Table of Contents
Tok Essay Titles May 2021
“Labels are a necessity in the organization of knowledge, but they also constrain our understanding.” Discuss this statement with reference to two areas of knowledge.
Labels as differentiating parameter
Labels help us in categorizing groups based on their attributes. Labels are tags that are influencers to guide your perceptions and interpretations by giving birth to preconceived notions. As distinguishing parameters, they create imaging in our brain to learn and perceive the concept or entity labelled and categorized in different groups or umbrellas, helping us often to learn through ‘umbrella thinking’.
It makes knowledge construction easy as we can differentiate things based on their similarities and dissimilarities. Though labelling leads to ease in understanding, it involves bias.
Avoid stereotypes
The overwhelming habit of attributing or tagging through ‘believing is seeing’ is nothing but stereotyping through conformist outlook. In the name of stereotyping scepticism and ignorance often entrap us in the reactionary and hidebound web, making us lose our minds of logical reasoning in identity perception. Don’t you think this is detrimental to the power of reasoning?
Bounded rationality
It is the preconceived notion built up through labelling which makes us gullible to blind faith. When this faith disseminates across generations and time, it turns to a belief system. Such blind faith may make orthodox minds push them to yield to framework effect or echo chambers and behave with bounded rationality.
Such triggering thoughts make us explore the statement through the magnifying lens of different AOKs.
Labelling in Arts
There is a common tendency to acclaim artists’ pieces of work in a judgmental manner being succumbed to the framework effect, where there is a general tendency of viewers to visit exhibitions of reputed artists instead of young achievers.
Do you think that this kind of labelling has a broad, balanced, and open-minded outlook? Does it restrict us to deep dive into the ocean of what we still don’t know about arts and the respective artists’ and their approach?
Labelling in Human Sciences
Studies by anthropologists, auto biographers, and other social theorists show the extraordinary power of labels, categories, and names. Research conducted by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict show behaviours of Americans to be abnormal, such as homosexual acts or going into a trance state. Have you heard of Secondary Deviance? It is when a person labelled for repeatedly defying the social norms. Think about addicts or criminals. When a criminal is labelled, do others dig in to know the reason for the crime- whether it is a deliberative move or self-defence or accident. Why people become addicts? These victims of secondary deviance are ostracized by others with a strong discriminative treatment. In such cases, how do you justify labelling? Will it necessarily propel you to refute the social norms?
Many more questions will baffle you because you may experience speed-breakers like relativism, filter bubbles, primary and secondary deviance while driving along the path of rational decision making in classification.
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