Given the different authorities heard at the debate, what source of knowledge and perspective “tells the truth” best about the ‘nature’ of the rose? As a budding ToK student, what has convinced you the most? Why? What hasn’t? Why not? The ‘nature’ of a rose is simply billions of atoms assembling together in a certain way to form what we call a rose. This chemistry perspective is quite convincing out of all the other arguments as a rose is simply that and regardless of what we think or feel about it, it is still a collection of atoms which form this ‘rose’.
The rose cannot change into any another object and although there are different breeds of roses a rose will still remain as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen put together in rearranged order. With language and arts, as more subjective views of the rose, there is a weaker argument of what a rose actually is. Language for example claims that all ‘areas of knowledge, theories of knowledge are controlled by language’, I feel that knowledge is only controlled by language because it is a much easier form of communication, if there were another form of communication that was an easier medium to express our feelings, thoughts etc….
through then we would feel this other form of communication will ‘control’ our knowledge. An example which shows that language is not necessary in knowledge is Helen Keller. How is it possible for someone who had a near complete lack of communication been able to communicate and interact with everyone when she only had 19 months of learning how to communicate with language?
She hardly had any means of other communication apart from a sign language created by her family cook’s daughter and from that, it could have been next to impossible to understand new things she has never encountered before. Therefore if she hadn’t yet understood what a rose was, for example, how is it possible for her to communicate what she came to understand a rose is? And how would everyone else know if what she thinks is a rose really is the rose…. This leads to the arts where it is understandable that everyone will have their own special definition of a rose.
As to each individual, a rose would have different values and meanings but because of this, it is hard to understand what the ‘real rose’ is if everything is different to everyone then of course it would be easy to agree that there is something similar to what we believe is a rose but then we wouldn’t know what a REAL rose is. So how is it possible for the arts to be the best perspective which “tells the truth” of the ‘nature’ of a rose when we all only have a concept of what it is.
This brings us back to chemistry where it is much simpler and a rose will exist regardless of what we feel/think of it, it is still a collection of atoms reacting together to form this ‘rose’. Even if we called it a table, it is still the same construct of a thing we presently call a rose. It may be a human expression of a beautiful rose in a picture and will give us the same emotions of what we relate to as a rose, maybe a rose of different specie to a biologist but it is still a group of atoms to a chemist and even if we don’t exist to understand all of this a rose is what it is.