Responses (Nov 2015) — Summary

The list of IB TOK Prescribed Titles for November 2015 will be collected in this post.

Topic Titles:

1. “The main reason knowledge is produced is to solve problems.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?
2. Assess the advantages and disadvantages of using models to produce knowledge of the world.
3. “Without the group to verify it, knowledge is not possible.” Discuss.
4. “In some areas of knowledge we try to reduce a complex whole to simple components, but in others we try to integrate simple components into a complex whole.” Discuss this distinction with reference to two areas of knowledge.
5. “No knowledge can be produced by a single way of knowing.” Discuss.
6. Is explanation a prerequisite for prediction? Explore this question in relation to two areas of knowledge.

Responses:

This list is even more intriguing than the previous one because the questions adopt a more contentious slant. The emphasis seems to be one of debate, in which Yes/No positions are key for questions 3-6, whereas questions 1-2 are general and broadly discursive.

Responses (May 2015) — Summary

The list of IB TOK Prescribed Titles for May 2015 (with some of my personal brief responses) will be collected in this post.

Topic Titles:

1. There is no such thing as a neutral question. Evaluate this statement with reference to two areas of knowledge.
2. “There are only two ways in which humankind can produce knowledge: through passive observation or through active experiment.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?
3. “There is no reason why we cannot link facts and theories across disciplines and create a common groundwork of explanation.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?
4. With reference to two areas of knowledge discuss the way in which shared knowledge can shape personal knowledge.
5. “Ways of knowing are a check on our instinctive judgments.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?
6. “The whole point of knowledge is to produce both meaning and purpose in our personal lives.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?

Responses:

This list is intriguing because the questions are a lot broader and more interesting than usual. The emphasis continues to move in a direction away from specific disciplines/AOKs and toward more holistic challenges. I'll add specific responses after a decent period of time has elapsed, as usual.

Responses (November 2014) — Summary

The list of IB TOK Prescribed Titles for November 2014 (with some of my personal brief responses) is collected in this post.

Topic Titles

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.  

Responses:

There are two general frameworks that may be of use here. The first is to consider the uses of information: describe, explain, predict, invent/imagine, connect, transform; these can be remembered using the acronym DEPICT. The second is the hierarchy of knowledge construction and use: data given context or value is information; information that is tested for validity, reliability and utility becomes knowledge; knowledge used in the best possible way in a certain situation is called wisdom — these can be remembered using the mnemonic DIKW.

I will, as usual frame some responses here after a decent period of time.

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That time having passed, here are some useful notes.

T1 really requires a clear understanding of description vs transformation, as well as a simple definition of the world. To describe is to detail one's apprehension (sensory perception, emotional response etc) of things in a way that contains some kind of truth—the truth that is inherent in a particular AOK. For example, from the AOK viewpoint of the arts, the truth is largely aesthetic, based on how good a work is at evoking a desired response from its audience. To transform is to change things in a way that is contingent on the working-out of the AOK; to use the same example of the arts, this would mean that the arts not only seek to describe an aesthetic truth but to present it in a way that forces people to react to it, to acknowledge it, to change in response to it.

T2 is pretty basic—stories are narratives, facts are the singular elements used to fill out and construct the narratives. A fact need not be true in all senses; after all, 'fact' comes from the Latin word meaning 'to make' (e.g. as in 'manufacture' = 'make by hand', 'factory' = a place where things are made, 'factor' = an element, component or guiding principle used in making something). Hence, in Gothic novels, you might say 'vampires drink blood' is a fact. All forms of knowledge are composed of narrative structures (hence there is a 'literature' in any discipline) given substance by their own facts. The question really requires some kind of analysis about how (much) these two things combine in two specific AOKs in order to create the knowledge we associated with those AOKs.

T3 looks difficult, but the key to it is to understand what emotion is. Emotion is the set of biochemical and physiological responses that accompany a change in psychological state. The inputs that trigger such responses can be sensory (i.e. via the nervous system) or mnemonic (from memories) or imaginative (from consideration of non-actual scenarios and ideas). Reasoning, on the other hand, is a process by which a person decides or attempts to form logical connections between things—events, facts, processes, data, and so on. The impulse to actually do such a thing is almost always emotional. This is the basic level of the argument. However, at a more advanced level, emotion allows humans to make quick judgements (cf. 'gut feel') when digesting huge amounts of data, thus simplifying the situation (whether accurately or not) when considering complex cases. In different AOKs, these things have different levels of application, and that should be discussed.

T4 requires an understanding of stereotypes. The original meaning of the term is that of a solid object used to make an imprint or used as a mould for producing identical copies. 'Stereo' is from the Greek for 3D (as in 'stereophonic' = having the properties of 3D-sound) and 'type' has one of its usual meanings—the original form of something (as in 'typeface', 'typical'). The question therefore is asking us to evaluate how useful the deployment of 'master images' or 'standard prototypes' is in different AOKs. The usual social definition of stereotypes as rudimentary descriptive templates for groups of people can only be used in the humanities/human sciences AOKs, so beware.

