The Core Theme - Knowledge and the Knower

Lesson 3 - What shapes what we can know? (Perspective 1: Agent)

Every knower stands somewhere. This lesson is about learning to identify where.

In 1986, The Guardian released its award-winning "Points of View" advert. A sequence of images shows a man running toward another. From one angle, he appears threatening; from another, he is acting to save a life. The event does not change, only the perspective does.

I was exactly your age when this advert came out and I remember it very clearly. The advert captures something genuinely unsettling. The first interpretation feels complete and certain. It feels like seeing what is simply there.

Only later does the viewer realise that what seemed like direct perception was already shaped by prior assumption and a limited vantage point. The Guardian advert is often taken to make a point about multiple perspectives. The deeper point is that each viewpoint presents itself, in the moment, as sufficient and true. From there, the questions of this lesson follow. If perception already involves interpretation, then what we take to be immediate knowledge is already shaped. Intuition can both reveal and mislead - how do we distinguish insight from bias? And if memory reconstructs the past from the standpoint of the present, what exactly are we claiming when we say we remember it?

The power of the advert lies in its compression of all of this into a single moment of recognition. The event stays constant. What changes is your position relative to it. That is the source of the correction. This lesson asks you to make that move repeatedly: to treat your own perspective as something located, structured, and open to question.

Next lesson, we focus on how it is structured. In this lesson, we focus on you the knower.

THE PROVOCATION

What the hell is water?

In 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at a small college in Ohio. It begins like this:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and says, "What the hell is water?"

The fish are swimming through the thing they cannot see. Water is the medium of their entire existence - it shapes what they can do, where they can go, what they encounter - and they have no framework for noticing it, because every framework they have is already made of water. The thing that most determines how they perceive everything else is the one thing they cannot perceive directly. Wallace argued that the educated mind is one that has learned to ask the fish's question. He called the unexamined alternative the "default setting": moving through the world at the centre of your own experience, taking your assumptions for background facts, interpreting everything you encounter through a framework you have never examined because it has never had to announce itself. The default setting is the ordinary operating mode of any mind that has not been interrupted. That interruption is what Lesson 3 is about.

This is Water - David Foster Wallace

The Selador

In his 2005 commencement speech “This Is Water,” David Foster Wallace argues that real education is not just about knowledge, but about learning how to think consciously and empathetically. Using the metaphor of fish unaware of the water around them, he explains that people often live trapped in selfish, automatic ways of seeing the world. True freedom comes from choosing awareness, and frustrations of adult life through attention, compassion, and deliberate thought.

Five big ideas about the perspective of human agency.

Big idea 1 - Perception is not passive

What you see is not what is there. What you see is what your brain has decided to show you.

"Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realising one's sensations."
Paul Cézanne (recorded in Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne, 1926)

As long as you were awake all the way back in 11e Critical Thinking lessons, you have already encountered this idea in the context of optical illusions, Gestalt principles, and the discovery that what seems like direct perception of the world is already, always, interpretation. Remember these five examples?

Here we go to the next stage. If the raw data of experience is always already processed, what does that mean for the knowledge we build on top of it? Paul Cézanne spent decades trying to paint what the eye actually does rather than what it seems to do. At the time, critics found his canvases unfinished, even clumsy, objects that seemed to tilt, apples that seemed too round, perspectives that seemed wrong. But Cézanne was not making mistakes. He was painting the process of seeing rather than its result. He understood, long before neuroscientists could confirm it, that vision is not a camera recording a scene. It is an active, constructive process in which the brain reaches out to meet the world, completing patterns, correcting ambiguities, suppressing information that doesn’t fit.

La Pendule noire - Paul Cézanne

Cézanne painted The Black Clock around 1869-71, for Emile Zola, who kept it his entire life and can be seen with it hanging behind him in Manet's 1868 portrait of the writer.

