The Core Theme - Knowledge and the Knower
Lesson 2 - What is Knowledge? (Scope)
Everyone assumes they know what knowledge is. Philosophers have spent 2,500 years discovering that the answer is far harder than it looks.
Lesson 2 - What is Knowledge? (Scope)
Everyone assumes they know what knowledge is. Philosophers have spent 2,500 years discovering that the answer is far harder than it looks.
You have just spent twelve or more years in school, accumulating what everyone around you called “knowledge.” But what exactly were you accumulating? Is knowing a fact the same as knowing how to do something? Is knowing something the same as believing it very strongly? Can you know something that turns out to be false? These questions are not word games, they go to the heart of what education is for, and what the IB is asking you to do.
THE PROVOCATION
Two schools, two ideas of knowledge
Is knowledge something you accumulate, or something you do? The answer shapes everything about how a school teaches you.
Two schools, two ideas of knowledge
Is knowledge something you accumulate, or something you do? The answer shapes everything about how a school teaches you.
There is a live argument in education right now, one you may have experienced without knowing it had a name. On one side: the knowledge-rich curriculum and on the other side: the skills-based curriculum.
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The knowledge rich argument for education is that students cannot think critically, analyse, or reason effectively without a rich store of factual knowledge in memory. Skills rest on knowledge. You cannot evaluate an argument about the French Revolution if you do not know what the French Revolution was. You cannot read critically if your vocabulary is thin. Knowledge first, then skills. I made a short film about this a few years ago.
The skills-based education argument is that in a world of instant information access, what matters is not what you know but what you can do with information. Memorising facts is the wrong goal. Teach students to search, evaluate, synthesise, create. The skill of critical thinking transfers across contexts. Knowledge, in this view, is what you look up, not what you carry. |
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"Pupils who will do least badly at... projects are those who have gained background knowledge from elsewhere... they will do better at such projects than their less advantaged peers, who will not have the background knowledge necessary to solve such problems and who do not have access to alternative means to make good their knowledge deficit." Daisy Christodoulou, Seven Myths About Education
You are sitting in the middle of this debate. The Swiss Maturité leans toward the knowledge-rich tradition: deep content, sustained study of traditional texts and methods, high expectations of factual mastery. The IB leans toward the skills-based tradition: approaches to learning (ATLs), self-directed inquiry, transferable competencies. Neither is simply right. But the fact that you have experienced both gives you something most people in this debate do not have: an insider’s perspective.
Daisy Christodoulou had a short career as a teacher before writing Seven Myths About Education an influential attack on seven assumptions that, she argues, dominate progressive pedagogy and actively harm the students they are supposed to help. The myth she targets most forcefully is that knowledge can be separated from skills, and that skills should come first. She draws on cognitive science to argue the opposite. Without knowledge in long-term memory, working memory is overloaded by the basic building blocks of thought, and critical thinking becomes impossible. The education debate is, at its core, a debate about the nature of knowledge.
But before we can decide who wins that debate, we have to answer a more basic question: What is knowledge? Not what does it feel like, not what do schools call it, but what actually makes something knowledge rather than mere belief, opinion, or information? That is the question TOK is built around. And philosophers have been arguing about it for 2,500 years.
Daisy Christodoulou had a short career as a teacher before writing Seven Myths About Education an influential attack on seven assumptions that, she argues, dominate progressive pedagogy and actively harm the students they are supposed to help. The myth she targets most forcefully is that knowledge can be separated from skills, and that skills should come first. She draws on cognitive science to argue the opposite. Without knowledge in long-term memory, working memory is overloaded by the basic building blocks of thought, and critical thinking becomes impossible. The education debate is, at its core, a debate about the nature of knowledge.
But before we can decide who wins that debate, we have to answer a more basic question: What is knowledge? Not what does it feel like, not what do schools call it, but what actually makes something knowledge rather than mere belief, opinion, or information? That is the question TOK is built around. And philosophers have been arguing about it for 2,500 years.
