What exactly is a knowledge issue? Web viewIt also occurs in the assessment descriptors that examiners use to mark the essay and that the teacher ... For example in Physics one

Knowledge Issues

Theory of knowledge is primarily concerned with knowledge issues. This phrase is used often in describing what is meant by a good ToK Presentation or a good ToK essay. An essay or presentation that does not identify and treat a knowledge issue has missed the point. It also occurs in the assessment descriptors that examiners use to mark the essay and that the teacher uses to mark the presentation. To put it briefly: the whole point of the presentation and essay tasks is to deal with knowledge issues.

What exactly is a knowledge issue? To start with a knowledge issue is a question about knowledge. That seems simple enough. Most of the questions we deal with in school are questions about knowledge such as: ‘what is the atomic mass of Hydrogen?’ But this is not a knowledge issue. This is because the answer is clear and uncontroversial: the atomic mass of Hydrogen is one. Knowledge issues are open questions – that is questions where the answer is not clear and is often controversial. These are questions with two sides to them. Usually knowledge issues depend crucially on the understanding of one or other key idea which leaves plenty of space for disagreement. So what about: Is Rembrandt a better painter than Maxfield Parrish? No, this is not a knowledge issue. It is true that there is now some reason for controversy. But there is still a problem. While there is knowledge involved in making the judgment which is the better painter the question is not specifically about knowledge. It is about painting. But surely we can fix this: How can we know if Rembrandt is a better painter than Maxfield Parrish? This is getting closer. Now the object of the question is knowledge. But it could still be argued that this is not a knowledge issue (or at least not a very good one). The reason is rather subtle. Imagine what an answer might look like. “We can know that Rembrandt is a better painter by observing how each handles light, composition, and texture. We can observe the subject matter and the composition”. The problem here is that the answer is couched in the language of painting – even though this language clearly articulates some sort of knowledge. This is still rather too specific. It is local to the particular comparison being suggested. What we are looking for is a somewhat more general question. In particular we are looking for a question that is a second order question: a question about the nature of artistic knowledge rather than a question of artistic knowledge. A better knowledge issue would be: What sort of knowledge is expressed by an artwork? This is a good knowledge issue because it is couched in general terms that do not refer to anything too local.

Ric Sims October 2009

Why this definition of a Knowledge Issue?That a knowledge issue is an open question concerning knowledge is hardly surprising. After all we established that ToK is often about deep issues that permit many different interpretations or can be viewed from different perspectives. This might suggest that the typical ToK question doesn’t have one straightforward correct answer. As a ToK student you might well find yourself facing this sort of question in class. Perhaps a typical response might start: ‘it depends what we mean by ...’ In other words, our first task in trying to answer a ToK question is to establish how we can understand the key concepts involved. There may be a number of different ways of thinking about these concepts. Each might give rise to a different analysis and ultimately a different answer to the question. Moreover your own personal situation and experience might influence the way in which you interpret the question. Inevitably in complex and messy real life your personal perspective will play a part in the judgments that any analysis throws up. The intellectual resources that each of us has to draw upon might well be different and lead us to different or even diametrically opposed conclusions.

The possibility of a lack of unanimity in answering ToK questions might be a worry. After all in Mathematics if you get a different answer to your neighbour you might be a bit concerned that you have made a mistake (or that your neighbour has). In a ToK question it is perfectly conceivable that you and your neighbour differ. What is important is that your analysis is thorough and that you have good reasons for saying what you do. It can be that both your conclusion and that of your neighbour can both be true. This is not some sort of flaky relativism. Rather what is going on here is that the interpretations that you both make of the terms in the question and the weight you give to various strands of the analysis might be different. Ultimately you and your neighbour might have answered very slightly different questions.

More mysterious is the requirement that a knowledge issue is somehow more general than the particular examples which illustrate it. This requirement springs from this idea that ToK deals with second order questions. For example in Physics one deals with questions about the material world. In ToK we ask questions about Physics itself. How can the Physicist be sure of her conclusions given that they are based on hypothesis and experiment? The ToK student is not talking in Physical terms because she is not talking about the physical world. Rather she is talking about Physics itself. Therefore it is necessary to use a different more generalised vocabulary. The physicist uses terms like particle, energy, mass and charge. The ToK student uses terms such as hypothesis, experimental data, interpretation, anomaly, induction, certainty, uncertainty, belief and knowledge. So, knowledge issues should employ these terms not the terms of Physics.