T5 requires an understanding of history as a discipline. History is a purely descriptive and explanatory art. It does NOT make predictions; once it does, it is treading the ground of the human sciences. For example, economic history is the history of human evaluation, transaction and resource allocation in the realm of goods and services. Once this is used to predict human behaviour, it becomes economics. Same for social history and sociology, political history and political science, and many others. The question then is whether such an approach (description and explanation of human events in a chronological matrix) can actually uncover general principles applicable to all humans, and whether another AOK's approach might be better or worse at this.

T6 is hard only for students who cannot define 'the arts'—or those who cannot differentiate between morality, law, ethics and similar constructs. Since the arts are all forms of human action designed to produce something that conveys emotion or produces a desired emotional response, the question is whether humans do indeed have general artistic standards or can produce specific evaluations of merit. The answer is, as always, in between—you can have scores in gymnastics, choir competitions, karate, platform diving, dance, pottery... and they will all have some variance. But some have very tight rubrics of performance, relative to others. Ethics, being a socially-constructed sometimes-philosophical basis for evaluating 'right behaviour' in a human social context, suffers similar issues. It is clearly wrong to steal in a society which has property rights; it is impossible to steal in a society that doesn't have such rights. It's the student's job to define both these areas and craft a nice debate.

Responses (May 2014) — Summary

The list of IB TOK Prescribed Titles for May 2014 (with some of my personal brief responses) is collected in this post.

Topic Titles

1. Ethical judgments limit the methods available in the production of knowledge in both the arts and the natural sciences. Discuss.  
2. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems begin to resemble nails” (Abraham Maslow). How might this apply to ways of knowing, as tools, in the pursuit of knowledge?  
3. "Knowledge is nothing more the systematic organization of facts.” Discuss this statement in relation to two areas of knowledge.  
4. "That which is accepted as knowledge today is sometimes discarded tomorrow.” Consider some of the knowledge issues raised by this statement in two areas of knowledge.  
5. "The historian’s task is to understand the past; the human scientist, by contrast, is looking to change the future.” To what extent is this true in these two areas of knowledge?  
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.  

Responses:

Clearly, the emphasis on specific areas of knowledge and ways of knowing has almost completely disappeared as the IB prepares to transit to their new TOK model. This means a return to basics. Here are some deliberately short responses.

1. An ethical judgment is a judgment based on the composite morality of a social environment. That is, you can argue that any method that can legitimately be used in knowledge production (based on what a discipline considers to be legitimate) is also bound by what society deems legitimate. We are thus talking about the intersection between what methodologies fit the definition of an area of knowledge (e.g. the various forms of scientific method in the AOK of the natural sciences) and what methodologies fit the range of actions which a society considers to be moral actions.

2. Consider a way of knowing (e.g. sensory perception) and the associated methodologies linked to it (in this case, mostly empirical observation and related methods). If this is your only tool, then you would think that only empirical observation would allow you to pursue knowledge. You would dismiss all other phenomena as being less valid and/or less reliable.

3. Is knowledge just 'stamp collecting'? (I invite students to look for the source of this idea.) If so, then all you need to do is find the right organisation of facts and you have an area of knowledge. But what defines an area of knowledge? This is a key knowledge issue, and it can be resolved by asking questions (similar to those I have answered elsewhere in this blog) such as, "What is the difference between the humanities and the arts?"

4. Well, clearly we need to know what knowledge is, and whether it can be said to become not-knowledge. One argument is that, if you 'know' something and it is later found to be false, you never really 'knew' it. For example, if you thought that lead and gold atoms behaved the way they do because of purely classical reasons, and then learnt (as we did only about 20 years ago) that they did so because of effects related to Einsteinian relativity, did you ever know anything about these atoms?

5. This is an interesting question. History, unlike the sciences, has only descriptive and explanatory theories. Once it develops predictive theories, we call it sociology or political science — examples of human sciences. Why is this so? Again, I've answered that question elsewhere in this blog.

6. I really don't like this kind of question. Consider what would happen if a) you failed to define 'skeptic' properly, and/or b) you considered this approach skeptically (i.e. being skeptical about skepticism). Can you be skeptical about skepticism at all? If so, why not? And if not, why so?

Responses (Nov 2013) — Summary

The list of IB TOK Prescribed Titles for November 2013 (with some of my personal brief responses) is collected in this post.

Titles

1. "In the natural sciences progress can be made, but in the arts this is not possible.” To what extent do you agree? 
2. “Technology both enables us to produce knowledge and limits the knowledge that is produced.” Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge. 
3. “Every attempt to know the world rests on a set of assumptions that cannot be tested.” Examine this proposition in relation to two areas of knowledge. 
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? 
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” (Morris Bishop). To what extent is this true in history and one other area of knowledge? 
6. “The methods used to produce knowledge depend on the use to which it will be put.” Discuss this statement in relation to two areas of knowledge.

Responses:

#1: You have to define progress first, probably in relation to knowledge. Once that is defined, then your definitions of the natural sciences and the arts as knowledge-pursuits leading to 'progress' will frame your subsequent argument. This is actually a rather traditional question, a bit thin.

