TOK Essay-Lack Of Knowledge

When an individual becomes more knowledgeable, they become aware of the limitations of both their knowledge and themselves as a knower. Suffice it to say, knowledge is something to be desired, but it is also something we should be wary of. Knowledge opens us to innovative inventions and surprising solutions, but knowledge can also shed a light to the faults in both ourselves and what we think we know. This realization causes said individual to become more skeptical in regards to what they know; therefore, I wholeheartedly agree with the statement when it claims that new knowledge can lead people to doubt what they know.

To say that a person could come to question what they know upon gaining new information seems to imply that there were faults

One’s self-perception and self-awareness play a large part in how confident someone is in their knowledge. Generally, we tend to view their knowledge as an extension of ourselves, so if we learn something that makes us doubt our own abilities, then that self-doubt will be reflected in what we know. In order to examine how one’s self-awareness can affect their thinking, I want to focus on how it affected me personally in my TOK essay. When I first approached the TOK essay I had an appreciable amount of unfounded confidence due to lack of knowledge surrounding it. At first, I thought that the TOK essay would be just like any of the other essays that I wrote in my normal essays, so I incorrectly assumed that I would be able to complete the TOK essay with little effort and my limited understanding of knowledge. After learning about the many intricacies of the TOK essay, I realized that my abilities as both a writer and a knower were inadequate. As a result of this realization, I began to doubt what I thought I knew about TOK because I thought that if my own view of myself as someone well-versed in this discipline was incorrect, then what I thought I knew about said discipline might also be incorrect and could have been the cause of my incorrect insight, even if that was not the case. By learning more about TOK, I became more aware of my own limits, which lead me to become unsure in what I thought I knew in TOK. At this point, I must acknowledge that while my claims up to now seem to imply that doubt only functions as a hazard to knowledge, but that is not always the case. While uncertainty can certainly cause trouble, it also makes a person more cautious and open-minded. To bring it back to my example, because of my doubt in my own capabilities I worked hard in order to make up for