How do we know when common societal stereotypes are false?
Quick, what comes to mind when you hear the word “schizophrenic”? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably conjure up shadowy visions of multiple personalities or violent criminals. You certainly wouldn’t think of an award-winning law professor with an endowed chair and her own institute (“Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics”).
But you’d be wrong on both counts.
Before she published her bestselling memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, USC law professor Elyn Saks was recommended by one of her friends to publish it under a pseudonym. “Do you want to become forever known as ‘the schizophrenic with a job‘?”, her friend probed her.
Elyn did, eventually, reject the advice, opting to publish the book under her real name. Her reasoning, she told me, was simply, “I could never write anything that could possibly be more helpful to other people than telling my story, and it was worth the risk.”
When all was said and done, her decision was clearly the right one. But it’s important to remember that the risk was real.
And it shouldn’t have been.
Related Ideas Roadshow IBDP resources include Ideas Roadshow’s TOK Connections Guide for Geography, TOK Connections Guide for SCA, TOK Connections Guide for Psychology, the video clips Stereotypes of Mental Illness (TOK) and Mental Illness and Autonomy (TOK).
Your school has not subscribed yet? Visit our website – HERE – to learn more about Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal which offers an extensive database of authoritative video and print resources explicitly created to meet the needs of both teachers and students throughout the Diploma Programme.
Today’s Extending Wednesdays topic comes from the Physics section of Ideas Roadshow’s Extended Essay Guide, where Nobel Laureate Tony Leggett discusses the so-called Anthropic Principle, an idea that begins with the recognition that our current models of particle physics contain within them a number of “fundamental constants” that have no prior explanation – they simply have to be accepted ahead of time, or, as physicists like to say, “put in by hand”.
Well, most theories have some sort of axioms involved, so that, in itself, is not so significant. What makes this case potentially different, however, is that the particular values of these constants seem remarkably special (“fine-tuned”, a physicist would say), with only a very narrow range being suitable for not only human life, but even the existence of stars and galaxies. Why, then, do we happen to have the very values of these constants that we seem to “need”? It is this that “The Anthropic Principle” purports to explain? Check out the video called The Anthropic Principle featuring Prof. Tony Leggett.
The recent history of The Anthropic Principle is an intriguing one all by itself, as scientific opinion has oscillated, often very frequently, from utter disdain at its “inherent unscientificness” to a wholehearted embrace. In the 1980s the celebrated science and mathematics writer Martin Gardner wrote mockingly about the “Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle” with its vividly ironic acronym (“CRAP”), while many theoretical physicists unquestionably accept it today.
This topic bridges physics and philosophy. Possible areas of investigation for an extended essay include an examination of the history of the anthropic principle, current levels of acceptance in the scientific community, an analysis of the different types of anthropic principle (e.g. “weak”, “strong”) and a discussion on its compatibility with the scientific method.
Related Ideas Roadshow IBDP resources include the clip The Anthropic Principle, the compilation video Anthropic Reflections, and the eBooks and hour-long videos The Problems of Physics and Pushing the Barriers.
Your school has not subscribed yet? Visit our website – HERE – to learn more about Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal which offers an extensive database of authoritative video and print resources explicitly created to meet the needs of both teachers and students throughout the Diploma Programme.
This is the fourth of six TOK Tuesdays posts that briefly explore various nuances and concepts associated with each of the May 2020 TOK prescribed titles. In each post I will highlight a few specific themes that students may wish to consider related to each title, themes that are fleshed out in considerable detail, together with specific examples, in the corresponding Titled Assistance video available directly on Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal. Subscribers might wish to regard these posts as high-level summaries of those videos, illuminating large-scale structural motivations that can further assist students both before and after watching the associated Ideas Roadshow Titled Assistance video.
Today we tackle prescribed title 4. Once again it’s worth emphasizing that these thoughts, together with those in the related Titled Assistance video, are strictly personal opinions and are designed to highlight key conceptual points associated with each title rather than provide any particular thesis or response to the title in question.
Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of analysis: when faced with a complex problem I like to take things apart and reduce them to their simplest building blocks. This might be my physics training, or (to invoke a typical TOK-type of inversion), it might well be that my particular orientation and outlook made me more susceptible to those sorts of activities, like physics, which explicitly invoke the sorts of investigatory approaches that I felt most comfortable with.