#2: This is related to the general statement '[Tech] X produces knowledge Y using methodology Z that is inherent in X or intrinsic to X'. That is, the title statement implies that technology has a knowledge-constructing function, but that the form it takes necessarily defines the kind of knowledge constructed. It's a good solid question.

#3: In order to answer this kind of question, you need to be able to define the set of assumptions on which a given area of knowledge is based. You need to show how an AOK is an 'attempt to know the world' and how you would test assumptions (in general as well as in particular).

#4: This is the easiest question, apart from 6 which is equally traditional. An AOK is in some sense a human perspective, and as such it makes claims that define humanity implicitly and/or explicitly. This 'gives us a sense of who we are', or at least, attempts to do so. This is what needs to be explored — how successfully does the AOK accomplish this? Some AOKs aren't obviously directed at humanity.

#5: This is a bit of an intellectual joke. Does Bishop mean a collage, a mosaic, or a jigsaw-puzzle? This one requires you to think about how a design can be 'pleasing' (which hints at the role of emotion in knowledge-construction) and how easy/difficult it is to cause a paradigm shift in history or another AOK.

#6: This is a related to the general statement 'Desired outcome A requires knowledge base B which is constructed through methodology C'. Hence it discusses how functionalist ('the use to which it will be put') a particular AOK is — some kinds of knowledge may be seen as having no direct/intended use.

I'll follow up on some (possibly all) of these questions in the days ahead.

Responses 006 (May 2013)

#6 says: Can we know when to trust our emotions in the pursuit of knowledge? Consider history and one other area of knowledge.

It might seem obvious, but the question is not "Can we trust our emotions... ?" but "Can we know when to trust... ?" This is not as easy as it seems.

On one level, the "Can we know... ?" kind of question is somewhat facetiously answered all the time, by people who should know better, with "No, of course not, how can anyone know that they know anything?" On a slightly higher level, the point of asking a 'can I know' question is so that one can argue whether or not one has a reasonable chance of knowing something — it's not a 'will I know' question either.

To extend the idea further, let's ask this: "Can we know when to trust X in the case of Y?" It's a question about the reliability or validity of the approach, and there are two main ways of trying to answer it.

The first is inductive, a historical-legal approach based on the evidence of precedents and antecedents. Supposing that trusting X has always led to success or truth or knowledge in the case of Y. Then clearly we can know when to trust X — it's whenever Y is the case. But the problem of the inductive approach is that at any time, a 'black swan' might appear — a fluke that happens and shows that prior performance is no guarantee of future success. How much can you trust something based on its history? Does the 100% reliability of the past continue into the future?

The second is deductive, a philosophical-logical approach based on reasoning. If Y is such that Y is susceptible to success when using X, then we can always trust X based on the nature of Y. Then we clearly can also know when to trust X — it's whenever Y (or something with the X-related properties of Y) occurs. However, the problem of the deductive approach is that it depends on our first assumption or axiom being true. If we think Y is such, but it isn't, then all our subsequent reasoning is flawed. How much can you trust something based on logical conclusions that are worked out based on an assertion that might not be valid?

Now let's consider 'pursuit of knowledge... history and one other AOK'.

History can be defined as the construction of a narrative based on verifiable events in generally chronological order, so as to explain the present in the light of the past. History should make no attempt to predict the future; it is a sense-making exercise based on things that have already happened and are far enough away that we can begin to gather a fairly comprehensive collection of evidence concerning those things. (You can probably find useful definitions of other AOKs elsewhere in this blog.)

So how would we know when to trust our emotions when in the pursuit of historical knowledge? Clearly, the evidence must be verified by sense and reason to a large extent. But the pursuit of historical knowledge consists of different types of evidence: witnesses and reports, archaeological finds, ideas from the other human sciences (sociology, anthropology etc) about how humans normally behave.

Some of those kinds of evidence require us as humans to respond as humans — to try to understand by empathy and emotion why people did things. This is what emotion as a way of knowing is all about — it is the body's complex physiological and biochemical response to incoming material, giving us a sense of how other humans might feel about it and thus altering or forming our psychological perspective on it. We then interpret what we see in the light of what we feel. In this way, the history we then construct therefore makes more sense to our readers and may be closer to a true explanation of why humans did something. How do we decide WHEN to trust emotion in this way? If we can decide at all, that's the answer to part of the original question.

And that's the beginning of the argument you need to construct. Enjoy!

Responses 003 (May 2013)

The third question in this semester's list is:

"The possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility." Evaluate this claim.

It's a rather interesting question, this one.

Why is it interesting? For a start, you'd have to define the area of knowledge known as ethics before you decided how and why possession of knowledge might carry an ethical responsibility.

Ethics can reasonably be defined as the knowledge of moral decision-making carried out by individuals within a defined group. For example, medical ethics deals with people who handle medical issues, but excludes people who are not 'medical'. An ethical responsibility is a responsibility that you bear because you are a member of the group to whom a particular kind of ethics is related.

