Nidhish Balakrishnan's ToK Blog

 'Past knowledge' is what we call experience. And it is no stretch to say that our 'experience' has greatly influenced our acquisition or production of new knowledge. Several instances, let's say findings in sciences, greatly relied on the foundations built by previous scientists' findings and such. One can even go far as to say that there will be no acquisition or production of new knowledge if there is no past knowledge. This is universal because you can only explain what the new knowledge is with your past knowledge.  Even the first human, let's say, who only had his or her five senses and nothing else acquired knowledge that rock was grey with his sense of sight, that it was sharp through his sense of feel, etc. This could only be acquired because he knew that what he touched was unique to each type of object he touched from his past experiences.  Our experiences also influence our method of thinking and perceiving things in different ways. A few millenn...

 The Veil of Ignorance by John Rawls is one of the most influential philosophical ideas in the past century. It's a method of understanding what builds up a just society from scratch. One thinks that they're building a society from rock bottom, by imagining themselves in the situations before the society existed, which is called the Original Position. The idea is fundamentally looking at the society your present self is trying to build through your pre-society past self or should I say an older perspective, and judging whether it would approve of your actions as just or not.  This process, of course, has a lot of weaknesses because the person and their Original Position would have fixed biases, and there would be a lot of disagreement between two people. However, this is the problem that John Rawls tries to address, and has found a solution for it. He first assumes certain things about people who design their own society. Their Original Positions are assumed to be all equal an...