Well, whatever. The point worth stressing here, I think, is that the analytical approach, like all others, has its natural limits: there are many times when it succeeds, but many others when it does not, or at least doesn’t fit the problem at hand as well as other avenues.
Which brings me, in a roundabout sort of way, to PT 4, which is all about the issue of giving one’s take on the role of analogy. What does it do? What are its limits? What does it not do? What does it depend on?
A strictly analytic approach would involve a detailed examination of the relevant words in the title, such as “understanding”, “justification”, “role” and so forth in an attempt to develop appropriate definitions and frameworks that one could then “apply” somehow to the notion of an analogy, and see what happens.
There are several major hurdles to this approach however, certainly including the slipperiness of defining the key terms in question and their variability due to context. But by far the biggest problem in my view is that, to weigh in on the role of analogy, you really have to wade into considering actual analogies themselves. In other words, this is not a title that particularly lends itself to a detailed abstract analysis of key terms, but rather one that clearly requires plunging in to the world of analogies and carefully assessing what they are doing, and not doing, in various circumstances.
To use an analogy here (who could resist?): investigating the role of analogies without explicitly invoking specific analogies is like learning how to swim from a textbook.
Which makes it all the more ironic that the detailed PT 4 Titled Assistance Video I’ve just completed does actually present things in a rather analytical fashion: outlying a framework, highlighting key terms and issues and so forth. Why on earth would I do such a thing? Well, because as any teacher knows, there’s often a real difference between getting a handle on something and deciding how to most coherently and concisely describe it to others. The way I went about exploring the issue for myself, unsurprisingly, was by considering lots and lots of different specific analogies and trying to sort out what each of them were doing. Once you’ve done that enough times, you start getting a hang of how to group things in a reasonably coherent way: these sorts of things do that, those sorts of things do this, and so forth.
But going through such an exercise in a video would likely make for a pretty boring and incoherent experience, bombarding people with example after example and then waiting for a pattern to somehow emerge. Of course, one could always simulate such an approach (deliberately choosing a string of examples that highlight different aspects and characteristics), but I think that runs a serious risk of making things look a bit too ad hoc.
So when you watch our PT 4 video you will notice two things:
There are more than three times as many examples in this Titled Assistance video than any of the others.
It is, correspondingly, significantly longer than any of the others, coming in at just over 40 minutes.
While this title has its challenges like any other, that’s not because it’s so obviously the most complicated. It’s because if you want to learn to swim, at some point you simply have to get wet.
The Titled Assistance – Supporting PT 4 video is now available on Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal to all individual subscribers and subscribing schools. It can be found in the Student TOK section, TOK Teachers section and general Theory of Knowledge section (under “TOK Compilations”). It provides a detailed discussion of PT 4 with 15 specific examples from Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP resources to highlight the concepts under discussion.
For information about an affordable individual teacher or student subscription which provides full access to Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal, including all Titled Assistance videos PT 1-6 please visit our website, for students: here, and for teachers: here.
This is the third of six TOK Tuesdays posts that briefly explore various nuances and concepts associated with each of the May 2020 TOK prescribed titles. In every post I will highlight a few specific themes that students may wish to consider related to each title, themes that are fleshed out in considerable detail, together with specific examples, in the corresponding Titled Assistance video available directly on our Portal. Subscribers might wish to regard these posts as high-level summaries of those videos, illuminating large-scale structural motivations that can further assist students both before and after watching the associated Ideas Roadshow Titled Assistance video.
Today we tackle prescribed title 3. Once again it’s worth emphasizing that these thoughts, together with those in the related Titled Assistance video, are strictly personal opinions and are designed to highlight key conceptual points associated with each title rather than provide any particular thesis or response to the title in question.
In my view, PT 3 is distinct from all the others on a number of different fronts.
The first thing that you’re likely to notice is simply the way that this title is formulated. While every other prescribed title asks the student to explore, discuss and investigate certain claims and statements, this one abruptly poses the question, Does it matter…?
What are we to make of this? Well, it’s not so easy, I think.
After a first, second, and even third reading I was preparing myself to launch into a standard type of detailed exploration of the wording in order to highlight the relevant nuances involved. While it seemed reasonably straightforward that “your knowledge” referred to the notion of personal knowledge, rather than shared knowledge, there was a whole range of associated subtleties to explore: how might we define, precisely, “personal circumstances”? To what extent can “influence” be objectively assessed, not to mention the “seriousness”of how one takes knowledge? Not to mention the concepts lying behind the words: “taking knowledge seriously”, after all, implies a specific “taker” who goes unmentioned in the title. Presumably the situation changes considerably depending on who is doing the “influencing” and who is “being influenced”. So there is all of that.
