TOK situations about objectivity
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.
What objectivity means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- India
Restoring murals nobody saw painted
Every intervention on the Ajanta cave paintings, from colonial-era varnishes that darkened them to modern cleaning that removes those very varnishes, embodies…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Objectivity
- East Asia
Restoring what you cannot see
The Mogao cave paintings at Dunhuang have been repainted, damaged, removed to foreign museums and digitally reconstructed across centuries. Conservators must…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Objectivity
- India
Rewriting yesterday's growth rate
When India moved to a new GDP methodology, recalculated back-series produced growth figures for earlier governments that differed sharply from the numbers…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- Global
The economy that does not count the household
National accounts exclude most unpaid household and care work by definitional choice, leaving activity that sustains every economy outside its headline…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- East Asia
The cloning papers that unravelled
Hwang Woo-suk's celebrated human cloning results, published in a top journal and backed by national pride, were exposed as fabricated partly through anonymous…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Responsibility
- Objectivity
- Latin America
The inflation statistic nobody believed
After Argentina's government intervened in its statistics institute in 2007, official inflation ran far below every independent estimate for years, private…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- Latin America
The satellite data that cost a director his job
In 2019 Brazil's space agency published satellite figures showing sharply rising Amazon deforestation; the president called the numbers lies and the agency's…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Objectivity
- Africa
The economy that grew 89 percent overnight
In 2014 Nigeria rebased its GDP calculation to include sectors like Nollywood and telecoms that the old 1990 framework barely saw, and the economy became…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Certainty
- Objectivity
- India
Reading the colonial archive against itself
The Subaltern Studies historians argued that South Asia's archives, largely produced by colonial administration, recorded peasants and rebels only at the…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Objectivity
- India
Whose air quality number is right?
On a smoggy Delhi morning, official monitors, embassy sensors and cheap home devices can disagree by wide margins, and the choice of averaging window changes…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Objectivity
- Global
The crash test body was a man
Vehicle safety testing standardised for decades on dummies modelled on an average male body, and injury statistics show women faring worse in comparable…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- Global
Manufacturing consensus, in the good sense
IPCC reports pass through nested drafting, expert review and line-by-line governmental approval of summaries, producing calibrated language about confidence…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Objectivity