KNOWLEDGE ISSUES (KIs)
Knowledge issues are questions that explicitly address
knowledge. Knowledge issues are best expressed in
terms of ToK vocabulary. For example,
• When is a scientist justified in saying that she
knows something?
• Does intuition help us make moral judgements?
• To what extent does language influence our
understanding of history?
This is the sort of vocabulary you need to help you
construct good knowledge issues:
WoKs: reason, emotion, language, sense
perception
AoKs: mathematics, natural sciences, human
sciences, history, ethics, the arts
Others: truth, certainty, evidence, proof,
explanation, prediction, interpretation,
justification, intuition, experience, culture, values,
belief, objective/subjective
Consider, for example, a real-life situation. Let's say you
know someone who visits an acupuncturist, and you
sense there's some KI mileage here.
How might you go about extracting a good
knowledge issue from this?
You might go through this kind of process.
Acupuncture
Traditional
medicine
Does TM
work?
How can we establish if TM works?
In what ways do TM and science explain the
natural world?
How do we evaluate alternative scientific
explanations?