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Theory of Knowledge Series
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Ways of Knowledge
What are Ways of Knowing?
All knowledge comes from somewhere. Even if we say it is innate (comes from within us)
we still have to say how that knowledge appears. The Ways of Knowing are the methods
through which knowledge becomes apparent to us. In the IB there are eight different ways
of knowing: Language, Sense perception, Emotion, Reason, Imagination, Faith, Intuition and
Memory. Although this might seem like a lot, the good news is that for the IB you’re only
really advised to study four of them in depth (although it’s worth knowing how each of
them works).
Language
Language is defined as a system of signs with meanings. These signs include, but are not
limited to: letters, pictures, symbols, sounds and gestures. Language is everywhere, and
some aspects can even be considered universal. As well as being everywhere, language is
crucial to our survival and success as a species. Despite its omnipresence and importance,
language is still full of potential problems. Problem areas crop up like sarcasm, ambiguity
(when something isn’t clear), irony and translation issues. We all know how a joke in one
language might not work in another.
Despite its flaws, language is really important for communicating knowledge. As ToK
students, we should think about how language communicates knowledge and some of the
problems that might creep up when we try to pass on knowledge through signs as symbols.
One fascinating topic that you might not have heard of is the debate over ‘linguistic
determinism’. This is the idea that language determines the way we think. The idea is that
because a specific community speak in a certain way, the way they think is structured
accordingly. You could argue, therefore, that using a specific language limits our ability to
think. Others argue that the way we see things and the way we think about them are not
limited to our culture, but are universal. This is an ongoing debate and a really interesting
one to consider using in your presentation or essays.
Sense Perception
This Way of Knowing relates to the way a person uses and understands their senses.
Traditionally, it was thought we only had five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight.
However, as time has passed more and more senses have been suggested. Other senses
that it has been claimed that people have include the sense of heat, of pain, of movement,
of balance and of hunger and thirst, even a sense of where our body parts are in space has
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been suggested. Some of these might seem a little unusual, but try this: in a moment, close
your eyes and try to touch your forefingers together. Were you successful? I bet you weren’t
far off! But only the sense of proprioception (where your body is in space) could have
allowed you to do this. One of the big debates here surrounds the idea of empiricism. This
term, which you might have heard of, refers to the theory that all knowledge comes from
the senses. This is a historical view. Now, it is commonly believed that our expectations
help shape our sense experiences. Deciding how perceptions and beliefs influence each
other is a fascinating topic for essays and presentations. Illusions are a good illustration of
how the brain’s expectations influence our sense experiences.
Emotion
There are two important views of emotion that tend to come up in ToK. One is called
the naturalistic view of emotion. This view tells us that emotion is a result of our physical
bodies, with physical causes and effects. Charles Darwin was one supporter of this view.
One interesting implication of the naturalistic view is that emotions are seen
as universal and experienced across cultures. The opposite view to this is that of social
constructionists. Proponents of this theory argue that emotions are socially constructed.
This would mean that emotions come from our social environment. The social
constructionists might point at to an emotion like shame and say that, shame is an emotion
based on social ideas of what is right and what is wrong. Without society telling you what
actions were ‘wrong’ you might never feel shame. One question you might consider is
whether emotion is a help or a hindrance when it comes to gaining knowledge. You could
argue that emotion is a problem when seeking knowledge. For example, you might argue
that emotion hinders rational thought and thus distorts reality. However, someone might
disagree with you. Somebody could tell you, for example, that without emotions it is
difficult to make sense of cultural and social experiences. People with autism, for example,
can struggle to understand social situations and to know what it is other people feel. What
does this say about the universality of emotions?
Reason
Most people would tell you that they are reasonable, but definitions of reason vary greatly.
There are two things you should understand when thinking about reason as a Way of
Knowing. Firstly, is the concept of logical deduction. This allows us to go from starting
ideas (premises) to reach valid conclusions. Here’s a simple example:
Premise 1: Rex is a dog.
Premise 2: All dogs have fur (remember this doesn’t have to be true)
3 Question: Does Rex have fur?
Valid Conclusion: Yes, Rex has fur.
Going from premises to conclusions like this is called logical ‘deduction’. Earlier it was
noted that deduction leads to valid conclusions. This does not mean that the conclusions
are true. What it means is that if the premises are true then the conclusions will be true.
Here’s another example. Premises 1: Peter is a man Premises 2: All men have eight legs
Question: Does Peter have eight legs? Valid conclusion: Yes, Peter has eight legs.
Remember that this might not be true, people don’t usually have more than two legs!
However, the conclusion is still logically valid because it follows from the two starting
premises.
Second is the concept of logical induction When we used deductive logic above we
made general statements (about men and about dogs). We used these to show
something specific about a man (Peter, showing he had eight legs) and a dog (Rex, showing
he had fur). With inductive logic we take a specific example to tell us something about
the general. For example, you might have noticed that most windows are made of glass. We
could say the following:
Step one: All the windows I have seen are made of glass
Step two: Therefore all windows are made of glass
Notice that inductive reasoning can involve probability. You might think that because
you’ve seen so many windows and they were all made of glass, that all windows are made
of glass. However, there is nothing stopping a window from being made of plastic or of
jelly. You should know something about logical induction: it is what we call ‘inferential’.
This is that it makes a statement which is not strictly provable. There’s no way I can prove
that all the windows in the world are made of glass. The idea that they are is just inferred
from my experience. This notion of inference helps separate deductive and inductive
reasoning.
