ToK Prescribed Essays November 2020 Titles 3 & 5 Part 1
ToKTutor • 2 May 2020
‘Novum Organum’ vs ‘Spiritual Diaries’: The Light and Dark Twins
The Elizabethan Age in England was as full of tensions as any other historical period in any other country. With new renaissance ideas taking root, such as ‘humanism’, which promoted the centrality of the human mind in the universe, there emerged a kind of dissonance between what we already knew and what we did not know. What we already knew was based on the power of religious knowledge to shape all aspects of life. What we did not know and were about to was the power of scientific knowledge to give humans more independence and control over their lives.
In this turmoil of transition from the ‘old’ to a newer ‘modern’ world, emerged two English contemporaries of Shakespeare: John Dee and Francis Bacon. While both men were obsessed about how to discover new knowledge, the questions they asked in acquiring this knowledge came from very different places.
Bacon is considered to be the father of modern science, whose ‘Novum Organum’
sets out the principles of thinking which have evolved into the scientific method as we know it today. He proposed a repetitive process of observation and evidence gathering, aimed at testing our hypotheses about how the natural world works, using the available technology of the time. Part of this process is our ability to ask questions about what we already know as a way of refining our hypotheses and making our knowledge of the natural world increasingly closer to the truth. This slow but steady process of incremental edits of what we already know prefigured Popper’s idea of scientific ‘falsification’ and explains how knowledge evolves over time towards more accuracy.
Dee is considered to be a ‘Magus’, existing in the murkier world between the old superstitions and the new science. His ‘Spiritual Diaries’
encapsulate a mode of questioning based not on books or what people already knew in their minds but on a ‘method of divination’, asking angels for answers to his most pressing need to know what no one else knew. His approach was, strangely enough, meticulously scientific in a broad Baconian sense. With the help of a piece of new-old technology of his time, the Aztec manufactured ‘Obsidian Mirror’, Dee was able to build new knowledge by combining observations he made during ‘scrying’ sessions (talking one-to-one with angels). He would follow this up with deep analyses of the data to work out which were true revelations from angels and which were the tricks played by demons. In this sense, Dee himself showed he believed in the progress of knowledge, whether or not this progress was ‘real’ in the scientific sense.
Thinking about the various challenges involved when experts transfer knowledge between contexts creates various challenges for the experts who and whether or not they underestimated these challenges. Does the analogy of growing tomatoes help understand the question?
‘Fresh’ has the connotations of ‘new’ or ‘innovative’. And when something new arrives into the world, it’s usually accompanied by change. Often it’s hard to measure the impact of change until time has passed and we can look back with the cool, detached eye of objectivity.
Human beings are at the centre of the knowledge universe. This is why in your TOK studies everyone explores the ‘Core Theme’. Figure 3 pictures ‘Me as a knower and thinker’. Anyone who pursues knowledge, whether an expert or not, will at some point have to reflect on the fact that there are various factors, both internal and external, which either promote or constrain their endeavours.
Do we truly need custodians of knowledge, those who safeguard and preserve our collective wisdom throughout time?
Let’s look at two alternative senses in which knowledge might be acquired within ‘bubbles’. One within the Natural Sciences. The other with the Arts. In the former, we explore the notion of scientific 'paradigms'. In the Arts, we look at the notion of 'storyverses' or fictional worlds into which we imaginatively immerse ourselves...
HS experts are supposed to be trained to communicate difficult knowledge about mental health conditions and yet our expectations sometimes ignore the fact that diagnosing and treating mental illnesses is a messy business and not always easy. New tech allows experts to create visualisations which in turn can be helpful in communicating the complexities of a case and potential treatments...
Artists are like magpies who copy from other artists. This form of ‘copying’ is the broad sense of the term ‘replicability’ in this Title. From one point of view, such ‘replication’ leads to the creation of original works of art which make us see the world anew. From another point of view entirely, such copying borderlines on artistic plagiarism, fraud or forgery...
Exploring how a song about apartheid turned into an anthem, voicing the strength of those who have been marginalised from society, sometimes in a violent way. To what extent does such exclusion actually help build resilience and self-knowledge? How far is it harmful?
There is a branch of knowledge, akin to pseudo-scientific knowledge like ‘flat Earth theory’, in which one can seem to have absolute certainty and full confidence, because the truth of that knowledge is somehow ‘guaranteed’ or ‘underwritten’ by a higher power. Faith-based knowledge.
Now, consider a clichéd example when we seem to have the utmost certainty and confidence in knowledge and they both seem to be moving in the same direction: 2 + 2 = 4. On the one hand, this is something you cannot doubt, isn’t it? You know this with 100% certainty.. You might actually be very confident about your knowledge...