Replying to LO30564 --
Dear Organlearners,
Mark McElroy <mmcelroy@vermontel.net> wrote:
>Since I cannot resist the urge every time I see it to refute the
>"knowledge is the capacity for effective action" argument, I
>will do so here again.
Greetings dear Mark,
I ask fellow leaners to be patient with this long reply, or else to hit
the ESC key.
Thanks for the refutation which you promise. Nothing can be better than to
compare by dialogue our understandings of a topic, especially an important
one such as knowledge.
>At base, if you are saying that knowledge is the same as action
>(albeit 'effective' action), then the definition you offer mistakenly
>confuses knowledge with action. (I believe we've been over this
>ground before). Previously, I gave you examples of how different
>knowledge could lead to the same action, thereby exposing the
>fallacy of the claim that knowledge and action are always one and
>the same. I don't recall seeing your response to that.
No, i am not saying that knowledge is the same as effective action. I say
that effective action is one of the main outcomes of knowledge. It can be
seen as a short, operational description of knowledge. For example, in
botany the flowers of a plant is crucial to find what species the specimen
belongs to. Flowering is an act the specimen, but the specimen is more
that its flowers.
>Further, to say that knowledge is the capacity for effective action
>is to suggest that it is a necessary and sufficient condition for
>effective action. This has a number of problems. First, effective
>action also requires many other things that have nothing to do with
>knowledge. These would include (a) the desire to take action,
>(b) the power or authority to do so, and (c) other material and
>non-material means required to act (e.g., tools, assistance from
>others, money, etc.).
Living knowledge has to take into account essential facets of itself such
as wholeness, openness, diversity, etc. Without them knowledge cannot lead
to effective action. For example, wholeness entails that knowledge
requires a human body to act. Consequently, i will never suggest that
knowledge is a necessary and sufficient condition for effective action.
(a) The desire to take action is for me part of knowledge. A person has to
know how to cultivate and sustain this desire. (b) Knowledge has its own
power or authority to act. A person will know when to let this power or
authority bear its fruit. (c) You are right -- knowledge cannot operate on
its own. See my remark above on wholeness.
>Thus, knowledge is a necessary but INSUFFICIENT condition
>for effective action. It contributes to the capacity for effective
>action, but it alone does not provide all of the elements of capacity
>required to take action - -- effective or otherwise. So what good
>does it do to say that knowledge is the capacity for effective action,
>when it alone provides us with considerably less than is needed to
>actually TAKE effective action? Here I think the OL community tends
>to oversell the term 'knowledge' while ignoring the many other
>conditions required to take action, not to mention a few other things I
>discuss further below.
I think we ought to avoid the danger of over specification. For example, a
marathon runner will say that he/she has trained thoroughly to run a
marathon. He/she will not also specify what the heart, lungs, liver and
kidneys must be able to do.
>Second, 'effective action' is a terribly value-laden term. 'Effective'
>according to whom? What if I think my action is effective and you
>think it's not? In such a case is the knowledge I used to take it
>'knowledge' or something else? And who gets to decide? And
>according to whose or what values or criteria? No, this definition
>raises more questions than it answers. That dog, as they say in
>Texas, just doesn't hunt.
I agree that "effective" is a "value-laden" term. (I would rather say that
it has many values intrinsic to it.) So, should someone else need a
further description of "effective", i will try to give it. I will begin by
giving a synonymous phrase for "effective action", namely "creating
constructively". This will allow me to connect to creativity and how to
make it constructive.
I do not want to make what is going to become a long rely even longer. But
i have to mention that "capacity for effective action" focus on one of the
7Es (seven essentialities of creativity), namely liveness ("becoming-
being"). It is possible to focus on each of the other six 7Es to give yet
another concise description of knowledge. For example, with respect to
wholeness ("unity-associativity") we might say that knowledge is the
capacity to all faculties of knowledge.
>Third, why define knowledge in terms of something outside
>of itself? Even if we could agree that it contributes to effective
>action, that definition, ironically, tells us nothing about WHAT
>IT IS!!! In a sense, who cares what it contributes to? The
>question was 'What is it?'
I would venture an answer. Knowledge is one of the living systems in a
person's whole personality (personality seen here as Smuts saw it). But
like in the case of "effective action", many learners will want to know
what constitues a "living system". So again we will have to travel the
path of increasing complexity the more we want to know.
>Fourth, since I asked the question, I will try to answer it. I will
>do so, first, by quoting you once again: "Knowledge lives only
>in the mind of a person while information exists outside it." Here
>again we have a statement that skirts the issue. This time you tell
>us where knowledge "lives" but still not what it is.
What i did, was to distinguish between knowledge and information which is
for me crucial. I used "lives" rather than "living system" to keep the
description as simple as possible. I contrasted this "lives" with
"exists". For example, a rock, even with some information engraved on it,
merely exists. It does not live.
>Enough torment. Here is a definition that I favor:
>
>"Knowledge consists of encoded structures representing descriptive
>and argumentative assertions that help the systems that created
>them to live and adapt, and which also have survived their tests
>and evaluations for verisimilitude."
What about tacit knowing? The above definition does not provide for it.
The same for experiences. And how does wisdom, a most important dimension
of knowledge, fit into this description?
>In the human domain, these structures consist of beliefs and belief
>predispositions, and also of claims, but only of such beliefs, belief
>predispositions, and claims, that have survived our tests and
>evaluations.
Like you previously did, i would have ventured to ask what these tests and
evaluations are and who determines which of them are valid? But i rather
want to comment on your structures of "beliefs, belief predispositions,
and claims". I would personally not reduce knowledge to a logical system.
