Dear Colleagues,
I would like to thank all participants in this discussion for raising important questions and providing insights.
The topic is both important and challenging. We get into an esoteric area--philosophy of science. And we have knowledge produced in the realms of several paradigms, which (automatically) raises the issue with terminology and mutual understanding. We also have to deal with several fashionable conceptualization that might be problematic.
A caveat: I would not discuss here the differences and usage of terms like knowledge, information, data, fact, etc., because these phenomena are conceptualized and defined differently in different paradigmatic environments.
I personally don't feel very comfortable with the idea that if we have an artefact, we have knowledge. Knowledge might be encoded in the artefact, but until we decipher it, it doesn't exist for us. It is like a book in French, given to someone who has no way to know French or to find a translator. We will have new knowledge only after researchers explicate the knowledge encoded in the book. It is a completely different subject that the book also carries encoded typographic knowledge. We should not mix these two realms.
The concept of knowledge encoded in the artefact would not be challenged even by the Positivists. However, this doesn't give us much. We need to have explicit knowledge in order to disseminate it and operate with it (in most cases).
As a spin-off of this discussion, I would like to muse a bit about the implications of different conceptualizations of the artefact as a container of knowledge. In the Deconstructivist discourses, such a conceptualization is fashionable and works nicely. Actually, this is an heuristic metaphor, which is productive only if we use it within the limits of its adequacy. After that, it becomes misleading. It misleads many design researchers who believe that after they paint a picture, they have made a dissertation. The road to dissertation is long and bumpy. The painters need to explicate the knowledge, method, and way of thinking in order to produce knowledge. Otherwise, the painting remains a French book that I cannot read and cannot get much out of the paper pages. (I chose French at random, considering that if I mention a rare language, someone might get offended. And I kindly ask the French to treat my example as a generic one).
One the other hand, we can always use a working term like knowledge container as a place holder or like we use the term place holder. I am not against such use, as long as it is explicated and discussed.
At this time I get overwhelmed, joggling between several traditions of philosophy of science, fashionable metaphors, and major initiatives to make every object full with information and to assign it agency and teleology. But this is going to be another topic, and I will stop here.
Best wishes,
Lubomir
Lubomir Popov, PhD, FDRS, IDEC, CSP
Professor, School of Family and Consumer Sciences, Bowling Green State University
American Culture Studies affiliated faculty
217 North Eppler Hall, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403
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419.372.7935
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