In what ways do values affect the production of knowledge?

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

  This prompt shifts the question from the individual knower to the production of knowledge, where values operate through funding, method choice and acceptable error rates.

  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.

• Objectivity

  Status of Knowledge

  If values are internal to knowledge production, objectivity cannot mean value-freedom, which is the tension the prompt sets up.

  Independence from the particular standpoint of any individual knower. Objectivity is better understood as something a method or a community achieves through checks on individual bias than as something a single knower can simply decide to have.

Where the knowledge framework bites

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

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.

Objectivity: A community with a narrow range of standpoints can be internally rigorous and still systematically blind. This is why the diversity of perspectives inside a discipline is an epistemic matter and not only a political one.

Methods and tools

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.

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.