This has direct bearing on the basic argument to be evaluated. If you possess knowledge, you are a member of the group 'possessors of knowledge'. If knowledge is considered to be a good thing (like food or air or any other useful resource) then to some extent you have a duty to share it. If you don't share it, you ought to have a reason, and that reason would also be a matter of ethics.

For example, if you know how to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time with readily-available resources, you have the general duty to share knowledge (maybe it will save people from you or people like you, but with fewer moral scruples) but you might not want to share it in case somebody else uses this knowledge to kill others.

Well, that's the basic stuff. Now go and work on it.

Responses 002 (May 2013)

The second question in the list is this:

"Only seeing general patterns can give us knowledge. Only seeing particular examples can give us understanding." To what extent do you agree with these assertions?

It's an odd question, and it hinges a lot on the way we define knowledge and understanding. One way to approach it, therefore, is to begin with such definitions.

Knowledge is plausibly defined as information given a context. This allows us to separate it from understanding, which we can then define as awareness of that context and the significance or usefulness of knowledge within that context.

Here's an example. Consider the mathematical equations of a straight-line graph. They all take the form y = mx + c, and we're taught that m is the gradient of the line and c is the y-coordinate when x = 0 (the y-intercept). We can solve linear equations without seeing a graph at all, and our solutions would be correct; they would be valid and reliable, and people would say we knew how to solve linear equations. However, it would be difficult to explain the concept of a linear equation (why 'linear', for a start) or a gradient (what is a 'slope'?) unless you gave an example, preferably of graphic nature.

Understanding, therefore, includes the ability to explain something. It could also include the ability to make something that can be explained. And it is probably demonstrated best when we manipulate things such that people can figure out what we did, and how we did it, and how we justify what was done.

In a sense, understanding is the outgrowth of knowledge, just as a specific example is the outgrowth of a general pattern. But that's only one side of the argument.

You'll probably recall that this kind of reasoning, from the general to the specific, is called deduction. One of the problems with deduction is that you have to assume that the general rule or pattern is true. If it isn't, then seeing particular examples and linking them to the false general pattern gives us false understanding.

But if we are inductive thinkers, then seeing particular examples gives us knowledge of individual cases, and we can use those to build general patterns. Inductive thinking is the opposite of deductive thinking in that sense — and understanding will come when the general pattern appears from our knowledge of individual cases.

And that's the other side of the argument, for which I shall not provide examples because that would make it too easy for you.

Responses 001 (May 2013)

The next lot of prescribed topics of this kind produces intellectual contortions of various varieties. Topic 1 reads:

In what ways may disagreement aid the pursuit of knowledge in the natural and human sciences?

There are clearly several levels of disagreement and pursuit of knowledge to think about here. However, we should begin by taking a little digression to establish what the natural and human sciences are in the first place. We'll look at the content of these large super-areas of knowledge and then what lies beneath them.

The natural sciences are areas of knowledge that stem from the observation of natural phenomena and the construction of theories and experiments concerning such phenomena. These would include the life sciences (e.g. biology, zoology, botany), earth sciences (e.g. astronomy, geology and meteorology), and physical sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, metallurgy).

The human sciences are areas of knowledge that stem from the observation of human phenomena and the construction of theories and experiments concerning such phenomena. These would include psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and so on.

There's more about the disciplines in the natural and human sciences in this topic from the previous session. Theories in the natural and human sciences also differ (prior argument here).

Because of the differences between the two large groups of disciplines, and the range within each group, you'd probably need to think about the general rules for each group; you can use the linked posts I've provided to think about what the rules are. Once you've decided what defines these areas of knowledge, you can think about how you would pursue that knowledge.

Which leads us back to how disagreement might aid such pursuit. What is disagreement? On one level, it occurs when two data or data sets do not agree; that is, they are just not the same or lead to different conclusions. On another level, it is a process of trying to produce arguments that contradict a given position. On a third level, it is the mindset of deliberately being contradictory in order to ensure that a fair skepticism is brought to bear when thinking about science.

The first case is perfectly natural. We define things by difference; our senses tell us what inputs are different from the previous state (e.g. 'it is getting brighter' or 'this water is warmer than normal') and our emotions are basically differences in physiological states that allow us to evaluate our environment and shift our psychological perspectives. Therefore, to make an observation requires us to determine whether or not what we sense and record disagrees with what we have sensed and recorded before.

The second case is an extension of the first. If we keep evaluating our disagreements or the disagreement of our 'new' data with the 'old' data, we will start constructing theories about why this is so — one famous case is the Hegelian dialectic, where a thesis is confronted by its antithesis and a synthesis resolves this disagreement.

The third case occurs when this kind of thinking becomes a legitimate and established process. Then the idea of disagreement with what we've found becomes a valuable tool that keeps us from being too conservative about knowledge. Disagreeing with what we think we've established earlier can also help us to learn new things (look up 'cognitive dissonance' and 'skepticism' elsewhere).

OK, that's my brief take on the first topic. Goodness, it's not as brief as I thought! How... disagreeable.

