Areas+of+Knowledge

=Areas of knowledge = Within this section of the site you will find the areas of knowledge discussed. If the ways of knowing are how we gain knowledge, the areas of knowledge is the knowledge itself. It is, nothing less, everything we know about the world. Obviously when we’re talking about such a massive amount of information, we need some way of categorizing and ordering it, so in TOK we divide up knowledge into six different areas, each one of which we will consider separately, but also consider in terms of how they overlap with each other, and relate to the ways of knowing. == [|The arts] == The arts are the results of our expressions of creativity, including music, painting, sculpture, and literature. Key questions we will address, amongst others, are what constitutes art, whether we can ever term art ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and to what extent our understanding of art is universal. == [|Ethics] == Considering ethics as a separate area of knowledge rather than including it within the other areas such as human sciences and history indicates how important it is considered in the IB diploma. The word ‘ethics’ means the study of moral decision-making, and in order to do this, we will examine such questions as the how relative morality is and the extent to which we should – and can - incorporate ethics in our everyday life. == [|History] == When we study history, we are studying, of course, people’s opinions of the past, rather than the past itself, since we cannot observe it at first hand. Questions we will address include the reasons for our continual reevaluation of what has happened in history, what we can ever know for sure about past events, and the responsibility of the historian in helping us move forward into the future. == [|Human sciences] == The human sciences are concerned with anything involving human beings, so include fields like geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so on. The human sciences are generally regarded as more ‘subjective’ than the natural sciences – in other words, more subjective and open to debate. This is probably because we are dealing with the most unreliable of matters – ourselves. Key questions that we will address include whether we can really arrive at an objective judgement about human beings, to what extent we can use the techniques of natural sciences in the human sciences, and how important the human sciences are in building a better society. == [|Natural sciences] == By human sciences, we refer primarily to physics, chemistry, and biology, although there are plenty of fields that relate to these different areas that overlap into other disciplines. For example, there are subjects associated with the environment that are linked to chemistry and biology, and even relate to aspects of human sciences such as geography. Key questions that we will address include what constitutes science, what makes scientific investigation reliable, and how our view of science has changed over time. == [|Mathematics] == Mathematics of often understood to be the most objective of all the academic subjects we study, since its foundations are concrete and solid. We will look at whether or not this is really true, the extent to which mathematical formulae can provide us with an explanation for how the universe is structured, and how we can use the axioms of mathematics to assist our powers of reason.