ROAD MAP

Hi everyone,

I think it might be useful at this point if I gave you a "map" of where we are and where we intend to go.

We have looked at four Areas of Knowledge (the Natural Sciences, the Human Sciences, History and Mathematics) and tried to make some comparisons and points of contact between them. We have also, I hope, been thinking about how we employ the various Ways of Knowing in these disciplines. All the time, we are identifying knowledge issues and trying to respond to them.

Next week, you will be getting your 800-word assignment back with comments. We will give you an opportunity to judge what you think your work is worth, and then we will tell you what we think. We will also look at a couple of essays written by students elsewhere and have a go at marking them - I think this will be a very useful exercise for you in coming to understand what a good essay might look like. You will also get some titles to choose from for your next assignment, which will be a full-length essay of 1,600 words - we will give you the Easter vacation and the time immediately afterwards to write this and the deadline will be 28th April.

In the remaining time before the semester examinations, we will be using our lessons to take a close look at the Arts as an Area of Knowledge. We will still need to look at Ethics, but that will probably be postponed until the very beginning of IB2. However, that does not stop you from finding out a bit about this very important area in advance.

We hope very much that this blog will help you in every aspect of your work in this course and beyond, and that includes essay writing. While the blog is probably not a good source for taking material verbatim (why not?), we hope it raises awareness of issues and examples that you might develop.

As we are concentrating hard on essay writing at the moment, there will be no new question of the week today. Instead, we should be focussing on extending the conversation on last week's question because it is designed to help you directly with the essay writing task. So keep the comments and contributions coming on that thread.

I hope this helps us to orient ourselves with respect to the journey. Have a restful but thoughtful weekend.

Does discovery leads to invention or it is invention that leads to discovery?

Is Logic based on Belief ?

I was thinking yesterday after TOK class about the way we reason and what we call logic. In my opinion i think we practice binary logic. To illustrate this lets take for example i say if something is "non-existent" then it is not "existent" (It is either this or that). This is used in indirect proof (reductio ad absurdum). But i was thinking, what if there were other possibilities like say it was both or neither (I think in Artificial Intelligence this is called fuzzy logic). All these questions were aroused by our talk on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in class. Godel has made us classify some statements as neither true nor false(they are referred to as Undecidable). All along (until Kurt Godel came along), we thought statements were either true or false; That something could only be one of two opposites. I think this is particularly interesting in Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) where we have a host of counterintuitive results. For example, in Young's double slit experiment, the question as to which slit the photon passed through is still unresolved because it appears to have entered neither, both and yet still only one. What a conundrum !!! But to propose fuzzy logic in my opinion has far reaching consequences for indirect proof which relies on something either being true or false. So, is logic dependent on belief ????

mathematics

Does this saying work or apply in mathematics.
Necessity is the mother of invention?

NOTE: I have corrected all the spelling mistakes here - please take some care with your posts (JHK)

Are Mathematics and Ethics Related???

I can't help but wonder if mathematics and ethics are interrelated. For example when leaders have to make decisions about certain life or death situations, if the death toll is about three people, it is "more moral" than say, a death toll of 1000 people. To me this is trying to quantify morality. So does ethics depend on mathematics? I personally don't have a stance on this issue but it just popped into my head and I wanted to get other opinions.

Invented or discovered?

Shall we start the famous 'is mathematics discovered or invented' debate anew? I remember hMensa posed it earlier. The question is, does nature display some kind of mathematical properties or is mathematics a product of our imagination (or ingenuity) that happen to describe nature? In class many of my students were not impressed when I tried to explain that there is good justification to say that mathematics is a discovery like the sciences. Does nature speak the language of mathematics or it is just us?

food production

Hi Everyone,

Please go to the following network location for an interesting vintage news story on food production.

K:\Staff_To_Students\IB Subjects\Core\TOK

HEY - DID ANYONE GO AND LOOK? NO FEEDBACK? NO TOK INSIGHTS? I'M STILL HOPING (SIGH). MAKE MY DAY...