(by Eileen Dombrowski, from OUP blog) Which of her eager suitors will make the right guess in the gamble – and win the beautiful Portia and her fortune? Mathematician Alex Bellos gives us a new twist to a story familiar from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: a lovely and virtuous heiress is compelled by her late father’s will to marry the man who chooses, out of three caskets, the one which contains her portrait. In a Theory of Knowledge class, love, luck, literature, and logic combine in a quick class activity solving a problem – and thereby clarifying for students the process of deduction and justification through reason and language as ways of knowing. And it’s fun. Continue reading
(by Eileen Dombrowski, from 
Dombrowski, Rotenberg, Bick. Theory of Knowledge IB Course Companion. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Activating TOK on FACEBOOK
- analysis arts cause classification cognitive bias concepts/language confirmation bias critical thinking definitions emotion ethics evaluating sources evidence faith history human sciences imagination implications indigenous knowledge intuition knowing how knowledge claims knowledge questions language literature mathematics media memory methodology natural sciences perspectives psychology reason sense perception shared knowledge sources statistics symbolic representation truth ways of knowing
Dombrowski, Rotenberg, Bick. TOK Spanish translation. Teoría del Conocimiento, Libro del Alumno. Oxford University Press, 2015.
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the essential question of knowledge
The question “How do we know?” drives inquiry. When we ask it with the stress on the last word – know — it opens up overview questions on the very nature of knowledge and the forms it takes. When we ask it with the stress on the first word – how? – it takes an analytical edge applied to methods of giving answers. In this blog, we follow this question — sometimes seriously, sometimes lightheartedly — through issues and stories of our day.
