Personal vs. Shared Knowledge: The Foundation
- Every piece of knowledge you encounter falls into two categories:
- Personal knowledge - messy, emotional, and completely yours.
- Shared knowledge - organized, systematic, and accessible to everyone.
- Understanding this distinction changes how you approach TOK completely.
Definition
Shared knowledge
What groups of people have figured out together, tested, and agreed upon
Definition
Personal knowledge
What you know from your own direct experience
- Learning to drive
- Personal knowledge
- You know that hitting the brakes too hard in your dad's old Honda makes the car jerk forward.
- You learned this through experience.
- Shared knowledge
- Physics tells us that sudden deceleration transfers kinetic energy, causing objects in motion to continue moving forward (Newton's first law).
- Personal knowledge
Why Your Personal Perspective Actually Matters
- Here's what most students get wrong about TOK.
- They think it's all about abstract theories and shared knowledge. That's wrong.
- TOK explicitly wants your personal perspective because it reveals something crucial about how knowledge actually works.
Knowledge Is Always Interpreted
- Shared knowledge doesn't just sit there waiting to be absorbed.
- It gets filtered through your personal experience every time you encounter it.
- COVID-19 vaccine data
- Clinical trials show vaccines reduce severe illness by 90%.
- Personal interpretation depends on your experience
- Three different perspectives:
- If your grandmother died from COVID, this statistic feels like a lifeline
- If you're young and healthy, this statistic might feel less urgent
- If you've had bad reactions to medications: This statistic comes with anxiety
Personal Knowledge Reveals Gaps
- Sometimes your personal experience shows you that shared knowledge is incomplete or wrong.
- And this is actually how most major breakthroughs happen.
- Someone simply notices their direct experience doesn't match what everyone else believes.
- In the 1840s, shared medical knowledge said disease spread through "bad air." Dr. Semmelweis noticed that when he washed his hands between patients, fewer women died in childbirth.
- His personal observation contradicted shared knowledge. Medical establishment rejected his findings for decades.
