TOK Atlas
Teacher account
Element 3 of 4

Methods and tools

The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.

Knowledge questions

Each one is written to be argued about rather than answered. The areas of knowledge underneath are where it has somewhere to land.

  • 01Do instruments extend a knower's senses or replace their judgement?
  • 02How does a community decide that a result has been established?
  • 03What assumptions does a method build in before it is applied?
  • 04What can a discipline's methods not detect, even in principle?

Methods and tools in each area of knowledge

Concepts that surface here

Evidence
Every discipline's methods are, in effect, a definition of what it will accept as evidence. A controlled trial, a dated document and a proof step are all evidence, but the practices that produce them are not interchangeable, and a method that cannot generate a certain kind of evidence will systematically miss the claims that would have needed it.
Justification
A discipline's methods encode its standard of justification: peer review, replication, source criticism and proof are all answers to the question of when an inference has earned its conclusion. Comparing those standards across areas of knowledge is more revealing than asking which is strictest.
Explanation
Methods determine which explanations are reachable. A field that can only observe correlations will produce explanations shaped like correlations, and its inability to intervene is a fact about its tools rather than about its subject matter.
Truth
Each discipline has procedures for provisionally settling what will be treated as true: proof, replication, corroboration of sources, critical consensus. Studying those procedures is the practical way into the question of what truth is here.
Certainty
Methods do not only produce results, they produce a warranted level of confidence in them. Confidence intervals, error bars, source triangulation and the standards of proof are all machinery for saying how certain a knower is entitled to be.
Objectivity
Objectivity in practice is a set of methodological checks on individuals: blinding, pre-registration, peer review, replication, adversarial review. It is built into procedure precisely because it cannot be achieved by an individual resolving to be unbiased.
Interpretation
Disciplines build methods specifically to constrain interpretation without eliminating it: hermeneutic conventions, coding schemes, statistical procedure. Studying those constraints shows what a field regards as an interpretation gone wrong.