TOK essay

prescribed title:

“​Present knowledge is wholly dependent on the past knowledge.”Discuss this

claim with reference to two area of knowledge.

candidate number: hpy354

word count: 1323

“​Present knowledge is wholly dependent on the past knowledge.”Discuss this

claim with reference to two area of knowledge.

In this world, all living things have a certain degree of knowledge but as human

beings, we stand out and we store more knowledge in our “brain” than other

organisms. Knowledge is known as information or understanding of skills through

experience or education. Present knowledge is what we know now depending on

what we learnt while past knowledge is the knowledge that we’ve known or learnt

for some time. At this point, we can see that the relationship between present and

past knowledge is strongly attached to each other. But does it mean that we can

predict the future using past knowledge? In my opinion this sentence to some extent

is correct. In this essay, I will offer multiple perspectives of the topic, showing the

extent that they depend on each other. I will explore the topic using History and

Mathematics as well as Language and Imagination. My arguments will be explored

using the knowledge question “To what extent does present knowledge depend on

the past knowledge?”

To begin with, mathematics is independent of subjective experiences. Mathematics

is used in everyday life in all kinds of situations and math is one of the main courses

learnt in all schools around the world. And this is learnt since nursery to be able to

understand harder lessons as we grow. ​Although it seems that a lot of knowledge

has nothing to do with previous knowledge for example, my sister studied

mathematics, physics and chemistry in high school, and she went to college to study

economics. Is there any particular relationship? To be sure, the two disciplines are

different, but if you look closely, they are inextricably linked. And if you say that you
do not have good mathematical knowledge, it should be very difficult for an

economist to learn financial management. If you do not have good mathematical

knowledge, you will have a hard time learning macro and microeconomic estimates.

As I previously mentioned, ​Mathematics is connected to both past and present

knowledge. Mathematics is fundamentally necessary for everyone. The theory used

here is constructivism which states that past knowledge is a main factor in

learning.To manage to interact and benefit from all our surroundings we need

knowledge learnt in mathematics. So, the current knowledge depends entirely on the

knowledge of the past in this case.

However, it is possible to come across different situations in which past knowledge is

not necessarily needed for the understanding and comprehension of the knowledge.

Such as Historical knowledge, ​history is a past that has faded away, and there is no

way to reproduce it. The next question is, what methods can I use to get what has

existed before? Between real history and historical reality which one seems more

correct? Have you ever asked yourselves these questions? The history we are

learning is the real history? I asked myself many times but found no exact answers

for them. No one in the current world has seen a dinosaur but if you tell them to draw

one they would give you an exact image of what they’ve believed it would look like

as the historical books show. I asked a similar question to a grade 7 class to draw a

dinosaur. I asked them if they have seen a real dinosaur and the answer is no. So

what made them draw something they’ve never seen before, is imagination. The

theory used here is coherence theory which states that a statement is true if it is

consistent with other things that are considered true. No one can prove what

happened in the past if they did not see or actually lived at that time, which means
everything written in the books could just be a story that someone coined out of their

imagination and people believed in it. Remember imagination is characterised by

biases. So to this extent, present knowledge does not depend much on the past

knowledge. It is therefore clear that mathematics is reliable to a large extent but

often it can only show something to be true within one fixed system but not others

such as History.

Without past creation of languages we wouldn’t be able to communicate nowadays.

Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into

words. And words are combined into sentences, the combination answering that of

ideas into thoughts. And language develops as time passes on. All the letters and

sounds used for expression have changed their forms of writing or the vocabulary

and ways of expressing them are completely different. In China currently we are

using chinese characters but before it had developed till now they used oracle

instead and it has a lot of similarity. I am Chinese and I speak mandarin. Mandarin is

known as one of the hardest languages to learn in the world as people have to

handle both the writing and reading to understand the meaning of a sentence while

other languages don’t and also because there are hundreds of different cultures in

china which make them different while expressing the same sentence. But the

calligraphy is not as hard. Most basic words came first from the physical look of the

object it wants to express then developed into actual words. And this shows the

linkage of the past knowledge to finally form what we have in the present. Critics

would however wonder and ask: if all present knowledge depends on the past

knowledge then where did the first human in the world get their knowledge from?

That’s what Immanuel Kant thought to. The theory used here is language acquisition
which states that children are able to learn language out of desire to communicate

with their surrounding environment and world He wrote t​hat all information starts

with encounter there can be no question.

However, imagination is where a mind mixes experiences, knowledge, hopes, and

emotions into a haphazard concoction to create ideas and scenarios that can leap

beyond the bounds of reality often associated with creativity. They take a mass of

data and imagine possible explanations to why they got the data that they received.

The knowledge used in imagination doesn’t have to be knowledge from the past.

Instead people like or get amazed by the new images or thoughts that people create

than what have already existed. It is therefore clear that it is only to some extent that

past knowledge depends on present knowledge.

In conclusion, the statement “Present knowledge is wholly dependent on the past

knowledge” is not fully reliable. It is only to some extent that present knowledge

depends fully on past knowledge. And it is important to know that even though it

does not depend fully on the past knowledge but to some extent helps in the

development of the present knowledge.Past knowledge can be known as the basis

of present knowledge or also ​equivalent to the superstructure of a building

depending on the foundation.

Bibiographie:

1. <​https://www.ibmastery.com/blog/how-to-structure-a-theory-of-knowledge-ess

ay​>

2. https://www.bartleby.com/topics/Kant-Essay

3. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8237822-that-all-our-knowledge-begins-wi

th-experience-there-can-be

4. https://adamipsmith.com/2017/02/15/645/

5. https://www.travelchinaguide.com/essential/language.htm

6. http://www.toktalk.net/2008/11/09/three-different-types-of-truth/

7. https://study.com/academy/lesson/prior-knowledge-definition-theory-quiz.html