Responses (May 2013) — Summary

The list of IB TOK Prescribed Titles for May 2013 (with some of my personal one-line responses) is summarised in this post.

1. In what ways may disagreement aid the pursuit of knowledge in the natural and human sciences?
2. "Only seeing general patterns can give us knowledge. Only seeing particular examples can give us understanding." To what extent do you agree with these assertions?
3. "The possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility." Evaluate this claim.
4. The traditional TOK diagram indicates four ways of knowing. Propose the inclusion of a fifth way of knowing selected from intuition, memory or imagination, and explore the knowledge issues it may raise in two areas of knowledge.
5. "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." — Christopher Hitchens. Do you agree?
6. Can we know when to trust our emotions in the pursuit of knowledge? Consider history and one other area of knowledge.

For #1, you could first frame the sciences in terms of dialogue between contention and refutation. Or you could try natural history vs natural philosophy and the problem of validation.

For #2, you could attempt to define understanding and knowledge first, before debating how much various ways of perception can help you with them.

For #3, you could think about what ethics and an 'ethical responsibility' are, and what kinds of things place an ethical burden upon you.

For #4, you would probably have to think of intuition, memory and imagination as brain phenomena. There are several posts about each of them somewhere in this blog.

For #5, the obvious rejoinder (and one given by Hitchens' opponent in a debate) is, "What's the evidence for saying this in the first place, Mr Hitchens?" But there are depths to it.

For #6, the point is to think about whether you can know this at all. The rest is gravy.

I'll follow up on some (possibly all) of these questions in the days ahead.

Issues of Knowledge

An issue is that which comes forth from something. A knowledge issue is something that proceeds from the starting point of knowledge — can we know something, how do we know something, how do we apply tests of whether we know something. The kind of question or problem that is a knowledge issue reduces to this kind of question: "How do we know?", "What do we know?", or "How is it that we can say we know?"

And that is all. I cannot believe it has been about 2.5 years since I last wrote something about this. You can find it embedded somewhere in this post.

Epistemological Emergencies

I have to keep reminding people that there is a difference between an existential emergency and an epistemological one. (Indeed, I have to remind people that 'emergent' and 'contingent' need not always be linked to 'emergency' and 'contingency'.) I cannot imagine why students should feel that not knowing something should lead to their annihilation.

An existential emergency is just that — the sudden emergence of a personal situation whose circumstances seem to threaten personal existence. An epistemological emergency is something else — the sudden emergence of a situation (whether personal or not) whose circumstances require the drastic interrogation of those circumstances with questions like, "How do you know???"

These latter cases are wearisome but seem to be ever more common these days as the date for submission of the epistemological arguments comes near. I have to suppress my urge to reply, "Yes, well, think of this: HOW do you know, how DO you know, how do YOU know, how do you KNOW?" and provide more obvious scaffolding (no, not the type with a trapdoor and gibbet).

Thank God I have not yet had to cope with any of my students' genuine existential emergencies. Yet.

Assessment and Evaluation, Knowledge and Mind

People have different philosophies of assessment and evaluation. The kind of philosophy you have depends a lot on your theory of knowledge, and perhaps your theory of mind.

Here are some crude approximations. A theory of knowledge is your concept of what it means to know, and what it means for something to be (usefully or otherwise acceptably) called 'knowledge'. [Good starting link here] A theory of mind is your concept of what mind is, how we conceptualise mental states, and how we decide what these mental states are. [Good starting link here.]

It follows that if your idea of knowledge is ontological — derived axiomatically through reason but without 'real' evidence — then you would test for abstract knowledge. It is true, so all you have to assess is whether the candidate knows it, and perhaps whether the candidate knows why it is logically necessary to believe in it (e.g. by mathematical or theological proof from basic principles or axioms).

It also follows if your idea of knowledge is empirical — derived from observation and collation of 'real-world' data — then you would test for concrete knowledge. It is true only if it has reliable existence which can be detected by an observer. So you would need to assess whether the candidate can produce what is required (e.g. by making a pot, by swimming 50m, by making up a 1.0M solution of sulphuric acid).

Very often, we have conflated our idea of knowledge so much that we have no idea what to test, and the act of a candidate writing down an ontological proof is taken as empirical proof of reality. We thus evaluate the candidate as intelligent despite knowing full well that we can't tell. Which brings us to the theory of mind.

If you believe that mental states are not only apprehensible but comprehensible, it is quite likely you believe so by congruence. In other words, you believe that if a person does X, that person would be thinking much as you would be if you were doing X. Some people get this right more often than others, and they are said to be high-empathy or to have high EQ. Some people get this wrong more often than others, and we think of them as psychotic or low EQ (or otherwise deficient).

This is why when students do things that our tests don't rate highly, we think of them as not having appropriate intelligence or preparation or skill (or whatever). That's if we're being cautious and/or charitable. Many of us would just say, "This candidate is low-performing." (Or 'dumb', or 'stupid', except that nowadays we only think it but try not to say it.) Our concepts of high performance depend on how difficult it would be for us, the educators, to carry out. What's easy for us should be easy for those we have taught, right?