My initial plan was to build up things brick by brick until I was ready to finally address the whole business of mattering, but, frustratingly, it seemed like I was never going to get there, as the more I started thinking about how I was going to address these points, the further away I seemed to be getting from the actual question being asked.
After all, the title wasn’t asking me to describe to what extent personal circumstances influence the development of my personal knowledge, and it wasn’t even asking me to investigate under what circumstances personal circumstances can influence how seriously others take my personal knowledge (which personal circumstances? which “others”? “influence whom?”). Instead it was assuming that personal circumstances influence how seriously knowledge is taken and then asking me: does it matter?
So, suddenly, my standard analytic approach of breaking things down carefully and then building them up again seemed deeply problematic. It was time to try something different.
I decided to switch gears and focus on the whole question of mattering. What does it mean, I asked myself, to matter? Clearly this was a subjective appraisal: I might think that something matters, while someone else might think it doesn’t. But that, in itself, didn’t really help. After all, I was unlikely to find any objective truth in a core aspect of any TOK title – that is, after all, the whole point of the exercise.
Then I began thinking of how I could be sure that I felt something mattered. This is quite different, it should be stressed, than the subjective/objective distinction referred to a moment ago: I’m not talking about how I can be sure that something does matter (which is pretty well impossible given its inherently subjective nature) but rather how I can be sure that I think that something matters. Are there some surefire signs, in other words, that I can point to that indicate that I think that something matters.
And the more I thought about it, the more I began to conclude that indeed there were such signs: when I think that something matters I feel it instinctively in my gut. It is deeply tied, in other words, to a combination of emotions, intuition, and my personal moral judgement.
Suddenly, I instinctively felt that I was on a more productive path to addressing what was being asked.
The Titled Assistance – Supporting PT 3 video is now available on Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal to all individual subscribers and subscribing schools. It can be found in the Student TOK section, TOK Teachers section and general Theory of Knowledge section (under “TOK Compilations”). It provides a detailed discussion of PT 3 with four specific examples from our resources to highlight the concepts under discussion, with the accompanying PDF recommending a further 4 Ideas Roadshow resources. It is slightly less than 30 minutes long.
For information about an affordable individual teacher or student subscription which provides full access to Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal, including all Titled Assistance videos PT 1-6 please visit our website, for students, here and for teachers, here.
This is the second of six TOK Tuesdays posts that briefly explore various nuances and concepts associated with each of the May 2020 TOK prescribed titles. In each post I will highlight a few specific themes that students may wish to consider related to each title, themes that are fleshed out in considerable detail, together with specific examples, in the corresponding Titled Assistance video available directly on Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal. Subscribers might wish to regard these posts as high-level summaries of those videos, illuminating large-scale structural motivations that can further assist students both before and after watching the associated Ideas Roadshow Titled Assistance video.
Today we tackle PT 2 for May 2020. Once again it’s worth emphasizing that these thoughts, together with those in the related Titled Assistance video, are strictly personal opinions and are designed to highlight key conceptual points associated with each title rather than provide any particular thesis or response to the title in question.
While all TOK prescribed titles naturally contain a substantial amount of nuance for students to interpret through their understanding of TOK concepts, it is not always immediately obvious where, precisely, to begin. With PT 2, however, this is not so much the issue. The good news here is that the conceptual crux of the title is fairly easy to identify, with the notion of “a sharp line” standing out, as it were, quite strikingly.
While some might first opt to delve into the details of what exactly is meant by “descriptions” and “explanations”, since at the end of the day we are asked to give our judgement on whether or not “a sharp line” exists between them, it seems quite reasonable, for me at least, to focus our attention on what that means in this context before turning our attention to the particulars.
Well, it’s always good to have a sense of how to begin. But how can we go about, practically, the business of constructing such a definition?
Just as I discussed in last week’s PT 1 post, Establishing the Terrain, my approach here will be to start with some general statement that I can then probe and refine further as I increasingly delve into the associated subtleties. Recall that in Establishing the Terrain, we started with a rough-and-ready correspondence between each of the two approaches and particular AOKs, then moved on to consider specific exceptions to this rule before, eventually, investigating a range of specific assumptions buried within the prescription itself.
