The Core Theme - Knowledge and the Knower
Lesson 4 - Perspective 2: Structure
You did not choose the perspective you were given. But you can learn to ask who built it, and what it was built to hide.
Lesson 4 - Perspective 2: Structure
You did not choose the perspective you were given. But you can learn to ask who built it, and what it was built to hide.
This advert below begins as a fairy tale. Three pigs, three houses, a wolf. You know this story before it starts. Then it becomes a news event: a front page, a television broadcast, a blog, a protest. And with each new telling, the same events look different. The pigs move from defendants to victims to activists. The wolf shifts from predator to property developer to a man with a pre-existing health condition. Nobody is lying. The facts do not change. But with each new voice that enters the story, what the story means changes entirely.
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The Guardian made this advert in 2012, twenty-six years after the one we used to open Lesson 3. In that earlier film, the point was about angle: the same event, two cameras, two completely different readings. The lesson was that you can only ever see from somewhere, and where you stand shapes what you see. That lesson was about you the agent, the individual knower, located and limited. This lesson begins from that recognition and pushes it further. Because if you can only ever see from somewhere, it matters enormously where that somewhere is, and whether you chose it. Most of us did not. The perspective you bring to knowledge was largely constructed before you arrived: by the language you think in, by which stories your culture treated as worth telling, by whose voices were heard as authoritative and whose were ignored or never recorded at all. These are the structures that shape perspectives.
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The question this lesson asks is not only what does the knower see, but who decided what the knower would be shown. The advert contains a small answer. The wolf's version of events enters late, and nearly not at all. It requires a deliberate act, someone deciding to give him a voice, or the picture to shift. Power is not only about who argues most loudly. It is about who gets into the room where the story is being written, and whose absence from that room nobody notices. Lessons 1 and 2 asked what knowledge is and who produces it. Lesson 3 asked what the knower sees, given that they can only ever see from somewhere. This lesson asks who structured that somewhere, and whose knowledge never made it into the story at all.
THE PROVOCATION
Did you choose what you see?
To feel free online is not to be free. It is to move within a space someone else designed, and to have mistaken their choices for your own.
Did you choose what you see?
To feel free online is not to be free. It is to move within a space someone else designed, and to have mistaken their choices for your own.
Think about the last time you opened Instagram, or TikTok, or YouTube. You did not go looking for what you found. It was already there, waiting. A video, a post, a story, chosen for you before you arrived. It felt like your feed. It felt personal. In a sense it was: the system had been watching you long enough to know what would make you stop scrolling. But you did not build that system, and it was not built for you. It was built by engineers optimising for one thing: the number of seconds you keep looking at the screen. What you see is not a reflection of what matters, or what is true, or what would be good for you to know. It is a reflection of what has historically made people like you stop and stare. The perspective was constructed before you opened the app. You inherited it the moment you signed in.
"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’... That means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.... And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you... more likes and comments.” Sean Parker, co-founder of Facebook, Axios event, Philadelphia, 9 November 2017 (BBC 2017)
This is not a lesson about whether social media is good or bad. That question is being debated everywhere right now by researchers, governments, parents and doctors, almost always without asking you. We will come back to that. For now, consider just the mechanism itself: a system that feels like a window onto the world, but is in fact a room someone else designed, with no visible walls. The room was built to hide something. Not through deception exactly, but through invisibility. You are not shown what the algorithm does. You are not shown why you see what you see. You are not shown what you are not seeing. The most powerful thing about the structure is that it does not feel like a structure at all. It feels like your choice.
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An Anxious Generation
Penguin Random House Audio Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963) is an American social psychologist and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, known for work on moral psychology and political polarization, including The Righteous Mind. In The Anxious Generation (2024), he argues that the shift to smartphone-based childhoods and declining independent play have driven rising youth anxiety and depression. Haidt advocates delaying smartphones, reforming social media, and restoring play-based childhoods. |
Five big ideas about perspective and structure.
Big idea 1 - Power shapes knowledge
Dominant ideas do not impose themselves by force. They persuade. They present themselves as common sense, as the way things simply are.
Big idea 1 - Power shapes knowledge
Dominant ideas do not impose themselves by force. They persuade. They present themselves as common sense, as the way things simply are.
"The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as 'domination' and as 'intellectual and moral leadership'."
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Hoare & Nowell-Smith
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Hoare & Nowell-Smith
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist government in 1926. He spent the next eleven years writing, secretly, in code, under prison censorship, the notebooks that would become one of the most influential bodies of political thought of the twentieth century. His central question was one that still shapes this lesson directly: how do ruling groups maintain their power without constant recourse to violence?