Examples of Knowledge IssuesYou can find knowledge issues underlying almost any controversy. They are sometimes difficult to formulate precisely but they often lurk underneath popular controversial subjects that are discussed in the media. It is a very useful exercise trying to tease out knowledge issues underlying articles in newspapers or magazines. What I have done here is to give a selection of subjects suggested by newspaper articles and to analyse the knowledge issues to be found in each one.

For each of the questions in these examples try to work out what it is that makes them poor knowledge issues, good knowledge issues or not knowledge issues at all. Below are my comments on these questions.

Example 1As it now stands question 1 is not a knowledge issue for a number of reasons. It is rather too closely linked to the real life situation of the article. It is concerned with the ethics of government control of materials that are the basis for forming the beliefs of young people. The question does not directly concern knowledge as such. Ethical questions usually embody knowledge issues but they often require a bit more digging to find them. Be careful that you do not get seduced by a nice juicy ethical issue and miss the knowledge-specific aspects.

The same arguments apply to question 2. Good students would be able to find many knowledge issues in this question but as it is these are not explicit. Note that the vocabulary of both these questions still refers to the real life example in the newspaper article.

Question 3 is rather too general to be a good knowledge issue but it is moving in the right area. Better would be an examination of the relation between creativity and truth. If historians use their imagination doesn’t this introduce an element of fiction into their accounts?

A similar line of thinking emerges in question 4. Instead of imagination the question focuses on the effects of bias and selection as a threat to objectivity. Note that the words ‘bias’, ‘selection’ and ‘objective’ name central ToK concepts. The use of ToK vocabulary is an initial test for a good knowledge issue. A ToK student answering this question would have to spell out how she understands these central ideas in the context of the real life example.

Question 5 examines the possibility that historical knowledge is constructed. It is sometimes helpful to imagine an alternative in this type of question. An alternative to ‘constructed’ might be ‘uncovered’. These two words suggest quite radically different ways of thinking about historical knowledge. The word ‘uncovered’ might lead one to think of history as taking the lid off a box of truths about the past. Deep in the metaphor is a notion of the past as existing independently of our attempts to know and understand it. If one uses the word ‘constructed’ the emphasis is more on the notion that history is observer-relative. According to this view there is independently existing historical truth that serves as the gold standard for our knowledge claims about the past. It might be that historians can shape their own theories with greater freedom than the first view suggests. But more freedom is not the same thing as anything goes. An answer to the question would have to examine what constraints the historian faces in the writing of history.


Question 6 is linked to the previous questions. It focuses on the raw material of history – the building blocks out of which history is constructed or, if you prefer, the evidence on which inferences about what actually happened are based. It passes the vocabulary test: ‘facts’ and ‘interpretations’ are important ToK concepts. In this question and the next there is a hint at a parallel with the natural sciences. It could be argued that scientific facts – for example the outcome of experiments – don’t make any sense without the link to a theory. Does the same happen in history? Does the meaning of a document depend on theories that historians have about its significance in the larger scheme of things?

Question 7 concerns methodology in history. The methods each Area of Knowledge uses to assess and support knowledge claims lies at the heart of ToK. In particular: how reliable are these methods? Here the parallel with science is used to compare the reliability of the methods of history with say physics or chemistry. If it is judged that history is somehow less reliable, but at the same time that the two disciplines use broadly speaking the same type of method, then what is the source of the relative unreliability? This question sits very securely in the realm of ToK – it is an example of an excellent knowledge issue.

Example 2Question 1 slightly generalises the issue raised in the newspaper article. Nonetheless the question is more appropriate to political science than it is to ToK. The word ‘legitimate’ suggests a legal answer though a slightly metaphorical usage is possible here which hints at a moral or ethical interpretation. The subject matter here is not immediately relevant to ToK. Some digging beneath the surface is necessary.

Much the same criticisms attach to question 2.

There is a subtle difference between questions 2 and 3. Whereas 2 asks specifically about direct democracy so is a question of political science or indeed political philosophy, question 3 steers us to consider how we can know the claims of political science. It is not a wonderful knowledge issue despite the explicit appearance of the word ‘know’. It is rather too unfocussed and general. Nevertheless we are pushed to consider second order questions about how political claims can be backed up.

Questions that contain the word ‘fairness’ are often going to be moral or ethical questions. Whether they are relevant to ToK or not depends on how tightly focussed they are on the knowledge aspects of ethics. An analysis of fairness in the context of political systems grounds itself in ToK only if it asks: how can we decide what fairness is in a political context and what type of reason could possibly justify this? As such then question 4 is not a direct knowledge issue but nevertheless can be steered towards one.

