How important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge?

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.

• Evidence

  Grounds of Knowledge · primary lens

  Instruments do not passively record. What a tool can detect sets the outer boundary of the evidence available to a field.

  What is offered in support of a claim. Evidence is not the same as proof: it raises or lowers how likely a claim is, and its force depends on how it was gathered, what it was gathered for, and what else it is consistent with. Asking what would count as evidence against a claim is usually more revealing than listing evidence for it.

• Objectivity

  Status of Knowledge

  Tools are often credited with removing the observer, which is worth testing given that the tool embodies the choices of its designers.

  Independence from the particular standpoint of any individual knower. Objectivity is better understood as something a method or a community achieves through checks on individual bias than as something a single knower can simply decide to have.

Where the knowledge framework bites

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

Scope

Evidence: What a field can find evidence for marks the outer edge of what it can be about. Questions whose evidence is unobtainable in principle do not become open questions within a discipline; they fall outside its scope, and often get reassigned to another area of knowledge or to no one.

Perspectives

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.

Methods and tools

Evidence: Every discipline's methods are, in effect, a definition of what it will accept as evidence. A controlled trial, a dated document and a proof step are all evidence, but the practices that produce them are not interchangeable, and a method that cannot generate a certain kind of evidence will systematically miss the claims that would have needed it.

Objectivity: Objectivity in practice is a set of methodological checks on individuals: blinding, pre-registration, peer review, replication, adversarial review. It is built into procedure precisely because it cannot be achieved by an individual resolving to be unbiased.