Theme 1: Knowledge and the Knower
The Central Question
TOK’s foundational question is: “How do I know what I know?”
This is not a question you usually ask in your other classes. In History, you learn what happened. In Mathematics, you learn how to solve problems. In Biology, you learn what organisms are made of and how they function. TOK asks something different: how do any of us come to know the things we claim to know?
This is the domain of epistemology — the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, scope, and limits of knowledge.
What Is a Knowledge Claim?
Whenever we assert that something is true — or that we know something — we make a .
The twenty knowledge claims in our opening activity illustrate the range:
- “I know that a right triangle has a 90º angle” — mathematical, provable with certainty
- “I know that empanadas are delicious” — personal, experiential, resistant to proof or disproof
- “I know that God created the world” — metaphysical, neither empirically testable nor mathematically provable
- “I know when to stop arguing about something” — procedural, skill-based, difficult to articulate
Not all knowledge claims are equal. They differ in type, in the evidence that supports them, and in how certain we can be about them.
Types of Knowledge
Experiential, Procedural, and Propositional
A second framework distinguishes three modes of knowing:
| Type | Also called | What you know |
|---|---|---|
| Know-by-acquaintance | What something is like from inside | |
| Know-how | How to do something | |
| Know-that | That something is the case |
The How-To writing task explores the second type: procedural knowledge. The challenge is that you know something — how to make coffee, how to play a chord, how to fold a dumpling — and you must make that knowledge explicit enough for someone else to follow. Much procedural knowledge resists full articulation.
The TOK Framework
The IB gives us a framework for examining knowledge systematically. Applied to every theme and Area of Knowledge, it asks four questions:
| Element | Question |
|---|---|
| What does this area study, and what are its limits? | |
| How does this area produce knowledge? | |
| Who produces this knowledge, and from where? | |
| What ethical issues are woven into the pursuit of this knowledge? |
These elements recur in every chapter of this book and in the Exhibition and Essay.
The 12 TOK Concepts
TOK also provides twelve concepts that can be applied to any knowledge question. They orbit the central question: How do we know?
Evidence and Certainty
is what supports a knowledge claim. But what counts as evidence? In a mathematics classroom, a well-constructed proof counts as evidence; in history, a primary source does; in everyday life, our own eyes and ears often do. Different areas of knowledge have different standards for what makes evidence good.
is the degree of confidence we have that a claim is true. Mathematics can achieve a form of certainty — through proof — that empirical sciences cannot match. But even mathematical certainty is relative to the axioms we start from.
Truth
What is truth? Four theories:
— a claim is true if it corresponds to reality. Intuitive, but: how do we check correspondence independently of our perceptions?
— a claim is true if it fits consistently with other accepted beliefs. Avoids the correspondence problem but faces a different one: a coherent set of beliefs could all be false together.
— a claim is true if a relevant community of knowers agrees. Scientific consensus carries weight, but consensus has been wrong before (and often was the result of power rather than evidence).
— a claim is true if believing it works. A bridge built on Newtonian mechanics stands up; the theory “works.” But a useful belief can still be literally false.
No single theory is fully satisfying. In practice, we use all four.
Justified True Belief — and Its Limits
The classical definition of knowledge: a is a belief that is both true and supported by adequate justification.
This definition has appeal. But Edmund Gettier (1963) showed it may not be sufficient — he constructed cases where all three conditions are met, yet we would hesitate to say the person “knows.” The debate about what knowledge requires is unresolved.
What we can say: knowledge requires more than just having the right answer. It requires having it for the right reasons.
The Other Concepts
The remaining nine concepts — , , , , , , , , and — will be developed across the rest of the course. You will find them useful both for the Exhibition (which asks you to show how real-world objects connect to knowledge questions) and for the Essay (which asks you to argue a position on a knowledge question).
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
One of the oldest images of knowledge — and its limits — is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Prisoners chained in a cave mistake the shadows on the wall for reality. Released, one prisoner sees the world as it actually is; returning to tell the others, he is disbelieved.
The allegory asks: what might you be taking for the full picture? What shadows might you be mistaking for reality?
TOK does not answer this question for you. It gives you the tools to ask it — seriously, rigorously, and about every area of knowledge.
Vocabulary
Further Reading
- Plato. Meno and Theaetetus (on the definition of knowledge)
- Gettier, E. (1963). “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, 23(6), 121–123.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Analysis of Knowledge