IB Theory of Knowledge 3.5 Examples Are Evidence, Not Decoration Notes

3.5 Examples are evidence, not decoration

What an example has to do to earn its words

1. The essay has a maximum of 1,600 words. An example earns its space when you explain how it supports, tests or qualifies a claim about knowledge.
2. An example can make an idea easier to understand and also provide evidence for it. Explain which features bear on the claim, rather than assuming that a concrete illustration supplies its own justification.
3. The essay instrument's Excellent band, 9–10, describes arguments that are "clear, coherent and effectively supported by specific examples". Support is the load-bearing word: the argument has to rest on the case, not stand beside it.
4. Try removing the example and reading the paragraph again. If no reasoning or support is lost, check whether you have explained the example's contribution. Several cases may work together, so no single case has to carry the argument alone.
5. Connect the subject material to a question about knowledge. In a drug trial, for example, you might examine how its design supports an inference and which uncertainties remain.
6. A case that only repeats a claim in concrete terms may leave the reasoning unchanged. Show what the reader can infer from it and why.

Specific detail makes a case checkable

1. Compare a general claim that science sometimes resists new ideas with a particular case: in 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis introduced chlorine handwashing in the first maternity clinic at Vienna's General Hospital and reported a fall in mortality. You can investigate the evidence behind that claim.
2. The case raises questions about what justified the intervention and how its results were interpreted. If you use it to argue about resistance, investigate particular objections and their evidence rather than assuming one explanation for everybody who disagreed.
3. Identify the case precisely enough for a reader to check it. A date and place can help with a historical episode; a named theorem, artwork or study may need different identifying details.
4. A famous scientist's clash with authority becomes useful only when you explain the disputed claim, evidence and standards. Its familiar name cannot supply those details.
5. Specificity need not take a long paragraph. Include the details on which your inference depends and enough context to interpret them.
6. Use cases you understand well enough to explain. Distinguish established details from disputed ones, and retain uncertainty where the evidence warrants it.

The example that proves a different claim

1. A real, well-described case may support a claim slightly different from the one you made. Check the relationship between the example and the precise claim it is meant to support.
2. Consider this constructed practice question for analysis, not a prescribed title: Does the value of a model depend on its truth? Discuss with reference to mathematics and the human sciences. An epidemic model with a failed forecast might seem immediately relevant.
3. A failed forecast alone does not settle the model's value or the truth of its assumptions. You would need to explain what truth and value mean here, why the forecast failed, and what the model was used for. A useful model with simplifying assumptions could also test the relationship.
4. Write the claim in one sentence and identify what evidence would support or challenge it. If the case bears on neither, reconsider its role.
5. The Basic band, 3–4, describes limited arguments lacking effective examples. A mismatch between claim and case is one problem to look for, but a single example does not determine the whole essay's band.
6. You may need to narrow the claim to what the case supports, find evidence that bears on the claim, or explain a connection you have left unstated. Choose after investigating the gap.

Real-life situations and how far they generalise

1. A real-life situation supplies material for a question about knowledge. Move from describing the event to examining how a claim was produced, justified, interpreted or accepted.
2. For example, two historians disagreeing about an event can lead to this question: how can you decide between expert judgements when the experts disagree? Compare the evidence and standards behind their interpretations.
3. One case may establish a possibility or challenge a universal claim. A broader claim about how an area of knowledge usually works needs further support or a reason the case is representative.
4. An episode from one clinic, laboratory or archive does not automatically represent the whole discipline. State the scope of your inference and explain any extension beyond the case.
5. In 2015 the Open Science Collaboration reported replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies from three psychology journals. Thirty-six per cent of the replications produced statistically significant results. That measure concerns this sample; it is not a finding that all the other original claims were false.
6. Extending that result to psychology as a whole, or to the natural sciences, needs an argument about the sample and relevant methods. A comparison can examine shared practices without assuming the same replication rate elsewhere.
7. State the scope you can defend. For some human-sciences research, people may learn about a study and change their behaviour; explain whether that possibility affects the particular method or finding you are discussing.

Your six subjects are an example bank you already own

1. Your DP subjects offer cases whose methods you have already studied. A laboratory practical, a historical source comparison or a mathematical proof may give you a starting point for investigation.
2. Draw on particular academic disciplines within the required areas of knowledge. Identify the case and explain the practice it lets you examine.
3. Your history class's subject matter can become evidence for a TOK argument when you examine how accounts were interpreted or judged. The method and the content need enough context for the reader to understand that judgement.
4. For a classroom case, record what was done, what conclusion was reached and why the method supported it. Check details you only partly remember before relying on them.
5. Your own practical can be an example and can be identified as your work. Explain its context and limitations, and cite published sources when your claim depends on their methods or results. One classroom result does not establish a field-wide conclusion.
6. Recycling a subject essay is the failure mode here. A history essay answers a question about the past, and lifting its paragraphs into TOK answers that question a second time inside an essay that asked something else.

When one developed example beats three brief ones

1. The Excellent band, 9–10, includes consideration of implications. Develop the argument enough to show what follows from it; an implication need not appear after every example.
2. Several brief cases may leave the same inference unexplained. A developed case gives room to examine a mechanism, a complication and a consequence. There is no required word budget or number of cases.
3. A developed case is examined for what happened, what it supports about knowledge and what it leaves unresolved. More narrative detail alone does not do that work.
4. The Rudimentary band, 1–2, describes relevant points that may be descriptive or unsupported. Use that warning to inspect the reasoning around your cases, without assigning a whole-essay band to an isolated passage.
5. When your claim concerns how widespread a practice is, breadth of evidence may matter. Three selected cases can show occurrence in several settings, but they do not automatically establish how common the practice is.
6. Shorten your longest case as an exercise. Check whether you removed background, necessary context or a step in the reasoning, then restore what the argument needs.

Auditing an essay's examples in ten minutes

1. Mark the examples in your draft and note what each contributes. If you cannot explain an example's role, investigate whether the link is missing or the example should go.
2. Compare those notes. Two cases supporting the same claim may reinforce it, extend its scope or repeat one another. Keep the second only if you can explain what it adds.
3. Check that each case is identifiable and accurate. Include an agent, date and place when relevant; mathematical and other examples may need different details.
4. Compare the reach of your claim with the reach of the evidence. If a claim about all the natural sciences rests on one laboratory, narrow it or explain what further grounds support generalising.
5. Check how you evaluate competing points of view. You can do this through other cases, a different interpretation of the same evidence, or scrutiny of an assumption; a fixed number of opposing examples is not required.
6. Check sources for factual cases and acknowledge them. If a case is hypothetical, label it as such and use it only for the reasoning it can test, not as evidence that an event occurred.