The clock has no hands, a detail nobody has ever fully explained, and the tabletop is already doing what would later define Cézanne's mature work: the front edge does not run straight, the folds of the white cloth pull in directions that no single fixed viewpoint could produce. Meyer Schapiro devoted a whole essay to this painting, arguing that its instability is not carelessness but the earliest sign of Cézanne building a picture from several angles of looking rather than one.

The neuroscience supports the artist. Visual information travels not just from the eye to the brain, but also from the brain back down toward the eye, a constant stream of expectation and prediction shaping what gets registered as a signal. You do not just see with your eyes, you see with your whole prior experience, your expectations, emotions, your cultural training. Two people looking at the same scene are not receiving the same data. They are making two slightly different constructions.

This is what makes Cézanne’s work philosophically interesting. Jonah Lehrer, in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, argues that Cézanne painted the act of perception rather than its object, and that in doing so he anticipated discoveries about the visual cortex that science would take another century to discover. If even the most basic level of knowing, what I see in front of me is already perspectival, then every level of knowledge built on top of it carries that perspectival character forward. The eye's blind spot, the McGurk effect, the Yanny/Laurel ambiguity, the Kitaoka motion illusions you saw in 11e: these are not curiosities or party tricks. They are evidence that perception is a construction.

Paul Cézanne - 1839–1906
The Art Institute of Chicago

Cézanne is one of the most intellectually significant painters in the history of art. Working in Provence in the final decades of the 19th century, he abandoned the Impressionist goal of capturing fleeting sensation and instead tried to paint the underlying structure of visual experience, how the eye actually builds a scene.

The expert who knows something is wrong before they can say why - are they knowing, or guessing?

Big idea 2 - Emotion and intuition as ways of knowing

“There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, 2005.

In September 1983, an art dealer named Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum. He had in his possession a Greek marble statue, a kouros, a nude male figure of a type of which only about two hundred examples survive. The asking price was just under ten million dollars. The Getty commissioned fourteen months of scientific investigation: electron microscopy, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction. The conclusion was unambiguous. The statue was authentic. Then Federico Zeri, an Italian art historian on the Getty's board of trustees, stared at the statue's fingernails and felt, in a way he could not immediately articulate, that something was wrong. Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looked at the statue and the first word that entered his mind was "fresh" - and fresh, for a two-thousand-year-old piece of stone, was not the right sensation.

The Getty bought the kouros. It was later established to be a (possible/probable) forgery. Months of scientific analysis, conducted by experts using the most sophisticated instruments available, had reached a questionable conclusion. The instantaneous reactions of trained connoisseurs had been correct. Malcolm Gladwell calls this "thin-slicing": the ability of a trained expert to extract accurate information from a very small slice of experience - far more than they can consciously articulate.

Ancient Greek Kouros statue showing knowledge limitations in TOK.

Gladwell's examples all show up the same way: not as a reasoned case but as a feeling. Zeri felt something was wrong before he could say what it was. Hoving's first word was 'fresh.' Antonio Damasio's work explains why expert judgment takes that form. His somatic marker hypothesis holds that emotion is what delivers a conclusion to consciousness, as a bodily signal, before deliberate reasoning has had time to catch up.

Descartes' Error: Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis
Then & Now

Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese-American neuroscientist, trained in medicine in Lisbon and later worked in the United States. In Descartes' Error, he proposed the somatic marker hypothesis: emotional signals, rooted in bodily states, guide decision-making. Studying patients with brain damage, he showed that impaired emotion leads to poor choices, challenging the traditional separation of reason and emotion in human thinking.

Damasio studied patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex the region responsible for integrating emotion with decision-making. Intellectually, they were intact: they could reason, remember, and analyse. But without emotional signals to guide their choices, they became paralysed. Choosing between two restaurants for lunch could take hours. He concluded that emotion is not the enemy of reason, it is the system that makes reason practical. Without it, deliberation cannot conclude.