Imagination
Try the following: “Think of your favourite piece of music. Now imagine dragging your
fingers across a chalkboard. Now imagine plunging your hand into a bucket of sand and
feeling the grains crunch between your fingers. And now taste the difference between
lemon and lime – which is more sour? There was no sand; there was no lemon. And yet, in
response to a set of completely imaginary events, your mind produced very real physical
reactions.”
This quote from author Olivia Fox Cabane points out the power of the human imagination.
What is being described here is the what we traditionally call ‘imagination’: the ability to
form a mental representation of a sense experience without the normal stimulus. There is
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another form of imagination, however. Propositional imagining is the idea of imagining that
things were different than they are— an example being that the cold war had never ended.
You should always link your ToK essays back to real life. One way that you can do this
when discussing imagination is to talk about medical conditions that might affect the
imagination. One condition, such as schizophrenia can give some insight into what
delusions and extreme examples of imagination can lead to.
Faith
When you’re talking about faith, one effective approach is to discuss what faith means. To
some people their idea of faith might be religious, for example faith in God. Faith in God is
called theistic faith. However, religious faith is not necessarily theistic. Buddhists typically
believe in reincarnation but do not have faith in any God. Faith can also be secular, try and
think about all the different things we can be said to have faith in. Commitment to a
concept can be an expression of faith, but needn’t be religious. People can be committed to
an idea or a philosophy that guides their idea, they can be said to have faith in it.
Contrasting what faith means to a religious group, for example Hindus, and to believers of
a secular philosophy such as humanism can be really productive.
Faith is a way of understanding the world, underpinning the way we choose to interpret
things. If you wanted to be really critical in your ToK work you should think about the
complex relationships between the Ways of Knowing, like faith and reason. Some people
might claim that faith and reason cannot be reconciled, that they are totally different ways
of looking at the world, which often conflict. However, many religions see faith and reason
as interdependent. Natural Theology teaches that God can only be known through reason,
which He gave to human kind. Exploring these different perspectives might be very
effective in your ToK work.
Intuition
Reason, can be defined as using a rational process to arrive at knowledge. Intuition is quite
different from this. Intuition is having an immediate sense of knowing, without any prior
thinking. After a footballer kicks a ball toward a goal, an expert at the game might ‘know’
whether there will be a goal or not. The fact that this person has reached this knowledge
without having to consciously calculate the outcome shows that what is being used is his
or her intuition. But how is this sort of knowledge possible? Psychologists believe that the
unconscious mind is able to make many more observations than we consciously can in any
given situation. All this data would be too much for us to think about consciously. However,
5 we are able to process it on a subconscious level. This is often described as having a gut
feeling about what is going to happen, or what the solution to a problem is.
Intuition can be defined as immediate awareness; it is a very powerful way of knowing
because what we would call flashes of insight may come from our capacity for intuition.
Imagine taking a sofa and trying to fit it through a doorway. If you were to look at the sofa
you could probably make an instant judgement about whether it would fit through. This is
using your intuition (and perhaps some of the other WoKs as well). Computers do not have
any capacity for intuition, they are forced to use logic and analytic processing or thinking.
This means that for a computer to decide whether your sofa would fit through the door, it
would have to try every possible way of fitting the sofa through. The computer would have
to calculate whether the sofa would fit through on its side, its end or even diagonally.
Using intuition, you can tell instantly. If this is a strength of intuition, what do you think
might be a weakness of this WoK? How reliable is this Way of Knowing, and how well can it
be used to justify your actions? Is the phrase ‘I just know’ very useful in a debate?
Memory
Memory is a Way of Knowing that many students overlook. This gives you the opportunity
to say something unique if choosing to discuss it in your ToK essays and presentations. As
with the other WoKs, a starting point to your discussion might be to define what memory
actually is. We need to go beyond definitions such as ‘knowing what happened before’ as
these are not very helpful for critically examining memory. One way of defining memory is
as the faculty which allows us to retain information and reconstruct past experiences –
although like everything else in ToK, it is up to you to think about this definition critically!
If you do choose to discuss memory in your work, it might be worth referring to an ongoing discussion surrounding the status of this Way of Knowing. Some argue that memory
is not actually a Way of Knowing itself. They claim that memory is simply the recollection
of things we already know. In response to this it might be worth considering two relevant
points. One point comes from the psychology of memory. Many people, when thinking of
memories, imagine a tape that is recorded as we live our lives, and played back when we
wish to remember something, however, this is not really the case. Whenever we notice an
experience it is encoded into the memory. However, each time we recall that memory we
re-encode it. That is, if you remember an experience from your childhood, it is not the
‘original’ experience that you are recalling. Instead you are accessing the memory which
was encoded the last time you thought about that thing. This theory helps to explain why
memories are not completely reliable – if you were to photocopy a photograph every time
you wanted to look at it, and only were able to keep the copy, how much detail would
remain?
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A second point worth considering is the importance of memory in gaining new knowledge.
We do not gain new knowledge in a vacuum. Our past experiences affect how our new
experiences are interpreted. Because of this, memory is a huge part of how we gain
knowledge at any moment in time.
If you want to discuss memory, it might be worth talking about illnesses that affect our
faculties. Dementia affects many people as they grow older, and it is particularly important
not to forget Alzheimer’s which affects a growing proportion of many countries with aging
populations. You might consider using these illnesses to think about how memory might
not be a particularly reliable Way of Knowing. It might then be worth discussing how
billions of people rely on their memories every day of their lives.
For
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