TOK, Concepts

1 http://guidesbyjulie.blogspot.com/ Theory of Knowledge Theory of Knowledge Concepts

1. Knowledge: justified true belief  o  Justification: involves providing evidence or support for a particular knowledge claim; answering “How do you know that  x is the case?” o Truth: the quality of being true or correct according to some ground o Belief: belief that  x is the case is necessary for knowledge; knowledge must be believed 2. Characteristics of Truth: public, independent, eternal o Public: true for everyone o Independent: true despite what others may believe to be true o Eternal: true for the entire time frame of reference, such as “It’s raining outside” correspondence, coherence, pragmatic 2. Theories of Truth: correspondence, o Correspondence: a proposition is true if it refers to something that exists in reality, apart from the statement itself  o Coherence: a proposition is true if it is logically consistent with a body of  knowledge already known to be true o Pragmatic: a proposition is true if it works or has practical results 3. “A priori” knowledge: based on theory, logic—can be thought of as “book learning” 4. “A posteriori” knowledge: based on sense experience 5. Inductive logic: begins with specific facts and draws a general conclusion 6. Deductive logic: begins with a general conclusion and draws a specific fact 7. Objective: existing independently of perception, usually implies something that is publicly observable and the same for those who experience it, exists in the external world 8. Subjective: derived from the mind rather than external sources, relative to the knower’s own individual experiences, has no possible confirmation 9. Confirmation bias: tendency for people to gather information that confirms their preconceptions and ignore contradictory evidence 10. Psychological certainty: certainty: mental spectrum describing the degree to which one believes something is true statement 11. Proposition: any kind of assertion or claim, a declarative statement 12. Knowledge issue: insights into knowledge that relate to the question “How do we know  what we know?”; explorations into the limitations of knowledge and methods of  verification of knowledge 13. Opinion: judgment based on fact 14. Relativism: theory stating that there can be no absolute truth, that everything is on a relative scale 15. Prejudice: preconceived judgment or opinion made without sufficient knowledge 16.  Absolute: unquestionable, not to be doubted or questioned 17. Epistemology: the study of “How do we know what we know?”

2 http://guidesbyjulie.blogspot.com/ Theory of Knowledge Theory of Knowledge Concepts

18. Empiricism: the view that sense observations are the only source of knowledge 19. Causation/correlation: correlation does not imply causation; it is difficult to say that one thing causes another even when there is a correlation, since cause-effect cause-effect situations often involve multiple factors 20. Connotation: associated meaning of a word 21. Denotation: explicit, dictionary definition of a word l ogic 22. Fallacy: any error in thinking or logic 23. Scientific realism: there is an objective reality that exists without direct human perception