Perspectives

-How do individuals develop the knowledge that we have?

-What is their relationship to the knowledge of others?

-What are the various influences on our knowledge?

-Explore how we might analyse the impact of these influences.

Every individual will have a unique experience in relation to the world and how they have
gained their knowledge, so there’s no way we can exactly describe your personal
experience. But it remains true for everyone that we have developed our knowledge or
our own ‘perspectives’ in the context of other knowledge and other knowers. In some
cases, we consciously accept that knowledge (perhaps through learning), in some cases
we challenge it, and in some cases, we are unaware that we have taken on certain beliefs
in a non-conscious or non-reflective way.

The goal here is not to describe for every individual just how their knowledge has been
developed or what has influenced them, but rather to provide some conceptual tools
which might be used to uncover what is the case in your own experience as a knower.
These concepts might help you to reflect on your knowledge and identify and describe
the ways that what you know about the world has been influenced, and give you tools to
think about how to respond to this new awareness.

Puppet masters
First, a story.

Watch:
https://youtu.be/1RWOpQXTltA

Or Read:

1
Imagine yourself a prisoner in a dark cave where you’ve been trapped since birth. You’re
chained so you can only face the wall in front of you. To your right and left are other
prisoners in the same position as you. In front of you are flickering and indistinct images
bouncing about on the wall and you hear vague echoes coming from them. Other than
you and your co-prisoners, this is all there is in your world – the images and sounds have
always been there, you’ve never really questioned them, and they have become your
‘reality’; this is what you think the world is like. You and your fellow prisoners have even
developed a sort of language, one that allows you to name the images in front of you, and
you play games trying to recall the names of the images before anyone else can. It’s a
pretty shallow form of ‘fun’ but it is all that is available to you.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION

What shapes my perspective as a knower?

But there’s more. Behind you there is a roaring fire and in front of the fire is a walkway
where people with variously shaped objects pass between you and the fire and their
objects cast shadows on the wall in front of you, as if they were shadow-puppets. You
have never experienced the people, nor do you even have the idea that there are people
other than your prisoner-friends, or the idea of a whole other existence beyond your own
wall, images and chains. Your reality is what is real, there it is thrown on the wall in front
of you; these images are not the whole story – but you’re entirely unaware that there’s
more to what you see.

This story comes from an ancient Greek text written by a philosopher named Plato who
died in Athens about the year 347 BCE. In his most famous work The Republic, Plato
offers this story in what is called ‘The Allegory of the Cave’. This allegory is used by Plato
to make all sorts of points, but at the heart of all the various interpretations is this dilemma:
the prisoners believe that the shifting and vague images dancing about on the wall in front
of them is what is ‘real’ and they are deeply mistaken.

2
Plato’s point is that we are, in all sorts of ways, very much like these prisoners. We happily
accept what is presented to us as our reality. But, consider for a moment which beliefs,
opinions or ‘knowledge’ we have that might be no more real than the flickering shadows
of the cave? If you have ever had the experience of seeing a situation in a new light and
realized that you had previously been mistaken, then you might have a sense of what it
must be like for Plato’s prisoners. For the rest of our beliefs, are we sure that we have it
right?

Now the story continues:

Imagine that one day you are released from your chains and you turn to climb out of the
cave. You see the fire behind you and the people milling about. With a shock you
recognize that the fire and these objects are what created the shadows you previously
mistook for reality. The shadows are not real objects at all! You then rise and continue
out of the cave and find yourself in the harsh light of the day. You see the bright Sun
above you illuminating the world around you, even brighter than the fire below. You realize
that all this time you’d been living in an illusion; none of what you thought was real is
actually real at all. This is a revelation indeed!

