Dear Ken,
I’ll try to make it simple without my English style of ice gliding.
Forget the hammer.
Concentrate on the book.
If you concentrate enough you will find that books were, and still, are made for containing knowledge.
As a species, we decided and were able to externalize knowledge. We defined books, and, of course, some special books such as: Encyclopedias, Compendiums, Treatises and even … Dictionaries as Knowledge Containers.
This is more than a cultural conjectural stance. This is the very definition of knowledge. Without such books you would hardly be able to define knowledge in absolute terms.
Eduardo Corte-Real
PhD Arch.
Associate Professor
Professor Associado com Agregação
[log in to unmask]
Av. Dom Carlos I, nº4, 1200-649 Lisboa, Portugal
T: +351 213 939 600
> No dia 25/07/2017, às 13:43, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> escreveu:
>
> Dear Eduardo,
>
> Your reply involves a series of word games that play on shifts in meaning that make it impossible to respond without clarifying each instance where you make such a shift. I used the verb “contain.” I did not write about “knowledge containers.”
>
> Your reply is a scherzo on a few of the words in my post. To engage in the play, you shift the meaning of words at several points. A word that starts with one meaning ends with another. To reply would require ten times as many words. There are dozens of little metaphoric plays that contain enough truth to be comprehensible and meaningful. But these metaphors do not make genuine sense in epistemological terms. Since you’ve taken the time to post your reply to the list, I’ll offer a quick answer with one example.
>
> Consider your comments on the hammer. A hammer does not contain “the ‘instructions’ on how to make more hammers and how to hammer nails.” To make a modern industrial hammer, one needs far more information than a hammer provides. You can’t make the kind of contemporary hammer made by companies such as Stanley, Maxcraft, or Fiskars simply by simply looking at one of the hammers. To make one of these hammers requires a factory. But that’s not all. Neither you nor I can just walk into such a factory to make the hammer. Making more hammers of this kind requires a modern industrial firm with a high level of information and applicable knowledge. This knowledge is distributed across the firm in the skills of dozens of people — executives, engineers, shop foremen, line workers and more, and the organization requires a support staff of specialized experts whose job is facilitating everything from cash flow to purchasing to managing the lunch room where workers and executives eat. Among the kinds of information and knowledge such a firm requires are metallurgy, ergonomics, manufacturing skill, production line technology, and quality control.
>
> Neither does the hammer contain instructions on how to hammer nails. Someone who has never seen a nail will not learn about hammering nails by picking up a hammer.
>
> To say that a hammer “therefore, contains knowledge” is demonstrably incorrect. The knowledge of making the hammer and the knowledge of hammering nails involves the firms, professions, societies, and cultures within which the hammer occupies a niche.
>
> If you write that you went to Italy, what remains on paper is information, not knowledge. If I read what you write, what I read is information. After I read it, it becomes my knowledge, but even to say this requires careful distinctions for which I do not have time.
>
> If I remember what I read, the words that I take in may be the same words that you wrote, but they are no longer the information that you wrote on a page. Knowing agents know. A letter or a book contains information that represents knowledge. A letter or book does not contain or store knowledge. It contains or stores information.
>
> To answer this properly requires more words than I can use at this point.
>
> I’ll conclude as you did with medieval copyists. Medieval copyists believed a great many things that we no longer believe. Copyists and clerks were literate — they knew how to write and copy. But they were not the best educated people of the era. They weren't philosophers, or they’d have been teaching and writing rather than copying. Other literate people had better uses for their skills. Those who skilled in law, theology, pastoral care, or administration did not work in scriptoria as copyists. Their skills were too valuable. They held other roles in church, state, or university.
>
> I’m not sure that I care to debate epistemology with the medieval equivalent of my desktop printer.
>
> Yours,
>
> Ken
>
> Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
>
> Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
>
> --
>
> Eduardo Corte-Real wrote:
>
> —snip—
>
> I like your distinctions. They make sense.
>
> But I have been thinking about "knowledge containers” that may agree with what you wrote and… not.
