10 Socratic Discussion Prompts for IB Theory of Knowledge
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Knowledge & the Knower
If you grew up in a completely different culture, would you still believe the things you believe now? How would you know?
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Knowledge & Technology
Wikipedia is more accurate than any individual encyclopaedia — but does that mean we know more than people did before Wikipedia? What’s the difference between more information and more knowledge?
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Knowledge & Language
Some concepts in physics — ‘force,’ ‘energy,’ ‘mass’ — don’t translate cleanly into most languages. Does that mean speakers of those languages have less access to knowledge of physics?
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Knowledge & Society
Whose knowledge counts as knowledge in a democracy? And is that the same question as ‘whose knowledge is most useful’?
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Knowledge & Ethics
If a neuroscientist could prove that free will doesn’t exist, would that change anything about how we should treat criminals? Why or why not?
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Knowledge & History
We can never know the past directly — only through traces and interpretations. Is history a knowledge discipline, a humanity, or something else? What does it need to be in order to count as knowledge at all?
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Knowledge & Mathematics
Mathematical objects — triangles, prime numbers, pi — existed before humans did. Does that mean mathematics is discovered, not invented? If so, where do mathematicians ‘go’ to discover them?
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Knowledge & the Arts
Can art communicate knowledge that other areas of knowledge — natural sciences, mathematics, history — cannot? If so, what kind of knowledge is it, and how would you know if it were true?
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Knowledge & Natural Sciences
A scientist runs the same experiment twice and gets different results. She blames measurement error. A humanist says: ‘maybe there’s no error — maybe the phenomenon itself is indeterminate.’ Who is right, and how would you know?
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Knowledge & Politics
During the pandemic, different countries knew different things about COVID — not because the science was different, but because their governments chose which knowledge to distribute. Is political knowledge a real category, or just a polite way of describing manipulated information?