TOK RESOURCE.ORG - 2024

AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE

The Areas of Knowledge are highly organized aggregates of shared knowledge characterized by distinct subject matter and methods of inquiry.  Areas of Knowledge are socially constructed and incorporate the TOK Themes in various nuanced combinations. The individual Areas of Knowledge have endured and have evolved. They have commonalities and differences which are important to pinpoint including: specialized insider vocabulary, underlying assumptions and persistent open questions or frontiers.

Knowledge Questions pertaining to all five Areas of knowledge must be explored; utilizing the four framework elements: scope, perspectives, methods and tools, and Ethics.

1. HISTORY

Draw history (including cubist history)
History is not what happened
The map that made a nation cry

2. THE HUMAN SCIENCES

Consilience of Knowledge
Remembrance of things past
Asch and Milgram experiments
Physics envy

3. THE NATURAL SCIENCES

Is there a scientific method?
Nature: an encounter with a real science journal
Biological language delights
Theory of Ignorance
 

4. MATHEMATICS

Proof
Imagining geometry—a thought experiment!
Ideal gas law compared to Euler’s relation
The special case of mathematical induction
This Statement is False
Beguiling with statistics
Platonists and Formalists
Why is ethics like math and not like math?

5. THE ARTS

Shostakovich 8th string quartet
Evoked emotions in the visual arts
Picasso’s lie and Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief
Imagination (with constraints) and living in the subjunctive
Rembrandt self portraits
Duchamp's Fountain and Cage's 4'33''
The value of art
Astonishing high art brain imaging