>
> A knowlege container must be, first, a container. And as stupid it may seem, to define a container, we must state that it must have a limited physical form. Those limits make a secession between what is inside the container and what is not inside the container. If it is a container, it must “restrain” inside a “content”, and even with some plasticity, a container must contain what it contains, otherwise, will fail as a container. However, on the contrary, a container’s plasticity may allow the acquisition of further contents to be contained. Once contained, contents, must be contained by the container, otherwise the container would be a mere “place” or “situs” where contents may “stay” or “go away".
>
> In that sense, an artifact is undoubtedly a container because it generates a border defining a secession between what belongs to the artifact, namely its form, materials, shape, that do not “escape” from it, and what belongs to the outside of it.
>
> So let’s inquire about the possibility of an artifact being an intelligence container.
>
> It contains the intelligence used in making it, and the intelligence used in making it, contained in the artifact, can not be removed. (breathe) In fact, since the intelligence is contained, the artifact is not able of agency without help. The artifact simply contains a exemplification of intelligence and therefore contains intelligence since exemplification requires elements of the thing exemplified. (See Goodman: When is Art)
>
> So let’s inquire about the possibility of an artifact being a knowledge container.
>
> If you think of an hypothetical “first” artifact, it would undoubtedly be an intelligence container, but arguably a knowledge container. (it might be done or “discovered" by accident). However, every second artifact of the same sort, is a knowledge container. Why? Because of it’s secondness that, naturally, acknowledges the first object as a model. A “second artifact” is a container of knowledge (at least) about the “first artifact”. However, still, the artifact, although containing this knowledge, is not able of agency without help.
>
> So, artifacts correspond to some characteristics of containers: they are limited in space, they define an outside. And also they contain knowledge about their “family” (not to mention knowledge about their making) and, most of all, knowledge about their use.
>
> The fact that “the properties of knowledge, knowing, and agency remain with the creators of those tools” do not mean that knowledge is not exemplified in those tools and, therefore, as such, contained by them.
>
> So, a hammer, is a container of intelligence (as a in the “first hammer”) and a container of knowledge about Hammers and Hammering.
>
> However, a hammer is not made to be a container of knowledge. A hammer is made for hammering, God provide nails!
>
> So, I agree with you, a hammer do not know how to hammer nails, nevertheless it contains the “instructions” on how to make more hammers and how to hammer nails, and therefore, contains knowledge. I must stress “containing”. By admitting that knowledge containers exist, we separate, by all means, knowledge as agency from knowledge as an absolute. (I must admit that knowledge persists in me without agency. In that sense, I am also a container of knowledge about The Big Bang, which I have no agency with, or about Caesar’s murder, the architect of Sant’ Andrea in Mantova, Shetland dogs... )
>
> A book, for instance, however, is made to be, not only a container of intelligence, which is always, but by its form, a container of knowledge, and more important, some times, made to be a container of knowledge-as-knowledge.
>
> And here, I’m starting again not to agree with you, and also agreeing with you. There is no other purpose in writing other than store (fixate) knowledge. The same with drawing, maths an musical notation. The process by which we, as a species, fixate knowledge is by abstraction and its consequential symbolization. Books were artifacts “invented” to, by writing, drawing, math, musical notation and other forms of 2D symbolization, stack, maintain, contain and preserve knowledge externally.
>
> What is inside a book must not be confused with what is inside an igloo or an hammer simply because books are made in the assumption that we can store knowledge outside of us in special artifacts for harboring knowledge with no other purpose other than that (and be induced into an inert situation).
>
> If I tell you, by writing, that I went to Italy last week, you will be knowing that I went to Italy last week and that knowledge will persist in my writing ready for you to acknowledge it the moment you read it. It will not disappear, it will be stored and transmited.
>
> This is what the medieval copyists made. They wouldn’t have done what they done if they would not believed that knowledge could be contained, stored and preserved, hibernate and be alive somewhere in the future.
>
> programmed machines? That’s another story.
>
> —snip—
>
>
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