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May 2019 Prescribed Titles
1. “The quality of knowledge is best measured by how many people accept it.” Discuss this claim with reference to two areas of knowledge.
2. “The production of knowledge is always a collaborative task and never solely a product of the individual.” Discuss this statement with reference to two areas of knowledge.
3. Do good explanations have to be true?
4. “Disinterestedness is essential in the pursuit of knowledge.” Discuss this claim with reference to two areas of knowledge.
5. “The production of knowledge requires accepting conclusions that go beyond the evidence for them.” Discuss this claim.
6. “One way to assure the health of a discipline is to nurture contrasting perspectives.” Discuss this claim.
Who is Art for? Anish Kapoor given exclusive rights to use Vantablack in art
This was an excellent Real Life Situation chosen for a student presentation (see Wired magazine). The student correctly focused on whether Art would be held back by the idea of ‘exclusive rights’. What was also interesting was how this raised the question of what type of knowledge Art produces? Is it “self-knowledge”? Is it knowledge about what it means to be human? Here is a previous prescribed title on this theme “…we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” (Noam Chomsky). To what extent would you agree?
Here is the critical issue. Students will often see the subjective nature of the Arts as a weakness, “..it is too dependent on opinion”.But the subjective, the individual voice reaching out to you from painfully personal lyrics of John Lennon or the emotional insight gained by looking into the eyes of a Rembrandt self-portrait*, this subjective knowledge has its value in being personal and making the experience feel unique. Science will measure, categorise and make objective statements but will not aim to tell the story of the individual. For the Arts, being subjective is a strength!
Has Anish Kapoor taken the ‘individuality’ of knowledge too far? In the Wired article another artist described Kapoor as “a major ego and is a narcissistic maniac, but his work is so good, he’s earned the right to be”. The individual unique voice in the Arts has now become, with Kapoor, individuality taken to the point of ownership. My experience, my message is so unique it cannot be replicated.
The student’s presentation moved on to look at how people collaborate to make art and produce knowledge. For example, classical music is often a reworking of themes, open collaborations or replications. You can hear how Mozart builds upon Bach and then Beethoven takes the baton (!?) This process is similar to that in the Natural Sciences “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” Newton. Each successive generation pays tribute to the work of the previous. Science itself would be held back if the knowledge produced became the exclusive property of the individual scientist. Students will be too young to remember the furore that greeted attempts to patent the human genome. This was an attempt to own the ‘code of life’, human DNA.
It would be great to finish a TOK presentation and ask a class how does an Artist collaborate, who owns knowledge, should research/creativity be patented? Can you compare collaboration in the Arts with the Sciences? I think every TOK presentation should finish with more questions and open up new areas of thinking.
My own personal question would be, “..what processes have made the nature of knowledge more individual“. I wonder whether the individual is feeling lost and over-awed by the modern age. This clip from an old classic film “The Crowd”. represents this idea perfectly. The first 55 seconds are claustrophobic shots of crowds and from then on the camera picks out one skyscraper and then chooses one window in the skyscraper, it moves through the window to show rows and rows of desks but it focuses on one desk to tell the story of that one individual. Art tells the story of the individual so we can know what it is to ‘be human’ but the story cannot belong to any single individual.
*“Why did Rembrandt show such an untiring interest in his own features?…Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man’s inner life….In this constant and penetrating exploration of his own self, his range went far beyond an egotistic perspective to one of universal significance.” Jakob Rosenberg
Conceptual Understanding of History
Personal and Shared Knowledge
I feel I missed opportunity to encourage more students to consider how ‘experts’ are perceived (see this video from the UK Referendum campaign. former Education Minister Michael Gove infamously states “..people have had enough of experts). A nuanced and balanced essay should consider what the idea of an ‘expert’ might mean to different people (knowledge communities in TOK talk).
Here’s a good article from Prospect. An interesting conclusion to a student essay could consider how, when experts can agree and a consensus is reached, we may still have a problem with the relationship of trust between the experts and ‘joe public’ (the average man in the street). This is especially true with the current controversies in the UK surrounding Doctors, the Family Court and life and death decisions concerning terminally ill babies (great RLS for Practise Presentations: Charlie Guard and Alfie Evans) Here is a link to a populist anti-science website…. worryingly, the arguments will seem credible to some people.
If the theory of Type A/B personality was produced under influence of tobacco industry money should we dismiss it out of hand?
The strange and somewhat icky reason we call people ‘Type A’ personalities goes back to the tobacco industry
Getty Images
The science behind one of the most common ways we describe ourselves had dubious financial backing.
Type A behavior pattern (TABP), the personality characteristics we assign to people who are ambitious and time conscious — often to a fault — is a big part of popular psychological psyche. Who hasn’t heard someone describe themselves or others as “Type A” personality, or its less punctual and more laid-back opposite, “Type B”?
