Theory of Knowledge - Course Companion for Students Marija Uzunova Dang Arvin Singh Uzunov Dang

people realise that psychologists also take a vow,
Few
that at some point in their professional
promising
they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an
lives
that contains the sentence: ‘The human being
article
the only animal that ... ’. We are allowed to nish
is
sentence any way we like, but it has to start with
the
of us wait until relatively late in our careers to
Most
this solemn obligation because we know that
full
generations of psychologists will ignore
successive
the other words that we managed to pack into a
all
of well-intentioned scholarship and remember
lifetime
mainly for how we nished The Sentence.
us
also know that the worse we do, the better
We
will be remembered. For instance, those
we
who nished The Sentence with ‘can
psychologists
language’ were particularly well remembered
use
chimpanzees were taught to communicate
when
hand signs.
with
when researchers discovered that chimps in the
And
used sticks to extract tasty termites from their
wild
(and to bash each other over the head now
mounds
again), the world suddenly remembered the full
and
it is with good reason that most psychologists
So
o completing The Sentence for as long as they
put
hoping that if they wait long enough, they might
can,
die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by
just
Gilbert’s words may seem comical,
Daniel
they point out the problem with defining
but
human activities: monkeys do
distinctly
whales sing, birds use fire, honeybees
business,
complex social behaviour, trees
exhibit
and share resources with each
communicate
With each discovery the list gets longer,
other.
the arguments for human exceptionalism
and
so. In fact, it is a struggle to think of any
less
that show non-humans being less
studies
than previously thought. How
sophisticated
can we justify the status of the human
then
is the body of scientific knowledge about
Why
considered by TOK to be at least as
humankind
as our knowledge about the rest of
important
natural world combined?
the
in response to these questions, Joanna
Writing
says that the distinction between the
Bourke
and the animal is not only contested,
human
“policed with demonic precision”.
but
ideas, values and practices used to justify the
…
of a particular understanding of ‘the
sovereignty
over the rest of sentient life are what create
human’
and social life. Perhaps the very concept
society
‘culture’ is an attempt to dierentiate ourselves
of
our ‘creatureliness’, our eshly vulnerability …
from
those territories not only involves violence,
Delimiting
inspires it.
but
knowledge questions arising from the
The
sciences are also significant because of
human
power of this AOK to inform policy, social
the
individual action and choice.
movements,
body of knowledge shapes the realities,
This
and behaviours it studies. In
phenomena
evidence-based decisions about how
making
organize our societies and lead our lives,
to
make significant use of knowledge from
we
AOK. We look, for example, to cultural
this
to make sense of our similarities
anthropology
differences in an increasingly interconnected
and
and to economics to guide decisionmaking
world,
in a world of finite resources, time
information. For these reasons, we must
and
attention to theory building and concept
pay
in the human sciences—and consider
formation
what extent they reflect, versus shape, the
to
the aim of the human sciences primarily to
Is
and explain patterns of human activity,
describe
make predictions about outcomes in society,
to
guide interventions and inform action, or
to
I. Scope
I. Scope
those eight words.
(Bourke 2011)
and mailing address of every psychologist
name
ever nished The Sentence with the words
who
‘uses tools’.
a monkey.
(Gilbert 2007)
reality of human experience.
something else entirely?
sciences as a separate AOK?
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