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'.

Knowledge Issues and the Theory of Knowledge

In some old and troubled dream
I load my magazine
Thirty cartridges now seem
Too much for what they mean.

The true test of reality is death, because termination falsifies the dream. The problem then is subjective observation, because if you're dead, you have no way to personally verify the test outcome. It is a terrible situation to be in, which is why ontology should always precede epistemology.

That said, the question "How do we know (that)... ?" is the most important question of knowledge. It is possible to begin all knowledge issues with these words. More importantly, answering such questions requires the verification (or falsification) of claims, and the exercise of attempting to do this always tells you something more than you knew before.

Therefore, when stuck for a way to start an essay, ask yourself the question of how you would find out the answer to it. This applies both to explicit questions (e.g. "Freedom of speech is a necessary human right. Why is this (not) so? Discuss.") and implicit questions (e.g. "Write short notes on garlic cultivation and its significance to human existence.").

The second question, of course, is: "How do we conceive, construct and communicate a convincing answer to an unknown target audience?" This is something for another day.

Onto

Before we think about how we know, we must know what it is we think we know. And so begins the spiral into madness that is the irrelevant little sidetrack of most TOK students these days.

The solution is simple. Ontology precedes epistemology. Something is. As a knower, at the very least you exist. Very likely also, whatever it is, that allows you to have existed and to continue to exist, also exists.

The question of whatever that -it- is which must necessarily exist is ontology. The question of what you claim to know is epistemology. But before all your claims, you must first be.

And here is where worldviews come in. There are only two worldviews. One is that the knower is all that is needed, and everything is derived from what the knower thinks the knower knows. One is that there is something supernatural, something beyond natural observation and which can never be proven to exist. Some people have listed up to seven or eight different possible worldviews, but they all come down to this.

What?

This: either you can explain everything from nothing, or you can explain nothing from everything.

We shun the latter, because then the underpinnings of what we know must necessarily be accidental, revelatory, matters of faith. We love the former, because it is the ultimate reductionism. In the beginning, nothing. Then symmetry. Then symmetry-breaking which isn't quite so. And everything comes from nothing.

But we would then be part of the everything that came from nothing. We would be prisoners of our world. Why is that more acceptable? It's called 'pride of life'.