You remember your friends still chained in the darkness below, so you run back into the
cave and call down to them. They hear you but your voice has now become one among
the many indistinct voices they hear coming from the wall in front of them. Perhaps they
see your shadow, but they only think that this image is just another of the images they’ve
always seen; the reality of the situation is so far beyond what they even could know that
they barely give you a second thought. Since they are not responding to your calls, you
run back down to them and stand before them and attempt to convince them of what they
cannot understand: there is no reality to the shadows in front of them; what
they see that they are an illusion, a vague and pale reflection of the reality of the world
outside the cave. Your presence is a surprise to them, your words of this other reality
simply confuses them. They don’t believe you. In fact, they cannot believe you because
they have no ideas or concepts to help them understand this reality beyond anything they

3
know. They actually think it is you who has lost touch with reality. In order to give you the
chance to prove that you suddenly have not lost your mind, they challenge you to a game
of ‘name that image’, the favoured game from before you left. However, because your
eyes are no longer accustomed to the darkness of the cave, and because you no longer
can see the point in this game, you struggle to make sense of the images as well as you
used to and they consider you a miserable failure, thereby making you even less reliable.
They are now convinced of your madness and dismiss it. You have no choice but to leave
them to their illusions.

ACTIVITY
Consider some of the beliefs that you once had, but which have changed
since you’ve gotten older.
1 Can you identify why your views changed? Was it because of a new experience? New
challenges? New learning?

2 Perhaps the ideas you chose are not ideas that conflict with what you knew before, but
simply reflect a deeper understanding. Try to characterize your thinking in the following
terms:
‘I used to think …, but now I think …’

This story has occupied scholars for the last 2000 years and there are layers and layers
of meaning waiting to be uncovered. In one sense, it is an allegory for the journey of the
life-long learner. We are born into a world of existing facts and beliefs not of our making,
utterly convinced by the vague and imprecise notions we learn in our childhood. As we
learn about and see more of the world, we recognize that we have always had so much
to learn. Our learning is genuine – we move on from our childish understandings of the
world and replace them with more reliable facts and beliefs. In some cases, we
experience so much and learn so much about the world that we simply cannot return to
our relative ignorance. Imagine finding tales of Father Christmas (Santa Claus) or the
Tooth Fairy as convincing today as you once did. This can be troubling and painful. In the

4
original story, the prisoner’s transition to the harsh light of day is uncomfortable. He
staggers about in the bright light, shading his eyes, but he does become accustomed to
the new environment. It is then that his past environment becomes what is odd and
unknowable.

Let us now consider those individuals in the Allegory of the Cave that are wandering about
in front of the fire with various objects whose shadows are cast onto the wall in front of
the prisoners. Plato likens them to ‘puppet masters’ because the objects they
carry, some of which take the shape of various animals and other people, are like puppets
whose shadows being cast on the wall are being judged as real by the prisoners. In Plato’s
story they are nameless, but who are these puppet masters? If we are like the prisoners
in the story, then perhaps there are people, groups, institutions and processes that cast
their own shadows which we accept as ‘real’. Much of what we think – many of our beliefs
– are the result of other people casting their truths into our world, which we often accept
without much reflection. They are, in a sense, responsible for our understanding of the
world around us. Who are these puppet masters casting their shadows?

ACTIVITY
1 Consider for a moment your own ‘puppet masters’. Who is responsible for your
understanding of the world? These might be individuals or groups of people. Brainstorm
a list of people, groups or institutions that have played a role in developing your views on
the world. When thinking about certain people, try to be specific. Rather than the generic
‘teachers’, try ‘Mr. Moore’. Institutions might be more general but try to identify specific
institutions.

2 Consider what makes them a source for your understanding of the world. Why are they
in the position of casting their knowledge onto you?

3 Now see if you can rank them according to who you think is most reliable in that creation
of your reality. Who should you be listening to? Can you make an argument about who is
most reliable on your list? What is it about them that makes them most reliable?

5
4 For each of the puppet masters that you identified, try to identify a genuine belief that
you hold and that you can directly link to this puppet master. The belief might be religious
or political or ethical.

