The Core Theme - Knowledge and the Knower
Lesson 1 - Who is the Knower? (Scope 1)
Before we ask what knowledge is, we need to ask who is doing the knowing and how they got that way.
You already know a great deal. But how much do you know about the knower behind all that knowledge, the self that is doing the knowing? And how much of what you think you know about yourself as a knower was actually decided for you, long before you walked into a TOK classroom?
THE PROVOCATION
Where did your education put you?
By the time you reach the IB, your education has already told you which kind of knower you are. TOK begins by asking whether it was right.
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present...
We must disenthrall ourselves.” Abraham Lincoln
This is my website and these are my lessons. This is me. It is important that I say that from the beginning because a lot of the choices I am going to make - about what questions to ask, which authors to quote and which films I think you should watch - are just my choices. Like most TOK teachers I didn't study TOK at school and as far as I know you can't study IB TOK at university, and other than a two day course, locked in a room with other prospective IB TOK teachers I have never been trained to do this. What is clear is that I have been very influenced by certain authors in how I think about TOK. Two of the most infuential writers I want to refer to here: Ken Robinson and Howard Gardner.
Ken Robinson spent decades researching what happens to human creativity and intelligence as people get educated. His answer is uncomfortable: school happens to children whether it helps them learn or not. This is not because teachers are bad or curricula are badly planned, but because every school system encodes a hierarchy of knowledge, a ranking of which kinds of intelligence matter and which do not, and students absorb that ranking so completely that by adulthood most of them have concluded that the abilities schools did not value are not really abilities at all. The hierarchy is remarkably consistent across cultures. At the top: mathematics and language. Below them: the sciences and humanities. Lower still: the arts. Near the bottom: drama, dance, music. The assumption built into this ordering is that some ways of thinking are more valuable, more serious, more “knowledge-like” than others. By the time students reach the IBDP Diploma, they have spent twelve years being told, implicitly, which kind of knower they should be. Robinson borrows Lincoln’s word: disenthrall. We are enthralled - hypnotised - by ideas we have never chosen to examine. The idea that intelligence is one thing, measurable on a single scale, is one of those ideas. The idea that academic performance is the best proxy for intelligence is another. This TOK course begins with the task of disenthralling ourselves from these assumptions not because they are entirely wrong, but because you have probably never properly examined them.
Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity?
TED
Robinson led a UK government commission on creativity and education (1998) and gave what became the most-watched TED talk in history on how schools kill creativity. His central argument is that every child is born with enormous creative intelligence, but formal education systematically narrows it by privileging linguistic and mathematical ability above all other forms of knowing. Out of Our Minds (2001, revised 2011) is his account of why this matters and what to do about it.
'There is more than one way to know'
Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed (1999)
In 1983, the psychologist Howard Gardner proposed something that seemed obvious once said: there is not one kind of intelligence, but at least eight. Linguistic. Logical-mathematical. Musical. Spatial. Bodily-kinesthetic. Interpersonal. Intrapersonal. Naturalist. Each is a genuine cognitive capacity that can be developed, and each shows up in different people with different degrees of strength.
I remember exactly where I was on my teacher training course when I first encountered this, and why it landed so hard. Teachers are, almost without exception, people who succeeded in school. They were rewarded by the system, went further into it, and eventually returned to deliver it to the next generation. What they repeat, largely unconsciously, are the methods that worked for them - and what they value, again largely unconsciously, is the intelligence profile that the school system validated in themselves. The student who thinks in words and numbers, who sits still and works alone, who performs well on timed written tests: that student is recognisable to most teachers because that student, in some version, is them.
Gardner's eight intelligences made the rest of the room visible. The student who thinks spatially, who understands through movement, who reads other people with uncanny precision, who hears structure in music before they can name it - these are not lesser versions of the linguist or the logician. They are different modes of knowing, each with its own standards and its own tools. The school system's decision to treat two of the eight as "intelligence" and the rest as "talent" is not a neutral fact about human cognition. It is a choice about what counts as knowing - and it is a choice worth examining before you accept its verdict on yourself.
Five big ideas about you the knower.
Big idea 1 - You are not a neutral observer
Is it possible to know something without bringing yourself to it?
“...into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge.”
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958)
There is a powerful idea in modern Western thought that the ideal knower is detached, objective, impersonal, a scientist who observes without feeling, a judge who reasons without bias, an historian who reports without perspective. The philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi spent his career arguing that this ideal is not only unrealistic but incoherent. Polanyi noticed that real scientists are not following reason. Real scientists also exercise judgment, taste, and intuition. They have a feel for which problems are worth investigating and which lines of evidence are significant. Polanyi calls this the “personal coefficient” of knowledge. He does not mean that knowers are irrational or emotional. He means that knowing is something you do with your whole self: your curiosity shapes what you look for; your aesthetic sense shapes what you find elegant; your commitments shape what you are willing to accept. Strip all of that out and you do not get purer knowledge. You get no knowledge at all.