His answer was hegemony. Gramsci distinguished between two ways in which a dominant social group exercises supremacy. The first is domination, direct coercive control through the state, the law, the police, the army. The second is intellectual and moral leadership: the capacity to make a particular worldview appear as universal common sense, so that those who live under it come to accept it, reproduce it, and defend it as their own. It is this second form that Gramsci called hegemony, and it is this second form that is most relevant to the question of whose knowledge counts.
The mechanism is consent rather than compulsion. As Gramsci puts it, the dominant group secures the 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life — a consent that is not freely chosen in any full sense, but that is produced by the prestige and authority that hegemonic institutions enjoy. Schools teach certain histories and not others. Newspapers define certain voices as credible and others as fringe. Scientific institutions determine which questions are worth funding and which methods produce valid knowledge. None of this requires orders from above. It operates through the normal functioning of institutions that most people most of the time experience as neutral.
His answer was hegemony. Gramsci distinguished between two ways in which a dominant social group exercises supremacy. The first is domination, direct coercive control through the state, the law, the police, the army. The second is intellectual and moral leadership: the capacity to make a particular worldview appear as universal common sense, so that those who live under it come to accept it, reproduce it, and defend it as their own. It is this second form that Gramsci called hegemony, and it is this second form that is most relevant to the question of whose knowledge counts.
The mechanism is consent rather than compulsion. As Gramsci puts it, the dominant group secures the 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life — a consent that is not freely chosen in any full sense, but that is produced by the prestige and authority that hegemonic institutions enjoy. Schools teach certain histories and not others. Newspapers define certain voices as credible and others as fringe. Scientific institutions determine which questions are worth funding and which methods produce valid knowledge. None of this requires orders from above. It operates through the normal functioning of institutions that most people most of the time experience as neutral.
This is where Gramsci connects directly to Michel Foucault, who extended a similar insight into the specific machinery of knowledge production. For Foucault, every society maintains a 'regime of truth': its own mechanisms for distinguishing true statements from false ones, its own procedures for sanctioning who is entitled to speak truthfully, and its own categories that determine what can even be thought. As Foucault writes in Power/Knowledge: 'Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.' Where Gramsci asks how dominant groups maintain consent, Foucault asks how the very categories of knowledge, normal/abnormal, expert/layperson, evidence/anecdote, are themselves products of power.
The connection to Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, introduced in Lesson 1, is direct. Fricker describes testimonial injustice: the deflation of a speaker's epistemic credibility due to identity prejudice. A woman reporting pain to a physician, a Black man testifying in court, a working-class student proposing an interpretation in seminar, all face the possibility that their claim will not simply be rejected but will not quite register as a serious knowledge claim at all. Gramsci gives this a political structure: whose voice counts as knowledge is not accidental. It reflects which groups have secured intellectual and moral leadership, and which have not.
The connection to Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, introduced in Lesson 1, is direct. Fricker describes testimonial injustice: the deflation of a speaker's epistemic credibility due to identity prejudice. A woman reporting pain to a physician, a Black man testifying in court, a working-class student proposing an interpretation in seminar, all face the possibility that their claim will not simply be rejected but will not quite register as a serious knowledge claim at all. Gramsci gives this a political structure: whose voice counts as knowledge is not accidental. It reflects which groups have secured intellectual and moral leadership, and which have not.
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Antonio Gramsci, a founder member of the Italian Communist Party was arrested under Benito Mussolini’s regime in 1926, a prosecutor declared: “We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” Imprisoned in harsh conditions, Gramsci continued writing his Prison Notebooks, refining his ideas on power and culture. His health deteriorated severely, and although released shortly before, he died in 1937 as a result of his imprisonment, underscoring the regime’s fear of intellectual resistance.
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Big idea 2 - Silenced pasts
History is not what happened. It is what was allowed to be said about what happened, and by whom
History is not what happened. It is what was allowed to be said about what happened, and by whom
"Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)." Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995)
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In 1995, the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot published Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, a book that asks, with great precision, how some events come to be remembered as history and others disappear. Trouillot's argument is that silences do not happen by accident. They are produced at four distinct moments in the historical process: at the moment of fact creation (what gets noted, recorded, archived); at the moment of fact assembly (what gets retrieved and processed); at the moment of narrative construction (what gets included in the story told); and at the moment of retrospective significance (what gets remembered as mattering).
