ToK Prescribed Essay Titles (November 2014): Question 1

“Some areas of knowledge seek to describe the world, whereas others seek to transform it.” Explore this claim with reference to two areas of knowledge.

Read this post in association with the post on Title 2 of the November 2014 TOK Title list.

You might think that the Arts and Sciences neatly fit into the distinction expressed by this title.  The Arts involve imaginative descriptions of the world which draw you into a world of make believe, through words, paint, music or dance, for instance, and you’re thrown back into the real world after the story ends or you disengage from the art work or when the music stops.  The Sciences involve a practical application of theories that lead to inventions in the physical worlds of media, technology and industry, for example, and you use the products of this process often without thinking about it and taking it very much for granted.

This distinction often leads people to argue that the Arts are generally useless when compared to the Sciences.  How can the Arts ever be anything but secondary to the Sciences?  But this would be naive at best and ignorant at worst. In fact, why can’t the Arts and Sciences be both descriptive and transformative?  We need both equally and they are both equally crucial to our evolutionary development.

Consider Jonathon Gotschall’s thought experiment. Imagine millions of years ago in the evolutionary beginnings of our ancestors, there are only two human tribes, alike in every way except one, as designated by their names: the ‘Storytelling People’ and the Practical People’. One group is going die out, whereas the other is going to survive.

Here’s how the difference manifests itself: the Storytelling People do their hunting and gathering and mating as the Practical People do, but they get bored easily and when tired out by the day’s activities often spend long hours exchanging tales (sometimes downright lies) about things that have happened, might happen or might never happen at all.  They enjoy themselves and have lots of fun making up their fictions while the Practical People don’t have anything to do with the seemingly trivial matter of telling stories; they keep on with their survival activities, hunting, gathering and mating more and more, and when they get tired, they crash with fatigue and sleep to refresh their energies for more of the same practical survival work.

We know the end of this thought experiment, Gotschall argues: the Storytelling People is homo sapiens and they survived; the purely Practical People (if they existed at all beyond the thought experiment) no longer exist.  And yet if we hadn’t known this outcome from the beginning and had been asked to predict which of the two groups would survive, surely it would have been the Practical People, whose frugality and efficiency and value systems were more than a competitive match for the frivolous storytellers.

The fact that this didn’t happen Gotschall calls ‘the evolutionary riddle of fiction’.  So what is it about our imaginative capabilities, our need for storytelling that gives us such an evolutionary edge?

Some answers are that the human imagination is like a virtual reality ‘holodeck’ which constantly runs internal simulations in which we project ourselves into make believe situations as a practice for real life situations; telling stories is a socialising experience which sharpens our empathetic skills and hones our altruistic nature which gives our species an evolutionary advantage of cooperating when faced with life’s manifest obstacles; moreover, engaging with these internal, imaginary fictions can be done in the safety of our head which takes away the risks and dangers involved in the real world.

Imagining the future paves the way of shaping a vision of how things can be which in itself is the first step towards transforming the here and now...

ToK Essay Presecribe Titles (November 2014): Question 4

“To gain an understanding of the world we need to make use of stereotypes.” With reference to two areas of knowledge, to what extent do you agree with this statement?


Click on the picture and read the corresponding post before reading what follows...



The anecdote about Gandhi is special on many levels, most especially in the way that it simultaneously exposes a negative cultural stereotype of the ‘stupid foreigner’, then subverts and replaces it with a celebration of a more positive stereotype of the ‘heroic Englishman’.  The irony is, of course, that Gandhi’s response to his Professor embodies the very sense of humour for which the English are renowned and turns it against his Professor to underline a reversal of roles.  Stereotypes are, in short, often about seeking patterns and we cannot help using them to function in the world as well as to understand it, because we are inherently pattern seeking creatures...
 

Click the picture to go to a TED Talk entitled, 'The Science of Stereotypes'

 

Stereotypes and emotion: Think of survival and the fear driven flight/fight responses of our early ancestors which continue to shape our behaviours today. There is a link with intuition, our capacity to make quick judgments without reason getting in the way.  The usual example is to imagine yourself in a savannah; you find yourself face to face with a hungry lion and your back to a tree.  You don’t reason out the pros and cons of the situation as this would take too long and you’d most likely end up as lunch; you feel fear and this triggers an intuitive ‘save yourself’ response which instantly drives you to climb the tree (hoping the lion doesn’t follow!) Now even, though we don’t often find ourselves in a savannah, the same thing happens in our urban jungles and emotion helps to judge situations based on our recognition of patterns of danger.  But the down side is that there’s no in built ‘deception detection’ kit – in other words, you could be wrong in your emotive judgments.