Why do I opt to do things this way? Well, part of it is surely a matter of taste. But the principal advantage, I believe, to the technique of starting off with a simplified picture that you know only tells a small part – if any – of the full story, is that you can actually start somewhere concrete. Otherwise there’s a real risk that our investigatory efforts quickly get bogged down in shifting layers of “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” types of commentary and we feel that we have no sense of solid ground on which to build a coherent argument.
When it comes to PT 2 I’m naturally provided with such a starting point because it so happens that many practicing experts in both the human sciences and the natural sciences do actually subscribe to a general, big-picture version of the claim in the title, or at least go about their day jobs as if they do, which is more or less the same thing. So that seems a natural place to begin in our quest to develop an appropriate definition for “a sharp line”.
Opinions naturally vary considerably on whether this is a good or bad thing, but the astute reader will note that such a value judgement takes us much further away from the title than we should probably go. The only thing we are asked to express is our level of agreement with the claim at hand. Which, in turn, is a matter of definition.
As you doubtless expect, a closer look reveals that things are hardly that simple, and this “sharp line” is significantly fuzzier than one might naively suppose: not only is it often the case that there is a clear relationship between the two things (so that the types of explanations developed often depend strongly on the descriptions), but it is not infrequently the case that both descriptions and explanations are constructed simultaneously.
The Titled Assistance – Supporting PT 2 video is now available on Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal to all individual subscribers and subscribing schools. It can be found in the Student TOK section, TOK Teachers section and general Theory of Knowledge section (under “TOK Compilations”). It provides a detailed discussion of PT 2 with four specific examples from our resources to highlight the concepts under discussion, with the accompanying PDF recommending a further 4 resources. It is slightly less than 30 minutes long.
Your school has not subscribed yet? Visit our website – HERE – to learn more about Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal which offers an extensive database of authoritative video and print resources explicitly created to meet the needs of both teachers and students throughout the Diploma Programme.
For most people, it’s hard to think of something more black and white than mathematics, a domain that, with its celebrated distinction between “right answers” and “wrong answers” is often invoked as nothing less than the acme, in some cases even the very definition itself, of objective tests of knowledge.
And yet, it is not always quite as simple as that.
You might be relieved to learn that this piece will not try to convince you that claims such as 2+2=4 are merely experientially-determined subjective opinions, but rather explore something somewhat more nuanced: the very notion of mathematical proof itself. How do we know, in short, when something has been mathematically proven?
If you talk to a mathematician, more often than not this question won’t seem any more profound than asking her what 2+2 is, as she will unthinkingly rattle off a list of the various long-established techniques for mathematical proof that everyone agrees on: deduction, induction, contradiction, and so forth.
But what about if I do something different from all of that? What if, as the philosopher of science James Robert Brown suggests, I rely upon a picture instead as proof of my claim?
Well, it’s one thing to discuss these things in the abstract, but quite another to grapple directly with a concrete example, and the one that Professor Brown highlights in the associated video clip Proof by Picture on Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal will, I’m quite certain, make you agree with him: a careful examination of the diagram he provides will convince you, just as much as any other “established” mathematical technique, that the theorem he states at the outset is successfully proven.
And suddenly, our answer to the question of “how do we know we’ve proved something?” is much less obvious. Because now we’re aware – at least sometimes and in some cases – that there might be additional ways, much less easy to objectively quantify and assess, that can somehow provide us with that very same sense of certainty that our established mathematical toolkit of proofs does. And suddenly, instead of being in possession of a clear, objective decision procedure for mathematical certainty, our gut feelings have begun to play a curiously significant role in our convictions of what is true.
For additional examples of how TOK overlaps with mathematics, see Ideas Roadshow’s TOK Connections Guide for Mathematics which you can find in the Teacher Resources section and the Student TOK section of Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal.
If your school does not have an institutional subscription to Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal yet you can now sign up for an individual subscription. Annual individual teacher or student subscriptions cost only $75 and provide unlimited access to all resources. School-wide subscriptions are affordably priced based on the number of DP students in your school.
Today’s Extending Wednesdays topic comes from the English A: Language and Literature section of Ideas Roadshow’s Extended Essay Guide (which you can find in the Student EE section on the homepage of Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal) where UCLA Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Chinese literary translator Michael Berry discusses the impact of the decision by the Chinese government to simplify Chinese characters in an effort to raise literacy rates.
