Evaluate strengths and weaknesses of reasoning as a way of knowing
How do we know? That is the main TOK question, how do we know? Well we know through our experience, senses, knowledge, and reasoning etc. What is reasoning? For me it’s a claim, which supports essential processes, interactions, relationship; as well we base our reasoning on some knowledge in order to find some truth. However, reasoning as knowledge can be objective and subjective. On the picture on the left you see an apple; it is a usual apple, grown up somewhere in America. For a 3 year old child, it’s just a red apple with a nice smell. Apple has these traits and without child or person trying it, therefore this knowledge is objective, it exists without any other influence. But when kid is eating it, an apple becomes tasty, or bitter, in other words it becomes a subjective knowledge. I.e. the girl on the picture is eating an apple; she is excited and happy, the apple is tasty for her, she just experienced that, it’s subjective. Therefore, reasoning might be defined as, just an objective knowledge existing without any external effects and as knowledge based on our (individual) experience. Now let’s see, examples of reasoning of an Apple in different areas of knowledge.
As far as I choose reasoning for my TOK topic, for me I thought that the closest area of knowledge to reasoning is a science. So that’s what im going to talk about now. Everyone knows Newton Gravity Law, or Newton’s Laws of Dynamics. There is a legend that Newton found out Gravitational Law, while he was lying under the tree, suddenly apple fell down on his head, and he got the idea of gravitation. The thing is that apple itself doesn’t carry any gravitational meaning, its only Sir Isaac Newton (for any other guy it probably will not have any effect) had a previous knowledge, and for him it was a subjective reasoning, and apple was understood as an object going down with an acceleration g, later understood as weight. Since, Universal Gravitational Law was founded science start developing really fast; Newton actually opened a new world for science and created a fundament for everything that we have nowadays, i.e. technology, Cosmo rockets etc. And here reasoning can be said as a positive effect, human civilization developed, now we know more than 200 years ago, and it can be considered as a strong side of reasoning as a way of knowing.