Stereotypes and perception: As the Gandhi example illustrates, stereotypes often distort the way we see world and people and are reinforced by a number of cognitive biases.  On the more positive side, they can help build knowledge because they help to identify who belongs to a particular group and who doesn’t as a way of demarcating needs, values and beliefs which are, after all, essential to our nature as social beings.

Stereotypes and reason: A cultural stereotype is a form of generalisation, not exactly like the inductive inferences we draw from observed data by means of the scientific method or the deductive inferences we make using mathematical logic, but driven by emotion as a means of justifying attitudes and actions.  On the one hand, these reasoned inferences are helpful in various ways; for example, clarifying the decision making process when dealing with people and situations, but they also shore up prejudices and intolerance (eg. religious attitudes towards gay marriage...). We often rationalise our attitudes to people without realising that we are prone to making various logical fallacies in our justifying arguments.

Stereotypes and language: Here, stereotypes help us to classify social groups making it easier to give us sense of social/cultural identity, but can lead to extremes of nationalistic pride (eg. White Supremacists in the West and Taliban suicide bombers in the Middle East...) and social/cultural divisions (eg. gender divisions between men and women...) But here’s something of a paradox: according to the etiquette of political correctness, it’s offensive to use the ‘n’ word when communicating to and about black people, but then it appears to be fine for black rap artists to use the word in song lyrics. Is this simply artistic licence or doesn’t political correctness apply to them? A basic example, but you can probably think of other such examples of hypocrisy in our behaviour.

In summary, stereotypes are part of our ‘mental map’; a set of patterns we create or which are culturally handed down to us and which we use to navigate our world of disparate ideas, data and human behaviour.  We make them in order to have some sense of control over our thoughts, other people and our environment, but sometimes they get in the way of clear thinking and peaceful interactions with those around us...

ToK Prescribed Essay Titles (November 2014): Question 5

Click picture to go to a site which discusses the idea of 'The Banality of Evil'

“The task of history is the discovering of the constant and universal principles of human nature.” To what extent are history and one other area of knowledge successful in this task?

The idea of ‘constant and universal principles human nature’ implies, somewhat strangely, that knowledge about humans can be encapsulated in general laws which could in effect allow us to predict future behaviour. Given the conditions of a specific situation and how most people behave within it, most of the time and in most places, we can, with a high degree of probability, assert that an individual or group will behave in the same way should those conditions ever come about in the future.  Here is an exploration of examples within History, Ethics and H Sciences that span between the 1940s to the present day...

During the post Second World War Nuremburg trials, the prominent writer Hannah Arendt observed how some of the most notorious Nazi war criminals appeared to be just normal citizens of whom we wouldn’t take much notice in the street; often, some of them just seemed plainly nice on the surface.  She coined an expression to embody this observation about the paradox of human nature: ‘the banality of evil’.  The implied thesis is twofold: first, that in spite of being educated, intelligent and civilised, we all have a dark, monstrous side to us and can turn to it at any moment of our lives, especially when our consciences are influenced and undermined by those in authority.  And second, the common sense belief that some of us are simply born evil and these ‘bad apples’, so to speak, are the cause of all the nastiness in the world. But is this a ‘constant and universal principle of human nature’? And how do we know the difference between good and bad apples?

TOK students often present in their essays the psychology experiments undertaken by Stanley Milgram who set out to test the theses in the early 1960s.  Milgram’s ‘Obedience Experiments’ or “shock” experiments, as they came to be known, explore the tension between conscience and authority and offer a staggering conclusion: most people find it emotionally easy to ignore their sense of moral responsibility, especially when they see themselves as part of a chain of evil action and far away from the final consequences of it.  The idea is that good or evil isn’t entirely in our genes or brains or spirit (as some religions might have us believe), but our environment can deeply influence us to act in evil ways. Again, is this ‘a constant and universal principle of human nature’?

In 1971, Philip Zimbardo attempted to test the conclusions reached by Milgram through another experiment: the notorious ‘Stanford County Jail’ experiments which were reminiscent of situations described so vividly in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The results of the experiment are arguably more shocking than Milgram’s. The scheduled two week experiment was shut down by Zimbardo after a matter of days because of what Zimbardo came to call ‘the Lucifer effect’: how an individual’s character can become so transformed that an otherwise ordinary person can commit extraordinarily monstrous acts.  To extend a former analogy: a good apple can become bad when placed in a bad barrel.  In short, context is all.  Where Zimbardo’s conclusions go further than Milgram’s is in the insight that very often we don’t need an authority figure to manipulate us to do evil acts; good people can turn evil simply by adopting, or being assigned, a particular stereotype or role and put in a situation where the rule of law is not enforced fully.