Question 5 is an old chestnut of a knowledge issue: the measurement problem. Given an inquiry about whether a particular feature is true of a given situation – what practical measurements can be made to find the answer? What exactly should be measured and what measurement constitutes a positive answer to the question? This knowledge issue is generic and has broad applications across the natural and social sciences.

Question 6 is second order and uses the right vocabulary. On the diagram on page XXXX it is underwater. It is also something of a generic question that applies across the social sciences. Since the object of our investigation is something originating in human beings to what extent are we justified in describing its findings as objective?





Example 3Question 1 is again too bound up in the real life situation. Again the question is state interference. There are embedded knowledge issues, for sure, but this question on its own is not a knowledge issue.

The same holds for question 2.

Question 3 is still about state interference but is beginning to explore the moral grounding of this interference given irrational behaviour by the public. It is an interesting moral question. The public should be more ToK-like and question the authority of the celebrity endorsement. But they don’t do this. Given that the state knows that the public in general does not do this (is not critically thinking) to what extent should it interfere with certain individual freedoms to protect the public from its own lack of critical thinking? But the problem here is still that the knowledge issues are not explicit in this question. This is therefore not a knowledge issue yet without further work.

Question 4 is located under the line on the diagram but the problem is still a first order one – namely resolving a moral dilemma instead of looking specifically at the knowledge claims made as part of it. Questions 3 and 4 illustrate just how difficult it is to deal with genuine knowledge issues in the pure context of morality or ethics. There is a fix – namely to examine how we can know whether a particular set of moral principles applies in a particular case. But this is an extremely difficult question – and one which has greatly exercised moral philosophers for centuries.

Question 5 illustrates how easy it is to come to a knowledge issue once we throw off our fascination for moral questions. Again this is another example of the measurement problem. How do we establish that a particular product is effective? This type of question is routine in science, and some might suppose it rather prosaic, but nevertheless it is a tightly focussed knowledge issue.

Question 6 is another problem familiar from science. One can only ever observe correlation not causation. How reasonable then is it to infer causation from an observed correlation? A classic knowledge issue.

Example 4Question 1 is clearly phrased in terms of the language and concepts of economics. Words such as ‘demand’, ‘government policy’ and ‘global downturn’ name economic concepts. So this question is not a knowledge issue because it deals entirely in ideas native to economics as a discipline. It is not a second order question. Though it is an interesting issue in economics it is not a knowledge issue in ToK.

Much the same criticism applies to question 2.

The weakness of question 3 is that it is rather too general. It could be treated in a way that is ToK-rich. The concept of a model lies in the core of ToK. But it could also be treated entirely within the subject of economics and might therefore not raise second order questions. Interestingly, it is difficult to deal with this question as part of an economics course without actually going outside the subject and looking down and asking what is the purpose of models in economics. Typically these questions are


dealt with in chapter 1 of economics textbooks where the scope and methods of the subject are discussed.



A question like this might never be examined in an economics course. (The new IB Diploma Economics syllabus has corrected this somewhat). So treated in the right way this question becomes a bona fide knowledge issue.

Question 4 is a mainstream knowledge issue. Given two competing models and a set of macroeconomic data how does one decide between them? The nature of economics is somewhat different to the natural sciences. In the latter there is usually less doubt about whether a hypothesis is confirmed or refuted by the experimental data. In the messy human sciences the picture is more... well... messy. The question has a second order flavour to it. It is characteristic of a larger class of situations than the type suggested by the newspaper article. It is stated in more general ToK language. Interpretation of data to support a theory or model is very much a ToK idea.

The failure of a theory to predict with accuracy could be used as a criterion for truth of that theory or rather untruth. So question 5 is a strong knowledge issue that crosses the borders of subject disciplines. The philosopher John Searle bemoans the lack of progress in the human sciences compared to the natural sciences. He asks why it is that our models in psychology and economics do not rival what we can do in physics, chemistry and biology. Does this mean that our models in psychology and economics are simply not true in stark contrast to those in the natural sciences? This is a good knowledge issue. It is a fairly safe bet that any question that explores the relationship between models and truth will be a good one.

