TOK: AOK AND WOK

TOK: AOK AND WOK

AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE

WAYS OF KNOWING

PERCEPTION

any of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, by which the body perceives an external stimulus. 2 a feeling that something is the case. 3 (sense of) awareness or appreciation of or sensitivity to: a sense of direction. 4 a sane and practical attitude to situations. 5 reason or purpose; good judgement: there’s no sense in standing in the rain. 6 a meaning of a word or expression or the way in which a word or expression can be interpreted.

REASON

HISTORY

1 a cause, explanation, or justification. 2 good or obvious cause to do something: we have reason to celebrate. 3 the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically. 4 (one’s reason) one’s sanity. 5 what is right, practical, or possible: I’ll answer anything, within reason. 6. think, understand, and form judgements logically. 7 (reason out) find a solution (to a problem) by considering possible options.

1 the study of past events. 2 the past considered as a whole. 3 the past events connected with someone or something. 4 a continuous record of past events or trends.

It’s that first definition that’s important: the study of past events; in other words, not the past itself, but our interaction with it. History is not the past. For that reason, history is constantly being updated and reviewed, and depends to some extent (though this is subject to a great deal of debate) on the perspective from which it is studied.

MATHEMATICS

the branch of science concerned with number, quantity, and space, either as abstract ideas (pure mathematics) or as applied to physics, engineering, and other subjects

EMOTION

Actually, there are one or two grey areas: some argue that maths is not a science, as by Karl Popper’s definition, it cannot be falsified (see natural science), but more on that later. Questions we’re interested in include: why is mathematics sometimes called the language of the universe? How can the axioms of mathematics assist us with the way we present our logical arguments? And, whether maths is a human creation, or if it was ‘discovered’.

1 a strong feeling, such as joy or anger. 2 instinctive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.

Questions that we need to try to address include the ones mentioned in the introduction to ways of knowing – that is, how emotions interfere with how we view the world – but there are some more basic ones we need to consider before getting that far. These include: where do emotions come from? Why do we have them? How have they evolved? How do we feel them? What constitutes an emotion? To what extent can we control them? What relationship do they have with reason? Then we will think more about how they relate to the other ways of knowing, and how they help us to construct the areas of knowledge.

ETHICS

the moral principles governing or influencing conduct. 2 the branch of knowledge concerned with moral principles.

In other words, ethics does not mean the same as morals, it is the study of morals. And with that out of the way, we can move on. Ethics is one of those ‘special’ areas of knowledge that aren’t found in the Diploma hexagon – it’s an extra topic, if you like, that we only seriously consider in TOK. This is both positive and negative: because no one does a study of it elsewhere, everyone feels like they’re an expert in it. But at the same time, it is true that everyone has experience in trying to figure out how to live life ‘correctly’ and ‘right’