If there is no view from nowhere, if every act of knowing is situated and shaped by a particular person in a particular time and place, then understanding who the knower is becomes a fundamental question about knowledge itself, not just about the psychology of the person doing the knowing.
Big idea 2 - You are not a neutral observer
Is it possible to know something without bringing yourself to it?
“When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail.”
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958)
Think about riding a bicycle. You know how to do it, but could you write a set of instructions that would teach someone else to ride? You could try and a physicist could write the equations that describe the balance mechanics, but neither account would actually teach anyone to ride. The knowing is in the body, built through practice, and it resists translation into words. As Michael Polanyi put it, “We know more than we can tell.” Polanyi calls this the “tacit dimension” of knowledge. It shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. A surgeon knows things about the feel of tissue that cannot be found in any textbook. A skilled teacher knows things about when a class has understood and is ready to move on that no training manual specifies. This is the kind of knowledge that AI will struggle most to replicate.
Playing in the pocket
samuel prather
Playing "in the pocket" is a term used to describe musicians most often the rhythm section who are perfectly "locked in" with each other. It results in a groove that feels relaxed and steady, often because the drummer is playing slightly behind the beat while maintaining perfect time. Can this explained in words? Samuel Prather has an excellent go. Alternatively, listen to Green Onions by Booker T. & the M.G.'s: A classic example of a rhythm section being completely synchronized.
In each case, the knowing is real, but it cannot be fully articulated. Polanyi illustrates this with the example of a tool. When a carpenter uses a hammer, they are not conscious of hammer, they 'know' it through it the nail that is hit. The tool has been incorporated into the knower’s body. The same is true of the concepts a scientist uses, or the grammar a fluent speaker employs. This knowledge disappears into the background, it is transparent, taken for granted. That background is where most of our knowledge lives. We looked at this idea in our Critical Thinking lessons in 11e as the difference between System 1 and System 2 and we will also revisit this in a future lesson. All this is important to how we view education and assessment. If much of the most significant knowledge is tacit, embodied in skill, judgment, and practice rather than in propositional or declarative knowledge*, then exams and essays capture only a fraction of what a knower actually knows. The question is not just “what do you know?” but “how much of what you know can you put into words on the exam page?” and whether the gap between the two matters.
* Propositional knowledge (“knowing that” — knowledge of facts, statements, or claims; e.g. knowing that the Earth orbits the Sun) Declarative knowledge (knowledge that can be stated or described in words; e.g. knowing the causes of the French Revolution or the formula for photosynthesis)
Big idea 3 - You don't know yourself as well as you think
Can other people know us better than we know ourselves?
"Your memory system is like the obliging colonel who squashes all bad news to tell the commander exactly what he wants to hear."
Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open (2004)
There is something strange about the question of self-knowledge. We feel we have privileged access to our own minds, that whatever else we might be wrong about, we at least know what we think, feel, and believe. But the science of the mind tells a different story. The writer Steven Johnson spent a year undergoing neuroscience experiments: fMRI brain scans, biofeedback, lie detectors, chemical tests. What he found was a consistent gap between his first-person experience of thinking and what was actually happening in his brain. The “he” who was thinking and the systems that produced the thinking were not the same thing, and introspection, it turned out, was not a reliable guide to the latter.
This matters because it means the self is not a unified, transparent thing. It is a collection of partially coordinated systems running at different speeds, with different agendas, and with only partial awareness of each other. When you explain why you made a decision, or what you really believe, or how you feel about something, you are not reading directly from an internal record. You are constructing an account, and that account may be more story than fact. One example of this I have explained elsewhere in my history lessons as 'cognitive dissonance' and we will encounter other examples in Mercier and Sperber's argumentative theory of reason — developed in Lesson 6 — which adds a further twist: the very tool we use to examine ourselves evolved not for self-knowledge but for winning arguments.
Johnson also makes a further, interesting observation: we may actually be better at reading other people’s minds than our own. The social brain evolved to track the intentions, beliefs, and emotions of others with extraordinary sensitivity. Again we looked at this in 11e in our lesson on emotional intelligence. A close friend who has watched you across many years, or a therapist who has listened carefully, may have access to patterns about you that your own introspection cannot reach. The IB Guide asks: “Can other people know us better than we know ourselves?” Johnson’s answer, backed by neuroscience, is: sometimes, yes.
Cognitive Dissonance
Sprouts
Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort that occurs when people hold conflicting beliefs, values, or experiences. To reduce this tension, they often adjust their thinking, reject new evidence, or justify their behaviour. Psychologist Leon Festinger developed the concept after observing how people reacted when strongly held beliefs were challenged. His research showed that commitment, identity, and support from like-minded groups can make changing beliefs surprisingly difficult.
