An Introduction

How do we know what we know?

Theory of knowledge, otherwise known as TOK is a two year IB course that challenges our thinking of the world around us, and everything we know. To succeed in TOK you will need to analyze multiple profound questions with no right or wrong answer. This means that you will need to think from a variety of different perspectives in-class. This is made easier if your partner isn't someone your familiar with, or is someone who had a different upbringing than you did, making your conversations trying to answer these questions a lot more profound as you will have differing opinions on each question, and discussion.

Map 1

Map 2

In fact, one common discussion usually used by TOK teachers is a quote by a famous scholar named Alfred Korzybski, where he says "The map is not the territory". This quote is quite famous and my personal interpretation of this quote is that we put borders on different locations of the world and separate the people on each side. Each 'country' is just a small piece of the map, and basing our ideals based on whichever side of the border we were on is wrong. We take pride in our countries (nationalism) and sometimes even hate others just because of the country they were born in. This makes no sense to me as we are all essentially human and just because we were born in different places on Earth, doesn't mean that we need to hate each other, or to separate ourselves from others because of our 'country ideals', which are all dictated by other people from multiple generations before you.


Thinking about this quote has also led me to think about maps in general. Specifically, the scale, and position of several countries. Take for example Greenland. Map 1 shows Greenland to be small, and look quite compressed while map 2 shows Greenland to be even bigger than North America, South America, and Africa. Surprisingly, the map 2 model is the more popular map type even though it is a lot less accurate than the first map. It is called the 'Mecator Projection World Map' and was originally drawn in the 1500's. A lot of the countries' proportions are distorted compared to the rest with the most notable ones being Greenland and Africa. All our lives we have learnt Geography with the second map model even though Map 1 is more accurate. This makes me question the credibility of other things we have been taught at school. Was history exactly the way we were taught? Have the facts become distorted in favor of the winners? How can we know everything we are being told is the truth when even simple things such as maps are being taught falsely to students? This is an honest, and valid question however it doesn't mean that this map system is not helpful. Making Greenland seem bigger than it is could be helpful in a course talking about that specific country as it would be much easier to see, and analyze on the map. You could potentially just switch between different maps that focus on different countries, and areas so that you can facilitate the learning process.