Two relatively recent examples from vastly different cultures serve to illustrate how both Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments seem to have discovered a ‘constant and universal feature of human nature’ as far as morality is concerned.

In 2004, we learned about the atrocities committed by US soldiers at the Abu Graib detention camp – acts of evil which were strongly reminiscent of the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

In 2008, we learned about Shin Dong-hyuk, a North Korean man born in a detention camp, who, being allegedly the first person ever to have escaped from such a place, tells stories of some of the most terrible atrocities that are committed in the name of ‘democracy’, including his own act of condemning his mother to death by telling guards of her plans to escape.

So we evolved into moral beings who also have a capacity for immoral behaviour.  Most people, most of the time and in most places choose to be moral, but in certain situations, even the most ordinary person can be driven to unspeakable acts of evil.

If this sounds like a dark and miserable story, read up on the experiments conducted by Steve Sherman, the results of which suggest that education can help strengthen our consciences against the vagaries of authority; especially education that directs and guides us in creative enquiry into moral dilemmas and how we might resolve them…

ToK Essay Prescribed Titles (November 2014)

The new ToK Essay titles for November 2014 are out and published online courtesy of: http://tok.ais.wikispaces.net/file/view/TOK+Prescribed+Titles+Nov2014.pdf

1.“Some areas of knowledge seek to describe the world, whereas others seek to transform it.” Explore this claim with reference to two areas of knowledge.

2. “Knowledge takes the form of a combination of stories and facts.” How accurate is this claim in two areas of knowledge?

3. “In the production of knowledge, it is only because emotion works so well that reason can work at all.” To what extent would you agree with this claim in two areas of knowledge?

4. “To gain an understanding of the world we need to make use of stereotypes.” With reference to two areas of knowledge, to what extent do you agree with this statement?

5. “The task of history is the discovering of the constant and universal principles of human nature.” To what extent are history and one other area of knowledge successful in this task?

6. “We may agree about general standards in the arts but disagree as to whether a particular work has artistic merit. In ethics the situation is reversed: we may disagree about ethical theories but we all know an unethical action when we see one.” Discuss.

Good luck to all the students around the world starting on your TOK essay adventure!

ToK Prescribed Essay Titles (May 2014): Question 6

“A skeptic is one who is willing to question any knowledge claim, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic and adequacy of evidence” (adapted from Paul Kurtz, 1994). Evaluate this approach in two areas of knowledge.

 

Ideas about scepticism are closely linked to ideas about the certainty or lack of certainty of knowledge.  Consider these three alternatives:

Philosophical or Cartesian Skepticism

Like with the expression ‘Knowledge is Power’, this Q is no doubt going to attract students who want to write about Descartes and his ‘method of doubt’ summed up in his famous cogito ergo sum.  Descartes was willing to question everything, including his own existence, in an attempt to find those ‘clear and distinct ideas’ which would form the foundation of all human knowledge. His argument goes something like this:

P1. My body is something the existence of which I can doubt.

P2. My mind is something the existence of which I cannot doubt.

Conclusion: Therefore, I am the same as my mind; I am a thinking being.

Descartes claims that this is one absolutely certain piece of knowledge and with this in hand, he argued that the only certain knowledge we can have comes through reason and not the senses.

One of the great problems with this idea of knowledge is Descartes’ belief in the dualism of mind and body; he thought that they were separate entities and so left himself open to the extremely difficult issue of explaining HOW the two entities interact.  If the body is physical and made of matter, how can something so non-physical and immaterial as a mind or soul possibly influence it or cause it to do anything?  Without a clear answer to this question, Descartes’ explanation of how we make knowledge begins to collapse.

Scientific Skepticism

Scientific skepticism is less to do with issues about certainty of knowledge and more to do with the idea of testing knowledge against evidence.  This has evolved alongside the ‘scientific method’ ever since Sir Francis Bacon introduced us to its basic principles in the 17^th Century: theory, experiment, observation, prediction.  Michael Shermer discusses a ‘Baloney Detection Kit’ which uses scientific principles to help us filter out strange beliefs by means of grounding our beliefs in pertinent modes of questioning and in evidence. The project of such skepticism is thereby to distinguish between scientific knowledge (eg. about influence of genes on human behaviour) and pseudoscientific knowledge (eg. about the influence of astrology on human behaviour.)  Where scientific skepticism converges with philosophical skepticism is its insistence that scientific knowledge (or theory) is only provisional.  Think for example about the theory of dark matter: the theory allows us to make predictions about this strange ‘stuff’ of nature, but we have little evidence to justify any KNOWLEDGE about how this phenomenon works.  So we need a combination of better theory and better data to help justify that ‘dark mater’ exists.

A problem with skepticism is to sort out the skeptics from the so called ‘pseudoskeptics’ – those who use scientific language to discredit or refute beliefs but in reality fail to apply the scientific method rigorously. Consider the arguments of Deepak Chopra about consciousness and the afterlife in which he uses language from neuroscience to present his conclusions: "And life is, as he said, it's a process. It's one process. It's perception, cognition, emotions, moods, imagination, insight, intuition, creativity, choice making. These are not the activities of your networks. You orchestrate these activities through your synaptic networks. But if I ask you to imagine the color red or look at the color red, there's no red in your brain. There's just electrical firings." (Quoted in Michael Shermer, who calls this the ‘woo-woo’ approach to explaining beliefs.)

How do we differentiate between scientific skeptics and pseudo skeptics?  Read this: ‘On Pseudo-Skepticism A Commentary by Marcello Truzzi’ or this Wikipedia article on pseudoskepticism which summarises Truzzi’s ideas neatly.

Religious Skepticism

This can take two possible forms: either using one’s faith to doubt scientific explanations about the world which manifests itself in questioning the knowledge of science (eg. that the universe began with a ‘big bang’) or having doubts about one’s own faith which manifests itself in questioning the grounds of one’s belief in God as a way of reaching a higher level of faith (eg. the problem of evil – why does God allow evil acts?)  While questioning one’s faith can lead to a stronger knowledge of self and purpose in life, bringing empowerment and wellbeing (think of the works of Martin Luther King and Gandhi), the questioning of science can lead to a more dogmatic and narrow minded approach to knowledge bringing great disharmony, bigotry and destruction (think of Galileo’s imprisonment for asserting the truth of the heliocentric theory).  In its most extreme form, religious skepticism can lead to the kind of radical ideological hold on faith which leads to terrorism.

Read some of these articles on the positive effects of religious doubt while some of the dangers of religious uncertainty are explored here...

A conclusion

The language we use is so important in these matters.  Proper scientific always tries to establish knowledge ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ – the theories of science are provisional and true to a high degree of probability and can be modified when better evidence comes along.  Skeptics never ask for knowledge ‘beyond (all possible) doubt’. In science (and philosophy), it’s a good thing to be familiar with the ambiguities of the word ‘proof’.

Consider a real life issue in this light: the problems in Syria in September 2013 after Assad had allegedly used chemical weapons against civilians.  The US government was ready to attack because it believed there was proof ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ that Assad had used chemical weapons.  The Russians argued to wait until the it could be proved  ‘beyond doubt’ that chemical weapons had indeed been used by Assad.

Usually, when skepticism of any kind asserts that knowledge is true ‘beyond (all possible) doubt’ alarm bells should ring.  Read this post by Stephen Law about ‘scales of reasonableness’ to see the difference. What sort of knowledge can BE beyond all possible doubt? In the Syrian case, however, we see that while the US politicians used words that sounded good, it was the Russian President’s caution that actually won out and prevented an all out strike – in spite of his fuzzy request for something that any self-respecting skeptic would never ask for: knowledge beyond (all possible) doubt...

ToK Prescribed Essay Titles (May 2014): Question 1

Ethical judgements limit the methods available in the production of knowledge in both the arts and the natural sciences. Discuss.

 

The controversy surrounding the commissioning, design and construction of the Martin Luther King Memorial is well known (click picture above to go to article).  But it didn’t limit the Chinese artist who finally completed the piece from using his knowledge of sculpting and architecture to engage with the knowledge embedded in King’s own words and transform them into a physical embodiment of the leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the US.  What you think of the result is personal and subjective; but it is certainly a good example of how art and artists are able to transcend the tangles people get into over values.

 

Here are some of the arguments involved in the ethical controversy with the underlying assumptions they hold (can you make a counter argument?):

 

1/ Cultural bias: the commission should have gone to a black artist – assumption: a black artist would know intuitively ‘from the inside’ the impact of King’s achievement.

 

2/ Ideological bias: the final work reflects too much the political ‘cult of personality’ associated with the Soviet and Chinese regimes and therefore taints the spiritual message of King’s words with a political (communist) agenda – assumption: religion is free and detached of political influences & that King’s approach was not political.

 

3/ Artistic chauvinism: social realist genre of the artwork projects the wrong values like those associated with negative propaganda and dictatorial authority – assumption: any other genre of art is value free or projects ‘better’ values.

 

4/ Economic sovereignty: this is largely implied. Why outsource work and materials for a project that could just as well be paid for using North America labour and resources?  Assumption: it’s better for the economic growth (and national pride?) to keep things ‘in house’, so to speak.

 

Whatever the arguments and counter claims about the quality of the art work itself, perhaps the most powerful statement it makes is in the symbolic placement of the monument in a direct eye line between the Washington memorial (to celebrate the end of slavery in the US) and the Jefferson memorial (to celebrate the central tenet of the US Constitution: ‘life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness’.  Now that’s an imaginative construction of knowledge.

 

When you consider that Lei Yixin speaks no English and read the speeches in translation, it adds to the power of the creative process: our ethical values may confine and constrict the artist, but the imagination of the human spirit always finds a way to express itself.

ToK Prescribed Essay Titles (May 2014): Question 4

 “That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow.” Consider knowledge issues raised by this statement in two areas of knowledge.

 

Some KIs implicit in this Q are related to the idea of CHANGE and PROGRESS and EVIDENCE: to what extent does knowledge change with time? How far can we agree that an increase in knowledge is progressive?  In what ways does the emergence of better evidence give us good reason to discard knowledge?

 

Examples abound:

 

Arts: the rejection of the Modernist approach to creating art in favour of the Post-Modernist approach

 

H Science (Economics): the discarding of classical (monetary) v neo-classical (Keynesian) economic theory opposition in favour of the new 'Austrian school' approach to theory

 

History: the discovery of new skull fossils helping to modify the knowledge of human evolution

 

Maths: the transition from flat plane Euclidean geometry to curved plane non-Euclidean geometries

 

Ethics: the gradual transition from religious value systems to humanist ones

 

Religion: the Protestant re-interpretation of man’s relationship to God and rejection of the traditional Catholic interpretation

 

Indigenous knowledge systems: using insights of modern medicine to reject/enhance traditional Ayurvedic practices

 

But the one area, students will undoubtedly explore here will be N Sciences and the notion of ‘paradigm shifts’.  So let’s take a closer look at the notion of CHANGE or PROGRESS involved in scientific knowledge.  There are two possible views of progress of scientific knowledge:

 

1/ traditional view that scientific knowledge progresses in a LINEAR, CUMULATIVE manner

 

The example usually given is the transition from the medieval superstitious view of the universe to Newton’s mechanistic view of it: Newton himself explained this in terms of his famous quote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.

 

Implicit in this way of thinking is the belief in scientific realism: the idea that scientific theories must describe the truth of nature as exactly as possible; that truths of nature are just waiting to be discovered and described coherently by scientists; that new, better theory doesn’t negate or contradict the old theory, but subsumes it and is a better description of nature than the previous theory. The ultimate goal of science becomes the search for truth, better predictive power of theory and the subsequent control over nature that this gives.

 

2/ paradigmatic view that scientific knowledge progresses in a REVOLUTIONARY manner

 

Implicit in this way of thinking is a fundamental scepticism about scientific realism. Instead, we are asked to think in terms of the idea that science is a puzzle solving activity; it doesn’t seek to describe truth, but to engage with piecing together how the natural world works within a context of cultural, social and economic and scientific constraints that form the working ‘paradigm’ or set way of doing science at the time.  This ‘normal’ science, Kuhn argues, progresses in a cumulative way; but ‘revolutionary’ science challenges this approach.  At first there is resistance from the ‘normal’ scientific community to the prospect of change.  However, in Kuhn’s model, new scientific knowledge, or a revolution, occurs when a new theory solves puzzles better than the old theory, NOT because it’s a more accurate representation of reality, but because new knowledge replaces incompatible knowledge.

 

And of course, THIS is how you’d explain that old chestnut of a TOK example: the transition from the geocentric to heliocentric view of the universe.

 

Just remember: Kuhn’s argument about the nature of scientific progress in knowledge is a counter-claim to the traditional scientific realist argument about linear, cumulative scientific progress in knowledge.  Make sure relevant examples support the respective arguments...