TOK Essay (May 2019)

“The production of knowledge is always a collaborative task and never solely a product of the individual.” Discuss this statement with reference to two areas of knowledge.

Humans are social creatures—always forming groups to survive. It is within these groups, with each passing second of our daily lives, we explore and unveil new things. As a result, we naturally begin to accumulate and produce knowledge that becomes deeply rooted in our society over time. Knowledge can be defined as information, skills, or sets of facts that can represent both theoretical and practical understandings of our world. Produced personal knowledge held by constituent individuals of a group merge to form shared knowledge, through the process of synthesis and collective synergy. Shared knowledge and personal knowledge interact with, influence, and imitate one another. An individual’s finding or initial ideation of knowledge is not a production of knowledge but rather a discovery. Producing knowledge requires the knowledge to be synthesized coherently and to become applicable in the real world, thus being knowledge that is not abstract…