TOK this year has made me question the core idea of what being knowledgeable means. Before TOK, this question seemed obvious, even trivial to me. Of course, being knowledgeable on a topic means that I know a lot about it. However, what TOK has taught me this year is that what we understand as knowledge is perhaps a lot more complex. With so many different areas of knowledge with different origins, I’ve realized that to know something in say, the arts, is a lot more different than to know something in an area like mathematics. Through this understanding that to claim to ‘know’ something is almost always a problematic claim,  this has made me question what ‘knowing’ actually means.

Through TOK, I’ve learned to understand how we know what we know, specifically in different areas such as the natural sciences and the arts, and how these are different amongst the different areas of knowledge. For example, while in the arts, a statement like, “I know what the message of the artwork would be through my own emotions and sense” is permissible, if we were to apply a similar statement onto the area of knowledge of mathematics like “I know 2+2=4 because my emotions deem it as so”, this would be problematic. It isn’t easy to argue for the absolute truth and absolute knowledge in the lens of emotion, but it is easy to argue for the absolute truth and absolute knowledge in the lens of axioms and inductive reasoning. I’ve learned that asking questions to an artist like “why did you feel the way you did” not only leads to inconclusive answers, but it illustrates the inherent difference between areas of knowledge such as arts and mathematics: the methodology.

In summary, the main takeaway I’ve had from TOK this year is that my previous definitions and ideas of what knowledge constitutes, and what I ‘know’, is only a large simplification of an actually complex and multi-faceted question of what “knowledge” means, which depends heavily on the actual area of knowledge that is to be explored.