TOK Question 1

[monorn]

Hello our school is doing IB for the first year and am having some difficulties outlining this question that was presented to us to work on so we can practice for future real TOK essays. This one is just for practice but I want to understand how to go about it.

TOK Question 1

There are many different authorities, including academics, politicians, global organizations and companies, who make knowledge claims.

As an experienced TOK student, what criteria do you use to distinguish between knowledge, opinion and propaganda.

I have basically started with propaganda and paired it up with each of the following:

Academic propaganda

Political/Politicians and propaganda

Propaganda and global organizations and companies.

-Thanks!

[Sandwich]

Hello our school is doing IB for the first year and am having some difficulties outlining this question that was presented to us to work on so we can practice for future real TOK essays. This one is just for practice but I want to understand how to go about it.

TOK Question 1

There are many different authorities, including academics, politicians, global organizations and companies, who make knowledge claims.

As an experienced TOK student, what criteria do you use to distinguish between knowledge, opinion and propaganda.

I have basically started with propaganda and paired it up with each of the following:

Academic propaganda

Political/Politicians and propaganda

Propaganda and global organizations and companies.

-Thanks!

TOK questions are so terribly phrased... "as an experienced TOK student"... xP

Anyway, what you've got to do with this question is push it back to the basics. What is the actual definition dividing knowledge, opinion and propaganda? If somebody said something to you, how would you decide whether it was knowledge/opinion/propaganda? Use the whole "ways of knowing", "areas of knowledge" system if you want to score good marks. For instance would you use reason to help you decide, and how? Would you use perception (in the instance of propaganda)? Is it always possible to distinguish between them, or are the criteria for each clear-cut enough that you ALWAYS know what is propaganda and what is opinion etc.? What about emotion, does that help you tell?

Basically you've got to look at all the ways you can use to work out what is opinion/knowledge/propaganda and try to distill those down into precisely what it is (the 'criteria') you're using.

You'll spot that the first part of the question is more of a springboard than part of the question. I'm pretty sure this isn't a real IB question and more likely something your teacher made up (but I may be mistaken xP) because it's kinda confusingly worded -- the IB would never try and give you a bait to set you on the right track and give you ideas, which is what this question does You can use those areas to draw out examples (trying to build your arguments around examples is a good idea!), but don't accidentally make them the centre of your essay. The big thing you're finding is these criteria, and for that you have to look at how we gain and use the knowledge to help us decide between the three.

Hope that helps a bit.

[Lilly]

Is this someone from newman asking??