Are some types of knowledge more useful than others?

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.

• Values

  Knowledge and Society · primary lens

  Usefulness is not a neutral measure. Ranking knowledge by it smuggles in a judgement about what the knowledge is for and whose purposes count.

  What a knower or a community takes to be worth pursuing, protecting or preferring. Values operate inside knowledge production and not just around it: they select the problems, set the acceptable risk of error, and decide which trade-offs count as costs.

• Explanation

  Grounds of Knowledge

  Knowledge that explains rather than merely predicts is often called more useful, which puts the criteria for a good explanation in play.

  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

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.

Perspectives

Values: What a community values determines which problems look important, so the value commitments of a discipline and the range of perspectives inside it reinforce one another over time.

Methods and tools

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.

Ethics

Values: Values are not applied to finished knowledge from outside. They are already in the choice of question, the acceptable rate of false positives, and the decision about which harms count as costs, which is why value-free enquiry is not an available option.