This decision by the Chinese government to simplify Chinese characters in a way that wasn’t done in some other parts of the Chinese-speaking world effectively created a laboratory to study a number of intriguing effects related to a sudden change in the structure of a language.
“Chinese characters are made of radicals, and radicals do have meaning in and of themselves. And sometimes, when a character is simplified, some of the radicals will be taken out, reducing the nuance and overall level of meaning.”
Possible areas of investigation for an extended essay include an analysis of the impact of simplifying Chinese characters on literature, pronunciation, and literacy rates, as well as more general evaluations of how language can be used as an objective measure of sociocultural continuity. Further topics include the distinction between languages and dialects and the use of the structure of language as political propaganda.
Related Ideas Roadshow content includes the clip Character Development, and the eBook and hour-long video China, Culturally Speaking.
Your school has not subscribed yet? Visit our website – HERE – to learn more about Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal which offers an extensive database of authoritative video and print resources explicitly created to meet the needs of both teachers and students throughout the Diploma Programme.
To what extent can subjective biases in the arts be objectively measured?
Most people have accepted that the arts is a domain riddled with weird and wonderful combinations of objective and subjective judgements that we will never be able to fully entangle.
The subjective part is pretty obvious: anyone who maintains that he’s found a way to unequivocally assess artistic beauty or musical genius or theatrical excellence is immediately, and quite rightly, met with an archly-raised eyebrow. The notion that such things can be rigorously defined, let alone measured, is wholeheartedly counter to virtually all of our experiences, from the diversity of cultural values to the changing winds of artistic fashion.
And yet, there is Titian, and Beethoven, and Shakespeare, to name but three – artists whose achievements are universally recognized as transcending those who came both before and after them. Few would venture to adopt the unbridled relativist position that these are just three guys who somehow managed to squeak into the cultural pantheon just because they happened to have been at the right place at the right time.
So most of us, prudently enough, recognize the fundamental intractability of the situation and move on with our own personal solution to the subjective/objective artistic divide.
But nonetheless, if we force ourselves to think sufficiently critically, there are still real opportunities to make progress here. Take award-winning violinmaker Joseph Curtin’s quest to disentangle “the secret of Stradivarius”.
It turns out that, as Joseph went on to show in several groundbreaking studies with his colleagues, it’s hard to justifiably claim that the “secret of Stradivarius” exists at all.
The real secret, in other words, is our willingness to question our biases and assumptions. Which shouldn’t, of course, be a secret at all.
For additional examples of how TOK overlaps with music, see Ideas Roadshow’s TOK Connections Guide for Music, directly available in the Teacher Resources and Student TOK section on Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal plus the resources highlighted below.
Your school has not subscribed yet? Visit our website – HERE – to learn more about Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal which offers an extensive database of authoritative video and print resources explicitly created to meet the needs of both teachers and students throughout the Diploma Programme.
Today’s Extending Wednesdays topic comes from our Extending IdeasinMathematics video, where renowned astronomer and former longtime SETI director of research Jill Tarter discusses the famous equation that Frank Drake developed in the 1960s to help us best assess the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe.
This intriguing topic naturally straddles a vast number of different fields, encompassing mathematics (through its pioneering use of statistical arguments), physics (through associated measurement and observational techniques), biology (definitions of life and intelligence), philosophy (the epistemic validity of such statistical techniques) and social and cultural anthropology (the validity of extrapolating the notions of intelligence and civilisation based upon our own experiences).
While this wide variety of possible angles of attack might well raise suspicions about the likelihood of developing a suitably refined research question, more direct and focussed possibilities associated with this general topic include:
An analysis of the current state of our knowledge of the specific parameters of the Drake equation
An examination of its degree of recognition throughout the scientific community
To what extent the biological category of “extremophiles” have changed the basic definition of life, together with specific examinations of extremophiles
The rapidly evolving state of our understanding of exoplanets and related astronomical techniques for detecting them
An assessment of how the prospect of extraterrestrial life influences the way we look at our own
Related resources that are part of Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal include the clips A Cosmic Perspective, Frank Drake’s Agenda, Fermi’s Paradox, Hunting Exoplanets, Technology as a Proxy, and the hour-long video SETI: Astronomy as a Contact Sport plus the accompanying eBook with lots of additional reference materials.
If your school does not have an institutional subscription to Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal you can now sign up for an individual teacher or student subscription. Annual individual subscriptions cost only $75 and provide unlimited access to all resources that are part Ideas Roadshow’s IBDP Portal.
