Anastasia Celine / 11 IBDP 2

TOK Commentary on Eilin’s Essay

“The quality of knowledge is best measured by how many people accept it.” Discuss this
claim with references to 2 areas of knowledge.

I will first give my commentary on the positive aspects of the essay.

The knowledge question is precise and detailed, using two areas of knowledge as
references, with an explanation of the real life situation. Her real life situation is her personal
experience dealing with the acceptance of certain knowledge, which makes it relatable to the
reader and aid them in understanding the basic premise : how popular belief and people
acceptance influence knowledge. When a knowledge is widely accepted by people, it
becomes qualified as knowledge.

In her argument parts, she used the AOK Mathematics and Arts as references, expanding
the main question into two other knowledge questions :
1. to what extent different Areas Of Knowledge (AOK) rely on acceptance for
maintaining the quality of knowledge?
2. to what extent does subjectivity determine the justification of quality?

The main ideas for the main question are : ​quality of knowledge ​and ​the degree of
acceptance.
The main ideas for question 1 are : ​which AOK are dependent ​and ​which are not
dependent ​on the ​society acceptance
The main ideas for question 2 are : ​Subjectivity, and the justification of quality.

These questions are clear, precise and correlated to each other.

Now for her arguments :

For the first sub-question, the problem I observed is that she provided a very definitive
answer for the ​example, ​but does not provide the extent to which knowledge is relying on
acceptance. She simply stated that Mathematics is dependent on acceptance, while Art isn’t.
This part is very descriptive and it only provides answer for the examples, not to the
knowledge question. She didn’t provide the range or extent to which acceptance matter in
knowledge in general.

In question 2, she went further by questioning if the ‘​quality’ ​we’re trying to label those
knowledge with is subjective or not. Here, ​she only use the AOK Arts ​as reference, leading
the reader to assume that the AOK Mathematics has an objective standard of quality, formed
and responded to by people’s acceptance. Her answer for this part is : ​determination of
quality is never free from subjectivity. ​Her conclusion is good, but maybe a comparison
between two different AOKs would be better rather than giving explanation to one AOK only.

Her conclusion is moderately good : Claiming that quality of knowledge is influenced by

other factors beside society acceptance, and that different AOKs have needs for acceptance
and different standards of quality. Although some of the arguments in the essay are not
completely answered, she managed to gather the informations from all those questions and
compile and form it into a coherent final answer.
So, my overall evaluation towards Eilin’s essay is this :
Eilin’s essay is decently good. Some knowledge questions are correlative to the prescribed
title. However, some of the answer she provided for those question are not sufficient to
provide a justification and degree. Some arguments are clear and supported by example,
although sometimes she let too much of the example to guide her final answer rather than
only providing different perspectives to the matter. In the end, she also didn’t provide
sufficient explanation to the link back to her real life situation. So for this essay, I’m going to
give it a 6, which is a grade for Level 3 TOK Essay.