TOK situations about justification
The reasoning that connects evidence to a conclusion. Two knowers can hold the same evidence and be justified in different beliefs if their inferential standards differ. Justification is what separates knowing something from happening to be right about it.
What justification means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- Africa
A song as a political argument
Fela Kuti's long-form Afrobeat pieces named institutions, described mechanisms and accused specific powers, and the Nigerian state responded with raids and…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Justification
- Global
The proof no human has read
The 1976 proof of the four colour theorem relied on computer checking of hundreds of case configurations that no mathematician could verify by hand, and parts…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Justification
- Certainty
- East Asia
Grams of asteroid, years of travel
Japan's Hayabusa2 spent years travelling to asteroid Ryugu to bring back a few grams of material, though telescopes and spectra had already characterised it…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- Oceania
Sailing to Tahiti without instruments
Scholars long argued Polynesian settlement was accidental drift, doubting deliberate navigation across such distances was possible. In 1976 the Hokulea sailed…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Justification
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Testing vision instead of theorising it
Ibn al-Haytham's eleventh-century optics rejected the reigning theory that eyes emit rays, arguing from designed experiments with dark chambers and controlled…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- Oceania
The raft, the genes, and Pacific origins
Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki voyage showed a raft could drift from South America into Polynesia, and the spectacle carried his settlement theory for decades.…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- The Middle East and North Africa
Freedom inside a system
An Arabic maqam performance improvises within a modal system with defined pathways, and a knowledgeable listener can tell when a player has gone somewhere they…
Enduring · The arts
- Justification
- Culture
- India
Ramanujan's unproven theorems
Srinivasa Ramanujan filled notebooks with thousands of results, many stated without proof and attributed by him to intuition or the goddess Namagiri.…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Justification
- Interpretation
- Global
The textbook findings that would not repeat
Large replication projects in psychology found that many celebrated effects shrank or vanished on rerun, implicating flexible analysis, publication bias and…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Justification
- Certainty
- The Middle East and North Africa
Cracking hieroglyphs against a bilingual stone
Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs leaned on the Rosetta Stone's parallel texts and his knowledge of Coptic, and the proof was predictive: readings…
Enduring · History
- Justification
- Interpretation
- India
The textbook called Vedic Mathematics
The calculation shortcuts published in the twentieth century as Vedic Mathematics are useful and teachable, but historians of mathematics find no source for…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Power
- Justification