Truth and Relativism

“Truth is most often used to mean in accord with fact or reality or fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal.”

Is truth an actual thing or is everyone’s idea of truth different? Can one person’s truth be untrue to someone else? Do things need to be accepted to be true?

If there is no “truth”, then there can be no knowledge. Truth, in terms of TOK is universal. A lot of things don’t even have to be accepted or believed to be true. For example, I believe that 5 + 5 = 11. However, the truth behind this math is 5 + 5 = 10. In regardless whether I believe or accept the truth, it remains at 5 + 5 = 10.

“Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration.”

The concept of Truth Relativism is a view that absolute truths do not exist, and truth depends on something else. To throw in an example, the expression “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, what is beautiful or ugly depends on the beholder, who is the person viewing it so it assumes that an absolute view of beauty does not exist. Relativists would believe that absolute truths do not exist. They would believe instead, that truth depends on external factors such as experience, culture, etc…

In my opinion, I think empiricism links to this content of truth. Empiricism is how we obtain knowledge from this world and is one of the greatest utility. In various ways, our senses are correct but it can also deceive us. The knowledge we obtain from the world isn’t always the same, we’re just more dependent to the opinions surrounded by people. Not only this affects it but our environment and our experiences can affect the way we perceive things. What we see may differ from what is truly there. Our mind often creates an image opposite to what is actually there. This relates to truth because it both obtains knowledge and without them we would be more isolated, causing unable to communicate with nature and human.

An Inspiring quote I heard during TOK class "It works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it".

Bible and the Koran

Can they both hold the truth?

Expanding…

Emotion

The scientist Edward O. Wilson has defined an emotion as 'the modification of neural activity that animates and focuses mental activity.

Some type of emotions:

• Happy
• Sad
• Anger
• Fear
• Confidence

The list could go on for a very long time but the point trying to be established here is that there are many emotions felt by the humans.

We found out that it can be both, satisfaction is classified as a feeling but is a state of mind one feels satisfaction when hormones are produced by the brain to do this. Also, pain is classified as an emotion, but it is a feeling based on physical means; when you get hurt you feel pain.

Emotions play a very big role in our way of making diction's and in are interaction with the world may depend on our emotions. There is a perfect example of this shown buy a famous case, of Phineas Gage.

Reason

Topic

Classification

Classification is to arrange or order by classes or categorize. In our daily basis, people always classify in the society we live in nowadays, to maintain an organized mind and arrange or sort things with differentials. We often classify because of physical appearance, and its function.

 There are different types of classifying such as giving example of school; students often classify other pupils as popular, nerds, funny, etc… classifying is a powerful tool when it comes to remembering and also gives us basic information about the object that we have classified that had been obtained by classifying. Just by seeing which category it fits in, we can know its function instantly.

 Is classifying always useful in our life? It gives several benefits, makes our life less complicated but it also has negative aspects which affects the society or contribute to the point where the world is divided into different cultures, nationalities and religions. Overall, classification tends to create stereotypes for example; people with glasses are usually considered nerds or book worms. We classified people with glasses with the basic information received from the category and simplified it.

We classify everything as it is our natural human behavior and for example in my case would be when buying a game from a store, I classify them by genres such as action, shooting, etc… To conclude, classifying gives us huge benefits but it could also create huge conflicts when it comes to society.

Language

People nowadays express their feelings and thoughts throughout speaking and listening, which is the most common thing in the world and it is the simplest way of communicating with other people. But, it would require something what we call it "language" for us to understand what she/he is trying to tell us and communicate without using body signs. The world just has developed a much simpler way of communicating but yet the problem was the requirement of the similar country language. There are more than 2000 languages in the world, and it is impossible for human to learn all of them, not even close to most of them. 

So what if there was a case where you and a person met but have totally different languages and couldn't communicate at all using words? There was a teacher called Mr. Tomalin who gave us a short story about his family member, whom wasn't part of his country and spoken different language but his experience was that it wasn't impossible at all to communicate fairly well. They would mostly be using body language and face expression, to understand each other and according to his story, he told us that he spent the whole day trying to communicate which came out to be successful and managed to learn some of her (his family member) language too. Thanks to Mr. Tomalin for sharing his interesting story in fact, related to our TOK topic and taught us that there are a lot of different ways to communicate besides using language.

Empiricism/Senses

Empiricism, a theory of knowledge that comes primarily from sensory experience, a study of human knowledge which comes with rationalism, idealism, and historicism. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, referring to sensory perception, creation of ideas depending on their traditional culture which they sense different due to relations of their previous sense experience. 

There are several types of empiricism which are classical, radical and moderate empiricism. Classical Empiricism is a concept written by John Locke that at birth we know nothing, that as we live along we gain information to our mind by our own experience. Radical empiricism is that it holds all our knowledge is gained from our senses meaning that by experience, we confirm that it is real. In a daily real life talk, people usually talk about what they have experienced or else the conversation will turn out to be meaningless, it is impossible to talk about things we had never experienced in life before. Moderate empiricism, which means we do not necessarily use our sense to use or gain our knowledge, referring to the general rule. Examples such as "triangles have three sides" or "100 + 100 = 200" does not necessary have to be investigated in order to find out the answer, it is just a basic knowledge a human has. Some empiricists determine that Moderate empiricism is more reasonable than radical empiricism.

My first TOK class

I found my first TOK class pretty interesting because you would get involved into the topic that the teachers give us. It was a class discussion in the same room with about 30 people, and each of us gave different opinions. Although some people are afraid to express their opinion, most of the class participated well enough to continue the flow of the class. Everyone had different perspectives how they see the world, which is true that world contains infinite definitions which divided people as what they believe in, what is called the "religion".
The world nowadays is divided in territories or countries, mostly having their own language or belief. But we talked about, what would happen if the world was not divided into countries, but rather all connected? It was an interesting question to think about, and of course again, everyone had different opinions which were basically right and to a certain point it was more like a prediction you would make to this question. It was very inspiring and as you get more involved in it, the more fun you have with the subject and learn different things we haven't learned previously.
In my opinion, world would of been better without divided into territories because its a significance of division between different people. It's hard for the whole society to accept the difference and the change because they are not used to it.