TOK Essay

"People need to believe that order can be glimpsed in the chaos of events" (adapted from John Gray, Heresies, 2004). In what ways and to what extent would you say this claim is relevant in at least two areas of knowledge?

This statement can be applied to two areas of knowledge, the natural sciences and the social sciences. It could be argued that the very purpose of the natural sciences is to find order in the chaos of natural events and therefore this statement can be readily applied in this area of knowledge. In Reuben Abel’s book Man is the Measure, Abel claims that science explains facts by taking a general law combined with specific conditions of nature to logically deduce the facts. This shows how scientists are taking the chaotic situations of their natural environment and finding a way to explain them with order and reason, therefore glimpsing the order within that chaos. An example of this is the expedition that was taken to find water on the moon in October 2009, when NASA launched a missile into the surface of the moon to break up the rocky ground and collect samples to discover if they contained any water content. NASA was trying to find supportive evidence that the Moon was once a part of the Earth by studying the composition of its water molecules. In the end they discovered that it was strikingly similar to water on Earth and this was the evidence they had hoped to find. This supports this claim because it is an example of how scientists try and make sense of the chaos that is our universe. Despite how much they do not understand they are working they are looking for an order and explanation for the way the universe is.

Another example of this statement in the natural sciences is the Climategate Scandal. E-mails of many climate change researchers asking other climate change researchers to manipulate their data to make global warming seem like more of a threat than it actually is were discovered by computer hackers and posted online for the rest of the world to see. This supports this claim because it shows that these scientists were trying to create order by fooling other people into believing they had to organize themselves to deal with the issue of global warming. In the chaos of environmental change these people took drastic measures to ensure there would be some organization of support for environmental awareness. The implication of this statement in the natural sciences is that the world and universe we live in is completely chaotic and we may never truly understand it despite how much we try to organize it.

In the social sciences, it could be argued that people devote their time to trying to find an order to the chaotic event that is mankind. In Man is the Measure, Abel claims that the purpose of the social sciences is to formulate general conditions under which events occur either by or within human beings. This shows how scientists in the social sciences, similar to those in the natural sciences, are trying to make sense of a chaotic phenomenon such as human behavior and are therefore looking for the order within chaos. An example of this claim in social sciences is the documentary titled 18 with a Bullet, which studied the trends and behavior of gangs in El Salvador. A group of social science scientists and a camera crew went to a city called San Salvador in El Salvador and spent months following and interviewing a gang called 18 to learn about their culture and see how their social system was set up. These scientists were looking to find trends that would predict the behavior of the gang members in certain situations and they were looking for explanations for the violence they encouraged within their culture. This example supports this claim in the social sciences because it shows how these people were trying to find a rhyme and reason to human behavior in such a violent and chaotic environment. They were looking for the order within the social system of such a chaotic group of individuals.

Another example of this statement in the social sciences is the Stanford Prison experiment. In this experiment student volunteers were chosen to participate due to their background of being generally good people with no real criminal record; some of these students were assigned to be guards while others were assigned to be prisoners. Social scientists observed the behavior of the students in this prisonlike environment and discovered that guard students very quickly began abusing the prison students to the point where they had to stop the experiment. This behavior lead these scientists to believe that even good humans are easily susceptible to becoming evil in a sadistic environment. This experiment exemplifies how this statement applies to the social sciences because it shows these people in the experiment felt the need to organize themselves in such a chaotic environment as a prison in order to survive. They felt the need to find order in chaos. The implication of this statement in the social sciences is that humans resort to order and system in any chaotic situation despite the outcome of their actions.

A counterclaim to the relevance of this statement in both the natural and social sciences is that the statement is false to begin with. It could be argued that people do not attempt to find order in situations of chaos and therefore they would not feel that it is necessary to do so. An example that may support this claim would be anarchist societies which strive to abolish all systems of order and embrace the idea of chaos in a way. However, this claim can be disputed with the fact that the majority of human societies do not promote anarchy and that that suggests the majority of humanity would be likely to support this claim of finding order in chaos. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to say that this statement is readily applicable to both the natural sciences and the social sciences.