Anthony Shen - TOK Exhibition - Is Bias Inevitable in The Production of Knowledge

TOK Exhibition: Is bias inevitable in the production of knowledge?
Object 1: Euclid’s The

Elements, written circa
300 BCE, an edition in
Latin and Greek printed
in 1573/1574
Mathematics is often
conceived of as a field
thought to be free from
bias. The pioneering
method of deductive
proof from the basic
axioms of geometry laid
out in logical clarity in
Greek mathematician
Euclid’s work, The
Elements (c. 300 BCE), is often held up as an epitome of that fact. Yet it is also in part due to Euclid’s
paradigmatic status in the mathematical sphere that has led some scholars, such as Richard J. Trudeau
and William Clifford, to claim that the new development of non-Euclidean geometries in the
19th-century is every bit as significant as the Copernican revolution in astronomy.
In his book, The Non-Euclidean Revolution (1987), Trudeau outlined how mathematicians in the
19th-century had to reject the fundamental assumption of the “intuitive truth” that Euclid saw in his
basic five axioms which he proved all the rest of his results from. For example, his fifth postulate, that
parallel lines never intersect, expresses an instinctive fact that humans have about the nature of space.
But Trudeau writes that these axioms in actuality, encoded a subconscious bias resulting from
fundamental human limitations in sensory perception of the “physical reality of space” itself. Indeed,
Einstein’s theory of relativity was only able to describe the actual curvature of space-time through
non-euclidean geometries developed by mathematician Henri Poincare. Objects beyond the scale of
kilometers are difficult to be directly observed by the naked eye in its entirety, much less intuitively
understood. Objects less than about twentieth of a millimeter cannot be seen unaided. At our level of
existence, the ground is flat and space is three dimensional, a biased perspective that Euclid had not
realized in developing his system.
It can be seen that even in a field which prides itself as being pure and “lies outside of humans” as
G.H. Hardy put it, the development is still very much influenced by human biases, psychological
biases that perhaps delayed the paradigm shift due to the pre-eminence of Euclid, and the fact that our
biology inherently restricts the range of our direct sensory perception.
Object 2: Samuel Morton’s collection of
human skulls with lead shot used for cranial
capacity measurement held at the
University of Pennsylvania
The origins of “scientific racism”, which

has been long debunked as pseudoscientific
belief, is in part attributed to the highly
influential work by 19th-century American
anthropologist Samuel George Morton. His work, Crania Americana (1839) which was used
purported as evidence for the intellectual superiority of Caucasians, gained prominence in European
circles around the time of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. His lithographic illustrations and
cranial capacity measurements made with seeds and lead shot had the air of scientific credibility, and
his purported empirical measurements of skull volume and claimed link to intellectual capacity was
founded on a history of systemic racism. Darwin’s contemporaries including Alfred Russell Wallace
applied the theory of natural selection in an attempt to explain the supposed hierarchy of races.
Historian Richard Hofstader wrote of the time, “The Darwinist mood sustained the belief in
Anglo-Saxon racial superiority which obsessed many American thinkers in the latter half of the
nineteenth century.”
In The Mismeasure of Man (1980), evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould criticized the
methodology used by Morton and his contemporaries. These anthropometric methods, Gould claimed,
were subject to unconscious selection bias due to preconceived racist notions, and on top of that he
extrapolated dubious data on cranial volume to mental capacity, a link which has been refuted. It is his
purported scientific work in part that sustained the racist suppression of native Americans, and
slavery, and later, the eugenics movement in North America and Europe, which held mainstream sway
until the Nazi oppression came to light. Morton’s illustrations and publications perniciously
demonstrate how even in the scientific establishment, theory and data to justify fictitious claims such
as those of racial supremacy as a result of individual and collective biases.
Object 3: A photograph of
John Maynard Keynes as
the UK delegate at the 1944
Bretton Woods Conference
Perhaps the most influential

economist in the 20th
century is John Maynard
Keynes, whose system of
economic theory, laid out in his treatise The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
(1936), is still highly influential in economic policy around the world today. The photograph of
Keynes at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, with The Economist calling him its true “intellectual
leader” testifies to his authority gained over the course of his life. Keynesian economics, as it was
termed, advocated active government intervention in the free market, such as in the wake of a
recession to cut taxes and increase spending to boost domestic demand. Yet Keynes’s rebuke of the
mainstream neoclassical economics was only made so influential and dominant due to the realities of
the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Keyne’s personal experience with the prolonged recession inspired his early work in criticising the
British policy of maintaining a balanced budget. He instead argued that deficits from lending were
necessary to boost the economy. Initial rejection of Keynes’s thoughts was replaced with widespread
acceptance in the 1940s, first in academia and then in government, due to a perceived failure of
neoclassical economics to explain the severity of the depression. This shows how the development of
new economic knowledge, in this case, Keynesian theory, is inextricably linked with the historical
context of the time. The second hurdle is the widespread acceptance of this knowledge, which, as
Keynes’s success with his ideas as the photograph testifies to, was only predicated on a second
historical event, World War II. The massive government deficits which boosted domestic spending
and production for the war, particularly in the United States, was a vindication of Keynes, postwar
economist John Galbraith argues. This example demonstrates the knowledge production does not
happen in a vacuum and the types of knowledge produced in certain fields such as economics are
profoundly biased by the historical realities under which it arose.
Word Count: 945

Works Cited:
Asian Pacific American Institute. “Timeline Of Scientific Racism”. Asian Pacific American Institute,
https://apa.nyu.edu/hauntedfiles/about/timeline/.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “John Kenneth Galbraith”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 25

Apr. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Kenneth-Galbraith.
Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure Of Man. W. W. Norton & Company, 1981.
Heinzmann, Gerhard and Stump, David. “Henri Poincaré”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/poincare/.
Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism In American Thought. Beacon Press, 2016.
Morton, Samuel George. Crania Americana, Or, A Comparative View Of The Skulls Of Various
Aboriginal Nations Of North And South America. J. Dobson, 1839,
http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/60411930R
Ouellette, Jennifer. "There’s New Evidence Confirming Bias Of The “Father Of Scientific Racism”".
Ars Technica, 2018,
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/theres-new-evidence-confirming-bias-of-the-father-of-
scientific-racism/.
Swetz, Frank, 2015. Mathematical Treasure: Euclid's Elements in Both Greek and Latin. [online]
Mathematical Association of America.
https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-euclids-elements-in-
both-greek-and-latin.
Trudeau, Richard J., 1987. The non-Euclidean revolution. Intr. by Harold Scott Macdonald Coxeter.
Boston - Basel - Stuttgart: Birkhäuser XII.
“What Was Decided At The Bretton Woods Summit”. The Economist, 2014,
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/06/30/what-was-decided-at-the-brett
on-woods-summit.
Wong, Yan. "How Small Can The Naked Eye See?". BBC Science Focus Magazine,
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-small-can-the-naked-eye-see/.

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TOK Exhibition: Is bias inevitable in the production of knowledge?

Object 1: Euclid’s The

The origins of “scientific racism”, which

Perhaps the most influential

Word Count: 945

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “John Kenneth Galbraith”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 25

Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure Of Man. W. W. Norton & Company, 1981.

Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism In American Thought. Beacon Press, 2016.

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