TOK Presentation: Beauty

[SushiMonstar]

Topic: [b]"How do we perceive beauty in the modern society?"[/b]

Is this TOK-ish enough? ;z or should we change our question? If so, do you have any suggestions?

Me and my partner are also thinking of having a debate on our presentation on:

[b]ANOREXIA : Is it socially or psychologically induced?[/b]

Does anyone have any idea on how to make our presentation better?

Any topics that we might need to include to make it sound TOK-ish?

Thank you for taking your time to read and/or reply! :]

[ibjamminmon]

I think you should go with the anorexia topic. I think it will give you more opportunity to expand your presentation to make it longer if needed. Social issues are easy to evaluate based on the ways of knowing: perception, reason, emotion, language. Use these to discuss the different views the society has on anorexia. For example, when dealing with perception, somebody who has a fabulous life with anything and everything might not understand why someone could become anorexic. Whereas somebody who has dealt with anorexia would perceive the issue differently, and be more understanding of people with the disease.

Hope that helped.

[Aether]

Your question about beauty is definitely not leaving any space for discussion, maybe you should change the phrasing, because it sounds as if you will be enumerating how do we perceive beauty. About the anorexia one, I think that you should also rephrase that one, because the term "psychological" is very vague. By using that word, you are not taking into account, for example that one model of psychology believes that behaviour is caused by a subject's environment. What I think you are trying to say in these question is what induces anorexia? Environmental factors like social pressure? or intrinsic factors like cognitive processes and maybe even biological factors?

[SharkSpider]

IMO anorexia is kinda lame and overdone, because it's so narrow. Beauty as a whole can make a much more elevated and successful presentation if done well. Describing what causes anorexia is not TOK, trying to define some aesthetic principle is TOK. The reason this is so is because TOK is philosophy and not psychology. In general, the examiner comments included that many students mixed the two up in their TOK essays and scored low marks because they were simply using empirical observations to discern how the brain works. The only real question with that subject that fits in to philosophy is a moral question of "is it bad for people to hurt themselves to make other people see them favorably" and then you say "no, our consumerist and shallow society is bad" and that's about it. Sure, there may be a teensy bit of human nature, but in general it's psychological analysis. Truly overdone as a subject, with an answer that is too clear cut and obvious for either case. Either you discover that it's both psychological and societal, though in varying degrees, or you go the other route and find out that beauty is only skin deep. In general I'd stay away from this. Anyways, I'd propose picking beauty itself instead.

How do we determine beauty? Is it natural for humans to have a sense of what is beautiful? Can the sense change? If so, who has the right to determine what is or isn't beautiful? Sure, you'd get the same media determines beauty thing as before, but now you're looking at it objectively, because you can talk about how beauty determines value, if it is a value, etc. Is the beauty of a person comparable to a work of art, minding that art has human expression, whereas beauty is random in its humanity? How about the difference between beauty and sexual beauty? One may find members of their own gender, beautiful (or other people they are not sexually attracted to) but they may find sexuality in something that they don't find beautiful. So... what's the deal there?

Lots of questions, no clear-cut answers. Good TOK material.