What are they and how do we find them? Knowledge Issues What are they and how do we find them?

Knowledge Issues arise from knowledge claims. Knowledge claims are simply those instances when we ‘claim’ to know something. For example: * Boulder is in the state of Colorado. * Medicine is the best career to suit my strengths and interests. * God Exists. We all search for knowledge claims to answer questions and to expand and deepen what we know. In TOK, however…

…your aim is not primarily to discover or learn new knowledge claims (though you will learn some). The essential aim is instead to examine the knowledge claims you or others make—to question and challenge the status of those claims. The issues that arise from this act of wondering about and questioning the veracity of knowledge claims are knowledge issues. A knowledge issue is anything that directly refers to our understanding of the world in connection with the acquisition, search for, production, shaping, and acceptance of knowledge. (See bulleted list of general knowledge issues on handout and the reverse side questions one should ask to evaluate knowledge claims.)

KI’s come in many shapes and sizes Really broad: To what degree can we think without language? Very Specific: What should the role of emotion be in making ethical decisions?

But not all KI’s are equal… Good KI’s are Open ended questions that admit more than one possible answer. Explicitly ABOUT knowledge and not about specific subject claims. Couched in terms of ToK vocabulary and concepts: Areas of Knowledge, Ways of Knowing, belief, certainty, culture, experience, intuition, evidence, interpretation, justification, truth, values, Etc. Precise in terms of the relationship between these concepts. See examples A-E on handout. Fill-in KI for ‘Good’ F.

Real Life Situation (An event in the real world at either a global, local or personal level)    The simulation of a Big Bang at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Not A Knowledge Issue (Often this will be a very factual question and will sound like something you will study in one of your subject lessons) What is a Hadron? (This sounds like a physics question) A Weak Knowledge Issue (This will explore the current issue but will tend to lead to a GCSE style For / Against debate where one person argues one side of the case, their opponent argues the opposite and in the end they either compromise or agree to differ. Often weak questions will start with verbs like ‘will’, ‘can’, ‘do’, ‘is’, ‘have’, etc ...) Will the LHC destroy the world? (Simple Yes / No debate style question) A Medium Level Knowledge Issue (This will begin to talk about knowledge more explicitly and will be a more open ended question without a simple for and against answer. Note however, that it is still tied too closely to the original real life situation ) How can we know the LHC is safe? (The word know makes the focus more explicitly on knowledge and the question is more open, so it’s a good question, but we can take it one stage further.) A Strong Knowledge Issue (This should be a question that explores knowledge and how knowledge works in an open ended way at a very high level – it needs to be high level so that you can compare the same issue from the perspective of different AOKs orWOKs. Often strong questions will start with words or phrases like ‘how’, ‘to what extent’, ‘in what way’, etc …) Is there any knowledge that it is too dangerous to pursue? (Notice how this question seems to have taken a huge leap away from the original topic of the LHC and this is what enables you to compare different AOKs – there could conceivably be knowledge that it is too dangerous to pursue in the Natural Sciences, but can the same be said of the Arts, History or Maths? Now this sounds like a really interesting question) a  

Homework: Develop your own example of an effective ‘Knowledge issue.’ Identify a real-life situation as found in a stimulus such as a current event, article, commercial, film, book, picture, song lyrics, etc. that makes an inherent knowledge claim/s. Extract an underlying knowledge issue, framed as a question, that would lead to a fruitful investigation of at least one of the knowledge claims. Required: * Hard evidence of the real-life situation (article, book, picture, etc.) or a clearly written descriptive paragraph. * A strong knowledge issue—be ready to present. Example: See advertisement on next slide—what knowledge issues can you extract?