To what extent is certainty attainable?

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.

• Certainty

  Status of Knowledge · primary lens

  The prompt is a direct interrogation of the concept, and its force comes from noticing that certainty is a state of the knower rather than of the claim.

  The degree to which doubt about a claim has been closed off. Certainty is a state of the knower, not of the claim, which is why a claim can be true without anyone being certain of it and why confidence and reliability can come apart badly.

• Truth

  Status of Knowledge

  A claim can be true while no one is certain of it, so the answer depends on holding truth and certainty apart.

  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

Certainty: The certainty available in a field is a feature of the field, not a measure of its rigour. Mathematics can offer proof because of what it is about; the human sciences cannot, and reading that as a deficiency mistakes scope for weakness.

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.

Methods and tools

Certainty: Methods do not only produce results, they produce a warranted level of confidence in them. Confidence intervals, error bars, source triangulation and the standards of proof are all machinery for saying how certain a knower is entitled to be.

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.