Category: ToK

One example of a paradigm is the food we eat for breakfast, there are certain foods that we accept as only being able to eat in the morning for breakfast. Food is closely linked with culture and cultural paradigms whether taboos or just preferences. The cultural paradigm can be described as “one in which the phenomenon being considered is regarded as being the product uniquely of its cultural context.” Is it because of culture that we eat certain foods and different time periods of the day?

Another example of a paradigm is that the earth is in the center of the universe. One of the questions which concerned our ancestors had to do with the movement of the heavens as seen from earth. From our perspective, it looks as if we are standing still while the universe turns around us like a giant wheel in the sky. For hundreds of years this has been the belief that explains the sun, moon, stars and other planets. However these paradigms can change causing a paradigm shift.

Human behaviour can be influenced by an observer.

A real life situation is if an observer were to come into a classroom full of students and they were aware of the observer, it would cause demand characteristics, where a person changes their behaviour in order to perform what they think is expected. They wouldn’t act as they usually would, for example, if the principle were to watch them, the students may talk less with each other and act more focused than they may usually be. Demand characteristics can happen in many psychological experiments, for example, Brown and Kulik’s experiment in 1977 on flashbulb memories. Brown & Kulik gave 80 participants questionnaires which had a series of nine events, like the assassination of President Kennedy, and they were asked to recall the circumstances when they first heard about the event. Where the participants said they remembered the event, they were asked to write a detailed account about what happened that day and rate it on a scale of personal importance. The way the question is framed can induce demand characteristics, as the question makes the participant assume that they should know about the event. Moreover, this means that they might lie about remembering the event and the researchers cannot verify if the stories are true, making the experiment less reliable. When people are aware they are being observed, the task or observer creates an implicit demand for the people to perform as expected. 

I don’t think it is accurate because I don’t agree with some of them like Fitness preference, I didn’t choose one scenario over the other because of the person’s fitness level. I think if a person was actually in that situation they wouldn’t have enough time to think about what to do.

Cognitive biases:

Biases are a result of the mechanisms the brain uses to help it quickly make sense of information and experiences. These mental operations can help us quicken our thinking and give us a sense of reality however it can be distorted and incomplete. Biases are ingrained in our cognitive architecture so they don’t feel like tendencies or prejudice. It can be seen as a “blind spot” in our thinking. We can’t prevent them as they are ingrained but it is useful to know about them and to try to see past our biases, even though it may be very hard. With a logical fallacy, with practice, we can learn to recognize and completely avoid mistakes of logic. While faults of logic come from how we think, and thus we can simply change our thinking to be more logical, biases arise from the cognitive machinery that allows us to think.

Video:

Dan Gilbert describes decision making as an equation, odds of the gains multiplied by value of the gains. However problems arise when calculating odds and the value of the gains. People usually compare with their past experiences, which can influence their decisions. However, their past presents a bias and people are susceptible to following what they think is right. Framing can also affect our decisions, if something is framed more positively we are more likely to follow it. For example, if you go to a theatre to see your favourite movie, and you bought a $20 ticket for it, but you lose it, would you buy another one, versus, you lose $20 on your way to the movie theatre, would you buy one using your other $20 note? Most said no to the first one and yes to the second because of the loss attached to the ticket however the loss is not attached to the ticket. EIther way, you lose $20. To summarize, sometimes we can not trust our decision making skills because it might not be the best decision we can make for that situation.

Personal Knowledge in the Arts often relies on interpretation.

The Arts is based on the creator and the observer. The art created will be true to the artist as it is a personal experience that no one else would go through, however, the concept of it can be expressed in many ways for other, observers to interpret them, and that interpretation can be true to themselves. The ‘truth’ in the arts is personal knowledge as an observer usually relates to a piece of art when they believe it is true, however it might not be what the artist wanted to convey. An example of this is Georgia O’Keeffe, who had painted flowers in the 20s and she had meant for them to only be flowers, however, many had thought that the flowers represent a female’s genitalia (Ellis-Petersen, 2016). O’Keeffe had resisted this claim however it gained popularity once again in the 70s, women used her work as a statement of women empowerment. They interpreted it one way and it inspired them, it meant something to them and it was the truth to them even if it isn’t the truth for the artist who created it (Ellis-Petersen, 2016).

A counterclaim is that the artist creates the art for people to interpret a certain way, that both the creator and the observer agree with the ‘truth’. An example of this is Kevin Carter’s powerful photography of a little girl dying while a vulture watches and waits for its prey. Carter is said to feeling the need to photograph shocking images to share into the world (Neal, 2014). Some people saw what he was trying to convey and received backlash for it. Carter perhaps found it shocking, so he took a photo of it to share to others and the people who saw this image also interpreted the photo as shocking. But the photographer and the audience reacted to this image differently, even though they had the same truth behind them. His reaction was to share it however the audience’s reaction was to retaliate, wondering if he could have saved the girl (Neal, 2014). This understanding of the photo however becomes shared knowledge as we all feel the same thing.