Remember the famous example of Phineas Gage we looked at in 11e? Gage was a railroad construction foreman who, in 1848, survived a catastrophic accident in which an iron tamping rod blasted through his skull, damaging his frontal lobes. Although he lived, his personality reportedly changed from responsible and dependable to impulsive and erratic. His case became crucial evidence that specific brain regions, particularly the frontal lobes, are linked to personality, decision-making, and social behavior, influencing the early development of modern neuroscience and psychology.

Phineas Gage survived an iron rod passing through his skull. But he wasn't the same again.

Big idea 3 - Memory is reconstruction

You cannot step back into the past. You can only step back into a version of the past that belongs to now.

"The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die." Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff

The French novelist Marcel Proust devoted seven volumes and the last fourteen years of his life to a single sustained attempt to recover the past through memory. The most famous moment comes early in the first volume, Swann’s Way. The narrator dips a small cake, a madeleine, into a cup of lime-blossom tea. The taste triggers something unexpected: not a thought about childhood, but childhood itself, flooding back with a vividness that voluntary memory, the deliberate effort to remember, had never produced. Pixar produced a film version of this more recently.

Proustian

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was a French writer best known for In Search of Lost Time (published 1913–1927). “Proustian” refers to vivid, involuntary memories triggered by sensory experiences, such as taste or smell. His famous madeleine episode shows how a simple sensation can unlock rich, emotional recollections. The term now describes moments where the past resurfaces unexpectedly and intensely through sensory cues, highlighting the deep connection between memory and perception.

Proust called this involuntary memory (mémoire involontaire). Unlike voluntary memory, which produces thin, intellectual reconstructions of the past, involuntary memory seems to deliver the past whole, full of sensation and emotion. Smell and taste are unusual among the senses. They connect directly to the hippocampus, the brain's centre for long-term memory, without passing through the thalamus first, the checkpoint that sight, touch and hearing all go through on the way to conscious, language-based processing. That is the same asymmetry Big Idea 2 already described: a fast, non-conscious channel delivering a result before slower deliberate processing is even involved. Zeri's hunch about the kouros worked the same way. So, for Proust, did the taste of a piece of cake.

That speed explains why the memory feels immediate and undeniable. It says nothing about whether what comes through is accurate. But actually, once it reaches conscious awareness, it goes through the same construction Big Idea 1 already described for perception, this time applied to memory instead of sight. Every act of recall is an act of construction. The memory you retrieve is a story you tell in the present, using materials from then. Jonah Lehrer, in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, connects this to a 2000 experiment by Nader, Schafe and LeDoux: a rat's fear memory could be erased by blocking protein synthesis at the exact moment it was recalled, not when it was formed. Reconsolidation, later work suggested, applies to human memory too. Proust's intuition, that memory is remade each time you reach for it rather than replayed intact, turns out to be close to the mechanism. Elizabeth Loftus spent decades documenting the malleability of eyewitness memory. In her most cited experiment, participants watched a film of a car accident and were then asked either how fast the cars were going when they "smashed into" each other, or when they "hit" each other. The word "smashed" produced significantly higher speed estimates, and, a week later, significantly more reports of broken glass in the film. There had been no broken glass; the word had created a memory. (BBC - The Big Idea - Memory wars)

The implications extend far beyond the courtroom. Oral history - the testimony of witnesses, participants, and communities about their own past - is a vital historical source, particularly for events and communities that left few written records. Oral history is subject to exactly the processes Proust described and Loftus measured: later knowledge contaminates earlier experience, and this is unavoidable. It is a source that must be read, like all sources, with an understanding of how it was produced. The historian Alessandro Portelli argued that oral sources carry more than a record of actions. They reveal what people intended, what they understood themselves to be doing, and how they now interpret what happened.

Rashomon Effect

Rashomon (1950), directed by Akira Kurosawa is a film presents a single event told through conflicting testimonies, each shaped by the narrator’s perspective and self-interest. This gave rise to the term “Rashomon Effect,” describing how individuals can experience and recount the same event in radically different, yet sincerely believed, ways. Its significance lies in highlighting the subjectivity of perception, the unreliability of memory, and the role of bias in constructing knowledge, making it especially relevant in fields such as history, law, psychology, and TOK.