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Traditional vs Progressive Education
Seah Seng Wee and NotebookLM. This video generated with the help of AI outlines the key features of traditional and progressive education and concludes with an argument that is best to do both if you can! 
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Four big ideas about the nature of knowledge.
Big idea 1 - The classic answer: Justified True Belief
What would make a belief something more than a belief? What would make it knowledge?
“True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long. They run away from a man’s mind, so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason.” - Plato, Meno, trans. G.M.A. Grube.
Big idea 1 - The classic answer: Justified True Belief
What would make a belief something more than a belief? What would make it knowledge?
“True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long. They run away from a man’s mind, so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason.” - Plato, Meno, trans. G.M.A. Grube.
Philosophy’s standard answer to “What is knowledge?” was, for most of its history, both elegant and compelling. Knowledge, the tradition held, is belief, but not just any belief. Knowledge is belief that is true, and that you have good reason to hold. In the language philosophers use: knowledge is Justified True Belief, or JTB. The three conditions are each necessary, and together they were thought to be sufficient. Belief: you must actually hold the proposition, you cannot know something you have never considered. Truth: the proposition must correspond to reality, you cannot know something false. Justification: you must have adequate grounds for your belief, a lucky guess, even if correct, does not count as knowledge.
Consider a simple example. It is raining outside. You look out the window and see the rain. You believe it is raining, you have excellent grounds for that belief (perception), and it is in fact raining. According to JTB, you know it is raining. Now suppose you believe it is raining because your horoscope this morning said “expect precipitation.” It happens to be raining. You believe it, it is true, but you do not have adequate justification. According to JTB, you do not know it is raining, even though your belief is correct. The condition of justification is what separates knowledge from lucky guessing.
This framework traces back to Plato. In the Meno, Plato uses the image of statues of Daedalus that walk away unless you tie them down. True beliefs, he says, are like those statues: they are valuable only when fastened by reasoning. In the Theaetetus, Plato works through the problem more systematically, testing and eventually rejecting several candidate definitions of knowledge before arriving at something close to JTB. For roughly 2,400 years after Plato, Western philosophy treated JTB not as one possible answer but as the answer.
The philosophical vocabulary that comes with JTB matters beyond this lesson. Propositional knowledge, “knowing that” something is the case, is the territory JTB is designed to map. When you claim to know that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, that climate change is human-caused, that 7 is a prime number: these are propositional knowledge claims, and JTB sets out what makes them genuine knowledge rather than mere belief. Keep that vocabulary. You will need it throughout the course.
Consider a simple example. It is raining outside. You look out the window and see the rain. You believe it is raining, you have excellent grounds for that belief (perception), and it is in fact raining. According to JTB, you know it is raining. Now suppose you believe it is raining because your horoscope this morning said “expect precipitation.” It happens to be raining. You believe it, it is true, but you do not have adequate justification. According to JTB, you do not know it is raining, even though your belief is correct. The condition of justification is what separates knowledge from lucky guessing.
This framework traces back to Plato. In the Meno, Plato uses the image of statues of Daedalus that walk away unless you tie them down. True beliefs, he says, are like those statues: they are valuable only when fastened by reasoning. In the Theaetetus, Plato works through the problem more systematically, testing and eventually rejecting several candidate definitions of knowledge before arriving at something close to JTB. For roughly 2,400 years after Plato, Western philosophy treated JTB not as one possible answer but as the answer.
The philosophical vocabulary that comes with JTB matters beyond this lesson. Propositional knowledge, “knowing that” something is the case, is the territory JTB is designed to map. When you claim to know that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, that climate change is human-caused, that 7 is a prime number: these are propositional knowledge claims, and JTB sets out what makes them genuine knowledge rather than mere belief. Keep that vocabulary. You will need it throughout the course.
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JTB and Gettier
TOK is not philosophy, but sometimes it is.