We find ourselves in the middle of a highly interconnected web of people from whom we
learn and who are sources for our knowledge. Schools are a great example. They are
designed to pass on knowledge and information which has already been discovered and
which you simply don’t have time to learn yourself. If you have any hope of learning what
your school leaders have decided you need to learn before leaving school, then you have
to accept much of what you are told and move on. Imagine if you were asked to develop,
by yourself, all the knowledge you’ve learned even this week. Of course, during your IB
Diploma Programme experience you will conduct a number of science experiments, you’ll
read a good few novels and write reflective essays on them and you might develop proofs
for a handful of mathematical theorems. However, these exercises are largely so you
know how those processes work, not so that you develop new knowledge. Most of the
time you’re being given information that others, sometimes long ago, have developed and
which, hopefully, you can move beyond as your education becomes more specialized.

But who chose which knowledge to pass on to you? Your parents are part of the decision
in that the choices they make have led you to the school you’re in, your curriculum
writers at the IB have made choices about what is essential for DP candidates to know
in their subjects, teachers have made choices about what and how to present those
concepts in the classroom and your textbook writers have made choices about what to
discuss in the books you read. You might consider them as similar to the ‘puppet masters’
in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, who construct the reality that we happily accept.

Not all is mere illusion of course. Some of the information offered by your puppet masters
is true and it would be right to accept what they pass on to you. For example, it is very
useful to have good medical information: knowing how to treat or prevent dangerous
diseases is good to know, especially if you have that disease. However, some of the other

6
images of reality presented by your puppet masters might not be as helpful, or they might
be limiting. Leafing through a fashion magazine and looking at the models depicted
might give a false impression of what ‘beauty’ should look like. An examination of
the racial and gender profiles of the boards of governors of many major companies might
give a false impression of the types of people needed to successfully run a company.
These shadows cast on your knowledge do need reflecting on, and in some cases, they
need to be challenged or replaced with better ideas.

ACTIVITY

From your list of puppet masters, choose a source of knowledge that you think might
offer an unreliable, unhelpful or misleading view of reality.

1 How effective has that image of reality been for your thinking?
2 What learning or experience has made it possible for you to identify that information as
unreliable?

Assessment advice
Choose one of your puppet masters and think of a human-made object which
is linked to them or it. You might want to use this object as one of your
exhibits in your internal assessment. Perhaps it is something that this person
uses or has created. Think about how that object illustrates something
particular about how that puppet master constructs knowledge.

The idea is that we, as knowers, do not stand in isolation from others around us. Thinking
about who or what has influenced us is very much at the heart of the TOK
Programme. As children, we find ourselves living in a world where there are already
many ideas about how the world works, about what is real, about how people should
behave and about what is important or valuable. The point of living in families and
societies is so that we can learn from these groups. It is therefore the responsibility of

7
these groups to pass their understanding and approaches on to the young in their groups.
As we become older, we begin to develop a certain distance from those groups and
to think about which of the beliefs provided to us we want to believe and why. Many
of those beliefs are not worth thinking about, but some are very much worth believing, for
a variety of reasons, and we must decide which is which. The TOK course is one way in
which we can understand the importance of this task and develop the skills and processes
to make these decisions.

ACTIVITY
Interview one of your chosen puppet masters.
1 Explain to them the concept of puppet master and why you think this
person is one of yours.
2 Explain in what way they have helped shape your reality.
3 Ask them whether they know about the impact they have had on your
understanding of the world.
4 Did they reflect on how best to influence you?
5 Do they think they are a reliable influence on your understanding of the
world around you?
6 Where do they think they may be less reliable, or may have misled you?

Having thought about your own puppet masters, you might have realized that each of us
has many different sources of knowledge – different puppet masters casting their
shadows in various ways. As individual ‘knowers’ we stand in relation to a number of
these sources. In another way of thinking about it, we might find that we are part of many
different ‘communities of knowers’: groups of people of shared interest, skills and
knowledge. So how can we think about what these puppet masters provide? They give
us different maps, different ways of navigating the world.

8
9