Big idea 4 - Confirmation bias

We do not find evidence and then form beliefs. We form beliefs and then find evidence.

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises.”
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620.

Confirmation bias is the most consistently documented cognitive error in psychology: the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm what we already believe. We will revisit it as "myside bias" in Core Lesson 6. It is a feature of how all human minds process the overwhelming volume of information they encounter, and it has consequences for what we count as knowledge.

In the 1960s the psychologist Peter Wason tested this with a logic problem stripped of any emotional content at all. Four cards lie in front of you: one shows a vowel, one a consonant, one an even number, one an odd number. You are told the rule "If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other," and asked which cards you must turn over to check whether the rule is true. Most people choose the vowel and the even number, the two cards that could confirm the rule. The correct answer is the vowel and the odd number, the only pair that could actually break it. Almost nobody picks that pair unprompted, even with nothing at stake but a printed rule and four cards. That is the default search order Wallace already named in the provocation, the mind's ordinary operating mode, here working on a logic puzzle instead of a worldview.

What makes confirmation bias epistemologically interesting is that it operates across all levels of knowledge production, not just card games. Scientists are more likely to publish results that confirm their hypotheses, and news consumers are more likely to trust sources that confirm their political views. Nations are more likely to remember versions of their history that confirm their self-image.

Francis Bacon described this four hundred years ago, long before the psychology experiments that measured it. The phenomenon is that old, and that persistent. For the TOK student, the practical habit worth building is specific: when you notice yourself holding a rule or a belief, ask what card would break it, then go and look for that one.

Wason selection task

This video runs a different version of the same test, cards with letters and colours instead of letters and numbers, and it names the two fallacies the task is built to catch. Flipping the card that would only confirm the rule is affirming the consequent. Flipping the card that was never part of the rule to begin with, the A card here, is denying the antecedent. Both show up constantly outside the card game: "if the power is out, the television is off" does not mean "if the television is off, the power is out."

Big idea 5 - There is no view from nowhere

Perfect objectivity is impossible, and understanding why is itself a form of knowledge.

"... there are things about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint, however much it may extend our understanding beyond the point from which we started."
Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, 1986.

Confirmation bias is at least correctable in principle: notice it, and you can go looking for the falsifying card instead of the confirming one. That correction looks like it should eventually add up to full objectivity, if you catch every bias along the way. Thomas Nagel's argument is that it does not. Even a knower who has corrected for every bias they can find is still a knower standing somewhere, a structural fact about having a perspective, not a leftover bias waiting to be corrected.

His 1974 paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" made an argument that seems simple until you follow it carefully. Bats navigate by sonar (echolocation) and have a rich experience of the world through this sense that humans entirely lack. You can know everything measurable about bat sonar: the frequency of the pulses, the processing in the auditory cortex, the behavioural consequences. But knowing all of that, Nagel argued, still leaves out something essential: what it is like, from the inside, to experience the world that way. I tried to summarise the idea in the following diagram with the help of NotebookLM.

anatomy-of-subjectivity-what-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat-infographic

This is an insight into the structure of perspective itself. Objective knowledge, knowledge that is the same from any point of view, is necessarily knowledge from which the subjective has been removed. That removal is sometimes exactly what we want: we want the speed of light to be the same whether measured in Zurich or in Tokyo. But there is a class of things for which removing the subjective perspective also removes what is most important about them. You cannot have an objective account of what grief feels like. You cannot have a view from nowhere on your own history.

Nagel's argument is that the ideal of a fully objective standpoint - one with no particular perspective at all - is unachievable, and that pretending otherwise produces worse knowledge than acknowledging your position and working to understand it. Perspectives remain subject to reasoned assessment and vary in quality. Nagel's target is the aspiration of a view from nowhere; objectivity as a value and an aim remains intact.

