TOK Exhibition

What counts as good evidence for a claim

Object 1: My copy of “A brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking goes deep on several topics in this book, but the main ones are finding out
why the universe is the way it is and where we and it come from. What fascinates me about this
book is that I still haven’t understood everything, since it is so complex and goes from black
holes to living creatures. The whole book is based on theories. While this book is really hard to
understand at the beginning, after re-reading certain parts it appears that he is explaining
everything so clearly and logically, which is also why you start believing what he is saying. The
evidence he is providing here is mostly not proven, for example as he wrote, it is assumed that
the star Cygnus X-1 was in a system with a black hole. In the end, they all seem to be
speculations for me, but using the professional syntax and context, imaging, drawings that make
the visualization clearer, and him having a famous name, make us believe that all he is saying is
factual evidence. This book changed my perspective of the world, although not regarding my
beliefs of the universe, but regarding the information given to people. From what we don’t know,
all that Mr. Hawking described is false and his claims make no sense. Since we are all humans
and we only know human knowledge, it seems very believable with all the evidence and
thoughts the Author provided. We trust his source not only because he was one of the most
renowned physicists, but also because he is human and explains his thoughts thoroughly and
with sketches.

Object 2: Picture in L’Economiste, Edition from the 21 May 2021

Pictures have become a very big part of humanity in the past 100 years. Even before that there
was something substituting pictures… paintings. Although how can a picture help you claim
something? Generally speaking, a picture/video shows the accurate happenings going on in the
frame. It will support a claim since with a picture there would be visual proof of what was
happening. It used to be a very reliable source until humans started manipulating them like we
always do. Especially nowadays pictures can be faked very easily and what is worse is the
accessibility to the photo-shopping programs is immense. Anyone who knows how to download
an app can fake pictures. In 1945 we got to see one of the most historic pictures in American
history, sadly it was manipulated by staging it. This ruins the beauty of truth since truth becomes
evitable by fake proof. The depiction you can see as my object does not seem so suspicious for
faking at all. Why would someone fake a picture like that, you might ask yourself. The thing is
you never know for what reason and what parts of the picture could be faked. Possibly someone
presenting a manipulated picture could also be supporting a false claim. Even if it might not be
true, the ships in the picture could have been made bigger to maybe let other countries believe
the economy is going well. We don’t know and we can only make assumptions.

Object 3: Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a website most of us, if not all know what is. People have access to upload
information, changing it, and deleting it. So this is the solution for everything, you can learn
anything you want on one website, even for free. That’s not the way I see it. I believe you don’t
learn exactly what you want to know, but through different information, you skip to the clause of
what you were looking for. Let’s say you are blind and want to know what color lemons are. You
will feel the similarity between oranges, clementines, lemons, and other citrus fruits, which might
lead you to think that lemons are orange like most other citrus fruits. In this scenario you were
pretty much tricked by nature into thinking that lemons are not yellow, instead, you could have
researched from proof that comes from rather reliable sources (these will very rarely be 100%
reliable). Still, in the same scenario, you now decide to let people put fruits and vegetables that
are the same color together, as a blind person you will now know which food has the same
color. Although you still don’t know the actual color of lemons you now know that it has the
same color as bananas. Doing more similar experiments like this one will lead you to your final
answer, which will be more accurate. I can just emphasize this scenario onto Wikipedia and the
internet in general a lot, since you shouldn’t stay on one source, one pot of evidence but vary
between different points of view.

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