Is bias inevitable in 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.

• Objectivity

  Status of Knowledge · primary lens

  If bias is inevitable then objectivity cannot mean its absence, and the prompt pushes towards objectivity as something a community builds rather than an individual achieves.

  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.

• Perspective

  The Knower's Lens

  Distinguishing a distorting bias from a productive standpoint is the hardest part of the prompt, and it cannot be done without the concept of perspective.

  The position from which a knower encounters something, made up of their history, training, interests and situation. A perspective is not only a limitation: it can make features of a problem visible that no view from nowhere would pick up.

Where the knowledge framework bites

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

Perspectives

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.

Perspective: This element exists because the standpoint of the knower is not noise to be removed. Whose questions a field has taken seriously, and whose it has not, is part of the content of what that field currently knows.

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

Perspective: Deciding whose perspective counts as informed is an ethical act with epistemic consequences. Excluding a standpoint usually removes the evidence only that standpoint could have supplied.