Each of these moments is a site of power. Who owns the archive? Who funds the historian? Whose community generates the documents that get preserved, and whose leaves only gaps? Trouillot illustrates this with the Haitian Revolution, the world's first successful slave rebellion, which in 1804 produced the first Black republic in history. At the time, European and American commentators could barely process the event. It was not merely unexpected, it was, in Trouillot's word, 'unthinkable': it did not fit within the conceptual frameworks available to those who wrote history. A revolution led by enslaved people, against the most profitable colony in the world, succeeding — this could not be integrated into the narratives of history that Europe was producing. So it was minimised, misrepresented, and ultimately forgotten in a way that the American or French revolutions were not. Remind youself of what you studied in the history programme of the Swiss Matu, did Haiti feature? Why didn't Mr Jones teach it? |
The Three Little Pigs advertisement enacts this precisely. In the first telling, the radio bulletin, the wolf simply dies. His story is not told at all. In the newspaper version, the pigs are criminals, the wolf a victim, but the pigs' version, the original fairy tale's version, has been suppressed. In the internet version, the wolf's community has a history that was never part of the story at all: a context of displacement and economic violence that renders the whole episode in a different moral light. Each shift shows a silence being partially lifted, or a new one being imposed.
For TOK, Trouillot's framework is particularly powerful because it makes the production of historical knowledge concrete and analysable. It is not enough to say 'history is written by the victors', a truism that explains nothing. The question is: at which moment, by which mechanism, through which institutional arrangement, did the silence enter? Answering that question requires the same critical tools that the knower applies to all knowledge claims: who produced this? What are their interests? What is absent from the account, and why?
For TOK, Trouillot's framework is particularly powerful because it makes the production of historical knowledge concrete and analysable. It is not enough to say 'history is written by the victors', a truism that explains nothing. The question is: at which moment, by which mechanism, through which institutional arrangement, did the silence enter? Answering that question requires the same critical tools that the knower applies to all knowledge claims: who produced this? What are their interests? What is absent from the account, and why?
Big idea 3 - Whose data gets collected?
When half of humanity is missing from the data, the knowledge built on that data is not universal. It is partial, and it acts as if it is not
When half of humanity is missing from the data, the knowledge built on that data is not universal. It is partial, and it acts as if it is not
"One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don't get said at all. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man."
Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women (2019)
Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women (2019)
In 2019, the British journalist Caroline Criado Perez published Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. The book's argument is simple: in almost every domain of data collection including medicine, urban planning, economics, engineering and technology the default research subject is male. Women have been systematically excluded from data. The resulting 'knowledge' is presented as universal but is in fact partial. The invisible women of the title are not invisible in daily life. They are invisible in the data, and it is the data that drives decisions.
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Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women
The crash test dummy, used in virtually every vehicle safety test since the 1970s, was designed on a male body. Female dummies were introduced eventually, but often as scaled-down male dummies rather than female bodies, failing to account for the different ways women's necks, spines, and seatbelt positioning interact with impact forces. Women are 47% more likely than men to be seriously injured in car crashes, even controlling for other factors. The data was there. The question was never asked, because the standard body, the body for which the world was designed, was male.
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The pattern repeats across domains. Heart attack symptoms in women (nausea, jaw pain, fatigue) differ from the classic male presentation of chest pain. Medical education has historically focused on the male symptom profile, with the result that women presenting with atypical symptoms are significantly more likely to be misdiagnosed, sent home, or have their symptoms attributed to anxiety. Drug trials, until recently, routinely used male subjects on the grounds that female hormonal variation would complicate the data. The drugs then approved on that data were prescribed to everyone, despite the fact that many drugs metabolise differently in female bodies.
The standard office temperature, 21–22 degrees Celsiusk is based on a metabolic rate formula developed in the 1960s using a 40-year-old male weighing 70 kilograms. Women's resting metabolic rate is, on average, lower. In a room calibrated for the male standard, women are consistently cold. This sounds trivial until you multiply it across every domain of design, infrastructure, and policy: city planning that prioritises car journeys over walking routes (women walk more); economic statistics that do not count unpaid care work (predominantly done by women); AI trained on data sets that replicate historical bias. The omission is not malicious. It is structural and it is precisely this structural character that Foucault's analysis of knowledge production predicts.
Criado Perez's work connects directly to Lesson 4's central question because it shows that the problem of whose knowledge counts is not only about whose voice is heard in argument. It is about whose body, whose experience, and whose life is treated as the data from which knowledge is built.
Big idea 4 - Manufacturing consent
The media does not tell you what to think. It tells you what to think about, and who is worth listening to when you think it.
The media does not tell you what to think. It tells you what to think about, and who is worth listening to when you think it.
