command respect from fear or some spurious and elitist notion that they had access to truths about human nature to which everyone else was blind?  Here, the implication is that the ‘passivity’ in such resistance doesn’t come without a cost - it involves a commitment and discipline to the very human principles which any authoritarian regime appears to negate, sometimes at the expense of many lives. Such power is the very antithesis of authority worship.

If perception is so linked to power, then in a very disconcerting sense, perceptions can kill...

ToK Essay Prescribed Titles (November 2013): Question 5

“…Our knowledge is only a collection of scraps and fragments that we put together into a pleasing design, and often the discovery of one new fragment would cause us to alter utterly the whole design.” (Maurice Bishop)” To what extent is this true in History and one other Area of Knowledge?

Consider this oft quoted passage from Ecclesiastes 3:1-15

Remember that from one perspective the Bible itself is a ‘collection of scraps and fragments’ woven together ‘into a pleasing design’ and to many millions it reflects the ‘whole design’ that God had in mind for every human being.

The various antitheses in the opening of Ecclesiastes are central to this design – they outline a pattern to our lives in every aspect of its physical and psychological manifestations.  The lines map out, in short, our destinies.  Now every individual will, of course, have a slightly different path than the one mentioned (not everyone will ‘rend’ and ‘sew’, for instance – unless you accept the metaphorical meaning of the words), but the essential idea is that we are each of us enmeshed in our own fate and thus our ultimate end (and thereby our beginning) is predetermined.

Philosophy students will raise all sorts of objections at this point, but let’s just suspend our disbelief and explore the possibilities of this position in terms of the KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS it raises: to what extent can we know the predetermined outcomes of our actions?  How far can we discover a path that changes forever this predetermined path?

Theologians have elaborated numerous responses to questions like this and the upshot seems to be: our lives are a constant struggle to know God’s will for us and once we discover this, it will change our lives forever; the path won’t change, but our attitude will or should.  This explanation accounts for people’s conversion experiences to belief in God as well as radically confirming believers’ own faith and sense of moral obligation to the Will of God.

Not everyone is satisfied with this answer, but you can see how it’s pretty consistent within the Christian belief system as underlined by the passage.

Besides, it’s wonderful poetry...

And if you’re interested, read T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets which makes ample use of this passage and other biblical allusions.