How do you know what you know?

In over three years of my experience in Life Skills education, I have trained over two thousand students on various aspects of Life Skills for the 21st century. But in the process, I have learned more from the students and the leading institutions that I have partnered with. One framework that I learned in IB schools has stuck with me forever, it is called the Theory of Knowledge.

What is the theory of knowledge (TOK)?

It isn't just a tool to make you a critical thinker but it is something that helps us travel through the maze of life, discovering the outer and inner world to the extent human mind is capable of. The world-both inner and outer-is filled with innumerable problems and crises; TOK is an approach that, in its humble ways, tries to bring us all together to a point from where we can see all these problems in utter lucidity.

TOK asks us to think more than how we have done until now. TOK overpasses the assumption of the postmodernists that they have found the solution to run the world, where the western idea of reason and objectivity is everything.

TOK is the way we think about the world, our understanding of it, our relationship with it, our own emotions and our perspective about it. The central idea of TOK is to defer judgment till the very end and try our best to be a mindful, unbiased researcher of our knowledge, emotions, and biases.

How to implement TOK?

It begins with a reflection of all the prejudices we have had in our mind given to our surrounding, our media and our trust in a single source of information. Sit, and write down on your reflection on why you have believed something, why you have hated things, and why you have loved things. It isn’t about what you were thinking till now but what about why you were thinking? Doubt things you took for granted. Why did you do so, was it because of your own reasoning, own faith, own intuition, or at worst because of your imagination. Have you ever thought about why you believe in something while not in others? The beginning of TOK lies in you doubting your beliefs and being clear that we are not asking you to indulge in hyper-skepticism.

Next step is to develop an appetite for creating knowledge questions, whenever you hear about an incident. For example when you hear about a rape case in your country, you should feel bad about the victim, but rather than just being angry you should ask yourself why rape is a crime, and why some people can go to the extent of doing it, when a person like you considers its an impossible, reprehensible act. And, as you do it, curb your natural urge to see it as a negative or a positive act. Do your research unbiased.

Once you develop the attitude of developing knowledge question, naturally, next you try to find topics from different AOK (areas of knowledge) and pick topics you are well aware of but never thought a lot about, and never doubted yourself. For example

History-

Why Gandhi is such a controversial figure, in spite of whatever opinion you might have of him?

Physics-

Why the world was so excited at the announcement (later proven wrong) that they have found out a particle neutrino that can travel faster than the speed of light, and even if it was admitted to be wrong many people still believe in it?

Mathematics-

Why does Fermat's theorem continue to baffle mathematicians?

Religion-

What is God? (Keep your status of being atheist, or agnostic or believer out of it)

Ethics-

If you find your best friend cheating on a girl who is a good friend, what do you do?

Such topics can be from various subjects, and think about it before you delve into exploring them further.

Now, you need to consider the way of knowledge (WOK) reason, intuition, imagination, faith, memory, sense perception, language, and emotion. You need to see how you have used these to delve deep into your topic. Not only delve into the topic but also observe how you use these various WOKs to conclude things.

How do you make knowledge questions?

Knowledge questions are never about the topic, but a bigger arena that encompasses the topic we haven't taken into consideration. To begin with, you can write as many questions as you can, and then you begin thinking if it’s a knowledge question. Though it’s not easy to define a knowledge question, a simple answer is that it leads you to know bigger fact about the matter, and doesn't consider a single perspective, irrespective of how appealing it seems.

How do we know we are moving in the right direction?

While seeking for answers, we often face a conformational bias. For e.g. if we are educated we seem to give more importance to the intellectual viewpoint than that of a lay person, or if we are a non-believer we see nothing in the view of a faithful believer. As long as we have this thought, we are surely not moving in the direction we intend you to. The right direction is to leave the conclusion to the very end of our search for truth, and even when we reach we should know that it might not be the final conclusion.

Why do we need it?

We don't really need it, if we want to let things happen the way they are happening, and let things go out of our hands, as it had been happening for long. Rapes, murders, violence, wars, etc all are the result of people not spending enough time understanding the perspective of others. We educate ourselves but restrict ourselves to consider perspectives that don't appeal to us. As we go to the 21st century with its own set of problems, TOK will help you measure your steps before you take it. TOK isn't a destination but an ever going journey. It's not only a way of thinking but a way of life.

For more knowledge visit

https://www.theoryofknowledge.net/areas-of-knowledge/