"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society." Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent (1988)
I said in the introduction to these lessons that this is my TOK course. I meant that as an indication of the importance of perspective and understanding how important my reading (and watching) have been to making me, the teacher. You will see this perspective in the history section of TOK of course, and you may have noticed that Gramsci features as one of the eyes in the logo for this website. When I was university in 1988, the linguist Noam Chomsky and the media analyst Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. This book and the especially the documentary made a few years later (I'm a film studies teacher remember - a short extract is below) would have a significant impact on me. Their central argument is that the mass media in liberal democracies does not function as a watchdog on power, it functions as a mechanism for producing consent among the population for the policies and interests of powerful elites. This is not a conspiracy theory. It does not require editors to receive instructions from governments or proprietors. It operates through the structure of the media system itself: through five filters that determine which stories get told, which sources are considered credible, and which frames are applied.
The five filters are: media ownership (large media organisations are corporations with shareholders and financial interests); advertising revenue (most media is funded by advertisers, not readers, which makes advertiser interests structurally significant); sourcing (journalists rely on official sources (government, corporations, recognised experts) whose output is cheap, plentiful, and pre-formatted for news); flak (the organised criticism that powerful interests deploy against reporting they dislike, making certain stories costly to publish); and dominant ideology (the shared assumptions and frameworks that define the range of acceptable opinion). Together, these filters do not require censorship. They produce it.
The five filters are: media ownership (large media organisations are corporations with shareholders and financial interests); advertising revenue (most media is funded by advertisers, not readers, which makes advertiser interests structurally significant); sourcing (journalists rely on official sources (government, corporations, recognised experts) whose output is cheap, plentiful, and pre-formatted for news); flak (the organised criticism that powerful interests deploy against reporting they dislike, making certain stories costly to publish); and dominant ideology (the shared assumptions and frameworks that define the range of acceptable opinion). Together, these filters do not require censorship. They produce it.
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Manufacturing Consent: Chomsky and Herman
Chomsky's Philosophy Through the “propaganda model,” it argues that ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and ideology shape news content, subtly guiding public opinion. The film combines interviews, lectures, and case studies to show how dissenting voices are marginalised while dominant power structures are reinforced.
This is slightly longer than most of the extracts I have chosen for the website, but it is worth it. A full version of the film is available at the end of this page. |
The Guardian advertisement repays re-watching through this lens. The Guardian presents itself as the platform for open, multi-perspective journalism, the platform that will show you all the Little Pigs' stories, including the wolf's. But the Guardian is also a large media organisation with advertisers, institutional relationships with government and expert sources, and a political editorial position. The advertisement is both a genuine statement of journalistic values and a piece of institutional self-promotion. Both things are true simultaneously, which is precisely Chomsky and Herman's point: the media's commitment to open information and its structural interests in managing that information are not contradictory. They coexist within the same institution.
For TOK, the propaganda model is most useful not as a conspiracy theory but as an analytical tool. When evaluating a media claim, the relevant questions are not only 'is this true?' and 'what is the evidence?' but also: who owns this outlet? Who are its advertisers? Whose definition of credible expertise does it rely on? What would be the institutional cost of publishing the contrary position? These are structural questions about the knowledge-production system, not just about the individual claim. And they connect directly back to Foucault: the regime of truth operates not through individual bad faith, but through institutions that reward certain kinds of knowledge production and make others difficult or costly.
For TOK, the propaganda model is most useful not as a conspiracy theory but as an analytical tool. When evaluating a media claim, the relevant questions are not only 'is this true?' and 'what is the evidence?' but also: who owns this outlet? Who are its advertisers? Whose definition of credible expertise does it rely on? What would be the institutional cost of publishing the contrary position? These are structural questions about the knowledge-production system, not just about the individual claim. And they connect directly back to Foucault: the regime of truth operates not through individual bad faith, but through institutions that reward certain kinds of knowledge production and make others difficult or costly.
Big idea 5 - Indigenous knowledge systems
The word 'traditional' has been used to mean primitive. It actually means ancient and rigorous, which is not the same thing at all.
The word 'traditional' has been used to mean primitive. It actually means ancient and rigorous, which is not the same thing at all.
"My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide. But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer. Why two flowers are beautiful together would violate the division necessary for objectivity."
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 'Asters and Goldenrod
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 'Asters and Goldenrod
The four big ideas in this lesson, Foucault on power and knowledge, Trouillot on historical silence, Criado Perez on whose data is collected, Chomsky and Herman on who controls the media all converge in their most complete form in the treatment of indigenous knowledge systems. The question 'whose knowledge counts?' is nowhere more starkly answered than in the five-hundred-year history of the relationship between Western scientific institutions and the knowledge traditions of indigenous peoples worldwide.
The botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer opens Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) with a graduate seminar scene: she tells her professor that she wants to study why asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together. He tells her she has asked an unscientific question. 'Beauty' is not a scientific category. To ask why something is beautiful is to ask a question about experience, about relationship, about value, none of which belong in the laboratory. Kimmerer spent her career demonstrating that this exclusion is not just a question of method. It is a question of what counts as knowable at all, and that the exclusion of relational, experiential, and community-held knowledge from the category of 'science' has produced a science that is systematically incomplete.
The botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer opens Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) with a graduate seminar scene: she tells her professor that she wants to study why asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together. He tells her she has asked an unscientific question. 'Beauty' is not a scientific category. To ask why something is beautiful is to ask a question about experience, about relationship, about value, none of which belong in the laboratory. Kimmerer spent her career demonstrating that this exclusion is not just a question of method. It is a question of what counts as knowable at all, and that the exclusion of relational, experiential, and community-held knowledge from the category of 'science' has produced a science that is systematically incomplete.
The ethnobotanist and explorer Wade Davis makes this concrete with Polynesian navigation. In his 5x15 talk 'Cultures at Risk', he describes sailing with the Polynesian Voyaging Society: sailors who 'even today can name 250 stars in the night sky' and who navigate by reading 'the reverberation of waves across the hull of the vessel, knowing full well that every island group in the Pacific has its own unique refractive pattern that can be read with the perspicacity with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint.' These are, Davis notes, sailors who can 'distinguish as many as five different sea swells moving through the sacred canoe', separating local weather patterns from deep Pacific currents. In The Wayfinders (2009) he develops the point further: this is not a remarkable feat of memory. It is a knowledge system, systematic, transmissible, refined across generations, and empirically accurate. The word 'traditional' has been applied to it as if it means 'pre-scientific'. What it actually means is that the observation and refinement have been going on for far longer than Western instrumental navigation has existed.
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Wade Davis - Cultures at Risk
5x15 Stories Wade Davis is a Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and former Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic Society. His work focuses on indigenous cultures, languages, and traditional knowledge systems, often gained through extensive fieldwork in places like the Amazon and Himalayas.
In his talk “Cultures at Risk,” Davis argues that the world’s cultural diversity, what he calls the “ethnosphere”, is rapidly disappearing under pressures of globalization. |
Five points crystallise what indigenous knowledge systems require us to understand epistemologically.
- Indigenous knowledge is systematic, not merely intuitive. The refinement of plant knowledge, navigation, ecological observation, and seasonal practice across hundreds of generations is, by any reasonable standard, a form of empirical inquiry. The timescales involved are longer than Western science has been practising.
- The knower is part of the known. In 'Learning the Grammar of Animacy', Kimmerer explains this directly: 'In Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.' This is not metaphor. It is a claim about the structure of reality, one that Western scientific grammar, with its insistence on the inanimate 'it' for non-human beings, cannot accommodate.
- Oral knowledge is real knowledge. The assumption that written records confer validity is itself a cultural choice. Davis states this with precision in 'Cultures at Risk': 'every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of social and spiritual possibilities.' Oral traditions carry detailed ecological, astronomical, genealogical and legal knowledge across hundreds of generations with sophisticated systems of verification and authorisation. When a language dies — Davis notes that fully half of the world's 7,000 languages are no longer being passed to children — what is lost is not merely vocabulary. It is an entire structure of knowledge about how to live in the world.
- Epistemicide, the colonial destruction of knowledge systems — connects all the lesson's threads. Residential schools, missionary bans on language and ceremony, the legal category of terra nullius (the fiction that uncultivated land has no prior owners, which required the prior fiction that its inhabitants had no land-management knowledge worth recognising) — these were not only cultural erasures. They were deliberate destructions of knowledge systems. When Kimmerer describes what was lost when Potawatomi speakers were forced into English, she is describing what Trouillot calls the production of silence — but at the scale of an entire epistemology.
- Integration problem, incorporation or appropriation? Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is now actively sought by climate scientists because it contains multi-generational ecosystem observation that instrumental records cannot match. But the question is who controls the integration. When pharmaceutical companies patent compounds derived from plant knowledge held by indigenous communities — without attribution, consent, or benefit — that is not the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into science. It is epistemic extraction: the removal of knowledge from its community of origin, without acknowledgement of where it came from or who holds it.
Bringing it together
This lesson began with an advertisement and ended with the Pacific Ocean. The path between them ran through Gramsci's hegemony, Trouillot's archives, Criado Perez's crash test dummies, Chomsky's five filters, and Kimmerer's Potawatomi grammar. What connects them is a single underlying discovery: the question 'what do we know?' cannot be answered without also asking 'who is doing the knowing, under what institutional conditions, with whose experience as the raw material, and at whose expense?'
