Are some things unknowable?

What this prompt is really asking

Each of the twelve TOK concepts gives you a different way into a prompt. These are the ones that do the most work here.

• Certainty

  Status of Knowledge · primary lens

  Unknowability comes in degrees: not yet known, not knowable by us, and not knowable in principle are three different claims with different consequences.

  The degree to which doubt about a claim has been closed off. Certainty is a state of the knower, not of the claim, which is why a claim can be true without anyone being certain of it and why confidence and reliability can come apart badly.

• Explanation

  Grounds of Knowledge

  Something can be predictable and still resist explanation, which is one way a limit on knowledge shows up without being a limit on data.

  An account of why something is the case rather than merely that it is. Explanations are judged by more than accuracy: scope, simplicity, fruitfulness and the ability to say what would have happened otherwise all matter, and these criteria can pull against one another.

Where the knowledge framework bites

Reached through this prompt’s concepts, in the framework’s canonical order.

Scope

Certainty: The certainty available in a field is a feature of the field, not a measure of its rigour. Mathematics can offer proof because of what it is about; the human sciences cannot, and reading that as a deficiency mistakes scope for weakness.

Explanation: Whether a field seeks explanations at all, rather than descriptions, predictions or interpretations, is a scope question. Mathematics proves, history accounts for, the natural sciences model, and the arts can illuminate without explaining anything propositional.

Methods and tools

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.

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.