In this excellent cat dominated episode Hank Green talks about some philosophy stuff, like a few of the key concepts philosophers use when discussing belief and knowledge, such as what defines an assertion and a proposition, and that belief is a kind of propositional attitude. Hank also discusses forms of justification and the traditional definition of knowledge, and introduces us to the second big idea below in which Edmund Gettier just totally messed with JTB and how the philosophy world has still not recovered. |
Big idea 2 - The crack in the foundation: Gettier
Can you have a justified true belief that is not knowledge?
Can you have a justified true belief that is not knowledge?
In 1963, a philosopher named Edmund Gettier published a paper two and a half pages long. He was twenty-nine years old and, by his own account, did not think it was much of an essay. He almost did not publish it. He submitted it mainly to have something on his CV. The paper was called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” and it changed philosophy. Gettier’s method was simple: he constructed cases where all three conditions of JTB are met - belief, truth, justification - and yet something has clearly gone wrong. The subject does not seem to know anything. The cases are brief, almost conversational, but their implications are devastating.
Case One: The Job and the Coins
The first case study is about me and Mr Smith. We have both applied for the same job. Smith has strong evidence (the company president told him directly) that I (Mr Jones) will get the job. Smith also happens to know that I have exactly ten coins in my pocket (we counted them together earlier). Smith therefore forms the justified belief: “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.” As it turns out, Smith gets the job, not me. And, by a coincidence that Smith did not know about, Smith also has exactly ten coins in his own pocket. So the proposition “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket” is true. Smith believed it. Smith was justified in believing it. But Smith did not know it, because his belief was about me, Jones, not himself, and he had no idea it applied to him.
Case One: The Job and the Coins
The first case study is about me and Mr Smith. We have both applied for the same job. Smith has strong evidence (the company president told him directly) that I (Mr Jones) will get the job. Smith also happens to know that I have exactly ten coins in my pocket (we counted them together earlier). Smith therefore forms the justified belief: “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.” As it turns out, Smith gets the job, not me. And, by a coincidence that Smith did not know about, Smith also has exactly ten coins in his own pocket. So the proposition “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket” is true. Smith believed it. Smith was justified in believing it. But Smith did not know it, because his belief was about me, Jones, not himself, and he had no idea it applied to him.
Case Two: The Ford and Barcelona
Smith has strong evidence that his friend Jones owns a Ford. Jones has always driven a Ford, has just been seen driving one, and has offered Smith a lift in it. Smith therefore forms the justified belief: “Jones owns a Ford.” He then constructs a further belief by logical addition: “Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.” (Smith picks Barcelona at random; he has no idea where Brown is.) This disjunction is logically entailed by the first belief, so if the first is justified, the second is too. As it turns out, Jones does not own a Ford — he was driving a rental car. But Brown, completely by coincidence, really is in Barcelona. So “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” is true. Smith believed it. Smith was justified in believing it. But Smith did not know it — the proposition is true for a reason Smith had no access to, and the belief is true entirely by accident. Both cases share the same structure. Justification and truth are both present, but they come apart from each other: the justification points in one direction, and the truth arrives from somewhere else. Gettier’s conclusion is stark: JTB is not sufficient for knowledge. Something is missing. What that missing ingredient is has occupied epistemologists ever since.
Smith has strong evidence that his friend Jones owns a Ford. Jones has always driven a Ford, has just been seen driving one, and has offered Smith a lift in it. Smith therefore forms the justified belief: “Jones owns a Ford.” He then constructs a further belief by logical addition: “Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.” (Smith picks Barcelona at random; he has no idea where Brown is.) This disjunction is logically entailed by the first belief, so if the first is justified, the second is too. As it turns out, Jones does not own a Ford — he was driving a rental car. But Brown, completely by coincidence, really is in Barcelona. So “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona” is true. Smith believed it. Smith was justified in believing it. But Smith did not know it — the proposition is true for a reason Smith had no access to, and the belief is true entirely by accident. Both cases share the same structure. Justification and truth are both present, but they come apart from each other: the justification points in one direction, and the truth arrives from somewhere else. Gettier’s conclusion is stark: JTB is not sufficient for knowledge. Something is missing. What that missing ingredient is has occupied epistemologists ever since.