There’s also the belief that Type A’s are more susceptible to coronary heart disease and heart attacks. This has stuck with the collective conscious of our society: Your stressed-out personality is literally killing you.
But the catch-all description we use to describe our nature isn’t supported by modern research.
In fact, the popularization of TABP actually came from flawed studies funded by the tobacco industry that were meant to obscure and discredit claims about tobacco’s harmful effects.
In 2002, after multiple lawsuits in the 1990s and early 2000s, the tobacco industry was ordered to release documents and memos to the public in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of San Francisco. The haul of paperwork includes decades’ worth of internal communication from companies like Philip Morris and British American Tobacco, as well as industry advocacy groups like the Tobacco Institute.
A scientific review study in 2011, led by Mark Pettigrew, a professor of public health evaluation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, analyzed these documents and found that the popularization of TABP occurred in spite of a lack of replicable scientific results.
His study searched the database from 1959 to 2011, flagging documents that contained relevant keywords, like “stress,” “heart disease,” “personality,” “TABP,” and “type A behavior.” Pettigrew told Tech Insider that he found evidence showing tobacco companies supported “science that was useful for litigation” for decades.
Obscuring tobacco’s health harms
Silberio77/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In the 1950s, the tobacco industry had a problem.
The public was learning that tobacco smoking was linked to a whole suite of terrible health effects. So to protect its massive interests, the industry formed the Tobacco Research Committee in 1958, which would later become the Tobacco Institute.
The committee had a few goals: Manufacture dissent over anti-tobacco findings, as well as determine health benefits from smoking.
Around this time, two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, claimed to find a causal relationship between personality and coronary heart disease (CHD).
This link was of great value for the tobacco industry. Their strategy, as Pettigrew explained, was “making the argument that cancer and coronary heart disease could be caused by one’s personality.”
The tobacco industry didn’t need invincible proof. It just had to show that smoking didn’t necessarily cause heart disease — that, instead, people with personalities who were predisposed to developing the disease just happened to smoke.
While this wasn’t the most solid argument against smoking’s harm, it was enough to defend the industry in court for years.
Similar strategies, like “Project Whitecoat,” sought out scientists to defend the tobacco industry, especially focusing on downplaying the health risks of secondhand smoke. Another worked with Hans Selye, the Austrian-Canadian endocrinologist considered the “father of stress,” to support the notion that stress caused cancer.
In the case of TABP, Friedman’s reputation was also valuable to the cause. In a 1962 internal document from Hill and Knowlton, a PR firm that promoted the tobacco industry, Friedman was included in a list of “serious workers in their respective fields who have not appeared as protagonists in the debates on tobacco and health.”
For the next few decades, the two psychologists’ work appeared in leaflets, films, and press releases produced by the Tobacco Institute for the public. One 1968 film’s message was simple: “Smoking is a symptom—not a cause—of cancer.” Smoking could mitigate stress, which was the real culprit, they asserted.
This cozy relationship was not one-sided, either.
Up until 1997, the Phillip Morris company provided the Meyer Friedman Institute with almost $11 million dollars of funding for multiple studies. Friedman looked for funding from other sources as well to obscure their influence, as one Meyer Friedman Institute correspondencewith the tobacco company showed.
“We obtained these funds initially to get a wider base of support for the project so that no one could or ever would say that only Philip Morris financed this research project,” Friedman wrote.
Getty Images
That’s not to say that Friedman and Rosenman made the whole thing up for the tobacco industry, but their initial 1959 study had its issues (for example, it only looked at white, middle-class, American men).
Most damning was the fact that the results couldn’t be replicated.
“[They] did find a link to having this particular behavior and CHD,” Pettigrew said, “but other people that moved into the field who didn’t have connections to the tobacco industry weren’t able to replicate the findings.”
Later studies in Northern Ireland, Japan, and France weren’t able to find a conclusive link between psychological factors and CHD.
So, in light of this biased connection, is your ambitious, stressed-out personality leading you to a early grave? Fortunately, probably not — though just like many other science and health misconceptions, society has latched on to the belief and never let go.
“It really has no scientific value or standing anymore,” Pettigrew said. “But it doesn’t matter because it has entered the culture. And it entered with a big push from the tobacco industry.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/type-a-personality-traits-smoking-marketing-2016-8/?IR=T
History and Science … a match of methodologies made in heaven?
The IB Review recently had an article on Knowledge Questions that links to the next AOK of knowledge we will look at, History. The following is suggested as an exemplar Knowledge Question: “What are the consequences for historical knowledge when trying to apply a scientific method in justifying historical claims?’
