International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

Theory of knowledge
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Theory of knowledge
Theory of Knowledge basically entails critical thinking as well as inquiring into the process of knowing. In Theory of Knowledge, people examine how they know what they claim to know by exploring knowledge questions and analyzing knowledge claims. Without application, the value of knowledge is reduced considerably. I agree with this knowledge question. In this paper, this claim or knowledge question is considered with respect to The Arts and Ethics areas of knowledge. Each of these two knowledge areas is connected to quite a few ways of knowing including language, emotion, intuition and reason.
The Arts
Mini-knowledge question: to what extent is knowledge of the arts applicable in the world and how does it make it valuable or not valuable. This mini-knowledge question is connected to two ways of knowing: language and emotion. Art is found in every culture and it is essentially about an aesthetic impulse except for a practical impulse. In an art, the intention of the artist is an aesthetic response, which could be provoking or pleasing. Art is a conscious design and deliberate communication. Art has to be man-made; it cannot be man-found or natural. A work of art is of high quality which requires talent and skill on the part of the artist.
With regard to psychological factors, given that human beings have similar perceptions in general, there would be universal responses toward a piece of artwork. For instance, the artworks of Michelangelo and Gaudi calm and delight most people. Given that people have dissimilar acculturated values and knowledge, they may be inclined to have dissimilar responses. Art also has an educational quality as it develops the spectators not just intellectually, but also morally by provoking people’s conscience and challenging their suppositions. Furthermore, art represents and should sound or look like what it is representing. This necessitates skill. Art can represent the essence of something, and art, including avant-garde art, can also improve or change the interpretation of the spectator.
Art could be viewed as a lie which brings a person closer to the truth. Plato described a hierarchy of knowledge with the example of a chair. Forms are the highest on the hierarchy of knowledge. A form is a non-physical concept of what an object is. As such, the form of a chair is a universal idea of what a chair could be. The craftsman uses these notions of chair in building a chair. The next level of knowledge is the finished chair, an object in space. When a painter paints a chair, this painting of a chair would be the 3rd level of knowledge and lowest form of knowledge of a chair. It is worth mentioning that artistic imitation of a chair is basically a specific, 1-dimensional proposition of what a chair might be. In essence, this is not a good representation of the truth of the form of a chair or a chair itself.
Language: different artworks have different liveliness of language. For more than a century, contemporary and modern art has been a site of intense linguistic production. Visual artists’ experimentations with language have created novel ways of perceiving it as a material resource, subject to transformative processes of creativity as well as symbolic manipulation which sometimes subvert or contravene ideologies of overriding languages – people’s received beliefs of what language has to be like or what it actually is. Art teaches a particular vocabulary that brings benefits beyond the art lesson for students. Traditionally, art rooms have fostered a rich assortment of language uses. A major language use in art includes the aesthetic attributes of artefacts that artists make.
Emotion: the correlation between emotion and art is a matter of wide-ranging study. In essence, aesthetic or emotional responses to art are basic stimulus response. Emotional responses are usually considered as the basis to experiencing art, and the main purpose of artistic expression is to create an emotional experience. Different from other human endeavours, art has the power to produce various human emotions. For instance, art can provoke a person to anger, can bring a person to tears, can make a person laugh, or can even leave a person tired on the sofa. On the whole, the emotions expressed in a painting are not necessarily the emotions represented.
Counterargument for claim: Artwork always expresses the emotions of the artist. Artwork also purges emotions to some extent. Refutation: The artwor...