Big idea 3 - The map of knowledge
You are already multilingual. Your languages already know more about knowledge than English does.
You are already multilingual. Your languages already know more about knowledge than English does.
“The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason.”
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
You have an advantage in this lesson that most anglophone TOK students do not have. You know that to translate 'to know' in German you have Wissen and Kennen. And you might also know that Italian has sapere and conoscere and that Spanish has saber and conocer. Every major European language except English encodes, in its most basic vocabulary, a distinction that philosophers took centuries to articulate in analytical terms. If you have ever felt that something was lost in translation when you switched from French to English that a sentence “knew” something in French that it could not quite say in English this is often why.
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Je connais, je sais et je suis.
You already know that the English word “know” is hiding something. In French, to know that Paris is in France and to know Paris are not the same verb. “Je sais que Paris est en France” savoir: to know a fact, a proposition, something that can be stated and verified. “Je connais Paris” connaître: to know a city, a person, a piece of music, by direct experience and acquaintance. Two different relationships with the world, two different verbs. English collapsed them into one word sometime in the medieval period, and anglophone epistemology has been trying to reconstruct the distinction ever since.
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And then there is être. To be. The French philosophical tradition, from Descartes to Sartre, insists on a connection that the English language makes easier to ignore: knowing and being are not separate activities. Descartes’ “Je pense, donc je suis” - I think, therefore I am - is not just a proof of existence. It is a claim that the act of knowing is itself a mode of being. You cannot ask “What do I know?” without already being something: a conscious subject, located in a body, shaped by a history, embedded in a language. Knowing is not a transaction between a neutral mind and a neutral world. It is something that happens to and through a particular kind of being. Which is why Lesson 1, the Knower had to come before this lesson.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell formalised the savoir/connaître distinction in English. He called it knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Knowledge by acquaintance is direct, immediate contact with something e.g. the redness of a sunset as you actually see it, the taste of coffee as you drink it, the texture of a city you have lived in. No description can fully substitute for acquaintance. Knowledge by description is indirect: it is knowing that something has certain properties, often without direct experience of it. You can know, by description, that the tallest mountain on Earth is 8,849 metres high without ever having seen Everest. Your friend in Australia can know, by description, that Geneva is a typical Swiss city without them ever travelling here. Russell’s point: connaître tracks acquaintance; savoir tracks description. French had already done the philosophy.
A related distinction, rooted in the work of another English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, separates propositional knowledge (“knowing that”) from procedural knowledge (“knowing how”). Ryle called the confusion between these two the “Ghost in the Machine” mistake: the assumption that all knowledge is ultimately a kind of inner knowing-that, a proposition held in the mind. But knowing how to ride a bicycle is not a set of propositions about balance and pedalling. Expert cyclists cannot articulate what they know. The knowledge lives in the body, in trained patterns of response. It is not propositional. It is procedural. Does it matter? Listen to the story that comedy legend John Cleese has to tell.
A related distinction, rooted in the work of another English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, separates propositional knowledge (“knowing that”) from procedural knowledge (“knowing how”). Ryle called the confusion between these two the “Ghost in the Machine” mistake: the assumption that all knowledge is ultimately a kind of inner knowing-that, a proposition held in the mind. But knowing how to ride a bicycle is not a set of propositions about balance and pedalling. Expert cyclists cannot articulate what they know. The knowledge lives in the body, in trained patterns of response. It is not propositional. It is procedural. Does it matter? Listen to the story that comedy legend John Cleese has to tell.
