ToK Prescribed Essays November 2020 Titles 3 & 5 Part 2
ToKTutor • 2 May 2020
‘Novum Organum’ vs ‘Spiritual Diaries’: The Light and Dark Twins
Both Dee and Bacon were driven by a key assumption shared by the intellects of the time: an undying faith that the universe was not random. They believed that behind the suffering and misery and shortness of life, there was an order just waiting to be known. Man was central to this enterprise and as such not only as ‘the most important thing in the universe’, but also as the pivot around which this knowledge ‘revolves’. Bacon’s faith was in humanity’s enduring capacity to know nature and thereby control all aspects of it, the social, economic and political, which laid the path for the innovations of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century. Dee’s faith was in bringing to birth a new order into the world grounded in divine principles but with humanity as the driving force of this movement. Some historians argue that this is how Queen Elizabeth used Dee's knowledge to justify her own imperial ambitions and pave the way for the later Colonial dominance of the English.
The difference between them lies in the fact that while Bacon saw the problems of this assumption, Dee did not appear to do so. Bacon saw the problem of human blind spots when it came to applying the principles of science effectively. What today we call the central ‘biases’ that undermine our ability to gain or produce knowledge originate in Bacon’s thinking about the ‘Idols of the Mind’. Bacon’s method allowed the possibility of human error, assumptions and prejudice. He understood that future scientists would take his ‘principles’ and resolve their problems to adapt them to new environments.
Dee, for all his scientific thinking and knowledge, is an almost forgotten exponent of scientific questioning. Perhaps his over-reliance on magic, obsolete tech and theatre undermined his pursuit of new knowledge, because it was delivered as an ‘absolute truth’ with no further questioning allowed. For a time, nevertheless, it was popular at court and he became a personal consultant to Queen Elizabeth. His shiny, black ‘scrying glass’
exists, however, in the British Museum. It encapsulates the origin story of how too much knowledge came to revolve around us and the problems this can cause. When you look at the surface of the glass, all it seems to do is reflect back a shadow silhouette of yourself. Rather than being a portal to another world of knowledge, perhaps it is also somehow a metaphor for our own blinkered approach to how we come to know what we know…
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...