One of the current Grade 12’s Assessed Presentation was on the Afghan war, its aftermath, and whether history can provide an adequate understanding of this troubling series of events. The student quoted the historian Carl Becker;
“The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves – a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future”.
Becker was the President of the US Historical Society. Here is some background. “In 1931, Carl Becker delivered what remains the single most famous Presidential Address in the history of the American Historical Association. Entitled “Everyman His Own Historian,” Becker’s speech continued his, by then, decades-old assault on the “scientific school” of history, which believed that the historian’s task was simply to correctly assemble the facts of the past, which would, in turn, interpret themselves. In its place Becker proposed a vision of history that was both more relativistic and more populist. His address was greeted with a standing ovation and has been celebrated in the ensuing decades as both laying the foundations for, and anticipating, many of the changes in history writing that would take place over the course of the next several decades.” Society for US Intellectual History
From Becker’s speech itself:
“History as the artificial extension of the social memory (and I willingly concede that there are other appropriate ways of apprehending human experience) is an art of long standing, necessarily so since it springs instinctively from the impulse to enlarge the range of immediate experience; and however camouflaged by the disfiguring jargon of science, it is still in essence what it has always been. History in this sense is story, in aim always a true story; a story that employs all the devices of literary art (statement and generalization, narration and description, comparison and comment and analogy) to present the succession of events in the life of man, and from the succession of events thus presented to derive a satisfactory meaning. The history written by historians, like the history informally fashioned by Mr. Everyman, is thus a convenient blend of truth and fancy, of what we commonly distinguish as “fact” and “interpretation.” ” Everyman his own Historian
Music and Symmetry
Anthropologists embedded in the US Military intervetions
Ethical Dilemmas in Human Sciences
In 2007, the American Anthropological Association called the Army’s effort to embed social scientists with combat units “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise,” citing a moral conflict between studying groups of Iraqis or Afghans and advising troops who might end up killing them. The AAA’s own ethical code includes this paragraph.
“In research, anthropologists’ paramount responsibility is to those they study. When there is a conflict of interest, these individuals must come first. Anthropologists must do everything in their power to protect the physical, social, and psychological welfare and to honour the dignity and privacy of those studied.” Savage Minds
Background to the story here. Question: Can Human Scientist every be fully responsible for the future application of the knowledge they produce? How can we fully know the consequences or implications of the knowledge we produce in research?
G11 Practise Titles (2018)
- “In gaining knowledge, each area of knowledge uses a network of ways of knowing.” Discuss this statement with reference to two areas of knowledge. (May 16)
- Given access to the same facts, how is it possible that there can be disagreement between experts in a discipline? Develop your answer with reference to two areas of knowledge. (May 2017)
- “Humans are pattern-seeking animals and we are adept at finding patterns whether they exist or not” (adapted from Michael Shermer). Discuss knowledge questions raised by this idea in two areas of knowledge. (May 2017)
- Areas of knowledge have methods for testing and supporting knowledge claims. How can we know that these methods themselves are reliable? Develop your answer with reference to two areas of knowledge. (Nov. 2017)
Some do and don’t for essay writing!
Do allow your own voice to guide the essay. You should not discuss the knowledge issues as a passive observer. Phrases like; “…this left me unconvinced” “…initially I found this metaphor seductive but…” ‘…while I accept the reasoning behind..I struggle to see how such a conclusion..” The examiner want to see that knowledge comes with responsibility and that you are already developing principles.
Do use unusual examples. The IB complains that the same examples* are recycled over and over again. The main worry is that students have gone to a ‘help’ site and taken examples. Be creative and original. Making unexpected links between AOK and WOK will make your essay stand out. (You can still use examples from the list I’ve linked to but try and provide an original angle).
Don’t use dictionary definitions of key terms. “Chambers defines ‘experts’ as… “ Find an example. The UK legal system has faced a crisis caused by its over reliance on so called expert witnesses. This raises a more interesting focus: the struggle to assign or identify someone as an expert. From this point you have an impetus for the essay, an overall point that can be argued that maintains a narrative through 1000+ words.
Don’t use ‘truisms’. “Some of the fundamental concepts of physics have been debated by Scientists across the centuries…”. The examiners know this already. A waffly introduction or conclusion will have a significantly negative impact on your grade!
Do signpost. Tell the reader what you are going to do, what it is you are doing and what it is you did. Make sure your paragraphs link and the overall thread of your argument is maintained.
Do use qualified language. Do not say prove, rather ‘supported the theory’ of ‘provided against the idea’.
Do use good, apt and well researched quotations. But please research, do not be the student who quote’s ‘Francis Bacon the Artist’ when it was really ‘Francis Bacon the philosopher’.