This distinction also matters enormously for the education debate you were asked to think about at the start of this lesson. Christodoulou’s argument is partly that “critical thinking” cannot be taught as a pure skill because there is no such thing as context-free critical thinking: it always requires propositional knowledge, knowledge of the domain you are thinking about. The skills advocate’s response might be that procedural knowledge (the habit of mind, the practice of evaluation) genuinely transfers across domains in a way that propositional knowledge does not. Both sides of the debate need this vocabulary to be having the right argument.
A further distinction runs through both everyday language and philosophical argument: knowledge versus belief versus opinion versus information. These are not synonyms. Information is data, a raw signal that may or may not be true and that does not, on its own, constitute knowledge. Belief is any proposition you hold to be true, regardless of whether it is true or justified. Opinion is usually a belief about a contested matter where the grounds are disputed. Knowledge, on the Justified True Belief, requires all three conditions. Keeping these distinctions clear is not being fussy: it is the basic equipment for thinking clearly about what you know and how you know it.
A further distinction runs through both everyday language and philosophical argument: knowledge versus belief versus opinion versus information. These are not synonyms. Information is data, a raw signal that may or may not be true and that does not, on its own, constitute knowledge. Belief is any proposition you hold to be true, regardless of whether it is true or justified. Opinion is usually a belief about a contested matter where the grounds are disputed. Knowledge, on the Justified True Belief, requires all three conditions. Keeping these distinctions clear is not being fussy: it is the basic equipment for thinking clearly about what you know and how you know it.
Big idea 4 - What is knowledge for?
Once we know what knowledge is, we have to ask: why does it matter?
Once we know what knowledge is, we have to ask: why does it matter?
“We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word.”
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The Gettier problem showed that knowledge is harder to define than anyone thought. The forms of knowledge showed that it is more varied than a single definition can capture. But there is a fourth question that education forces us to ask, and that TOK exists to answer: What is knowledge actually for? Why does having it matter? What does it do?
The American media theorist Neil Postman spent much of his career documenting what happens when a culture becomes so saturated with information that the question of what it is for disappears entirely. In Technopoly (1992), he described a society that had declared a “total surrender to technology,” in which information had become its own justification, produced, circulated, and consumed without any governing framework for asking whether it was useful, true, or good. More data. More channels. More content. But no wisdom to make sense of any of it. He wrote that book the same year as I first entered the classroom as a teacher. It was already true then, and that was before the internet, social media and AI. There was a lot of optimism in education in the 1990s about the possibilities of a world when everyone may have instant access to "the best which has been thought and said". Above I posted a link to the most important two and half pages in the history of modern philosophy. Did you click on the link? Did you read it? Alternatively, have you watched any other online videos of cats apart from Hank Green's Crash Course in recent weeks?
The American media theorist Neil Postman spent much of his career documenting what happens when a culture becomes so saturated with information that the question of what it is for disappears entirely. In Technopoly (1992), he described a society that had declared a “total surrender to technology,” in which information had become its own justification, produced, circulated, and consumed without any governing framework for asking whether it was useful, true, or good. More data. More channels. More content. But no wisdom to make sense of any of it. He wrote that book the same year as I first entered the classroom as a teacher. It was already true then, and that was before the internet, social media and AI. There was a lot of optimism in education in the 1990s about the possibilities of a world when everyone may have instant access to "the best which has been thought and said". Above I posted a link to the most important two and half pages in the history of modern philosophy. Did you click on the link? Did you read it? Alternatively, have you watched any other online videos of cats apart from Hank Green's Crash Course in recent weeks?
The psychologist Jerome Bruner approached the same problem from inside education. Bruner argued that knowledge is not a collection of facts but a set of structures. Knowledge is frameworks, narratives, organising principles that allow the learner to place new experience in relation to what they already know. His concept of the “spiral curriculum” follows from this: you do not teach a subject once and move on, but return to it repeatedly at greater depth, because understanding is not an event but a process of progressive structuring. For Bruner, knowledge is what makes meaning possible. And this is why schools and teachers are important in spreading knowledge. They don't just provide information, facts and data, schools provide structure and therefore meaning.
