Theory of Knowledge

I'm in Lake Tahoe at a training for a class I'll be teaching for the first time in August.

I have to say... I really didn't know a lot about the class. I mean, I had read the stuff in my own subject area, and I had seen a few classes from the other ToK classes on campus, but it's hard to understand the whole course.

Over the last two days, I've shared on Facebook a couple of the WTF-ier kinds of things we are talking about in the training. My parents have both asked -- jokingly, I think-- for a translation.

So what am I doing? Giving them one! Here, now. Of course, my main purpose in writing this is to cement the knowledge for my own sake, and I promise I don't care if you read this or not.

If there was an over-arching question in ToK, it would be "How do we know what we know?"

And everything else sort of circles around that. Do you know how to swim in the same way you know that climate change is happening? Of course not: one of them is personal to you, and one of them you know because you trust the experts. There is knowledge that you know because you have personally perceived it with your senses ("It's dark out") and knowledge that you know because we share it as a culture ("Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn").

ToK talks about the Areas of Knowledge (the disciplines, basically) and the Ways of Knowing (things like Reason, Language, Sense Perception, Memory, Imagination, and Faith).

Personally, I struggled a little with things like imagination and faith being ways of knowing, but we talked about how imagination can do things like *lead* to knowledge (for example, when a scientist imagines how something might work, or a writer imagines a world) and that some ways of knowing things tend to be more trustworthy than others (someone who *knows* there is a God knows it because of faith. We might not share in that knowledge, or we might disagree about that knowledge, or we might question the validity of that knowledge, but it is still how that person knows that thing).

What we will be teaching the students to do, by and large, is take specific examples of real life situations (in fact, we call them RLS) and create "second-order" questions about them. Like, if we saw the picture of the father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande this week and wondered things like, "is it ethical to share that photo" or "what could have been done to prevent this tragedy" or "whose responsibility is this," we might think about how the questions that photo prompted could be made a little more general/abstract and applied to other areas of knowledge.

My group today used that very example, and we initially asked the question, "Is it important to share this photo to create an emotional reaction in order to create change?" But that's still specific to this particular situation, so we generalized more: "To what extent is our perception driven by emotion?"
Why this question worked well was that you could apply it to other areas -- you could ask it about having an emotional response to a piece of art, or whether emotions color our opinions of new scientific discoveries (and we gave specific examples, like how people were disinclined to accept that Pluto was no longer a planet because they were attached to it).  Another group had chosen the same photo, but their knowledge question was, "How can we be sure our perceptions are accurate?" (It might have been a better question to ask, "to what extent can we be sure our perceptions are accurate.) And whereas we applied our knowledge question to Pluto and a poem, they brought up "deep fake" videos.

So far, what I like about it is that it is asking them to think very critically. They might ask how we know that the history text is right. They might ask which of two interpretations of literature is more valid. They might ask whether science is trustworthy when we so frequently see changes in scientific understanding. And we're asking them to wrestle with the answers to those questions, too.

Here's what I think will be challenging for the kids and for me: it is a little fuzzy and squishy and anything-goes. Like, a kid who wants to talk about the Illuminati could certainly talk about how he comes to that knowledge in part via faith and imagination. I mean... it wouldn't be a GOOD presentation, and you could massage it to make it better (preferably if the kid could actually thoughtfully critique his own goofball ideas), but it does seem to invite some of that fuzzy thinking.

And frankly, I was paying serious attention and thinking really hard, and so I was catching some of the mistakes my colleagues in the class were making, and it occurred to me that if these grown-ups with college degrees were fucking it up, my kids were going to struggle for sure.

My dad asked his question as a "shop guy," and I think what I've learned here is that we could totally take a "shop" situation and make it into a ToK topic of study. Like, some schools have gotten rid of shop. That makes me wonder whether people really value vocational education, or whether there's still a place for people who work with their hands as the job market changes. A knowledge question might be, "to what extent can we use existing knowledge to predict future changes?" See, the question is inspired by wondering whether we'll need shop guys in the future, but you could also ask it about science or literature or history.

Anyway, as I said, this was mainly an exercise for myself, so thanks for sticking with me, if you did!

My optional homework-- which I did NOT opt to do -- was to build a course outline, and that is something I actually SHOULD do. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get to that. Good night. Take care.