Lesson 3 established that there is no view from nowhere, that every act of knowing happens from a particular standpoint. This lesson makes a harder claim: that standpoints are not equivalent. The knower who belongs to an institution that defines credibility, who speaks a language that has been elevated to the status of knowledge, whose data gets collected and whose body gets designed around, that knower operates in a fundamentally different epistemic position from the knower whose testimony is not believed, whose past has been silenced, whose knowledge system has been destroyed, and whose data was never gathered.
This is not the same as saying that all knowledge is relative, or that Western science is simply wrong, or that indigenous knowledge is always right. It is saying that the production of knowledge is a social process, and that social processes are structured by power. Acknowledging that does not make knowledge impossible. It makes it more honest and, ultimately, more reliable. A climate science that ignores three thousand years of Polynesian ecological observation is not more rigorous than one that includes it. It is less complete. The task that follows from Lesson 4 is not scepticism about all knowledge claims. It is a more demanding form of attention: asking not only what we know, but how it was produced, and who paid the price for not knowing the rest.
This lesson began with an advertisement and ended with the Pacific Ocean. The path between them ran through Gramsci's hegemony, Trouillot's archives, Criado Perez's crash test dummies, Chomsky's five filters, and Kimmerer's Potawatomi grammar. What connects them is a single underlying discovery: the question 'what do we know?' cannot be answered without also asking 'who is doing the knowing, under what institutional conditions, with whose experience as the raw material, and at whose expense?'
Lesson 3 established that there is no view from nowhere, that every act of knowing happens from a particular standpoint. This lesson makes a harder claim: that standpoints are not equivalent. The knower who belongs to an institution that defines credibility, who speaks a language that has been elevated to the status of knowledge, whose data gets collected and whose body gets designed around, that knower operates in a fundamentally different epistemic position from the knower whose testimony is not believed, whose past has been silenced, whose knowledge system has been destroyed, and whose data was never gathered.
This is not the same as saying that all knowledge is relative, or that Western science is simply wrong, or that indigenous knowledge is always right. It is saying that the production of knowledge is a social process, and that social processes are structured by power. Acknowledging that does not make knowledge impossible. It makes it more honest and, ultimately, more reliable. A climate science that ignores three thousand years of Polynesian ecological observation is not more rigorous than one that includes it. It is less complete. The task that follows from Lesson 4 is not scepticism about all knowledge claims. It is a more demanding form of attention: asking not only what we know, but how it was produced, and who paid the price for not knowing the rest.
Next: Lesson 5 - Method 1: How Do We Know What We Know?
Being wrong for a long time is not the same as being stupid. Understanding why intelligent people get things wrong is as important as understanding how to get things right.
Being wrong for a long time is not the same as being stupid. Understanding why intelligent people get things wrong is as important as understanding how to get things right.
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.
- Gramsci argues that hegemony works by making dominant ideas feel like common sense rather than ideology. If that is true, how would you know when you are thinking for yourself and when you are reproducing hegemonic assumptions? Is the distinction coherent?
- Trouillot identifies four moments at which historical silences are produced. Is there a fifth moment, the moment of reception, at which readers or students participate in maintaining or disrupting those silences?
- Criado Perez shows that 'neutral' research designs, the standard body, the standard subject, are in fact partial. Does this mean that there is no such thing as a neutral research design, or only that this particular design was not neutral? What would genuine neutrality require?
- The propaganda model (Chomsky and Herman) describes structural bias in media without requiring individual bad faith. Is a structural account of bias more or less troubling than an intentional one? Does it change what could be done about it?
- Kimmerer argues that Potawatomi grammar encodes a different epistemology, that grammatical animacy is a claim about the nature of the living world. Can a language make a knowledge claim? Or does it only create the conditions under which knowledge claims can be made?
- The integration problem: when Western climate science draws on Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is this incorporation or extraction? What would the difference look like in practice?
- Lesson 3 argued that there is no view from nowhere. Lesson 4 argues that some views are systematically silenced. Do these two claims conflict? If every perspective is partial, does that give us any grounds for preferring the perspectives of those who have been silenced?
- Is epistemic injustice, the systematic undervaluation of certain knowers' testimony, a moral wrong, an epistemic error, or both? Does the distinction matter?
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 #14: Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?
