Dear Tim,

If I might comment on your note to Kari, it seems to me that we have two theories of knowledge in Plato. One is the concept of justified true belief. I see this as Plato’s own theory of knowledge it represents a form of knowledge external to human beings. It is linked to Plato’s concept of an eternal truth distinct from whatever takes place in the mortal and imperfect realm.

I infer from Socrates’s statements that he has a somewhat different theory of knowledge, a knowledge that is and can only be mortal because it is always embodied within a human actor.

A great deal of the knowledge management literature – certainly Nonaka – speaks to this kind of knowledge, rather than to knowledge as justified true belief.

Describing knowledge as justified true belief is, indeed, muddy. It leads to many problems. I don’t use this concept, but I propose a concept of knowledge that relates to knowing – and to being, and to doing. As you note, this is a relational concept, and it requires a knowing actor or agent. I wouldn’t use the term rational, however, for two reasons.

First, to know merely requires us to know something. You’ve also raised the issues of the capacity to choose and act. To be able to make choices of some kind does not imply “rational” choices. It merely requires being able to select and move toward goals. These may or may not be rational. We don’t know enough about how non-humans that know make choices, though behavioral psychologists have demonstrated that some dogs and primates have a sense of what is fair.

Second, though, my ontology of knowing does not require knowledge to be true. Just as data and information can be false, what we know and certainly what we act on can be false.

Rather than offer the full explanation here, I’ll simply say that it is better to make wise choices, ethical choices, or correctly choices informed than foolish, unethical, or incorrect choices. Even so, human beings have a long history of poor choices made on unwise, unethical, or false information. Nevertheless, people have made these kinds of choices based on what they know. In the same sense that information is an external representation of knowledge, false information represents a kind of knowledge that may be misguided or false, and knowledge may be based on false information.

One of the issues that led to me this was the problematic “knowledge pyramid” one often saw in knowledge management articles. This was an unproblematized pyramid with data as the broad base, rising upward through information, knowledge, and finally wisdom. It’s clear that knowledge does not always lead to wisdom, and human history from first to last is filled with highly skilled, well educated people making foolish, unethical, or stupid decisions in war, finance, politics, law, medicine and more.

There is a distinction to be made, therefore, between knowing – our ability to know and then to act on what we know – and taking measures to ensure that what we know is true, reasonable, or wise.

Any model of knowledge must address issues in ethics and in the truth or falsehood, adequacy or inadequacy of knowledge and the information on which it rests. Other problems also emerge in a relational model of knowing and knowledge. For example, data is not the single and unproblematic representation of things or even of relations among things: because all items under consideration may involve multiple structures of relations, there may be many more data points than the things we wish to account for. In a direction moving upward from data, information is the selective and structured representation of data. In a direction moving downward from knowledge, information may also be the selective and structured representation of knowledge, at least for those knowing beings that are able to represent their knowledge.

None of this requires us to get into the muddy bog of justified true belief, and we do not need to treat knowledge as stuff. Any creature that know something, of course, is mortal and embodied, so there is a physical dimension to knowing creatures. So, too, because information is an externalized representation of knowledge, we use stuff to transmit and share information.

I did not know Newell’s paper. It requires careful reading and consideration. One issue requires careful thought – the concept of rationality. Newell speaks of rationality as goal-seeking and acting to achieve goals. If this is so, then we probably need several words for that which is rational, since reaching somegoals is self-destructive to those who achieve them.

This is a reflective response comparing models while teasing out distinctions. I’ve got to think further on this.

We agree clearly that knowledge entails a capacity for action. I’m going to hold off on the word rational for now. Even so, the concepts of knowledge and knowing need the notion of an agent: no agent able to act, no knowledge. Or perhaps it can also be stated in this way: without an agent able to act, there can be no knowing, and therefore no knowledge.

Yours,

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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Tim Smithers wrote:

—snip—

I would put the Blackler paper, and all other knowledge management authors he cites, in theclassical concept of knowledge camp. This we have from Plato (one of his Early Dialogues featuring Socrates): knowledge is justified true belief.

As old and as well worked over (in Epistemology and Philosophy) as this notion is, it remains problematic because it’s three component concepts – justification, truth, and belief – are themselves problematic and unresolved.

This classical notion seems right to many: it has a warm and comfortable feel to it. But in practice it’s horribly muddy. Often, to escape this muddiness, authors have tended towards a vague, but more solid notion of knowledge as stuff, and this has given rise to ontologies of different kinds of knowledge stuff. Blackler, for example, refers to Collins (1993) and his embrained, emboddied, encultured,embedded, and encoded classification, but there are several others. (Knowledge as stuff has also led many to confuse knowledge with information, which they also confuse with data.)

Few if any of these attempts to use this classical notion have, in my view, lead to anything useful and usable.

However, all is not lost. Jon Stricklen pointed us to where I think salvation lies: Newell’s Knowledge Level paper. And I thank Jon for this!

In this foundational paper Newell presented knowledge as competence notion; a capacity for rational action; action that complies with the principle of rationality, which Newell stated as being.

If an agent has knowledge that one of its actions will lead to one of its goals, then the agent will select that action.

This concept of knowledge was subsequently taken up and further developed by a number of people working on what became known as Knowledge Engineering methods. Some of these people, particularly those working on the CommonKADS method [2], also took this approach into knowledge management methods, where it contrasts with the more classical work, but has established a small but successful corner.

I also took Newell’s concept of knowledge as the basis for a Knowledge Level theory of designing [3]. In this work too I further developed Newell’s original notion to include different kinds of knowledge, for different kinds of rational action--the ones needed to do designing. This theory was developed to inform the building of good knowledge level models of particular kinds of designing. It offers precise definitions for the common folk categories of routine design, innovative design, and creative design, and thereby offers theoretical accounts and explanations for these.

Knowledge as a capacity for rational action needs the notion of an agent: no agent able to act rationally, no knowledge. It seems strange at first, perhaps, but it fits happy with what Ken has been saying about what’s needed for any knowing to be going on.

—snip—




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