Big idea 4 - Not everyone's knowledge counts equally
What happens when who you are affects whether you are believed?
"Their immovably prejudiced social perception of Robinson as a speaker leads at once to a gross epistemic failure and an appalling ethical failure of grave practical consequence."
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007)
In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, an all-white jury convicts Tom Robinson, a Black man, of a crime the evidence shows he did not commit. The philosopher Miranda Fricker argues that their failure was not only a moral one but an epistemic one: prejudice had distorted their capacity to assess evidence, and that distortion had consequences as serious as any ethical wrong.
Polanyi shows that the knower is always personally involved in knowing. Johnson shows that the knower’s self-knowledge is limited. The philosopher Miranda Fricker adds a third challenge which she argues that not all knowers are treated equally. Social identity, race, gender, class, age, affects whose testimony is taken seriously and whose experience can even be allowed to put into words. Fricker calls this “epistemic injustice”, meaning harm done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. She identifies two forms. The first is testimonial injustice: when a speaker’s credibility is reduced because of identity prejudice. The hearer assigns them less epistemic weight than their testimony deserves not because of anything wrong with what they are saying, but because of who they are. The second form is more subtle: hermeneutical injustice. This occurs when someone lacks the conceptual resources to name and articulate their own experience.
Fricker’s example is sexual harassment before the term existed. Women in the mid-twentieth century who experienced unwanted sexual attention from men in positions of power had no adequate concept for what was happening. We revisit this in They could describe experiences that felt wrong, but they could not name them and what cannot be named is very difficult to address, resist, or seek remedy for. The shared conceptual resources of a society its vocabulary, its categories, its legal and cultural frameworks are not neutral. They tend to reflect the experiences of those who have historically had the power to shape them. We will examine this again in our lesson on language and linguistiic determinism. When a community’s experience falls outside those frameworks, the gap is not random. It tends to disadvantage those who are already marginalised. We develop this theme in a number of future lessons, notably in the optional theme on Ethics in language.
Epistemic Injustice
Edinburgh Law School
Fricker is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007) introduced the concepts of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice and has been enormously influential across philosophy, law, medicine, and education. Her central question: what does it mean to wrong someone not just morally but epistemically in their capacity as a knower?
Big idea 5 - You are a product of your communities
How much of what you know did you actually figure out for yourself?
"Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological)... All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals."
L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society (1978)
I began by making this point. This section has already relied heavily on authors I have been influenced by in the past. Almost everything you know, you know because of other people. You learned your language from a community. The concepts you use to think were developed and refined over generations. The standards you apply when you evaluate evidence, what counts as a good argument, what counts as reliable testimony, what counts as scientific proof were established by communities of inquiry working across centuries. Even your most personal beliefs are shaped by the communities you have grown up in, the schools you attended, the friendships you formed, the books you read, and the cultures you have lived in.
Polanyi is clear on this. The individual scientist does not operate in isolation; they work within a tradition. They use concepts developed by others, follows methods refined over generations, and submit their findings to peers who share the same standards of evidence. Scientific knowledge is a social achievement, sustained by communities, not a private achievement of isolated minds. There is another version of this that Steven Johnson calls "the multiple": when the same discovery arriving independently from several different minds at almost exactly the same moment. Sunspots were identified simultaneously by four scientists in four different countries in 1611. Oxygen was isolated independently by Priestley and Scheele within two years of each other. A 1920s survey documented 148 such cases across the history of science and technology. What the pattern reveals is that a breakthrough idea emerges when the surrounding knowledge environment puts it within reach.
This does not mean that individual thinking is unimportant or that you cannot think for yourself. It means that thinking for yourself is only possible because of the cognitive resources that communities have given you. The interesting question is not “is my thinking independent?” it cannot be, entirely but “which communities have shaped me, in what ways, and do I scrutinise those influences?” That last question is the beginning of genuinely critical thought.
Bringing it together
So who is the knower?
What these five ideas have in common is that they all challenge the Enlightenment image of the knower as a detached, rational, transparent mind, a kind of mirror that reflects the world clearly if only you keep it clean. Real knowers are none of these things. They are embodied (their knowledge lives in their muscles and habits as much as in their heads). They are partial (they do not have full access to their own minds). They are socially situated (their communities and environments have shaped what they believe and whose testimony they trust). And they are personally committed (their curiosity, their values, and their passions are part of how they know, not obstacles to it). If you know where you are standing, you can begin to account for how your position shapes your view. If you know that your self-knowledge is partial, you can be appropriately humble about your own certainties. If you know that not everyone’s testimony is heard equally, you can be more attentive to whose voices are shaping what you accept as knowledge.
