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CORE THEME: KNOWLEDGE AND THE KNOWER

After 16 years of life experience and more than a decade of formal education behind them, TOK students are knowers—in medias res―already in the thick of the action. TOK allows them to step back from the relentless daily acquisition of knowledge to ask: “how we know what we claim to know?” The Knowledge and the Knower core theme challenges students to reflect on themselves as knowers and thinkers, and to consider the extent of the influences of different kinds of communities of knowers to which they belong.

The units that follow consist of hands-on class activities and generative Knowledge Questions. They are arranged loosely according to the official TOK framework—Scope, Perspectives, Methods and Tools, and Ethics. The activities build on the introductory classes in Starting TOK.

I. WHAT COUNTS AS KNOWLEDGE?

Starting TOK
Student knowledge claims
The Map is not the Territory
The Allegory of the Cave
Parable of the blind men and the elephant
Knowing that and knowing how
Justified true belief
Coherence, correspondence and pragmatic theories of truth
Good and bad explanations
Sentience continuum
Instantiation—where is knowledge?
Knowledge evolves
Squidgy, pinkish buttery gloop

Ii. PERSPECTIVES

Figs from multiple viewpoints
Interpretation
What do little kids know?
Octopus intelligence
Feral children and forbidden experiments
Active sense perception
What is it like to be a bat?

III. TOOLS

41 orders of magnitude!
The unreliability of eyewitness reporting
Emotion and intuition
Cognitive bias—heuristics 
Belief without evidence
Pascal's wager

Iii. ETHICS

Ethics vs. morality
Duty, utility and intention
The Seven Deadly Sins
Why ethics is like math and not like math?
Vera Drake: saint or serial killer?
Asch and Milgram experiments