Ways of Knowing TOK 2021 Guide
Ways of knowing are the theory of knowledge. How one can know in different ways. It’s all up to the person’s attention and approaches how one can learn.
The superficial creations and its abilities:
Man is the superficial creations among all creatures. He has been blessed with amazing senses, skills and the finest of all the blessed understanding ability for everything we encounter and experience. Our brain and intelligence are what distinguishes us from every other living creature around us. No one on earth has been readily given understanding and knowledge by birth. We are blessed with a reason to question and understand that enables human beings to relish the heights of knowledge and wisdom. Visit for the 7 elements of Communication Process.
Ways of Knowing TOK
Even with the super blessed creatures as a human, one can never claim to have knowledge that is innate or gained from oneself. We need strong reasoning and referrals for what we know and how we know it. Ways of knowing are actually the methods with which knowledge becomes apparent to us and we get a sound understanding of everything. These prominent ways are highlighted as 8 IB ways of knowing that are:
- 1. Via Language
- 2. Via human senses
- 3. Via emotional understanding
- 4. Via human reasoning
- 5. Via imagination
- 6. Via human faith
- 7. Via human intuition
- 8. Or via memory
So what we think and what we know has justifications with the blessed abilities we are gifted with.
Let’s discuss brief details of each aspect to make it clearer and understandable.
How do we acquire knowledge with language in TOK?
“LANGUAGE is the shortest between two people”
Language is the pivot component of our understanding mainly. It is basically the medium with which we interact with each other and the world. Through language we question and through language, we get to know the depth of our understanding. With the right communication channel established among two people, their thoughts and minds are open for sharing and conversation.
We actually acquire most of our knowledge about the world around us with language. Although there are also great barriers to this communication channel depending on the type of language used we human have other abilities to sign and interact to let others understand what we mean to say. That is how international communication is practised as well.
How do we acquire knowledge via senses (Important Ways of Knowing)?
Senses are the magical powers given to human beings for a better understanding of the world and the happenings around them. We have 5 magical senses to see, hear, touch, smell and speak. These senses allow us to perform all the things we want and provide us with understanding for everything we want to do.
Like if we want to eat the meal we have the magical abilities that other creatures are deprived off. In order to make an easy go with eating food, we have the ability to touch food that lets us know either the food is hot or cold. We can see the food colour to know it’s condition and overall look. We can smell the odour so that we can determine either it’s fresh or not.
We can hear the people’s view for it either it’s good or bad and finally, we have teeth and jaws in our mouth to eat it while chewing it and getting it swallowed easily. What an amazing ability set man is blessed with to the most of his chores experience. So the power of our senses is magical and fanatical to make most of what we want to do in our lives.
How do we acquire knowledge with emotional understanding?
Emotions are themself a fine sense of understanding about everything we experience in the outer world. As we human are truly natural wonders so do we have emotions and feelings for everything we experience on a political, personal and relational basis? Sometimes emotions become a constraint from actually seeing the reality of a fact but still this feeling and emotional aspect is what makes a man a real man and a healthy resource to acquire knowledge.
What about human reasoning, imagination and faith elements in understanding?
Not with just the worldly blessing boundings we human have been blessed with the ability to reason stuff happening around us. Like if we observe the rising and setting of the sun every morning and in the evening we have imaginative perceptions of the glory of the divine within our minds. There are different types of conflict in the organization. If understanding is better it can be solved easily.
The whole thing can’t actually happen on its own there is some power to balance and regulate everything that is happening around us. That is how we imagine and reason our outer world experiences.
Now comes the faith, faith is something that is shaped with many elements such as the family we born in, the customs our elders follow, the traits we experience while we grow. This is the strongest and most influential aspect of one’s life that gives the sound understanding and knowledge of what we see and experience.
How intuition lets us acquire knowledge?
Intuition is something based on one’s mind thought without any prior inference or judgment for what we actually think. Relating to the reason the intuition is based in one’s life relying on some repeated patterns of happening or what one infers from a certain happening. Like if one says it’s going to rain today due to black clouds coming over so that’s intuition-based that black clouds cause rain but that is again not to be sure just an intuition.
How memory develops knowledge WITH TOK?
Memory also plays a vital role in our understandings. What we know is a memory and what we are going to be aware of also shapes from it. Memory holds all the knowledge we have acquired, the laws, the rules, the happenings around us and everything. So what we already know also becomes a memory.
So that is how this entire circle works and we keep on enhancing and evolving our knowledge with experience and time.