Welcome to Quomodo Scimus

Launching in August

It goes live just ahead of the new school year, and this is a brief introduction to what it is and what it tries to do.

I have been teaching IB Theory of Knowledge for a long time. Over the years I have found that the standard reading lists for TOK, the textbooks and approved resources, always tend to lag behind the research. This is especially true in the (currently five) Areas of Knowledge. The questions TOK asks are live questions. Researchers are still arguing about whether language shapes thought, whether reason evolved to find truth or to win arguments, whether AI systems can be said to know anything. The site is built around the people making those arguments. Basically its all about the books I have read since I first started teaching TOK. My TOK current bookshelf for knowledge and the knower looks like this:

You can probably pick out a few of the names. There are a lot by Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, Howard Gardner, Ken Robinson, Matthew Syed and Nassim Nicholas Taleb because they are so damn readable. But there are a lot of single copies by other authors who have had a profound impact like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Hans Rosling, Carol S. Dweck, Antonio Damasio, Jonah Lehrer, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They produced the sort of book (and ideas) that have stuck with me over the last couple of decades.

If you look at the top of the Quomodos Scimus page at the image of faces on the right, you will see some of those comtemporary thinkers. On the left of the screen you will the faces of my educational background. I came to TOK as history and politics teacher with a criminally under-exploited post-graduate degree in philosophy. When I began TOK it was all about applied philosophy. The shift in thinking from the left to the right of the screen has been profound and this website reflects it.

Eight core lessons

The backbone is eight lessons covering the core IB TOK curriculum in sequence. This is the knowledge and the knower.

The first two pages ask who is doing the knowing and what knowledge actually is. Lessons 3 and 4 turn to perspectives: how perception, memory and emotion shape what we see, and whose knowledge gets recognised as legitimate. For example, Gramsci, Trouillot, Criado Perez and Chomsky all appear in lesson 4, a typical mix of current and classic.

Lessons 5 and 6 cover methods: how claims get justified, and how the mind actually works. Lesson 5 runs through Hume on induction, Popper on falsification and Kuhn on paradigm shifts. This is classical, philo based TOK. In contrast, Lesson 6 addresses the recent cognitive science: Kahneman on System 1 and 2, Gigerenzer on ecological rationality, Mercier and Sperber on why reason evolved to win arguments rather than find truth, Haidt on moral intuition. None of these books had been published when I started teaching TOK. Finally, Lessons 7 and 8 address ethics: what knowing obliges you to do, and whether we can know what is right. Again, there is a mixture of the classic and contemporary: Kant, Mill and Marx are accompanied by Singer, Fricker and Appiah.

Optional themes

Two optional themes are complete at launch, the ones that I teach: Language and Technology. Each has four pages structured around the TOK Knowledge Framework: Scope, Perspectives, Methods and Ethics. The Language theme runs from Steiner on untranslatable words to Austin on performatives and Fricker on hermeneutical injustice. The Technology theme runs from McLuhan on the medium as message through Zuboff on surveillance capitalism, Haidt on engineered addiction and Harari on AI and truth. Three further optional themes - Indigenous Societies, Religion and Politics - are planned for the year ahead.

Areas of Knowledge

The History AOK is written (of course!), with four pages built around Carr, Bloch, Braudel, Jenkins, E.P. Thompson and Hayden White. Four further AOKs - Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Human Sciences and the Arts - are in development, hopefully ready for the launch.

Assessment support

Pages supporting the TOK essay and exhibition are also in development. These will connect assessment preparation directly to the site content, linking exhibition prompts to the thinkers and lessons where they appear.

The Blog

And finally this blog. I have never had a blog before, but I have felt the need for somewhere to upload, reflect and store TOK stuff that I read in the mainstream and social media streams. I thought I'd give it a go.

The site opens in August. It is aimed at students who want to go further than the lesson, and at teachers looking for a different way into the same material. But most of all it is for me, because I like to share ideas that interest me, when they are interesting me.

Richard Jones-Nerzic,

June 2026.