Robust Knowledge: History And Lack Of Knowledge

Introduction
One of the first quotes that IB students learn from their TOK books is “Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge” (Khalil Gibran). This quote, better than anything, explains that gaining knowledge begins with disagreement. Multiple people may see the same thing differently having different thoughts and ideas about it. Some of these people’s ideas will turn out to be true depending on the evidence that they get, others seeing that their theories have no backing will agree that what the other person suggests is true. Thus, robust knowledge is created. From this, we can conclude that knowledge must survive and overcome criticism and disagreement and emerge with consensus to become robust. But, is it true for different areas of knowledge? …show more content…
This essay will focus on the process of gaining knowledge with reference to History and Natural Sciences.

History and Robust Knowledge
History is a branch of knowledge that deals with past events, recording and studying them. In History, it could be argued that robust knowledge is knowledge that requires a lot of evidence and consensus from historians that study it. Disagreement is a major part of historical studies. Historians come together to conventions where they present and discuss their works and theories and listen to criticism of other historians thus coming closer to a single conclusion about a certain event. Sounds close to the definition of robust knowledge from the introduction, doesn’t it? But even so, is this knowledge truly robust? After all, history can be defined as series of past events and simply as academic inquiry carried out by historians. As series of past events, history is unchanging. Events that occurred in the past are set and done, there is no arguing if they are what they are or if they are something else entirely. This is the case however in the second …show more content…
Natural Sciences require disagreement to find robust knowledge. The same could be said about History, but in historical research it is not as vital. History has disagreements about data from the past that is incomplete which makes disagreement a source of perplexity. Historians have to use facts that are already know, regardless if it is complete or not. Natural Sciences can be said to have incomplete or rather lacking data because of everchanging nature of science, but unlike in History’s case it is part of the scientific