I've spent some time reading through your posts. I'm impressed by your level of thought and the degree to which you synthesized your own ideas and what we covered in class. You connected the dots in interesting and fresh ways. Nice work.

 The only area of weakness I'm seeing in most posts is a lack of integration of last year's work into the work you're doing now. While everyone's writing and thinking seem on track, and your formation of new ToK concepts is excellent, I can't help but wonder why I'm not seeing more depth of understanding about the ways in which perception and language inform our understanding of the world. I see a lot of you referencing emotion, perhaps because you talked about that at the end of last year, and most of you are being careful not to be stereotypical about contrasting it with logic, since we know the ways emotion and reason interact are complex, so I think you've got that down. But you all know so much about language and perception that I'm wondering why these aren't  there. Is it because you don't see how it might relate to the human sciences discussion or because you just prefer to spend your words on other topics? Also, remember everyone, you don't need to make your point in broad strokes. We all know that the natural sciences aren't perfectly objective. In order to make your point about human sciences reaching less certainty than natural sciences it's important that you don't overstate the objectivity the natural sciences have. The mark of a good ToK student is the ability to make a good argument while still tolerating ambiguity. So watch out for black and white thinking.

And finally, don't forget to define your terms and concepts. If you are going to answer a question about subjectivity and objectivity, for example, you've got to say what definitions of those words you're going to use. The best way to do this is to gather all the possible definitions of the words that there could be, all the denotations and the connotations, and then decide what meaning or meanings of the words best fit the context of the prompt as it's been asked. Sometimes a short discussion of the definitions is warranted as part of you processing the question and sometimes it's better to just give a definition and get into the meat of your paper. You'll have to decide if semantics is part of the challenge of your question. Sometimes that's part of the fun. If it is, don't be afraid of going to the swamp of definitions. If you are going to use a dictionary definition, examiners get kind of mad if you only defer to a dictionary. So begin with a dictionary definition if you want, but then fill it out by saying whether it either it is or isn't the whole story. Most of you answering the objective/ subjective question would have saved yourselves some headaches if you would have taken the time to figure out for yourselves and for your reader what those words even mean.

In any case, I'm really pleased with your progress and was happy to spend an afternoon inside your brains. I just wish I didn't have to grade them now. But that's another discussion.