Tok Essay No4.
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- Date Submitted: 12/20/2010 05:49 PM
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TOK Essay
4: To what extent do we need evidence to support our beliefs in different areas of knowledge?
Many of the areas of knowledge use evidence to support their theories. Evidence helps us to support our theory and maybe convince other people to that. According to English dictionary evidence is one or more reasons for believing that something is or is not true.
Evidence is obviously a very important thing of our everyday life for example your mom requires evidence that you have been in school today or you teacher needs the proof that you have done your homework. Evidence plays also very important role in knowledge. We use it to proof or base our theories on. But is it really that important in every kind of knowledge? I would say that evidence is very important in every kind of knowledge from mathematics through human sciences up to religion. Nevertheless is it not the same type of evidence.
My theory requires dividing the evidence into different categories of evidence. Because we cannot say that in math we can proof something with evidence, we are able to proof the statement only with use of convincing method of solving this exact mathematical problem. However it is also the fact of creating the evidence. Therefore evidence divides into:
1. Intuition
2. Personal experience
3. Testimonial
4. Anecdotal evidence
5. Scientific evidence
Each of those evidence types works with different kinds of knowledge. It is obvious that scientific evidence is going to work with natural science. But we might find it difficult to match intuition with a specific one. On the other side personal experience copes with all areas of knowledge. There is one more very interesting thing about evidence, we use our perception to create it therefore we can create a TOK problem and ask a question if the evidence can be fully trusted. If I would be asked this question I would answer: “Yes, until somebody finds better explanation – evidence.”
Lest investigate...
4: To what extent do we need evidence to support our beliefs in different areas of knowledge?
Many of the areas of knowledge use evidence to support their theories. Evidence helps us to support our theory and maybe convince other people to that. According to English dictionary evidence is one or more reasons for believing that something is or is not true.
Evidence is obviously a very important thing of our everyday life for example your mom requires evidence that you have been in school today or you teacher needs the proof that you have done your homework. Evidence plays also very important role in knowledge. We use it to proof or base our theories on. But is it really that important in every kind of knowledge? I would say that evidence is very important in every kind of knowledge from mathematics through human sciences up to religion. Nevertheless is it not the same type of evidence.
My theory requires dividing the evidence into different categories of evidence. Because we cannot say that in math we can proof something with evidence, we are able to proof the statement only with use of convincing method of solving this exact mathematical problem. However it is also the fact of creating the evidence. Therefore evidence divides into:
1. Intuition
2. Personal experience
3. Testimonial
4. Anecdotal evidence
5. Scientific evidence
Each of those evidence types works with different kinds of knowledge. It is obvious that scientific evidence is going to work with natural science. But we might find it difficult to match intuition with a specific one. On the other side personal experience copes with all areas of knowledge. There is one more very interesting thing about evidence, we use our perception to create it therefore we can create a TOK problem and ask a question if the evidence can be fully trusted. If I would be asked this question I would answer: “Yes, until somebody finds better explanation – evidence.”
Lest investigate...