The Arts — Scope and Knowledge

The arts, including visual art, music, literature, dance, theatre, and film, are the final area of knowledge in the TOK course, and in some ways the most challenging to analyze. Do the arts even produce knowledge, and if so, what kind? This lesson examines the scope of the arts as an AOK and the sense in which they can be said to give us knowledge.

The scope of the arts

The scope of the arts is enormously broad: they encompass the making, performing, and experiencing of works that are valued for their expressive, aesthetic, and communicative qualities. Unlike the sciences, the arts do not aim primarily at literal truth about the physical world; they aim to express, represent, provoke, move, and illuminate human experience. This makes their scope both narrower (they are not trying to predic