all 31 comments

[–]dp80 17 points18 points  (5 children)

I took Theory of Knowledged as part of the International Baccalaureate program back in 1997-1999. I'm 35 now and I have to say it's still the best class I ever took. It's the foundation for analyzing any new piece of information I come across, and helps me distinguish between bullshit and legit data. Being able to do that today, as opposed to 1999, is so much harder since anyone with a little bit of motivation can fill the Internet with just about anything. ToK is that filter that everyone should have.

[–]benld808 4 points5 points  (1 child)

I took it last year, and I would have to say it has gone downhill greatly


I took it like 5 or 6 years ago and I agree with you. It was such an amazing concept executed extremely poorly.

[–]Runcowskinky 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I took it a few years ago. Hated the class during it, but now I really am grateful for it. Sounds pretty Hallmark-y but it's true. I recommend IB to any and all high schoolers. That is teaches you how to think good.

[–]Zerowantuthri 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Not sure if this is just a different term for a class in Logic or some new wave bullshit.

Seriously...everyone should take a class in Logic. Sounds like what is being mentioned here. I think most universities offer it. Should not be missed.


Logic is not epistemology.

Let's say I am concerned about the effects of GMO research making its way into common products. An ecologist tells me I should not scale production too quickly, a chemist says everything will be fine, and a doctor says there is no way to know the long-term effects yet. What do I do? Epistemology allows us to differentiate the knowledge of each of these scientists based on their research methodology. The ecologist can not reproduce invariably the conditions necessary to show her claim in correct, so we give her a low "evidential threshold." The chemist has run many lab experiments to show their claim is true, but can not determine the effects in a sufficiently complex system. The chemist's results have a high evidential threshold but the evidence itself is not applicable to as many systems as the ecologist's research. The doctor is somewhere in between these two.

Consider epistemology a sort of extension from the Boolean propositions of logic to a larger ordered system.

[–]wiphiadminWireless Philosophy[S] 11 points12 points  (1 child)

This is part 1 of our brand new mini-course on Epistemology and Theory of Knowledge!

SUMMARY: In this video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) launches our Theory of Knowledge series. We look at the line between knowing and just believing something, focusing on factors like truth and confidence.

Thanks for watching!


[–]Cups_of_tits 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I go to this university, I should consider enrolling in one of her classes.

[–]Rieuxx 4 points5 points  (1 child)

What tools are used to make a video like this? I'd very much like to make some, particularly for my own students.

[–]wiphiadminWireless Philosophy[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

We use a great program called VideoScribe, made by Sparkol.

[–]subcore 5 points6 points  (2 children)

I am currently in International Baccalaureate as a Junior in High School and we have a Theory of Knowledge class. Boy is it mind boggling. Every letting this is questioned. Rather then providing answers, it's encouraged to ask more residual questions. I love the class so much and it is so different from anything I've taken before. ToK is amazing.

[–]jasonlarry 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I just finished my IB and it was truly the most memorable and worth it class i did. We discussed, argued and fought about so many things. I kinda regret how tok isn't mandatory or how students aren't aware of how great it is. (Scored an A btw)

[–]Recovering_Juvenille 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was so confused. I accidentally tl;dr-ed this and thought I was about to witness a medical professional perform an EPISIOTOMY. Not for the NSFW value, but I was genuinely interested in how and why after only hearing it done to my wife 19 years ago. A sound I'll never forget!

[–]wiphiadminWireless Philosophy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)


There have been quite a few requests regarding what the series will look like. It should look (at least to a very close approximation) like this:

  1. Introduction to theory of knowledge (published)

  2. Skepticism: the problem (ancient skepticism, the dreaming argument, the evil demon, the brain in a vat)

  3. Skepticism: proposed solutions 1: Descartes, Russell, Moore

  4. Skepticism: proposed solutions 2: Putnam/Chalmers, Williamson

  5. Analyzing knowledge 1: The Gettier problem

  6. Analyzing knowledge 2: barring false lemmas and defeaters

  7. Analyzing knowledge 3: the causal theory, reliabilism

  8. Analyzing Knowledge 4: Tracking theories

  9. ‘Knowledge First’ Epistemology

  10. Virtue Epistemology

  11. Internalism and externalism

  12. Perception

  13. Intuition

  14. Testimony

  15. Contextualism

  16. Disagreement

We are working on getting these built and we hope to release them over the next few months. I know that you guys are anxious to watch them (which by the way is awesome!) and we are working as hard as we can to get these built and released. This is our first attempt to build a "mini-course" and we hope in the future to have mini-courses like these in all the "core" areas, especially if the feedback and engagement with this kind of structured content is good.

For obvious reasons its much harder to build these mini-courses--we need to ask a lot more of our faculty who are already so generous with their time (!)--but we hope that this might serve as a good model for the future to help make philosophy more accessible.

Thanks for being so patient with us as we get this content built and thank you (as always!) for all your support.

[–]DonaldTrumpsBallsack 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh boy,Calling all IB students!

[–]Schnapps_out_of_it 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm with all the IB kids here, one of the most engaging and necessary classes of my HS career! Helped me in college in more advanced philosophy, too ☺️

[–]lesubreddit 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Huh, I've never seen "Confidence" ever given as a necessary condition for knowledge before. I don't think it really deserves its own category, since confidence merely refers to the strength of a belief.