These two thinkers, Postman and Bruner, offer a way of settling the education debate you started with, or at least of reframing it. The question is not “knowledge or skills?” The question is “knowledge in the service of what?” If knowledge is just information, facts to be stored and retrieved, then the skills advocates are right to worry that it becomes the enemy of understanding. But if knowledge is what Bruner says it is, a structured framework for making sense of the world, then Christodoulou is right that you cannot think critically without it. The dichotomy dissolves. The debate was about a bad definition of knowledge all along.
That is why the question of Lesson 2 — What is knowledge? — is not merely a technical puzzle for philosophers. It is the foundational question of education. Every curriculum embeds an answer to it, whether or not the people who wrote the curriculum know that they have done so. TOK asks you to notice the answer that has been embedded in your own education — and to decide whether you agree with it.
These two thinkers, Postman and Bruner, offer a way of settling the education debate you started with, or at least of reframing it. The question is not “knowledge or skills?” The question is “knowledge in the service of what?” If knowledge is just information, facts to be stored and retrieved, then the skills advocates are right to worry that it becomes the enemy of understanding. But if knowledge is what Bruner says it is, a structured framework for making sense of the world, then Christodoulou is right that you cannot think critically without it. The dichotomy dissolves. The debate was about a bad definition of knowledge all along.
That is why the question of Lesson 2 — What is knowledge? — is not merely a technical puzzle for philosophers. It is the foundational question of education. Every curriculum embeds an answer to it, whether or not the people who wrote the curriculum know that they have done so. TOK asks you to notice the answer that has been embedded in your own education — and to decide whether you agree with it.
So what is knowing?
This lesson moved from a live argument in education to the foundations of epistemology and it found that the two are not as separate as they look. The knowledge-versus-skills debate cannot be resolved without first asking what knowledge is. Plato’s answer - Justified True Belief - was compelling enough to last 2,400 years. Gettier’s answer took 2.5 pages and changed the conversation permanently.
Russell’s map of knowledge types gave us tools: savoir (knowing that), connaître (knowing of), knowing how. Your own languages already encoded this map. What philosophy did was make it explicit, precise, and available for examination. The education debate is partly a debate about which kind of knowledge schools value and the French curriculum’s traditional emphasis on savoir, on propositional mastery, stands in interesting contrast to the IB’s emphasis on knowing how to think. Neither is wrong. Both are incomplete without the other which is why you are doing the Double Diploma!
You now have a philosophical vocabulary (JTB, propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance and description, the Gettier problem) that you will use across the remaining six lessons on Knowledge and the Knower. These are not just terms to memorise. They are tools for thinking. Or, in the language you already carry: not just savoir, but être, a way of being in the world as a more careful, more self-aware knower.
This lesson moved from a live argument in education to the foundations of epistemology and it found that the two are not as separate as they look. The knowledge-versus-skills debate cannot be resolved without first asking what knowledge is. Plato’s answer - Justified True Belief - was compelling enough to last 2,400 years. Gettier’s answer took 2.5 pages and changed the conversation permanently.
Russell’s map of knowledge types gave us tools: savoir (knowing that), connaître (knowing of), knowing how. Your own languages already encoded this map. What philosophy did was make it explicit, precise, and available for examination. The education debate is partly a debate about which kind of knowledge schools value and the French curriculum’s traditional emphasis on savoir, on propositional mastery, stands in interesting contrast to the IB’s emphasis on knowing how to think. Neither is wrong. Both are incomplete without the other which is why you are doing the Double Diploma!
You now have a philosophical vocabulary (JTB, propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance and description, the Gettier problem) that you will use across the remaining six lessons on Knowledge and the Knower. These are not just terms to memorise. They are tools for thinking. Or, in the language you already carry: not just savoir, but être, a way of being in the world as a more careful, more self-aware knower.
These are questions for discussion, reflection, and your TOK journal. They do not have single correct answers, they have better and worse arguments.