Question 6 is related to question 5. Comparisons between areas of knowledge are standard ToK. But this does not make them any less interesting and gives rise to a number of subsidiary knowledge issues. What precisely is it about the human sciences that makes prediction so difficult? Is it to do with the subject matter – human beings? Is our behaviour inherently unpredictable? Is there a difference between different sorts of prediction? Is there not a sense in which human behaviour follows patterns even if they are only statistical correlations rather than the sort of rigid determinism of the natural sciences? Surely without such patterned behaviour there is no possibility of saying anything meaningful in psychology, economics or sociology.

Question 7 is a knowledge issue but, in my view, a rather deep one. Economists often protest that their discipline is about finding a means to an end that is decided by the politicians. In one of the IBDP Economics textbooks the author talks about so-called normative judgments – judgments about questions that do not have measurable outcomes. There is a denial that this type of judgment is actually part of economics. For example, if it is not possible to achieve both low unemployment and low inflation in an economy then which is actually better: low unemployment and high inflation or vice versa? Is economic growth a good in and of itself? This type of judgment involves weighing up sets of values which might not be entirely economic in nature – they involve life choices and decisions of taste. There is a fair bit of digging to do to get to the ToK words judgment and values – but they are there.



Example 5Question 1 and question 2 are both too involved in the physics to be knowledge issues. Question 1 is a tad more philosophical than question 2. It could be fixed to yield good knowledge issues. One could consider questions exploring the role of common sense in science or the role of metaphor in theories that are counterintuitive, for example.

Question 3 refers to a philosophical doctrine of instrumentalism. The idea that some scientific theory simply gives us clever ways of doing calculations that coincide with the results of experiments rather than tell us how the world actually is. This question suffers from being overly abstract. It could be dealt with by those with an interest in philosophy of science but it is a bit difficult for the non-specialist. So while we need knowledge issues to be more abstract and therefore more broad than the real life situations described in the newspaper articles – one should guard against the danger of becoming too abstract.

This is a good knowledge issue and one that allows a number of different approaches. It is linked to ideas about what we require from an explanation in science (or in other areas of knowledge). To what extent should an explanation satisfy our intuitions? After all, our intuitions can (and do) let us down. The macroscopic world in which many of our intuitions are forged might not resemble the world on other scales. The physicist tells us that the world at the scale at which quantum mechanics operates is really quite different. It might be unreasonable here to expect that everyday intuitions should still act as a reliable guide. Question 4 is both a broad and a deep knowledge issue.

Einstein said famously that ‘God does not play dice’. It is tempting to suggest that explanations that give a central place to probability theory are in some sense incomplete – or express the incompleteness of the state of our knowledge. This is clearly a second or even third order question. It is based on ideas about how the world operates that are presupposed by our doing science in the first place. For example, the idea that the world is explainable in terms that are comprehensible to us human beings or that the world functions causally – that is that every event is caused by another event. These statements lie beyond our experimental method since this very method presupposes that they are true. Question 5 is a good knowledge issue but one that is rather deep and is perhaps suitable for the student what is interested in science or philosophy.

Question 6 lies at the heart of what we might call the realist view of science. That science actually gives us an accurate picture of how the world actually is: that the objects of science such as electrons, photons and the like actually exist and have the properties that the physicist says they have. If this view is correct then it makes sense that our scientific theories yield accurate predictions. This might be called a common sense view. All well and good but the problems arise when the theories of science are so peculiar as to defy a common sense understanding. Such theories can be found in quantum mechanics. How can the cat be both dead and alive at the same time? That is the crux of Schrödinger’s paradox. Quantum mechanics gives us a very strange picture of the world. Yet quantum mechanics yields some very accurate predictions which have been tested time and again. A realist must conclude that this weird picture is actually true. This would force us to rethink radically how we think about the world. The alternative is to say that quantum mechanics is not true. But then how can it produce such realistic predictions? The temptation is to say that it gets something right at least. So, we are between a rock and a hard place. This is a good knowledge issue although it does require some deep thinking to treat it well. What is nice about it is that the actual example produces a knowledge issue that is general but does not arise in more everyday situations.


Question 7 represents a whole cluster of knowledge issues that explore the role and effects of simplifying assumptions on the truth of a theory or a model. These questions are not restricted to the natural sciences but can apply to all areas of knowledge including the human sciences, the arts and literature. It is a second order question and it is wonderfully broad – a knowledge issue par excellence.


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What exactly is a knowledge issue? Web viewIt also occurs in the assessment descriptors that examiners use to mark the essay and that the teacher ... For example in Physics one