Dear Martin,
To reply at all to Eduardo required some clarity and precision. This took more words, rather than fewer. That’s the difference between a good-faith attempt at an answer, and a reply of the that one hears in arguments between kids: “is so!” “is not!” But I wanted to clarify that a genuine and reasonable comprehensive answer would have required far more clarification.
Your question seems quite reasonable to me. You ask
—snip—
You also say, "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." Does a book of poetry contain information that represents knowledge?
Apologies for asking you for more words but I don't 'know' the answers - these are genuine questions.
—snip—
I’d say it does. That is, the words in a book of poetry represent what it is that poetry is. It’s clear that what we say when we say a poem, or what we know to say it, is not the kind of knowledge that we have of other subjects.
Even then, much of what we describe as knowledge must be limited carefully — for example, Eduardo said that he is a “container of knowledge about the Big Bang.” That is both true and incorrect — sure, he knows something about the Big Bang, as we all do, but what we know when we use the word knowledge in this way constitutes representative information. And the representative information that most of us on a list like this may have is far different to the richer and more representative information that a physicist has, especially that group of physicists with the capacity to represent the Big Bang in the specific language or languages of physics that professional physicists use.
So a book of poetry contains information that represents something, in the same way that a music score is information that represents something. That something is a kind of knowledge — but we can only say that the something of poetry or music is a kind of knowledge the we use the word knowledge in a careful way. When Eduardo said that he is not an “agent” in his knowledge about the Big Bang or the death of Julius Caesar, he misunderstood my point. He is not the agent behind the Big Bang or Caesar’s death, but he does have the agency of his knowledge as a knowing agent.
If you are a poet who builds the poems you speak, like the skalds of medieval Iceland and the Old Norse cultures, your poetry is a kind of knowledge that contains and shapes other kinds of knowledge. If you are a composer, when you write music, your musical score contains information that you know how to activate through your engagement with music, and other musicians who can read notation also know how to activate the information from marks on a page back into sounds.
Your question seemed to me quite reasonable, and it remains difficult to answer in a simple words. Poetry itself may seem simple, but it is not — it is a world built of words and activated through words for those who know how to read, or think it through, and yet the words of a poem may shape a different world for everyone who reads them.
So yes, they are a form of information, and yet they are a very different form of information than the musical score of The Art of the Fugue, which tells the performer a great deal more about Bach’s intentions than a poem may do, or the information in a computer program which is quite precise, or the information in the Theory of General Relativity which describes a great deal about the Big Bang — for those who know how to read the language of physics and to think through its consequences.
But a poem? Let me end with Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish.
Ars Poetica
--
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
—
Archibald MacLeish
—
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|