KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS (KQs)
Knowledge questions explicitly address knowledge.
They are best expressed in terms of ToK vocabulary. For
example,
• When is a scientist justified in saying that she
knows something?
• Does intuition help us make moral judgements?
• To what extent does language influence our
understanding of history?
This is the sort of vocabulary you need to help you
construct good KQs:
WoKs: sense perception, memory, language,
emotion, reason, intuition, creativity, faith
AoKs: mathematics, natural sciences, human
sciences, history, ethics, the arts, religion, IKKs
Others: truth, certainty, evidence, proof,
explanation, prediction, interpretation,
justification, experience, culture, values, belief,
objective/subjective
Consider, for example, a real-life situation. Let's say you
know someone who visits an acupuncturist, and you
sense there's some KQ mileage here.
How might you go about extracting a good
knowledge question from this?
You might go through this kind of process.
Acupuncture
Traditional
medicine
Does TM
work?
How can we establish if TM works?
In what ways do TM and science explain the
natural world?
How do we evaluate alternative scientific
explanations?