TOK blog post 5th september 2014

TOK blog post.

One of my higher learning classes in IB is psychology. In my opinion, psychology probably shares the most with theory of knowledge. Both explore the way our mind works cognitively. Also in psychology, an interesting area that we learn about is sociocultural level of analysis; this is essentially the study of societies and societal tendencies and people who live in different societies. I think this is interesting and relevant to theory of knowledge because of the relation to ways of knowing. A certain society shares a way of thinking, doing and morals, but how are these spread or passed down from generation to generation? In theory of knowledge, we have the ways of knowing: emotion, faith, imagination, intuition, language, memory, reason and sense perception.  In societies, the most prevalent ways of knowing are probably language and faith. A lot of different people have faiths that they believe in like Jews in Israel, Muslims in the Middle East, or Christians in South Korea. People tend to base their morals off of a religious belief. In Christianity, there are sins that if one commits, they get sent to hell, so people tend to avoid the act of sinning. Language as well is a largely prevalent way of knowing in most societies. There is a tribe in Africa that has broken the colour spectrum into different categories to what we perceive as being ‘normal’ categories for colour. Because of this they are able to distinguish between shades of green that look almost identical in our eyes, while struggling to even distinguish green from blue. I think this is interesting because it shows that language as a way of knowing within a society has changed not only how they categorise colour, but how they even perceive different colours. It just goes to show the power of our brains and language itself.