Dear Leenus, and all,

In your post you present several useful questions. In this reply I will focus on your question regarding the distinction between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. I think most scholars would probably agree that knowledge is the outcome of a learning process that involves experience of the perceptual world. This process involves transforming experience and data into information, which is then given meaning to create knowledge. 

Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Raw data are unprocessed characters and symbols that are the output of sensing devices or organs. For example field data might include interview audios and field notes, and experimental data might include measurements and observations. Data may be stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals or recorded on magnetic, optical, or mechanical media. 

Data must be processed and organized to be meaningful. Processing data may involve inspection, cleaning, or transformation to give the raw data structure and form. Processed data can also become raw data for later processing stages. When data are processed and organized they gain structure and form and thus become information. 

The analysis of knowledge aims to make the concept of knowledge more clear and precise. Most scholars agree that knowledge is the outcome of a learning process that involves experience. (I won’t discuss learning further here, since there is already a current thread on learning). However, while most scholars agree that knowledge is the outcome of a process, there is little agreement on what knowledge consists. The various different analyses of knowledge suggest two broad positions we can name intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. 

The intellectualist position analyses knowledge into justified true belief, usually expressed as a subject knowing a proposition, abbreviated in the form ‘S knows that P’. The statement ‘Adam knows that Helsinki is the present capital city of Finland’, is an example of propositional knowledge.

Intellectualism requires that knowledge satisfy three conditions of justified true belief since false propositions cannot be known, therefore knowledge requires truth. A proposition that a subject doesn’t believe can't be a proposition that the subject knows, therefore knowledge requires belief. Finally, a subject’s being correct in believing a proposition might merely be a matter of luck, therefore knowledge requires justification. Of the three conditions, most scholars agree the knowledge requires belief and truth. However, there is debate concerning the justification condition because, for example, empiricists, rationalists, and phenomenologists all maintain differing positions on whether the proper way to aquire knowledge is by observation, intuition/deduction, or interpretation.  

Anti-intellectualism divides knowledge into two distinct kinds, such as propositions and dispositions, or theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge, or declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge, or explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, or knowledge-that and knowledge-how. The various anti-intellectualist perspectives broadly share the view that, as Polanyi (2009, p. 23) puts it, “we can know more than we can tell”. For example, an anti-intellectualist would probably support the standpoint that it is true that a person can know how to ride a bicycle without first considering any propositions about how to do it. The debate first concerns the degree that knowledge-how is independent from knowledge-that, and second, in what exactly knowledge-how consists.

I think it is useful to understand knowledge a noun that describes a process. Horst Rittel’s view is useful; he writes that the relationship between information and knowledge is a process that changes somebody’s knowledge. Rittel (1972, p. 2) writes that we can tell that an information process has taken place when a person who knows something no longer this or knows something more. When a person tells another person something they already know, they have not been informed. And when a person tells another person something so that they no longer know what they knew previously, then they have also been informed in a way that takes knowledge away from them; this is called disinformation. 

The process of creating and using knowledge and information of an organization is a focus of the discipline of knowledge management.

----- 

I would not say that gramophone floating in outer space could know something in the same sense that a person can know something. Similarly, a person can know how to ride a bicycle, but I wouldn’t say that a bicycle knows how to ride itself. Likewise, a book cannot know the information printed on its pages.


Best regards,
Luke

Polanyi, M. (2009). The Tacit Dimension: With a New Introduction by Amartya Sen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Rittel, H. (1972). Structure and usefulness of planning information systems. Berkely: University of California at Berkeley, Institute of Urban and Regional Development. (Reprint).


On Oct 18, 2017, at 12:18 PM, Leenus Kannoth wrote

One fundmental question which I would like some one to adress is how to
distinguish between information and knowledge in this scenario.  What is it
that is in the book? Is it information? or Knowledge? When does information
become knowledge? Is it some form of human intervention that converts
information to knowledge. If it is so then when does book become container
of information? When does it become a container of knowledge?

Does this happen when a human being starts reading it?  Is transmission the
process that converts information to knowledge?


-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------