Dr. Polaris

Dr. Polaris, on Mar 18, 2011 - 12:47, said:

Good Evening Doctor!

'Derived knowledge issue' isn't a technical term used in ToK so I assume its just a name given by your teacher to label the knowledge issues which branch off from your main knowledge issue within your presentation. To be honest, there is no difference between a knowledge issue and the 'derived' knowledge issue. The only requirement is that they must be related or that the latter is a development of the former.

What is your main knowledge issue? You should state this at the beginning of your presentation and it should take the form of a question. This is the issue you will base your entire presentation around. Thus, all 'derived' knowledge issues and real life examples should have some connection to the main knowledge issue. Its like structuring an essay, you can use a new real life example (evidence) to support each 'derived' knowledge issue (point).

You had too examples there; sex before marriage and physical punishment. These can be used to support two different 'derived' knowledge issues with the knowledge issue of "How do we know what is 'right'?" or "What ways of knowing are used in determining what is 'right'?" The first example allows you to introduce emotion in the form of love/sexual desire. The second allows you to explore how sense perception 'clouds' reason (ironic because its usually emotion that 'clouds' reason). This is the case because consciously or subconsciously we inductively reason that we shouldn't do something because we may experience pain as a consequence of our actions ect.

So I hope this has cleared things up a bit and contained some useful ideas for your presentation.

Dr. Polaris, on Mar 18, 2011 - 13:31, said:

Your question is not broad at all. Unfortunately, it's not a knowledge issue or it doesn't have much ToK in it. A KI is a question which questions the nature of our knowledge, the question you have posed is more a psychology question. A rule of thumb is that if you start the question with 'How do we know...?' you cant be far off. How about 'What ways of knowing are used in determining what is right or wrong?'

Dr. Polaris, on Mar 18, 2011 - 13:31, said:

It is advisable that you have more than one real-life example, you should always try to include one personal real-life example. For the religion, you could use the same argument as the 'physical punishment' above. It'd the idea of flawed inductive reasoning. I don't think there's any well known religion that forbids its followers to eat shark fin soup, so I'd use the regions that restrict its followers to eat beef or pork as an example. But again, why use food as an example? Why not use a quote from the Bible, any quote will do and you can examine the language used. For the shark fin hunting I think you could bring sense perception in:


You can talk about bias and how different images cause different emotions even though they are strongly related. Find a another different real life example to answer 'What ways of knowing are used in determining what is right or wrong?'

Good Luck!

Dr. Polaris, on Sep 26, 2010 - 07:40, said:

lol guys stop abusing the rep system, please. at least if you do abuse it abuse it positively!

ALTERNATIVELY it may be because your rep is the sum of all your post ratings. For example I just thumbed down your post to -1, so your profile now says -2.