Dear Gunnar,

My dog Freddy agrees with you completely. And he knows.

Seriously, though, this raises two issues.

The first is that the boundary is not quite clear. At some point, however, creatures may be said not to “know” anything in the sense that we speak of knowledge. Without saying where the boundary lies, I’d be willing to guess that oysters and earthworms lie on the other side, while dogs, horses, and pigs lie on our side, along with chimpanzees and gorillas.

But the second issue is that no one can share knowledge in the sense that they actually “share” what they “know.” What knowing creatures do through writing, language, and other means is to share representations of knowledge.

When we share knowledge through representation, it becomes information. It only becomes knowledge again when another knowing creature takes it in. The different histories and world views of each individual knowing creature accounts for the challenge of engagement on the hermeneutical horizon: no hermeneutical horizon is the same, so no one can truly take in exactly what it is that another creature “knows” through the representations of their knowledge.

An interesting example occurs to me – the physicist Richard Feynman saw the letters in equations as having colors. He once wondered what these letters looked like to physics students. Now imagine a physicist who experiences the letters in equations as flavors or as sounds. Both physicists can communicate the samephysics to each other and discuss the physics with the same meanings, yet to one the internal feeling of some part of the physics is colored and to the other it is flavored or as musical tones.

Feynman once pointed out that we can describe many natural phenomena using different formalisms and equations to describe the same phenomenon. Even though the formalisms are equivalent in physical terms, they create different psychological frames, and each can open a different range of understandings – possibly permitting new ways forward. This, too, is a hermeneutical issue.

These are cases in which knowledge and representation are in some way different. What we know and how we represent what we know are different in some degree. How we perceive and understand representations of knowledge also differ, depending on our own knowledge. Knowledge has affective, emotional, and historically contingent aspects that flavor how we understand and representeven such abstract phenomena as equations. Schrodinger’s wave mechanics and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics are very different ways to describe the same quantum phenomena – each of the scientists who created one of the two formalisms disliked the other formalism. Schrodinger said that Heisenberg’s mathematical formalism repelled him, even though he proved that the two versions of quantum mechanics are physically equivalent. What each knew about the same phenomenon and howthey represented it were both very much the same and very different.

Your comment might have been a bit light-hearted, but it points to something quite profound. None of us and no creature can share what we know in the full sense of our own knowledge. We can only share representations of knowledge. In this sense, we can’t refuse to share knowledge any more than we could share knowledge if we wished to do so.

Warm wishes,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design

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Gunnar Swanson wrote:

—snip—

On Nov 14, 2012, at 7:27 AM, Ken Friedman wrote:

“… we can say that creatures on one side of the boundary ‘know,’ and creatures on the other side of the boundary do not ‘know.’”

Your saying so may explain why creatures on the other side of the boundary refuse to share their knowledge with you.

—snip—




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