This is the task that Lesson 3 sets: to become conscious of your perspective. A knower who understands their own standpoint - where it helps, where it limits, what it leaves out - is a more honest and careful knower for it.

Bringing it together

The view from somewhere

This lesson began with two fish swimming in water they were unaware of and ended with a claim about the structure of all knowledge. The path between them ran through Cézanne’s paintings, a forged(?) Greek statue, a madeleine dipped in tea, a card-sorting task, and a bat’s sonar system. What connects them is the same underlying theme that there is no neutral ground from which knowing happens. Perception constructs rather than receives. Intuition knows more than it can say, but also errs more confidently than analysis. Memory reconstructs rather than reproduces, and that reconstruction is vulnerable to suggestion, context, and the passage of time. Confirmation bias directs our attention toward what confirms our existing beliefs. And Nagel’s bat shows that even in principle, the view from nowhere is not available to a creature with a perspective.

None of this leads to the conclusion that knowledge is impossible but rather that honest knowledge requires knowing where you are standing. To be a fish that knows it is swimming in water. It is what Cézanne achieved in paint. It is what Proust achieved in prose. And it is what TOK is asking you to achieve as a thinker. Lesson 4 will take this further, from the individual knower to the social structures that frame perspective.

Next: Lesson 4 - Perspectives 2: Who controls what we know?

Questions, assessments, films and other stuff.

Questions to think about

Is it possible to correct for confirmation bias, or does the correction itself reflect the beliefs we already hold?
Gladwell argues that expert intuition is a form of knowledge. What makes it expert rather than merely confident? Is there a difference
Proust’s involuntary memory feels more real than voluntary memory. Does the feeling of vividness count as evidence of accuracy? When, if ever?
If memory reconsolidates every time it is retrieved — incorporating elements of the present moment — does this undermine oral history as a source, or just complicate it?
Cézanne painted the process of sight rather than its object. Can any art form give us knowledge that science cannot? Or does art illuminate what science later confirms?
Nagel argues that there is no view from nowhere. Does this make objectivity an illusion, or does it redefine what objectivity can mean?
Is it possible to know your own perspective? Or is self-knowledge subject to the same limitations — confirmation bias, reconstruction, the view from somewhere — as all other 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 #18.: Are some things unknowable?
Nagel’s bat argument suggests that some knowledge - the subjective experience of another kind of being - may be structurally unavailable to us. An exhibition could explore an object that represents a limit of knowability: something that can be described but not experienced, or experienced but not described. The prompt asks about unknowability in general; the bat argument gives you a philosophical framework for a specific kind of limit.

Prompt #3: "What features of knowledge have an impact on its reliability?"
Big Idea 1 (Cézanne, active visual construction, the Gestalt demonstrations) speaks directly to this prompt. An object that exploits or reveals the constructive nature of perception - an optical illusion, a work of art that uses visual ambiguity deliberately, a photograph that changes meaning when context changes - could anchor an exhibition exploring when and whether sensory evidence can be trusted.

Prompt #33: "How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?"
Big Ideas 3 and 4 together (memory as reconstruction, confirmation bias) map onto this prompt precisely. Any example of historical revision that involved acknowledging a perspective that had previously been invisible, would make a powerful exhibition object. The prompt is about historians; the lesson gives you the epistemological tools to explain why perspective cannot be eliminated from historical judgement.

Feature films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.

🎬 WATCH — Rashomon (1950)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Four witnesses give four completely different and irreconcilable accounts of the same event. Each account is internally consistent. Each witness is sincere. Which one - if any - constitutes knowledge? Kurosawa’s masterpiece raises the problem of testimony, justification, and the conditions under which conflicting justified beliefs can all be true at once.

🎬 WATCH — How reliable is your memory (2013)

Elizabeth Loftus TED

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics, and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider.