Is TOK SOBing

I have always been uneasy about the new, and significantly changed, TOK course guide since its introduction a number of years ago. It has taken me some time to pin down the root cause of this emotion, but I now believe (not “know” – read on) that this is because this revision involved a very fundamental change of direction without this ever being explicitly acknowledged. Just as a reminder, two of the major changes were the introduction of four new “Ways of Knowing” and two new “Areas of Knowledge” that rely heavily on these:

Faith

Imagination

Intuition

Memory

Religious knowledge systems

Indigenous knowledge systems.

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Those who (like me) have been involved with TOK for a while (~30 years) will know that this follows the appearance of Emotion as a “Way of Knowing” at the start of the millennium. My concern is that now five of the eight “Ways of Knowing” are, in my opinion, far more concerned with belief than knowledge, making the course Study of Beliefs (SOB – hence the title) rather than Theory of Knowledge. Whilst this is still a valid area of inquiry, I feel it is one significantly different to the previous TOK course and that this should have been overtly recognized, perhaps with a change of title. This change of direction is compounded by the fact that the difference between knowledge and belief is never addressed in the course guide, leaving open the question of whether the authors regard them to be one and the same. I certainly do not and believe that many others would agree with me in that regard, hence I feel an inquiry into the difference in these two

concepts is fundamental to TOK.

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Reading through the guide, the sections on these five ways of knowing (adding Emotion to the four new ones) use the words “believe” and “belief” far more frequently than “know” or “knowledge”, in contrast to Language, Reason and Sense Perception, where the only occurrence of believe/belief is in the phrase “Traditionally, there were believed to be five senses”. Could this be seen as some kind of acknowledgement that what is being discussed in these topics is in some way fundamentally different? Indeed many of the sentences and phrases in which knowing/knowledge occurs in the sections on Emotion, Faith, Imagination, Intuition and Memory reinforce this view:

“Emotion has sometimes been regarded as an unreliable way of knowing. Emotions have, for example, been criticized as being irrational obstacles to knowledge that distort our picture of reality.”

“Logical positivism claims that statements of faith have no meaningful cognitive content, so it doesn’t make sense to speak of faith as a way of knowing.”

“… faith is an act of trust and is an example of knowledge which is not evidence based.”

“… knowledge which is immediately evident without prior inference, evidence or justification.”

“To know something by intuition is to know something through introspection or an immediate awareness. In this way, some argue that it is impossible to justify, or that as it is immediately evident it requires no further justification.”

“Some would argue that memory is not itself a source of knowledge, but instead is a process which we use to recall knowledge gained in the past.”

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In the view of many, myself included, the idea of knowledge without evidence (see the third and fourth statements above) is a tautology. Some may argue that we have moved on from Plato’s “justified, true belief”, but even so most people, like Plato, differentiate between belief and knowledge. Often the basis of this difference is related to the nature of the justification offered and this merits detailed examination, as probably does the difference between these and opinion (such as this piece of writing).
 

The introduction of the new components to TOK led to another problem; how could it all be covered, at the expected depth, without increasing the length of the course? The way this has been addressed I think, to put it mildly, lacks subtlety. Limiting the course to the study of four “Ways of Knowing” and six “Areas of Knowledge” gives rise to the possibility of significantly different courses. Does a course that involves in depth study of, for example, only Emotion, Faith, Imagination and Intuition provide an equally firm foundation for TOK as one focused on Language, Memory, Reason and Sense Perception would? Similarly, and I make no apologies for being a scientist, would we want any Diploma students to follow a TOK course that did not include an in depth study of scientific method? I do however recognise the validity of the new “Areas of Knowledge” and would always have included these in my own TOK course even before they appeared in the syllabus, though the focus was on their interface with ethics and the differences between belief and knowledge. Similarly my course would always have included a discussion of the influence of Emotion, Faith, Imagination, Intuition and Memory on knowledge claims, but not as

equals to Sense Perception and Reason as ways of establishing these. You will deduce that I also have a bit of a problem with Language as a fundamental source of knowledge. I regard its principal function as being to enable the two-way communication between personal and shared knowledge though, like Emotion (which it can generate, as hopefully exemplified by the title), Faith and Memory, it can have a profound effect on its connotative context, as opposed (to borrow terms from the study of language) the denotative nature of a particular piece of knowledge.

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There are many things about the new course that I do like, such as addressing the issue of shared and personal knowledge as well as much clearer guidance on the expectations of the assessments. I also like the new “assessment instruments”, though the variations in the way that they are applied, even by experienced TOK practitioners, remain so varied that I still feel we would be better not assessing the course, but that’s another discussion.

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I hope however that the next TOK review, which by now should be well underway, will address the current imbalance by once again focusing the course on how we use Sense Perception and Reason to establish new knowledge claims, including the importance of Imagination and Intuition in stimulating the reasoning process, as well as an in depth discussion of the difference between knowledge and belief. The way in which this is done should also address the factors, such as Emotion, Faith, Language and Memory, that affect the way we perceive various claims as part of our personal knowledge and the context that we try to establish when sharing any knowledge that we discover.

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~Gratitude

We extend our sincere gratitude to the legendary TOK teacher, Dr. John Green, for his perception on the recent radical changes in TOK curriculum. He obliged graciously by responding to Mr.Surendra Singh Chouhan's request to contribute this for enlightening the CIians.