Wrong, of course. In my ramblings on this blog, I've pointed out the circularity of our ideas about intelligence and its vulnerability to subjective evaluation even when considered by experienced educators and scientists.

In effect, we need to stop thinking of intelligence as a scored function — high-scoring, low-scoring or whatever-scoring. We need to think of it as a) what jobs need to be done, b) what are the ways they can be done, c) does this person figure out such ways quickly? We can omit b) if we just want to see whether a person can get the job done, regardless of whether we are able to figure out how it might be done. We need also to think of it as d) can our candidate figure out what jobs need to be done?

You see, we have no ability to actually get into someone's head, short of telepathy. We cannot tell how cognitively brilliant someone is except by whether that person gets the job done fast. We can plausibly rate candidates on how convincing their products are to us, but that would be subjective — the more their thinking corresponds with what we think is good, the more points they get. All these are old criticisms.

Moving forward, I suspect what we should do is empower candidates by teaching them every tool we know, how to evaluate the usefulness of tools, and how to create their own tools. A lot of that teaching will comprise meaningless exercises. We must be honest and tell them that we don't know how valuable the education we're giving them is. When we are long gone, they will have to prove those tools in the crucible of reality, and our hope should be that they will survive it.

Gaps in the Clockwork

Perhaps the most infamous idea of how God and Science fit together is the 'God of the Gaps' concept. This is the general idea that whatever Science cannot (yet) explain (a 'gap') is God's due. If the explanatory universe is of constant volume, then God's role thus gets smaller and smaller, or at least, more and more involuted.

But the real gap in all religions is more fascinating. The real gap is the one between 'supernatural' and 'natural'. What is 'supernatural'? And if it is 'supernatural', how then does it interface with the 'natural' without being merely 'natural' itself? I use quotes throughout simply because I don't know what these terms really mean, in relation to each other.

In Christianity, the religion to which about 33% of the human world claims allegiance, God is always involved with His creation. He made it, and bridges the gap between it and Himself by unpredictable intervention and communication. He is able to say, "My ways are not your ways," and yet also, "Come, let us reason together." In Him we live and move and have our being, and yet clearly He is not of our substance. Yet, God became Man and dwelt among us.

How does that work? The authors of the Bible, expressing God's thoughts, point out explicitly that the whole thing defeats philosophy. They don't claim that logic will hold in this realm. In fact, they claim that you can attempt to use reason, but God is not bound by it. Once that happens, all bets are off.

The modern rationalist is repulsed by such things. If such a situation maintains, why bother? If ontology trumps epistemology, and deity trumps deontology, it is a farce.

To me, it is an amusement. Logic is like the screwdriver in the toolbox. It uses circular motion to effect linear progress. But it isn't the only tool, let alone the toolbox itself.

Its existence tells us only a few things about the tool-user: 1) makes tools, 2) has occasional need for screws, 3) is capable of effecting a grip-initiated turning motion... and so on. It's a good, very useful tool, but it doesn't even tell us what the other tools are, although it can replace some of them crudely in certain situations.

Some users treat it more like a Swiss Army knife — a multitool of some sort. But it requires a lunatic bravery to rely on a multitool for all your needs, all your life.

I don't think of a 'God of the Gaps'. I think that what we see of the universe is more wonderful than we can think, and if this is so, not all of it is amenable to thinking. I think the explanatory universe is infinite, and that God in His complexity can bridge 'natural' and 'supernatural' since they are only our feeble labels for 'what would exist without us' and 'what may exist but which we will never be able to describe, explain, predict or control'.

Responses (Nov 2012) — Summary

The list of topics for November 2012 (with some of my responses) is summarised in this post.

1. Can we have beliefs or knowledge which are independent of our culture?
2. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. — Arthur Conan Doyle. Consider the extent to which this statement may be true in two or more areas of knowledge.
3. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. — Albert Einstein. Do you agree?
4. What counts as knowledge in the arts? Discuss by comparing to one other area of knowledge.
5. Habit is stronger than reason. To what extent is this true in two areas of knowledge?
6. The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly re-test each other’s results. To what extent would you agree with this claim in the natural sciences and the human sciences?

For #1, I would attempt to define culture first, and then get ready for a philosophical argument.

For #2, I would consider the extent to which facts precede theories in different disciplines — and whether facts are required at all in the first place.

For #3, I would think about the concept of 'importance', and after working that out, consider the concepts of 'imagination' and 'knowledge' and what they imply.

For #4 and #5, I'd just look at some of my previous posts and work my dogged way through the obvious arguments.

For #6, I'd get a large sheet of paper ready and start to draw a large map of human knowledge...

Responses 006 (Nov 2012)

The final question in the Nov 2012 list of topics is this: The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly re-test each other’s results. To what extent would you agree with this claim in the natural sciences and the human sciences?

I like the way this question sets up little traps. 'Ultimate', 'supposed', 'the way', 'constantly' — these are all potential pitfalls. For a start, 'ultimate' ought to mean 'to the farthest extent of one's range'; 'supposed' implies that it isn't always so; 'the way' implies there is only one way; and 'constantly' implies this continues to happen all the time. You can create a little counter-argument involving each of these.