Next: Lesson 2 - Scope: What Is Knowledge?
Everyone assumes they know what knowledge is. Philosophers have spent 2,500 years discovering that the answer is far harder than it looks.
Questions, assessments, films and other stuff.
Questions to think about
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Most children think they are creative; most adults think they are not. What happened? Is this a problem about individuals or about systems?
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Gardner identifies eight intelligences. Is this a description of how minds actually work, or a political argument about what education should value? Does the distinction matter?
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If the school curriculum has decided which kinds of knowing are most valuable, is your own sense of what you are “good at” really your own conclusion — or is it something you absorbed?
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Can we know ourselves better than others? Under what circumstances?
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If all knowledge involves a “personal coefficient”, does this mean that truly objective knowledge is impossible or does it mean something subtler?
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We know more than we can tell. What does this mean for how we test and assess knowledge in schools?
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If credibility is affected by social identity, does this mean that knowledge itself is political?
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Is the knower the same person before and after they acquire significant new knowledge?
Exhibition connections
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here
It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to three of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.
Prompt #20: What is the relationship between personal experience and knowledge?
Polanyi’s personal coefficient is the most direct answer to this prompt: personal experience is not a contamination of knowledge but a constituent of it. Think about objects whose meaning or knowledge-value depends entirely on personal history — a tool worn by long use, a photograph, a piece of music that sounds different before and after a significant event in your life.
Prompt #34: In what ways do our values affect our acquisition of knowledge?
Both Polanyi (intellectual passion, personal commitment) and Fricker (whose testimony we trust) are relevant here. An object might be a newspaper or news source, a piece of scientific research on a contested topic, or testimony from a community whose credibility has historically been questioned.
Prompt #26: Does our knowledge depend on our interactions with other knowers?
Big Idea 5 addresses this directly. Objects might include a textbook (the accumulated work of many knowers), a peer-reviewed journal, a social media platform, a religious text, or an oral tradition passed through generations.
Feature films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
🎬 WATCH — The Matrix (1999)
Directed by Wachowski Sisters
Before asking what knowledge is, this film asks how we know that what we experience is real at all. Neo’s situation, confident in his grasp of reality, then confronted with evidence that his entire world was constructed, is the opening provocation of the lesson made cinematic. The moment of doubt is the moment philosophy begins. My students can watch the film here.
🎬 WATCH — The Truman Show (1998)
Directed by Peter Weir
The same question as The Matrix, in a warmer and more unsettling format. Truman’s dawning suspicion that his world is constructed and that everyone around him is performing a role, is a study in the moment when the knower begins to question the community of knowers that has shaped them. My students can watch the film here.
🎬 WATCH — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry
If your memories were erased, would you still be you? And if you are, in some important sense, your memories, your knowledge of your own past, what does that mean about the relationship between identity and knowledge? Joel’s mid-procedure realisation that he does not want to forget is one of cinema’s most striking statements about what personal knowledge means. My students can watch the film here.
Further reading
📚 READ — Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative by Ken Robinson (2011)
The best starting point for the provocation that opens this lesson. Robinson asks why children arrive at school creative and leave it convinced they are not, and locates the answer in the hierarchy of subjects that every school system encodes. Accessible, often funny, and genuinely provocative. His TED talk (2006) covers the same ground in 20 minutes. In the library in Education and psychology.
📚 READ — Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century by Howard Gardner (1999)
Gardner's clearest account of the multiple intelligences theory and its implications. Chapter 3 ("The Theory of Multiple Intelligences: A Personal Perspective") sets out the theory itself. Chapter 12 ("Who Owns Intelligence?") addresses the broader stakes. More demanding than Robinson but the philosophical argument is sharper: this is a direct challenge to the psychometric tradition's claim that intelligence is one measurable thing. In the library in Social science.
📚 READ — Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi (1958)
The source of the personal coefficient and the tacit dimension. The Preface and Chapter 4 (Skills) are the best places to start. Polanyi writes with unusual clarity for a philosopher, and the core arguments are accessible without a scientific background. In the library in General TOK books.
📚 READ — Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson (2004)
Johnson's account of a year of neuroscience self-experiments. Chapters 1 and 2 are the most directly relevant to this lesson. Reads like a science memoir rather than an academic text - accessible and genuinely surprising. In the library in Social science → Steven Johnson.
📚 READ — Epistemic Injustice by Miranda Fricker (2007)
Chapters 1 and 2 introduce testimonial injustice with clarity and through carefully chosen examples - the Tom Robinson case is in Chapter 1. Chapter 7 introduces hermeneutical injustice, with the sexual harassment example as its central case. More demanding than Johnson but worth the effort. In the library in Ethics.