Does our knowledge depend on our interactions with other knowers?

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.

• Culture

  The Knower's Lens · primary lens

  The prompt puts the social character of knowing in question, against the picture of a knower reasoning alone.

  The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.

• Perspective

  The Knower's Lens

  Other knowers are how a knower discovers the limits of their own standpoint, which is a form of dependence that improves knowledge rather than compromising it.

  The position from which a knower encounters something, made up of their history, training, interests and situation. A perspective is not only a limitation: it can make features of a problem visible that no view from nowhere would pick up.

Where the knowledge framework bites

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

Perspectives

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.

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.

Ethics

Culture: Documenting, translating or formalising the knowledge of another community changes it and raises questions of consent, credit and control that the receiving discipline is often poorly equipped to notice.

Perspective: Deciding whose perspective counts as informed is an ethical act with epistemic consequences. Excluding a standpoint usually removes the evidence only that standpoint could have supplied.