I'm not going to deal with those in detail, but I will add that if a homogeneous class (e.g. 'scientists' all using one 'way' to 'constantly' do something) does anything, there is necessarily a built-in bias, against which there is no defence. I will also add that to suppose anything requires someone to do the supposing. Who do you suppose does the supposing here? Scientists?

Hopefully, at this point, I have succeeded in convincing some of my readers that this topic requires great care and detailed planning. For those who have survived this, I will now add a note about 'natural sciences' and 'human sciences'.

These superclasses of disciplines are difficult to define for some people. I have given a quick summary of what they include towards the end of this earlier post. Let me now define them in slightly more detail.

The natural sciences are the spawn of natural history (i.e. the empirical observation and recording of natural phenomena in chronological order) and natural philosophy (i.e. the development of theory based on induction from natural phenomena or deduction from reasonable rules based on empirical observations). They include astronomy, geology, biology, chemistry and physics — disciplines which in general are considered to have objective content even in the absence of human activity or existence. Some of these disciplines may produce results that are difficult or impossible to re-test.

The human sciences deal with human affairs in terms of human activities. By analogy with the natural sciences, human sciences are the spawn of human history and human philosophy. These would concern the observation, recording, analysis and theory of matters social, political, economic, religious, and military. They thus include linguistics, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, psychology, management and other such 'soft' sciences. These disciplines would be much deprived by an hypothetical absence of humanity. These disciplines tend to produce results which are often difficult to re-test.

Neither group would include many varieties of applied science, technology and engineering — these are not natural but are not generally considered human sciences either. The two groups would exclude mathematics, history, and philosophy because these are either tools or precursor disciplines; they would exclude the arts as well.

Well, you now have some of the basic elements of an answer. Give the topic a good try. This will be an educational experience.

Responses 005 (Nov 2012)

The penultimate topic (Question #5) in the list reads: "Habit is stronger than reason." To what extent is this true in two areas of knowledge?

It's a bit of a let-down compared to the other five topics, and that is why mainly two kinds of students will attempt it: the brilliant risk-takers and the unimaginative. What I'm a little irked about is the lack of attribution: if George Santayana did indeed say this, at least attribute it to him as you did for Einstein and Conan Doyle in the same set! That said, the quotation looks horribly boring on first sight.

No doubt, this kind of question is a staple of the 'Theory of Knowledge Diet', of the form [quotation by famous person] + [request to justify with respect to two (or more) areas of knowledge]. But what to make of the 'X > Y' format used also in Question 3 (which has a better quote from Uncle Albert)?

I think that 'habit' must refer to people doing things automatically (as in 'force of habit'), as opposed to thinking about it first (i.e. 'reason'). If that's the case, then how to link it to areas of knowledge? Surely it's a commonly known fact of human existence that people do things out of habit more easily than with the use of reason.

Perhaps a discussion of the topic can be made more substantial by discussing what exactly 'habit' is. The word 'habit', from the Latin, has the original meaning 'to have' or 'to live in a specific state' — hence 'inhabit'. The modern sense is one of being in a constant state of existence, doing the same things and responding the same way to things.

Habits are patterns of life, patterns of behaviour, that have developed from uncritical existence in specific environmental situations. Here, I have craftily inserted the word 'uncritical'. After all, if one were to be critical, one would probably not continue to live the same way all the time. But it provides us with a proper basis for argument — we can now say that reason is critical, and habit is not. (I used a similar trick when handling this older question.)

Now we have a proper epistemological argument. To what extent, in various areas of knowledge, is uncritical behaviour (not necessarily bad, perhaps instinctive or intuitive) more useful or more powerful than critical behaviour (which must involve reasoning and judgement)? This is where it would be good to draw boundaries between disciplines that require more critical thinking and those requiring less. I've discussed this elsewhere. Enjoy...

Responses 004 (Nov 2012)

The infamous list has thrown up an uneven field of obstacles as usual. Obstacle Question #4 asks: What counts as knowledge in the arts? Discuss by comparing to one other area of knowledge.

This is a hoary old chestnut, so to speak. The debate over what constitutes 'the arts', and hence by extension what counts as knowledge in the arts, is a very old one. The crafty Greeks got around it by using the word technë, which means 'art', 'craft' and 'skill' all at once. Their legacy is a range of modern words, including 'technology', 'technique', 'technical', and 'polytechnic', which are all supposed to have something to do with the arts but seem more to do with the sciences these days.

The picture is complicated by classical ideas of what constituted the arts. Here is a list of what the Greeks thought the arts were, in the personifications of the Nine Muses. Included were agriculture, astronomy, geometry and history.

Indeed, history and philosophy are the parents of the sciences — the natural sciences are the descendants of the disciplines which we used to call 'natural history' and 'natural philosophy'; the term 'natural science' in its present-day meaning is relatively new and was not often the term of choice till perhaps the late 19th century. [See Ngram here.]