Big Idea 5 addresses this directly. Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Polynesian navigation, and Potawatomi plant knowledge are not simply data waiting to be incorporated into Western science, they are held by specific communities, transmitted through specific relationships, and embedded in specific languages. An exhibition object that represents a form of knowledge tied to a particular community (a traditional tool, a plant with community-specific uses, an object from oral tradition) could explore whether that knowledge retains its character when extracted from its community of origin, and what is lost or taken when it is.
Prompt #28: To what extent is objectivity possible in the production or acquisition of knowledge?
Criado Perez's argument is that the gender data gap is not the result of deliberate bias but of a structural assumption, the default male body that was never examined because it felt like no assumption at all. An object that represents a piece of knowledge presented as universal but produced from a partial standpoint (a medical textbook diagram, a crash test dummy, a map projection, a data set) connects directly to this prompt. The lesson's argument is not that objectivity is impossible but that claiming it prematurely closes off the examination of whose experience is actually doing the work.
Prompt #33: How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?
Trouillot's four moments of silence, the making of sources, archives, narratives, and history in the final instance, give this prompt a structural answer. Current knowledge about any historical event is shaped not only by what happened but by which records were kept, which archives were funded, which narratives were authorised, and which version was retrospectively recognised as significant. An object connected to a historical event whose account has been revised, disputed, or recovered from silence, a colonial-era artefact, a document from a suppressed archive, an object belonging to a community whose history was not written by them, connects directly to Trouillot's framework.
Prompt #21: What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?
Davis's ethnosphere concept, the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, and knowledge brought into being by human cultures — makes this prompt concrete. Each culture represents a distinct way of organising knowledge about the world: the Polynesian navigational system, Potawatomi plant knowledge, Andean sacred geography. An object that carries cultural knowledge within it, that means something different, or means something only, within a specific cultural context — allows a student to explore whether that knowledge is translatable across cultures, and what is gained or lost in the translation. The question of whether knowledge and culture are separable is one this lesson addresses from multiple directions.
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 #14: Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?
Big Idea 5 addresses this directly. Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Polynesian navigation, and Potawatomi plant knowledge are not simply data waiting to be incorporated into Western science, they are held by specific communities, transmitted through specific relationships, and embedded in specific languages. An exhibition object that represents a form of knowledge tied to a particular community (a traditional tool, a plant with community-specific uses, an object from oral tradition) could explore whether that knowledge retains its character when extracted from its community of origin, and what is lost or taken when it is.
Prompt #28: To what extent is objectivity possible in the production or acquisition of knowledge?
Criado Perez's argument is that the gender data gap is not the result of deliberate bias but of a structural assumption, the default male body that was never examined because it felt like no assumption at all. An object that represents a piece of knowledge presented as universal but produced from a partial standpoint (a medical textbook diagram, a crash test dummy, a map projection, a data set) connects directly to this prompt. The lesson's argument is not that objectivity is impossible but that claiming it prematurely closes off the examination of whose experience is actually doing the work.
Prompt #33: How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?
Trouillot's four moments of silence, the making of sources, archives, narratives, and history in the final instance, give this prompt a structural answer. Current knowledge about any historical event is shaped not only by what happened but by which records were kept, which archives were funded, which narratives were authorised, and which version was retrospectively recognised as significant. An object connected to a historical event whose account has been revised, disputed, or recovered from silence, a colonial-era artefact, a document from a suppressed archive, an object belonging to a community whose history was not written by them, connects directly to Trouillot's framework.
Prompt #21: What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?
Davis's ethnosphere concept, the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, and knowledge brought into being by human cultures — makes this prompt concrete. Each culture represents a distinct way of organising knowledge about the world: the Polynesian navigational system, Potawatomi plant knowledge, Andean sacred geography. An object that carries cultural knowledge within it, that means something different, or means something only, within a specific cultural context — allows a student to explore whether that knowledge is translatable across cultures, and what is gained or lost in the translation. The question of whether knowledge and culture are separable is one this lesson addresses from multiple directions.
Feature (and documentary) films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
🎬 WATCH — Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media dir. Mark Achbar & Peter Wintonick (1992) The documentary that brought Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model to a general audience. Interweaves extended interviews with Chomsky, on media ownership, the manufacture of public consent, and the framing of acceptable opinion, with case studies in how major news organisations covered East Timor, Nicaragua, and the Gulf War. Three hours long, so best assigned in sections rather than in full: the first forty minutes on the five filters stand alone as an introduction to Big Idea 5. The argument is now thirty years old; asking students how it applies or fails to apply to the social media landscape makes it a starting point rather than a conclusion. The book is here.