The arts can be be based on personal experiences or shared knowledge. There is always a creator and an observer and their interpretation does not always have to match for it to be the ‘truth’. It would be the truth to the individual.

Georgia O’Keeffe – https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/mar/01/georgia-okeeffe-show-at-tate-modern-to-challenge-outdated-views-of-artist

Kevin Carter – https://allthatsinteresting.com/kevin-carter

What is the role of intuition in mathematics? How about imagination?

Andrew Wiles said he had a revelation when it came to Fermat’s last theorem, suggesting that he had an intuition, something he couldn’t explain but wanted to prove and understand. Intuition can play a role in math where it can help people discover new things as well as question other things and find rigorous proof for it, it can help drive people into discovering and learning new things that we want to call the ‘truth”. Imagination can play a big role in mathematics as it can challenge existing ideas and or help us create something new or a new way of thinking that we haven’t thought of before. Humans search for patterns in nature but we can use our imagination to explain something in nature, imagination can lead to a big discover and or can lead us to the bigger ‘truth’.

In what sense is Mathematical research a search for Truth?

Derren Brown suggests that humans search for patterns naturally. Mathematics is about finding patterns that hold true, if we see a pattern we lean towards it to say that it is true because it has happened before. Once people begin to see patterns we assume that it has a meaning behind it, that there is a truth, curiosity is what drives humans and if there was nothing to search for in math it  wouldn’t be as important as it is now.

The method of trying to prove that all triangles add up to 180 degrees only works on 2D surfaces and can be proved with axioms. On 2D surfaces, the proof can be said as rigorous proof because it can’t be falsified, it has been tested a lot and is known as shared knowledge. The other methods can be falsified as if you draw a triangle on a sphere the angles would not add up to 180 and therefore is falsified.

SHIP → DOCK

Changing one letter from the word ship and trying to get to the word dock would be easier if you knew that all words in the english language contain a vowel, and the conjecture that any intermediate word would have two vowels. The rigorous proof demonstrates the outcome that is expected through steps in a logical manner. With the axioms, it made the task easier to do as we believed in them.

The term proof applies differently to Math and Natural Sciences, evidence is used to prove a conjecture or theory and it can make something more true to people as they would believe it more.

Math that can be found in Nature:

Snowflakes, it has the perfect symmetry and all snowflakes are different. Sunflowers also follow the Fibonacci sequence and the nautilus shell also follows the Fibonacci sequence.

 

There are different areas of knowledge that can explain different things with different levels of uncertainty. The certainty of knowledge from natural sciences is higher as people have faith in scientists who have supported a theory through a lot of observation as they’ve noticed a pattern and many experiments with evidence to support their theory, and many others who have gotten the same results. When they get the same results people begin to believe it and “know” of it as being the truth. People trust them as they have a higher authority and can provide answers that the general can agree with. The certainty could be considered greater than religion as there is more evidence to support the scientific theories, but people can still “know” through religion because of their beliefs and their faith even if there is less evidence to support it. Another way of knowing is with history. People “know” as there is a lot of evidence and justification behind it. There is also technology helping us with understanding what has happened in the past, like fossils or photographs. We can not be certain of things that were in the past as there might not be an explanation or too much evidence behind it. People also have different perspectives and can view the things that have happened in different ways, so the knowledge about one thing that we hold may not all be the same. We can ‘know’ the same thing but may have different reasons to why we know them, some may have a stronger reasoning however not everyone can agree on the same thing and can have their own personal judgement. But we can not be “certain” about anything.

The ALIS test could potentially predict what your IB score could be based on the people who have scored the same on the test however I think that there are many other factors that contribute to your grade, like ability and how much we study. ALIS only tested a specific part of our intelligence and not related to our subjects, so it can’t really predict what we would score but can give a good range of what you may get. A student could improve or even slack off after the test so their score won’t be the same as the ALIS one.

I think that if we were to find out our predicted it might influence the way we behave or how well we do in the subject. If it was a low score some students may be keen to get better to improve their score or they might not try at all because they think they’re going to get a low score anyways so there’s no point. If it was a high score students could get over confident and not do as well in their actual exams.

People thinking the earth was in the centre of the solar system is falsification as it was proven wrong, but now we believe that the sun is in the centre and that all the planets revolve around it, we believe this to be true because of the evidence we have found through tests and observations, however in the future this could be proven false through advanced technology or more observations.

 

Plants growing towards the sun could be replication, as the theory could be tested and observed many times to come to the conclusion and the test can be replicated. We believe this because everytime the test is performed we get the same answers.