TOK - Essay Title One (May 2025)

Do historians and human scientists have an ethical obligation to follow the directive: “do not ignore contradictory evidence”? Discuss with reference to history and the human sciences.

[niksipiksi]

im writing my tok essay one day before submitting and damn i think i just fell in love. but fr thank you cause this is one of the best explanations out there

[rainnyyyyy]

I was really scared of TOK at first, now Im scared of the TOK teachers but your cover was really good, when are you uploading it to Spotify?

[bestinlovesdogs]

You ate with the song at the beginning, currently waiting for the album!

[isitreallyyou]

Definitely not the start I was expecting from a TOK video. Liked and subbed drop the banger at the start pls i love it

[DavidOurielReshef]

Congratulations for this video … and for the singing introduction! I know, for having done it myself in the document I shared in our TOK Teachers" Group, how much it requires. I hope you will allow me, in the Model UN spirit of “friendly amendment”, to make a few comments.

This PT unusually targets explicitly “historians” and “human scientists”, so it is not merely about exploring two AoKs, but it is about the craft of the scholars involved in these AoKs. “Do not ignore contradictory evidence” is part of the methodologies of those Aoks, and it is the responsibility of scholars in those AoKs to proceed carefully with all available evidence, whether supporting or contradicting. Is there such a “directive”? Unless the contradictory evidence is “stupid”, mistaken, misrepresented, misinterpreted … it is the scholars’ professional responsibility to take it into account. This leads directly to the question what is the nature of the evidence in history and in HS, and how responsible scholars have dealt with such contradictory evidence. For example, in NS, one could refer to the case of the particle thought to travel faster than the speed of light (a very strong contradictory evidence if proven true) … but which was revealed to be a measurement mistake – thus the contradiction in this case is dispelled through branding it as a technological error.

You mentioned the replication crisis in HS, and rightly so, but how are students to use it in their essays? To be pertinent and stick to the PT, it seems to me that they would need to explore explicitly how scholars deal with the apparent contradiction arising from different replication results. Is the original experiment invalidated? Does the contradiction stand or fall? In my humble opinion, it seems to me that most often, the discrepancies are written off to methodological or contextual differences between the contrasting results.

As an aside, the Panfilov movie doesn’t seem to me to fit the bill of contradictory evidence – since it is a dramatization of a historical event, and not a work of history.

But most importantly, I can’t help but wonder at your take on the meaning of “ethical obligation”. I can’t help but feel that your development on ethics through Kant, or utilitarianism, or humanism, is wide off the mark, chiefly because “do not ignore contradictory evidence” has little to do with deontology or with utilitarianism, and everything to do with what it means to adhere to a “scholarly ethics” – what I have called epistemic ethics: just stick to the methodology and apply it with discernment. Curiously, you mention Popper and his “falsificationism” in the section on ethics, oblivious to the fact that falsification is usually seen as a feature of scholarly methodology, and seldom seen as part of ethics.

Basta. I felt the urge to pitch-in, but remain admirative of your willingness to do all this, and looking forward to the next installment. Cheers!