🎬 WATCH -- Hidden Figures dir. Theodore Melfi (2016) Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson were the mathematicians whose calculations made the early US space programme possible. Their knowledge was precise, their work was essential and the institution they worked for made them systematically invisible. The film is a sustained illustration of Fricker's testimonial injustice and the Criado Perez argument about whose labour gets counted and credited: the data gap is not always in the numbers, sometimes it is in the names attached to them. My students can watch the film here.
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🎬 WATCH — Beasts of the Southern Wild dir. Benh Zeitlin (2012) Six-year-old Hushpuppy lives in the Bathtub, a Louisiana bayou community below the levee — where knowledge is transmitted through story, ecological relationship, and communal practice rather than through institutions. When the state moves to relocate the community after flooding, two incompatible knowledge systems collide: one validated by science and bureaucracy, one rooted in place, kinship, and oral tradition. A quiet, visually extraordinary film that asks whose knowledge of a place is authoritative, and who gets to decide. My students can watch the film here.
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🎬 WATCH — The Social Dilemma dir. Jeff Orlowski (2020) The engineers who built the recommendation algorithms and the attention economists who designed the engagement loops explain, from the inside, how platform architecture shapes what counts as real. Connects directly to the Chomsky and Herman argument in Big Idea 5: the system does not need to conspire to manufacture consent if it is built to reward whatever produces the most engagement. For students already living inside these systems, it is a rare opportunity to see the machinery from outside. My students can watch the film here.
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Further reading
Books
📚 READ — Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013)
The Prologue ('Skywoman Falling') and the essay 'The Grammar of Animacy' are the key sections for this lesson. The Prologue contrasts the Potawatomi creation story with the Genesis story and draws out what each encodes about the relationship between humans and the living world. 'The Grammar of Animacy' is a direct argument that the grammar of Potawatomi, its animate/inanimate distinction, constitutes a knowledge claim. Both sections are short, elegantly written, and directly applicable to TOK questions about language, perspective, and what counts as knowledge.
📚 READ — Invisible Women (Chapter 1: Can Snow-Clearing be Sexist?) by Caroline Criado Perez (2019)
The opening chapter demonstrates the argument of the whole book through the apparently mundane example of how cities clear snow. In Karlstad, Sweden, when roads were cleared before pavements, traffic flowed but pedestrians, disproportionately women, often with pushchairs, elderly relatives, or mobility aids, were stranded. When the order was reversed, the net reduction in injuries saved the equivalent of a significant portion of the snow-clearing budget in emergency healthcare costs. A small, concrete example of how default assumptions in data collection and policy produce real consequences for those whose experience was not the default.
📚 READ — Silencing the Past (Introduction: The Power in the Story) by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995)
The Introduction is a clear, self-contained statement of Trouillot's argument about how historical narratives are constructed and how silences enter them. Trouillot writes with the clarity of an anthropologist used to making unfamiliar things legible, and the Introduction can be read in under an hour. The argument about the 'unthinkability' of the Haitian Revolution, that European commentators literally lacked the conceptual framework to process what had happened, is one of the most powerful illustrations of how power shapes what can be known.
The Prologue ('Skywoman Falling') and the essay 'The Grammar of Animacy' are the key sections for this lesson. The Prologue contrasts the Potawatomi creation story with the Genesis story and draws out what each encodes about the relationship between humans and the living world. 'The Grammar of Animacy' is a direct argument that the grammar of Potawatomi, its animate/inanimate distinction, constitutes a knowledge claim. Both sections are short, elegantly written, and directly applicable to TOK questions about language, perspective, and what counts as knowledge.
📚 READ — Invisible Women (Chapter 1: Can Snow-Clearing be Sexist?) by Caroline Criado Perez (2019)
The opening chapter demonstrates the argument of the whole book through the apparently mundane example of how cities clear snow. In Karlstad, Sweden, when roads were cleared before pavements, traffic flowed but pedestrians, disproportionately women, often with pushchairs, elderly relatives, or mobility aids, were stranded. When the order was reversed, the net reduction in injuries saved the equivalent of a significant portion of the snow-clearing budget in emergency healthcare costs. A small, concrete example of how default assumptions in data collection and policy produce real consequences for those whose experience was not the default.
📚 READ — Silencing the Past (Introduction: The Power in the Story) by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995)
The Introduction is a clear, self-contained statement of Trouillot's argument about how historical narratives are constructed and how silences enter them. Trouillot writes with the clarity of an anthropologist used to making unfamiliar things legible, and the Introduction can be read in under an hour. The argument about the 'unthinkability' of the Haitian Revolution, that European commentators literally lacked the conceptual framework to process what had happened, is one of the most powerful illustrations of how power shapes what can be known.