TOK situations about truth
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.
What truth means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- Southeast Asia
Perpetrators, re-enacting
The Act of Killing invited men who carried out Indonesia's 1960s massacres to restage their killings in the film genres they loved, and the perpetrators' own…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- The Middle East and North Africa
Baghdad's translation century
Abbasid Baghdad funded the translation of Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic, and scholars there corrected, extended and argued with what they…
Enduring · History
- Truth
- Culture
- East Asia
Inheriting an actor's name
In kabuki, actors inherit stage names through lineages stretching back centuries, and taking the name signals that the performance knowledge of that line now…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Culture
- India
Calculus before Newton, in Kerala
Mathematicians of the Kerala school, beginning with Madhava in the fourteenth century, derived infinite series for pi and trigonometric functions centuries…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Truth
- Perspective
- Africa
A film industry the textbooks missed
Nollywood grew into one of the world's most prolific film industries through straight-to-video economics, informal distribution and stories tuned to local…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Values
- Culture
- India
A film, a queen, and a fight over the past
Protests over the film Padmaavat turned on a figure known mainly from a sixteenth-century epic poem rather than contemporary chronicles. Crowds defended the…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- East Asia
Mountains that were never seen
Classical Chinese shan shui painters often worked from memory, canonical models and philosophical principle rather than from a particular view, producing…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- India
Reconstruction surgery in an ancient compendium
The Sushruta Samhita describes surgical techniques including nasal reconstruction, and European surgeons in the colonial period documented Indian practitioners…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Truth
- Culture
- South Asia
Painting by prescribed proportion
Tibetan thangka painters work to iconometric grids specifying proportions for each figure, deviation from which makes the image religiously ineffective rather…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Culture