Tok Essay, a 4 :P

TOK Essay

Essay Question:

To what extent do personal attributes affect Ways of Knowing and why, if at all, does answering this question matter in the first place?

Personal attributes can affect our Ways of Knowing in many different ways. For example, reasoning can be negatively affected by over-confidence and language can be positively affected by a creative personal attribute etc. In this essay I will look at to what extent Ways of Knowing are affected by personal attributes and then I will try to evaluate why this matters at all. The four ways of knowing, which I will investigate in this essay are; emotion, reasoning, sense perception and language.

If we begin with emotion, I think it is very much affected by our personal attributes. I will use examples to illustrate this:

· If you are losing badly when playing football a personal attribute like pride or self-esteem can have a great effect on our emotions. If you are proud of yourself and you expect yourself to do outstanding at something, like football, and you fail, then it is very likely that you will be angry, sad or disappointed. It might also affect our reasoning, causing us to blame the actual game for being stupid rather than blaming your own skill.

· A personal attribute like creativity can have a very good influence on our emotional way of knowing. If we are for example drawing a painting, we need creative skills to display our emotions in the painting. Therefore, if you are for example very creative, it can help us display our emotions to other people in different ways and so it affects our emotional stance towards the rest of the society.

From these examples we can draw the conclusion that our emotional Way of Knowing is very much affected by personal attributes such as creativity, pride, self esteem etc. I am sure there are a many more ways in which I could prove more examples as well. At the same time as emotion is affected by personal attributes it is good to keep in mind that it is probably the same thing the other way around. Our personal attributes are also affected by our emotions and other Ways of Knowing.

Now let us look at sense perception and how it can be affected by personal attributes. Seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting are all sense perceptions. Our sense perception defines what we perceive around us and can be affected by personal attributes, for example:

· A personal attribute like appearance can very much affect our way of perceiving things. If we are faced with an ugly person we will perceive him or her differently than we would have if he/she was good looking. This way a sense like seeing can be greatly affected by the appearance of people which may further affect how we perceive the message that the person may want to convey. This way it also has an effect on language as a Way of Knowing as we might perceive knowledge coming from another person differently by judging his/her personal attributes.

Finally, if we consider reasoning and how it can be affected by personal attribute, I think it will be affected to a great extent. Here are examples:

· You are just about to make a great acrobatic jump which requires a lot of skill. Before we do this we should use reason and consider the consequences. If you are confident, skilled or just stupid it could have the effect that you do it, your reason will be affected by the attributes stated and you will jump. However, if you are careful, clumsy, or perhaps just value yourself and your body, you might reason and come to the conclusion that the jump you are about to make is too dangerous or unnecessary.

This way reason can be affected by personal attributes, but there are of course many more possible examples. I have now looked at how I think personal attributes affect our Ways of Knowing, but let us turn it around and at it from a different viewpoint. Is it not possible that our personal attributes are also extremely affected by our ways of knowing? There are so many factors that play in so the examples which I have stated are merely simplified situations to convey my ideas. If we were to really understand how we are affected by our personal attributes we would have to look at how it works the other way around as well, for example how our Ways of Knowing could cause us to become over-confident and in that way affect our personal attribute; if you feel you have gained more knowledge or a more correct viewpoint of a certain knowledge issue than others in your surrounding it could result in you becoming overconfident.

At this point I have come to the conclusion that most of the time, from what I can relate to according to my experience; our personal attributes have a great effect on our Ways of Knowing. To answer the initial part of the question, our personal attributes affect our Ways of knowing to a large extent. Whichever Way of Knowing we are using to perceive knowledge (also combined), I am sure they are affected by our personal attributes. Our personal attributes are gained through our genes and trough experience and knowledge, and so they are closely connected to each other and will always affect each other.

The latter part of the question is concerning why it might be important to be answering it at all. I think the question is vital, and even if people might not think of the question in the way we have done it here, very consciously, I think most people have had reason to consider it in their lifetime, even if formulated in very different ways. But why has it been important to me? I want to be conscious of why I do things the way I do, why I think the way I think, including how personal attributes affect our Ways of Knowing. If people are more conscious about why they do certain things and why things turn out like they do, it is very important to consider questions like these in order to gain understanding of why people behave in certain ways, think differently and feel differently about certain things. This is why this question is important to answer and why it should not be ignored when we are learning and gaining knowledge throughout life.