TOK situations about explanation
An account of why something is the case rather than merely that it is. Explanations are judged by more than accuracy: scope, simplicity, fruitfulness and the ability to say what would have happened otherwise all matter, and these criteria can pull against one another.
What explanation means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- The Middle East and North Africa
The book that named algebra
Al-Khwarizmi's ninth-century treatise systematised equation-solving for inheritance shares and trade, and its title gave algebra its name while his own gave us…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- East Asia
Move 37
In its 2016 match against Lee Sedol, AlphaGo played a move professional commentators initially called a mistake and later called beautiful, a line no human…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Explanation
- India
Jantar Mantar: architecture as instrument
In the 1720s Jai Singh II built enormous masonry instruments in Jaipur and Delhi, sundials and sextants the size of buildings, to sharpen astronomical tables.…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Explanation
- East Asia
Why did the treasure fleets stop?
Zheng He's fifteenth-century fleets dwarfed anything Europe would float for centuries, then the voyages ceased and records were neglected or destroyed.…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Explanation
- India
Binary patterns in Sanskrit prosody
Pingala's ancient treatise on Sanskrit poetic metre enumerates syllable patterns in ways that parallel binary representation and combinatorial rules formalised…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Finding the direction of prayer
Determining the qibla from any city is a problem in spherical trigonometry, and medieval Islamic mathematicians developed sophisticated solutions and…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- India
The ancient theory of why art moves us
The Natyashastra's rasa theory, some two thousand years old, systematically explains how performance transforms depicted emotion into felt aesthetic experience…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Explanation
- India
Drumming you can speak
Tabla players learn compositions as spoken syllables, bols, before ever touching the drum, and can recite an entire piece aloud. The syllable is the unit of…
Enduring · The arts
- Explanation
- Culture
- Global
The purest mathematics, weaponised for privacy
Number theorists studied primes for centuries as the discipline's most ornamental corner, celebrated precisely for uselessness, until public-key cryptography…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Values
- Explanation
- East Asia
The instrument that felt distant earthquakes
Zhang Heng's second-century seismoscope reportedly indicated an earthquake in a distant province before messengers arrived to confirm it, using a mechanism…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Explanation