Tok essay

Question 7:
“The vocabulary we have does more than communicate our knowledge; it shapes what we can know.” Evaluate this claim with reference to different areas of knowledge.

Word Count: 1577 Words

Throughout our whole T.O.K. course, students have learned a lot of important elements in understanding not only what we learn, but how we learn everything we learn. Therefore, we haveunderstood to a greater extent our role in this world as knowers. Everyone is a knower, but as will be explained, only those knowers, who realize who they are, and how to expand their knowledge, are those who are truly knowers in every sense of the word.
Students have learned as well, that there are a number of different ways to get to understand all the different areas of knowledge. These ways ofknowing are: emotion, reasoning, perception, and the most important element of this work, “language”. In understanding the importance of vocabulary not only in the transfer of knowledge, but also in the ability an individual actually has to learn something, language is incredibly important. It can be seen as a master key for knowledge, or in the opposite direction, as the worst limitation.
Thenumber of words that exist in its entirety forms a language’s vocabulary. Thus, the number of words that a person knows in a certain language forms that person’s specific vocabulary, given that for him/her, no other words exist. This also means that the vocabulary of every person will always be limited, no matter how much he/she strives to improve it. However, the vocabulary of an individual is notlimited to just one language, as he/she could speak more languages, and could therefore know more words; professional jargon or neologisms could create in that person a specific vocabulary that only he/she or a small number of people could understand, therefore widening the original vocabulary.
By understanding this, it can also be understood that vocabulary is not a concrete idea, but a living bodythat expands by the second. Therefore, as it will be explained within the different areas of knowledge, the creation of new words, as well as the elimination of archaic terms, distorts language in such a way that our ideas change with it, as do our own ways of thinking and understanding as well.
An easy way to understand the importance of vocabulary in human life and interaction is throughtranslation. Translation is the conversion of words or terms from any given language to another, and it is of the utmost importance, because it can be applied to almost all areas of knowledge.
History is a great example in this case. History is a discipline whose sole objective is to understand and make connections with events past and to assess how it affects our modern world. In order to get thatinformation, and to present it to the world, a lot of records, some of them ancient, (we could call them “fossil records”), need to be investigated. Obviously, not all people in the present day speak the same languages, and certainly it has never been so. Therefore, many of the records that are investigated are written in languages that don’t even exist anymore. This means that in some cases oftranslation, texts can only be partially understood, and in other cases, nothing can be translated as some languages have completely died, and become indecipherable.
Relating that to the question, “How does vocabulary affect not only what we know, but what we can know? “ we can understand that, given the fact that the modern world is based on humanity’s past experiences, we need to understand thoserecords in order to avoid making the same mistakes all over again, by taking history into account. This means that among all the records that have not been completely understood over time, a great deal of data has been lost, and our ability to understand those concepts has become non-existent.
One could think that even if information were lost, we would only lose some knowledge; we would not...