What exactly is TOK? I'm in the class and everything but it's been two weeks in IB. Still not quite sure what it is.
I’m starting my second year of IB and I still don’t know what the hell TOK is but I’ll try my best to explain.
DO NOT MIX UP TOK WITH PHILOSOPHY OR YOU WILL ACTUALLY FAIL TOK
Yes, when explaining to Non-IB students what TOK is, I save the trouble and tell them it’s practically a certain branch of philosophy, but if you are in the IB do not fall down that trap - just because you don’t understand what the hell your teacher is talking about, doesn’t mean you’re in philosophy.
If you want to understand it as closely as possible, it’s most similar to the branch of Philosophy called Epistemology, which focuses on the study of knowledge.
Ideally, the point of TOK is to answer one thing: “How do we know what we know?”
This question is so broad, you will leave every class questioning the existence of the chair you sit on or the language you speak (According to TOK, it’s all gibberish. Not important. According to TOK, this post would be gibberish. Not real. A false way to make ourselves identify a problem and then work towards solving it. This won’t make any sense to you, don’t worry, you’ll get it when you begin your presentation next year.)
TOK is broken down into your Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowing. This helps us understand the different aspects of “How we know what we know”
Ways of Knowing: Intuition, Perception, Emotion, Reason, Memory, Language, Imagination, Faith.
Areas of Knowing: Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Human Sciences, History, Arts, Ethics, Religious Knowledge Systems, Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
Whenever we talk about anything to do with TOK we must reference WOKs and AOKs. There’s no question about it. It’s sort of our ‘classification’ of our lecture/point.
With TOK we focus on two things:
Shared Knowledge - knowledge more than one person shares. E.g. Christianity is knowledged shared between Christians
Personal Knowledge - knowledge only we have. E.g. Your opinion on something
With TOK we try and link these two types of knowledge and break them down to study the different aspects of each section - how do they interact, how do we acquire them etc.
When you’re studying TOK you usually use real life examples to link all your ideas together, but your discussion is NOT about the real-life situation - that’s just a way to introduce what you want to discuss - it’s about knowledge and the underlying methods in which it is constructed.
For example, here are possible TOK questions:
To what extent does shared knowledge influence our personal knowledge?
To what extent can Mathematics be considered a Language?
Check out more examples here. Do not copy titles from the internet for your own presentations, the IB is very strict about plagiarism and will catch you out.
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking TOK is based on ethical issues - it’s not, but there is a branch of ethics involved in TOK. If your question is based on ethics get rid of it immediately - it will steer you down the wrong route.
You can look for more TOK posts on my Navigation Page: IB > TOK
I didn’t really want to just copy paste definitions from other websites, because I know when I was confused with what TOK was, I didn’t find any of those sites/explanations useful, but I really hope this helped clear things up!