Next: Lesson 3 - Perspective 1: The Agent
You cannot step outside your own perspective to check whether it is correct. But you can learn to know where you are standing.
- Is a justified false belief more valuable than an unjustified true one? What does your answer reveal about what you think knowledge is for?
- Gettier’s cases show that something can be JTB without being knowledge. What is missing? Do you think the missing ingredient can be defined?
- Can you know how to do something without knowing that any relevant propositions are true? What does this suggest about the relationship between propositional and procedural knowledge?
- Russell argues that knowledge by acquaintance cannot be fully captured by description. Can you think of an example from your own experience that supports or challenges this?
- Is information the same as knowledge? What would have to be added to information to make it knowledge?
- Is the knowledge-rich curriculum really about knowledge, or about a particular type of knowledge? Which type? And whose?
- French has savoir and connaître; English has only “know.” Does a language that lacks this distinction make certain knowledge problems harder to see? What other distinctions might be hidden inside words you take for granted?
- If knowledge requires justification, can there be unjustified knowledge? Or is that simply a contradiction in terms?
- Postman argues that modern culture produces information without wisdom. Is wisdom a form of knowledge? What would it mean to know wisely?
Next: Lesson 3 - Perspective 1: The Agent
You cannot step outside your own perspective to check whether it is correct. But you can learn to know where you are standing.
Questions, assessments, films and other stuff.
Questions to think about
These are questions for discussion, reflection, and your TOK journal. They do not have single correct answers, they have better and worse arguments.
These are questions for discussion, reflection, and your TOK journal. They do not have single correct answers, they have better and worse arguments.
- Is a justified false belief more valuable than an unjustified true one? What does your answer reveal about what you think knowledge is for?
- Gettier’s cases show that something can be JTB without being knowledge. What is missing? Do you think the missing ingredient can be defined?
- Can you know how to do something without knowing that any relevant propositions are true? What does this suggest about the relationship between propositional and procedural knowledge?
- Russell argues that knowledge by acquaintance cannot be fully captured by description. Can you think of an example from your own experience that supports or challenges this?
- Is information the same as knowledge? What would have to be added to information to make it knowledge?
- Is the knowledge-rich curriculum really about knowledge, or about a particular type of knowledge? Which type? And whose?
- French has savoir and connaître; English has only “know.” Does a language that lacks this distinction make certain knowledge problems harder to see? What other distinctions might be hidden inside words you take for granted?
- If knowledge requires justification, can there be unjustified knowledge? Or is that simply a contradiction in terms?
- Postman argues that modern culture produces information without wisdom. Is wisdom a form of knowledge? What would it mean to know wisely?
Exhibition connections
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here
It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to three of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.
Prompt #25: "How can we distinguish between knowledge, belief and opinion?"
This lesson is built around exactly this question. A Gettier-type object, something that tracks the structure of justified belief failing to constitute knowledge, could anchor an exhibition exploring where belief ends and knowledge begins. Consider objects that encode a strong conviction that turned out to be wrong, or a belief that was true for the wrong reasons.
Prompt #11: Can new knowledge change established values or beliefs?
Gettier’s 2.5-page paper changed a 2,400-year-old philosophical consensus in one journal article. That is a remarkable example of new knowledge overturning established belief. An exhibition could examine the conditions under which new knowledge has the power to dislodge what was previously taken as certain, in philosophy, in science, in personal life.
Prompt #7: What are the implications of having, or not having, knowledge?
Christodoulou argues that the absence of background knowledge actively prevents students from acquiring the skills they need to think critically. An exhibition could explore the asymmetry between having and not having knowledge in different contexts, medical diagnosis, political participation, scientific literacy, and what follows from that asymmetry for questions of justice and power.
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here
It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to three of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.
Prompt #25: "How can we distinguish between knowledge, belief and opinion?"
