The Mouse That Ate The Cheese

Based on class conversations, the point of the story of the story "The Mouse That Ate The Cheese" is to show ToK students how we know what we know, and the different types of knowledge. It also shows how our belief system works. How we know what we is shown two different ways in this story. "Bill knew that the mouse mouse had eaten the cheese. He had seen it with his own eyes, and he wasn't dreaming...or hallucinating." One way of knowing something is seeing it. Another way of knowing is being told knowledge by someone with the original knowledge. "Bill obviously wasn't joking, his story was plausible enough and [Virginia] knew him well enough to accept his evidence as reliable...By now three people, Bill, Virginia and Adrian knew that the mouse had eaten the cheese." In "The Mouse That Ate The Cheese" three different belief systems are shown. Only one results in knowledge. Alice, who saw that the cheese had dropped to the floor, but did not actually see the mouse eat the cheese, rationalized that a mouse must have eaten the cheese, because it was the "only logical explanation." However, because she did not see it, and because Bill, the only one who did see the mouse eat the cheese, did not tell her so, she did not actually know that the mouse had eaten the cheese, she only believed it. Virginia and Adrian, although they did not see the mouse eat the cheese, knew that it had, because they chose to believe, Bill who had seen the cheese being eaten by the mouse. By believing Bill, his knowledge was transferred to them. George, who was told by Bill that a mouse had eaten the cheese, chose not to believe him. Therefore he did not know that the mouse had eaten the cheese, but he also didn't know that the mouse hadn't eaten the cheese, he only believed it, because he hadn't seen it, and he hadn't been told by someone watching the cheese, that it hadn't been eaten by a mouse.