TOK Atlas
Teacher account
Element 2 of 4

Perspectives

Whose viewpoints have shaped this knowledge, which viewpoints have been absent, and how the discipline handles internal disagreement. This element includes the historical dimension: how the standpoint of a field has moved over time.

Knowledge questions

Each one is written to be argued about rather than answered. The areas of knowledge underneath are where it has somewhere to land.

  • 01Can a field be rigorous and systematically blind at the same time?
  • 02How does a discipline resolve disagreement among its own practitioners?
  • 03What is lost when a perspective is absent from a body of knowledge?
  • 04Whose questions has this discipline historically taken seriously?

Perspectives in each area of knowledge

Concepts that surface here

Objectivity
A community with a narrow range of standpoints can be internally rigorous and still systematically blind. This is why the diversity of perspectives inside a discipline is an epistemic matter and not only a political one.
Perspective
This element exists because the standpoint of the knower is not noise to be removed. Whose questions a field has taken seriously, and whose it has not, is part of the content of what that field currently knows.
Interpretation
Interpretation is where perspective does its work. Two historians with the same archive, or two economists with the same dataset, can disagree without either misreading anything, because they bring different accounts of what the material is evidence of.
Culture
A discipline is itself a culture, with inherited vocabulary, exemplars and a sense of which problems are respectable. Its historical development is the record of that culture changing, which is why this element includes the past.
Power
Which perspectives are present in a field is largely decided by who was admitted, funded, published and cited. The composition of a discipline is a record of the power exercised over its formation.
Values
What a community values determines which problems look important, so the value commitments of a discipline and the range of perspectives inside it reinforce one another over time.