Comments on Wikipedia's IB Theory of Knowledge Article

The articlefails to mention that Plato's famous definition of knowledge is widely believed (by professionals who specialize in the theory of knowledge) to be incorrect. How a course can be organized around a definition known to be flawed is, to say the least, problematic.

Furthermore, the claim that the definition is flawed is easily found on the web. Just find Edmund Gettier's article "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (I quote the title from memory; but even if it's not right, a little time with Google will correct my error.)

Secondly, the article claims that the course "teaches" that among the forms of justification for our beliefs are "consensus", "authority", and "faith". These are all dubious sources of justification. Five million Americans or Frenchmen could be wrong. "Authority" begs questions about how you know who the experts are. "Faith" is especially problematic. The faith of many Americans leads them to reject well-established scientific claims. If "faith", e.g., is not a source of justification, you simply cannot teach that it is--and pretending that you are doing so is, at the very least, a dubious and confused enterprise. What the course should be doing is not t e a c h i n g that these are the forms of justification, but e x a m i n i n g their claims to be forms of justification.

That's more a problem with the article than with the course itself as conceived by IB. But, the course itself has problems too. The fundamental problem with this course--and I know because I teach it--is that there is no real theory here. At any rate, it's not theory in the way that one finds theories in the sciences. So, the title is misleading. There are epistemologists who doubt the very possibility of giving anything like a general characterization of knowledge. There are just too many forms of knowlege, and justification itself varies too much. (And, if, by the way, that' s what you teach when you teach "theory of knoweldge", a more accurate description would be "Anti-theory of Knoweldge".)

Another problem with the IB TOK course--a danger for teachers--is that one reverts to a knee-jerk sort of conservatism. All the things we believe turn out to be pretty much true, and everything is left where it was before we began our inquiry. Something similar occurs in in traditional epistemology in the Analytic mode, if one accepts the testimony of Bishop and Trout in their book "Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgement", published by Oxford University Press. <http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-516230-7> They provide something like the following characterization of analytic epistemology: We are supposed to be engaged in a serious intellectual enterprise; yet, at the end of the day it must turn out that our ordinary beliefs are pretty much correct. To my ears, that sounds like a recipe for anti-science, and when I read Bishop and Trout's book I immediately thought of IB Theory of Knowledge. The article above illustrates my point. Inclusion of "faith" on the list of forms of justification above is evidence of extremely strong intellectual conservatism--as if it's right to be there were a fait accomplis merely because many people would like it to be. What a proper epistemology course should do is examine the claim that faith is a form of justification. (And, it's not written into the unspoken rules that faith must, in the end, prove to be one.)

Note: Bishop's homepage has an article (co-authored with Trout) about the above, on the "pathologies" of "standard analytic philosophy": http://www.niu.edu/phil/~bishop/Research.shtml