Helpful Reading for TOK: Suggestions

If one wanted to deepen one's understanding of Theory of Knowledge, where would one look?  I have a couple of suggestions.

First, while one can stumble upon small online islands of information in surfing the internet, one more substantial site is theoryofknowledge.net.  It covers all the different aspects of the course and goes into sufficient detail, being neither too superficial nor too erudite that one is left behind coughing in a cloud of library dust. 

Next, I very highly recommend Nigel Warburton's Philosophy: The Basics.  A senior lecturer at the Open University in the UK, Warburton writes with admirable clarity and has the natural teacher's gift of making complicated ideas understandable.

Another great resource is Stephen Law's The Philosophy Gym, a book presenting a series of playful and imaginative dialogues on philosophical problems and issues.  Law is on the faculty of Heythrop College, originally a Jesuit school and since 1970 a part of the University of London.  Like Warburton, he writes lucidly about philosophical problems and makes them understandable and accessible. 

Julian Baggini has written many books, but Making Sense:  Philosophy behind the Headlines seems expressly written for TOK.  He explores philosophical issues raised by news stories.  As the publishing blurb states, "The discussions interweave philosophy and current affairs to create a compelling narrative that challenges how we make sense both of the world around us and of our own beliefs."

Baggini, Law, and Warburton have written other accessible books on philosophy, and also have websites and blogs.  Inevitably perhaps, but also very fortunately, they are more and more present on Youtube through recorded lectures and debates.  Civil, insightful, and always clear, they are very enjoyable to listen to, even if one may disagree with what is said. 

This extra reading is not mandatory, BUT if one wanted to pursue many of the topics and issues further, one could dip into these books and continue a journey in philosophical thought.

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Alone Together

Recently in class we watched a TED talk by psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle, who is a professor at MIT.  She studies the interaction of human beings with technology, and uses hundreds of interviews to gather data for analysis and interpretation.  Her most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011).  Her TED Talk reviews some of the findings of this recent book, raises some interesting questions, and makes some challenges.

Please write a reflection on the talk below.  Some questions for consideration (you need not answer any of them, these are just to stimulate thought!):

• Do you agree with what she says?  If not, would you say that her sampling of people was too limited (how does it break down, for example, by age group?  Should she have interviewed more teenagers?)?  Did she fail to take into account alternative points of view?
• When did you get your first cell phone?  Do you think that it has generally enriched or impoverished your daily life?  Does it distract you from your life or connect you to it?
• What challenges does she make at the end of the talk?
• In relating her research, Dr. Turkle is very emotional.  Clearly this work means a great deal to her.  How do you think empathy is present in her research and interpretation of her findings?
• Does her "pre-technological" value system (her values having been formed before the advent of personal computing and mobile devices) precondition her to view the more intense use of technology in a negative manner? How have values guided her interpretation of the data?
• Do the human sciences put more emphasis on emotion, empathy, and values?

Human Science 1

Introduction

Let's try to answer three questions:

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? 
................. cents

2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
 ................. minutes

3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch  doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
................. days

These three very short questions have sent smoke reeling through the ears of many people, as if mental gears were colliding, and in fact mental gears are colliding.  This test, along with other experiments, have persuaded many psychologists that human beings have two systems of thinking.  The first is quick, intuitive, emotional, and given to generalizing.  The second is slow, deliberate, logical, and given to making distinctions.

Many stumble on the three questions because System 1 leads them quickly and directly to the obvious and incorrect answer.  Those few who get them correct have resolved the problems with System 2.  These two systems of thinking have recently been explained in an engaging book entitled Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (I suggest reading his short autobiography at the Nobel site!).

Have you learned something about human beings? 

Welcome to the world of Human Science!

What are the human sciences?

The area of human sciences encompasses a large number of disciplines that includes  anthropology, archaeology, economics, education, game theory, law, linguistics, political science, sociology, and psychology.  These disciplines seek to apply the scientific method to understand how and why human beings think and feel, behave and interact, as they do.

But unfortunately the scientific method, which already gives rise to issues when applied to natural phenomena, has even more issues when applied to the study of human beings.  The Austrian philosopher Karl Popper argued very well that a scientific theory should be falsifiable and if it were not, then that theory was pseudoscience.  Therefore, psychoanlysis was pseudoscience:  Dr. Freud was always right and could not be proven wrong.  Would this be true for many human sciences?  Are theories in the human sciences like theories in the natural sciences?  And while one can speak of natural laws, such as the four Laws of Thermodynamics (elegantly explained in a brief book by Peter Atkins), are there any laws of human nature? 

Early pioneers of the human sciences, such as Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, believed the scientific method could be applied to the study of the behavior of human beings.  But when we begin to think about it, every step of the scientific method will have issues in this new application.     

The human sciences present much food for thought in a TOK class.

What methods can be used?

In the Natural Sciences the scientific method (Observation, Hypothesis, Experimentation) can lead to results and insights that can be explained with a scientific theory.  One proceeds inductively from observations to generalizations.  Unvarying regularities in nature are known as physical laws.  A scientific theory (i.e., a scientific explanation) is based on evidence and a chain of reasoning, it is falsifiable and has predictive powers.  As Galileo first discovered in his study of mechanics, mathematics is a very helpful tool for precise measurement and analysis of data.  Theories that fail to explain adequately natural phenomena are discarded and one can witness a complete paradigm shift.  Any currently accepted theory is tentatively accepted as the best explanation at this moment.

Methods in the human sciences, on the other hand, can be divided into two categories:  quantitative methods and qualitative methods.

• Quantitative Methods
• These include experiments, surveys, questionnaires, and tests that provide numerical data that can be analyzed for frequencies and trends.  Mathematics is used as a tool of analysis, but statistics that are produced need interpretation. 
• Qualitative Methods
• These include interviews and case studies.  These studies can provide more textured and nuanced data, but it is not precisely measured. 

Experts will often use both quantitative and qualitative methods.  In the next classes we will explore these methods more closely to understand their purposes and their issues.  Already one can see that linguistic interpretation is integral.