This lesson is built around exactly this question. A Gettier-type object, something that tracks the structure of justified belief failing to constitute knowledge, could anchor an exhibition exploring where belief ends and knowledge begins. Consider objects that encode a strong conviction that turned out to be wrong, or a belief that was true for the wrong reasons.
Prompt #11: Can new knowledge change established values or beliefs?
Gettier’s 2.5-page paper changed a 2,400-year-old philosophical consensus in one journal article. That is a remarkable example of new knowledge overturning established belief. An exhibition could examine the conditions under which new knowledge has the power to dislodge what was previously taken as certain, in philosophy, in science, in personal life.
Prompt #7: What are the implications of having, or not having, knowledge?
Christodoulou argues that the absence of background knowledge actively prevents students from acquiring the skills they need to think critically. An exhibition could explore the asymmetry between having and not having knowledge in different contexts, medical diagnosis, political participation, scientific literacy, and what follows from that asymmetry for questions of justice and power.
Feature films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
🎬 WATCH — Memento by dir. Christopher Nolan (2000)
The protagonist cannot form new long-term memories. He constructs justified beliefs using photographs, tattoos, and notes, an external scaffolding of justification in the absence of normal epistemic access. The film asks whether knowledge is possible without the capacity for continuous belief, and whether justification can be outsourced to objects. My students can watch the film here.
The protagonist cannot form new long-term memories. He constructs justified beliefs using photographs, tattoos, and notes, an external scaffolding of justification in the absence of normal epistemic access. The film asks whether knowledge is possible without the capacity for continuous belief, and whether justification can be outsourced to objects. My students can watch the film here.
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Further reading
📚 READ — Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? by Edmund Gettier (1963)
Two and a half pages. Read them. The paper is freely available online and is probably the most consequential short piece in twentieth-century philosophy. You do not need any background to understand it, Gettier writes with exceptional clarity. Reading a primary source that changed its field is itself a lesson in what philosophical knowledge looks like.
📚 READ — The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1912)
Chapter 5 (“Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”) is the key passage for this lesson. The whole book is accessible and rewards reading: Russell wrote it deliberately for non-specialists, and it remains one of the clearest introductions to epistemology ever written. Available free via Project Gutenberg.
📚 READ — Seven Myths About Education by Daisy Christodoulou (2014)
The introduction and first two chapters are enough for the provocation. Christodoulou writes clearly and polemically, her argument is designed to challenge, and it succeeds. Whether you ultimately agree with her or not, engaging seriously with her case will sharpen your thinking about what schools do and why.
📚 READ — Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman (1992)
Postman is a diagnostician of how information environments shape knowledge and culture. Technopoly extends the argument of Amusing Ourselves to Death: that a culture drowning in information, without organising frameworks for making sense of it, loses the capacity for wisdom. Challenging but rewarding for students who want to push the question of what knowledge is actually for.
Two and a half pages. Read them. The paper is freely available online and is probably the most consequential short piece in twentieth-century philosophy. You do not need any background to understand it, Gettier writes with exceptional clarity. Reading a primary source that changed its field is itself a lesson in what philosophical knowledge looks like.
📚 READ — The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1912)
Chapter 5 (“Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”) is the key passage for this lesson. The whole book is accessible and rewards reading: Russell wrote it deliberately for non-specialists, and it remains one of the clearest introductions to epistemology ever written. Available free via Project Gutenberg.
📚 READ — Seven Myths About Education by Daisy Christodoulou (2014)
The introduction and first two chapters are enough for the provocation. Christodoulou writes clearly and polemically, her argument is designed to challenge, and it succeeds. Whether you ultimately agree with her or not, engaging seriously with her case will sharpen your thinking about what schools do and why.
📚 READ — Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman (1992)
Postman is a diagnostician of how information environments shape knowledge and culture. Technopoly extends the argument of Amusing Ourselves to Death: that a culture drowning in information, without organising frameworks for making sense of it, loses the capacity for wisdom. Challenging but rewarding for students who want to push the question of what knowledge is actually for.