I do hope that this series touches on my personal epistemological view, instrumentalism. I'd also like to see an episode on contextualism, which I think is also pretty sound.

And SPOILER ALERT, there are no satisfactory responses to skeptical inquiries that can rescue the common idea of knowledge (as Justified True Belief).

[–]jakbob 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I think we can shorten it down to just justified belief, no? True/ truth implies a static nature and there are few if any things that we are aware of that are completely the same, forever..

[–]lesubreddit 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Even if the truth changes, it would have at least been true at some point, no? For example, if I get a new phone number but only remember my old number, it would be correct to say that I knew my phone number before it changed. The truth of my old phone number may not exist anymore, but it did exist in the past and thus knowledge of my old phone number was possible. I don't think this is a solid route to attack the premise of truth as a necessary condition for knowledge.

However, my personal theory of knowledge, instrumentalism, doesn't contain truth as a necessary condition for knowledge. The reason I give for excluding truth is simply because (almost all) truth is not accessible, as skeptics point out. We (usually) only approach truth by proxy of justification, but we can (almost) never grasp it directly.

[–]jakbob 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I like your last paragraph as I think it resonates highly with how we use the scientific method. We never truly prove something, just rule out other possibilities and or provide a greater degree of confidence. haha.

Another theory I am really fond of is physicalism. Knowledge to me implies sensory detection. If we know something, we are really talking about a process or set of processes of matter interacting in the physical world (our brains.) Interacting with other matter over "there" (i.e- seeing something) The universe being like a giant never ending (?) rube goldberg machine and to say knowledge is just one step in that process.

[–]lesubreddit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes! Instrumentalism was actually born out of the philosophy of science. Since we cannot directly grasp the truth of theories, instrumentalism instead suggests that we ought to evaluate beliefs based on their usefulness. So it doesn't really matter if a theory is true, it only matters if it is useful to believe. Thus, the necessary conditions for instrumental knowledge are usefulness + belief.

As for physicalism, I'm actually convinced that it is one of the few things we can confidently assess as false in the classical sense. Qualia, our direct sensory experiences, are one of the 3 categories things that we can be absolutely positive that they exist without any doubt, since we can grasp the truth of their existence directly. I think that the Mary's Room experiment and Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" argument demonstrate that qualia occupy an ontological space that physicalism cannot account for.

[–]Deckardzz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for making this. I'm strongly interested in epistemology and am enjoying these videos.

In the third video, "PHILOSOPHY - Epistemology: Science, Can it Teach Us Everything?," all of the examples of things that science cannot describe appear to be human experiences, such as what it feels like to experience something.

Are there any thought experiment of things that science cannot describe other than what it's like to experience something?

[–]King_MonkeyZ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are there more videos on ToK? If I'd like to learn it then where would I start?

[–]OhDatNerd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I, also, just finished taking Theory Of Knowledge (TOK) as part of my IB Diploma classes. Really amazing course that not only gives you a chance to question and think about the world around us, but also to broaden your understanding of others' thought processes.

Also helps to distinguish between who can and can't think LOL

[–]Irvine354 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Knowledge is the only kind of wealth that multiplies when we give it away!﻿

[–]jakbob 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good video. I really liked learning about epistemology in college but my personal take is that the problem really just lies in word convention. I think it is happenstance that we use the verb to know in some contexts and not in others and falsely implies that knowledge must = truth. What I know today may not be true tomorrow because our understanding of the world evolves with new technologies or changing circumstance, even in the presence of what seems like an abundance of evidence. Second, a more accurate definition for knowledge is really just sensory information I think. In every example, knowledge is the result of interaction with the natural world in some form. We see, here, taste something and this information is interpreted in the brain. Sometimes the "thing" arises from within us like a new idea or art but we generally don't say I know an art creation. Just my take. To point to the video's example, the man doesn't know its raining when he can't see it because he has no information to base that claim on. In that case wasn't he just making a prediction? Maybe its a hunch, or based on something else (like he watched the forecast this morning).

[–]qumqam -2 points-1 points  (1 child)

Thanks for posting. I enjoyed watching through these today -- until the end. You really need to revisit #7. It is presenting philosophy as uneducated about basic dictionary definitions and unnecessarily interested in semantic confusion.

On #7, the author seems unaware that by definition an emerald is a green beryl. A non-green emerald would be called an aquamarine, morganite, or simply a beryl depending on the color. I realize this wasn't the main point of #7 but since his whole argument relied on the idea that a non-green emerald could exist, it was unnecessarily confusing. Why not pick a swan or something that isn't specifically defined to be a single color? For a field where words should be defined and used precisely, this was an embarrassment.

About the merits of #7 (if a swan was used), the author seems to revel more in semantic confusion than talk about inductive reasoning. (Unpacking it, you start to see "All observed unobserved emeralds are blue." which seems to me to have no truth value whatsoever and therefore doesn't help us with the problem of induction.) The ravens example earlier seems a much simpler way to show that inductive reasoning is not controlled by form alone.

An additional disappointment with this series was the lack of any sort of building from one video to the other -- they really weren't much of a series at all, lacking much narrative cohesion. I would have rather had 8 videos by the author of video #1. You could have a nice one hour single professor course on knowledge, deduction and induction from some of this content.


It's not a series. The OP's video is dated February 12 (yesterday) and is Part 1 of its series. The next video in the YouTube playlist is dated 2013 and has nothing to do with it.