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 AoKs Others : reason, emotion, language, sense perception : mathematics, natural sciences, human sciences, history, ethics, the arts : 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?