This argues for a response that contrasts the arts with the sciences, using technology and engineering, architecture and design, as battlefields. It also means that whoever answers this question might have to draw a line of some sort between 'arts' and 'humanities' — not to mention the line between 'technology' and 'science'. Haha.

That said, how do we define knowledge in the arts themselves? I would argue that there are at least two kinds of knowledge: procedural knowledge (how it is done) and conceptual knowledge (what it is that is done) — for example, knowledge of how to paint vs knowledge of what painting is, or knowledge of how to write poetry vs knowledge of what poetry is. (We require most teachers of visual or performing arts to be practitioners to some extent; sadly, this is less true of the language arts.) How else can artistic (or 'aesthetic') knowledge be defined?

My instinct tells me that this essay topic is an easy one to handle. But it will require a disciplined approach that draws on personal experience and interpretation, coupled with the ability to examine disciplines critically.

Responses 003 (Nov 2012)

The short list for the year ahead has this as Question 3: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." — Albert Einstein. Do you agree?

I think this question is one of those trivial ones which can be made important by deliberately introducing extra material. So let's dispense with the trivial approach first.

Knowledge does not exist without information, and information does not exist without data. At each stage, the questions of validity, reliability, utility, generalisability, transferability (etc., etc.) intervene in an attempt to prove or disprove the various claims that arise (whether actual or potential). Hence the only way to claim knowledge is to subject it to tests of some kind of reality — something that contrasts or is contrasted with imagination. Without imagination, i.e. the capacity to create images/imagery or otherwise imagine, we cannot test knowledge. Knowledge therefore has no importance without imagination.

In fact, etymologically and historially, the image or imago is the ideal or fully-developed concept of something. The real is merely the sub-standard shadow in Plato's cave. We see this usage in the relationship between (for example) real and ideal gases.

At this point, we can concede completely that Einstein was right. However, as always, a case can be made for negotiating on the basis of 'important'. What does 'important' mean?

'Important', from Latin importare, is used to indicate something 'brought in', 'brought into the discussion'. This explains why 'import' can mean 'significance' as well as 'something shipped in'. When we say something is 'of import' or 'important', we are saying that it is a point to be noted, or that we should pay attention to it.

And that is why knowledge might be thought of as more important than imagination — knowledge is reality as far as we can confirm it, and is thus the basis of our action in this world. It introduces the key points to be considered in what we do, as opposed to imagination, which is what we might aspire to (or have realised that we can never attain).

The argument then, it seems to me, is whether the real is of greater value (practical or otherwise) than the ideal. It's a good debate to have. While the idea of an ideal gas allows us to conceptualise many things, no such gas exists — we have to solve problems in reality based on real gases.

Responses 002 (Nov 2012)

The Nov 2012 list really throws up some interesting problems. Here is Question 2 on the list: "It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." — Arthur Conan Doyle. Consider the extent to which this statement may be true in two or more areas of knowledge.

(Note: As usual, the context of this statement is not supposed to be important. For the more conscientious amongst us, this quote comes from Conan Doyle's 1891 Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal In Bohemia, in which Holmes is bested by the lady adventurer Irene Adler.)

The context which is important, however, is our consideration of the statement in terms of what a theory is supposed to be in different areas of knowledge. Here are a few thoughts.

In most conceptualisations of the scientific method, we're supposed to build theory from empirical data or reasoning from basic principles. It's either induction or deduction, repeated and mixed up, which generates theory. It isn't considered scientific to generate theory without any data at all, since you cannot even generate a problem statement or question that is of scientific value without some initial data. Why? Because a scientific claim must be testable, and we only know what a reasonable test is if we have some data to work with.

On the other hand, let's consider the arts. We'll have to define the arts as disciplines in which something material (a text, a narrative, an artifact etc) is created in order to induce a response (almost always emotional) based on somebody's sensory perceptions. A theory in the arts can be scientific in nature, if it is an analytical theory. However, a theory about what an artist thinks art is can seem spontaneously enacted through what he does. It's when people respond to that, that data are generated. The artist may not have any obvious foundations of data on which his theory of 'this is art' is built. He might be using his emotions as a guide, for example, or his intuitions, or his faith in his own arbitrary principles.

Other disciplines fall somewhere in between. All disciplines work with data; the question is whether data must precede theory (and thus be its foundation, as in the 'grounded theory' approach beloved of some research in the human sciences) or whether theory can be constructed before any data is received. It might be a chicken-and-egg kind of problem, requiring much thought before the obvious 'chicken came first' conclusion arises.

In this statement, however, is a lot more material for debate. You would have to think about 'capital mistake' (which implies 'fatal error'), 'insensibly' (by which Conan Doyle would have meant 'subconsciously', rather than 'irrationally', I think), and 'twist' (as in apply torque to deform, but not in a literal sense).

I suspect this question will be attempted by Sherlock Holmes fans, amateur investigators, and people who just want a no-holds-barred dust-up of the old-fashioned kind. A lot of fun, a lot of risk. "Two or more areas of knowledge," forsooth.