Can new knowledge change established values or beliefs?

What this prompt is really asking

Each of the twelve TOK concepts gives you a different way into a prompt. These are the ones that do the most work here.

• Values

  Knowledge and Society · primary lens

  The prompt asks whether the direction of influence can run from knowledge to values, when the more common claim is that it runs the other way.

  What a knower or a community takes to be worth pursuing, protecting or preferring. Values operate inside knowledge production and not just around it: they select the problems, set the acceptable risk of error, and decide which trade-offs count as costs.

• Truth

  Status of Knowledge

  Whether new knowledge should change a belief depends on what standing the new claim has, which returns to how its truth is established.

  The property a claim has when things are as it says they are. Whether truth is correspondence to a world, coherence within a system, or what enquiry would settle on in the long run is itself contested, and different areas of knowledge lean on different answers.

Where the knowledge framework bites

Reached through this prompt’s concepts, in the framework’s canonical order.

Scope

Truth: Areas of knowledge do not all mean the same thing by a true claim. Mathematical truth is truth within a system of assumptions, historical truth is answerable to surviving evidence, and asking whether a work of art is true requires a different sense of the word altogether.

Perspectives

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.

Methods and tools

Truth: Each discipline has procedures for provisionally settling what will be treated as true: proof, replication, corroboration of sources, critical consensus. Studying those procedures is the practical way into the question of what truth is here.

Ethics

Values: Values are not applied to finished knowledge from outside. They are already in the choice of question, the acceptable rate of false positives, and the decision about which harms count as costs, which is why value-free enquiry is not an available option.