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ToK essay some help


ferdi91

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Hi, my essay title is "Discuss the claim that some areas of knowledge are discovered and others are invented". When I thought about it i came up with some ideas for example: Invention results out of human intellegence mostly something which is build up like a plane but it is just working in theory and in praxis you have to discover how it actually fit in in the real world situation. To link this to the title i maybe thought that natural science for example is still there the humans just discovered how it actually works and who this can help us to explain phenomenas. Physics or chemistry it is working without the human but the human used the working things to apply it to our live they discovered it and fit it in to the "real world" situation???

Hopefullay anyone can follow my thoughts I just want to know weather I´m thinking right and I could use some thing like this for my essay or not??!!

Thank you very much

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The key thing with TOK essays isn't so much your ideas (although those do seem reasonable ideas, if a little difficult to understand the way you wrote them!) as it is getting back to the very basics. Although they like you to support your points with personal examples and generally use examples throughout, what they're really looking for is a very clear understanding of distinctions between "invented" and "discovered" knowledge in terms of the way we build up our knowledge via the ways of knowing.

My suggestion would be to go through the IB ways of knowing (the whole perception/reason/blah thing) as these are the ways in which we gain knowledge and then to look at the extent of invention and discovery within those, with clear references to areas of knowledge (this is where you bring in your examples). That's not necessarily exactly how to write the best essay or anything, but what that approach would do is to bring out what they want you to discuss - i.e. what makes the ways of knowing distinct from each other, what relates them to areas of knowledge (and both how these interact and also how they're distinct from each other).

What you don't want to do is focus on an area of knowledge (or two) because the question isn't "with reference to one or two areas of knowledge...", it's a generalised question. Just because areas of knowledge are in the title, it doesn't make them the subject matter, which is largely going to be the ways of knowing. After all, those are what decide between "discovery" and "invention" to a great extent.

Also, in future please read the board (as the notice at the top suggests)! There's already a thread for this topic where you can read what other people have discussed already. Keeping all this stuff together for particular TOK essay titles is useful both in terms of keeping the board tidy and also providing a resource where all discussion is collated together, and it would be appreciated if you could keep any further conversation on this topic within the thread I have just linked to. Thanks.

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