Tok Ea Essay

Dennis Le
Mrs. Beck
Theory of Knowledge
15 December 2014
TOK Essay
“Our Senses tells us that a table, for example, is a solid object; science tells us that it is mostly empty space. Thus two sources of knowledge generate conflicting results. Can we resolve such conflicts?”
Humans are blessed with the theory of mind. The theory of mind seems to cause plenty of us asking around. There are many claims out there regarding knowledge. As we become more curious, people attempt to provide an answer to the burning questions. The real question is, how can we know a claim to be true using the ways of knowing? This provokes the idea that we are limited by using the ways of knowing to find a claim to be true, but it also precedes our understanding towards a claim, depending on the circumstance and position one has been fallen into.
Regarding the research question, reason helps me think logically whether a statement may be false or true. Language is also a way of knowing for me to understand the situation within the event. The area of knowledge that reason and language may play a part in is mathematics. Mathematics contains answers or knowledge that may be difficult to gain. One way mathematics, in terms to the primary knowledge question, is not a reliable way to gain knowledge because there a many other ways that mathematics hinders gaining knowledge. In English class we spoke about symbolic figures and what they represent for later assignments. In my freshman high school year, I noticed the two teachers in the two classes said the contrasting statements. The math teacher agrees mathematics provides multiple directions onto conveying the single answer to the question while the English teacher agrees English provides multiple answers to the single question. This made me wonder on about how mathematics can be a reliable way to gaining knowledge by thinking about how it had failed in the past. In 1999 at NASA there was a famous unit conversion error that carried on...