TOK Essay Title 2 Nov 2021: “Knowledge gained through direct experience is powerful but problematic.” To what extent do you agree with this statement?
While exploring the Tok essay title November 2021, title 2, you may compare the key concepts on the impromptu knowledge gained through senses with the educated or perceived knowledge. The startling thoughts which would entrap you in the confusion web are-
- How effective is the first-hand experience gathered through your WOK, sense perception, in helping you to solve real-life problems?
- Empirical knowledge versus propositional knowledge
- Does empirical knowledge impede cognitive reasoning?
- How effectively does experiential learning address your problem-solving skills and connect with society?
- The problems of personal knowledge in creating bias based on past experience and memory
It is imperative that the personal knowledge you gather through the senses is subject to contextual exposure and is tacit. The exposure is again subjective and is susceptible to different conditional biases. Even the problem of experiential shared knowledge gathered from the community with which an individual connects, is prone to rampant changes in the thought process. So, the imminent question which arises is that to what extent we can believe such empirical knowledge.
Take the example where religious beliefs derived through experience may create a strong belief in theism. At the same time, do you think it can raise questions in the mind to reflect on the belief?
These thoughts do open the room for analyzing the reasons to believe any knowledge derived through experience. Here, the WOK ‘belief’ plays a key role in analyzing how convincing the empirical evidence is to believe the knowledge. However, the connotation of belief, as the propositional attitude of truth, needs to be unpacked to form the premise of knowledge. To be more vivid, it leaves us baffled with the thought that when can a belief be treated as knowledge.