Furthermore, it is very easy to confuse such tested beliefs, belief
predispositions, and claims with what is nothing else than mental models.
>What this means is that our knowledge may, in fact, be false, but
>because we regard it as true (until we learn otherwise), we think
>of it as knowledge. That's what differentiates knowledge from
>information: both consist of descriptive or argumentative assertions
>of one kind or another, but only knowledge consists of ones that
>we regard as true. And it is precisely this introduction and treatment
>of the issue of truth that makes the term 'knowledge' distinctive and
>useful for us.
I some sense i agree with you that truth helps us to distinguish knowledge
from information. But allow me to tell why. We have various ways to
establish truth like logical and empirical analyses. We have to learn some
of these ways to get closer to the truth. But too much emphasis on
analysis will not bring us closer and closer to the truth. For example, i
can analyse the morphology and physiology of a plant into great detail.
But this does not help me to keep the plant alive and propagating. I also
have to cultivate that plant by synthesising in captivity a sound
environment for it.
>Sadly, this 'truth dimension' to the subject of knowledge is
>conspicuously missing from too many contemporary definitions of
>the term, including the "capacity for effective action' school. It's as
>if we either don't care about truth and falsity, or that we somehow
>always assume that what's in our heads is true. If something we
>think happens to be false, don't we want to know that? God forbid
>we should have a definition of knowledge that takes truth versus
>falsity into account!
I agree with you that 'truth dimension' of knowledge receives far too
little attention nowadays. But the same goes for other dimensions of
character like beauty and ethics. Knowledge and character get so
fragmented from each other that both now have to stand on their own legs.
I think differently. Character has some of it as roots (related to truth,
ethics and beauty) in knowledge. But character goes beyond knowledge. As
an emergent from knowledge its greatest task is to direct knowledge with a
feedback loop.
>Finally, the definition of knowledge I favor provides us with just
>the antidote we need to counter the terribly anthropocentric flavor
>of so many contemporary perspectives. It does this by pointing
>out, for example, that knowledge can exist in the minds of
>non-humans, and also in the embodiments of all species and other
>physical forms (i.e., not in minds at all, human or otherwise). Our
>very DNA and the organs we rely on (in all species) are nothing
>more than knowledge claims, produced through a kind of trial and
>error process that we call mutation.
I wonder. Is your phrase "representing descriptive and argumentative
assertions" not typically anthropocentric. Consider a human-eater lion. It
is usually the outcasted male of a pack(?) of lions by younger male taking
its place. The knowledge (perhaps cunning in this case) of such a
human-eater lion is legendary. It can outwit the best of lion hunters for
many months. Lions do not have any "descriptive and argumentative
assertions" of which i know, unless we assume the sounds they make to be
such assertions. The biggest problem with a human-eater lion is that it
becomes silent for the rest of its life so as to hunt humans with
incredible stealth.
>Indeed, we can now "read" DNA and the claims it makes
>about how to construct a body. Moreover, that the bodies we
>see before us in a species have survived the tests of time amounts
>to a record of knowledge claim validation, the content of which
>says, 'Hey, the claims encoded in this organism's DNA is true --
>at least so far, that is.'
I think we must be careful here. Can any claims encoded in an organism's
DNA be false? What we do know that the vast majority of base pair clusters
(genes) in DNA have become switched off. But is this the same as saying
that they are false? They are rather undecidable in the sense of Goedel.
>My problem with contemporary treatments of the distinction
>between data, information, and knowledge is that most: (a) tend to
>be arbitrary, (b) fail to take actual semantic content into account,
>and (c) fail to address the issue of truth or verisimilitude as a
>distinguishing factor. Data, information, and knowledge are ALL
>forms of information, and all three contain descriptions and/or
>arguments. Knowledge is simply information that we regard as true
>or which has survived its tests and evaluations; data and information
>may or may not be true, but if we decide that they are true, we call
>them knowledge. Otherwise, we may be undecided about their
>semantic content, in which case they're "just data" or "just information";
>or if we have falsified them, then they are false data or false information.
>But knowledge is always information (which can include data) that we
>regard as true. So knowledge is a type of information, and is not
>separate and distinct from it. Knowledge is true information.
I am in doubt how much of the above i should have quoted since i have
already answered to much of it. However, i want to answer to the
following. Your data => information => knowledge distinctions seems to be
a hirarchial one. I myself also have a hirarchial distinction for
knowledge living in the mind as well as another one for information
existing outside it. My hirarchial distinction for knowledge (which i can
write on again as in the past) is carefully based on levels which emerge
from each other in succession. My hirarchial distinction for information
lack this feature since information itself has no emergences.
>Finally, since I have explained that knowledge need not be
>human-based, it should also be clear that knowledge can exist
>outside of human minds and in other forms. DNA in other species,
>for example (or in ourselves, for that matter), is a form of knowledge.
>And so is a claim made by a human in objective form (such as on
>paper, or in a computer, or in a book, in an e-mail, or in the form
>of speech). The same goes for extraterrestrial creatures.
I agree that not only humans learn and thus have knowledge. But humans
have very little, if any, knowledge to communicate with other kind of
animals with similar neurological systems so as to understand their
knowledge. Sadly, humans have even little knowledge of communication in
terms of information with others of their own kind to understand their
knowledge. I believe that they do not have a sound enough distinction
between knowledge and information upon which they can develop such
knowledge of communication.
I do not think of DNA as knowledge, even though it lives in the body,
since it is not supported by a neurological system. The DNA base pairs,
for example, is form at the byte level of information. I do not consider
any information in a computer, despite how dynamically it may be
represented or processed, as knowledge.
>Is all of the above just useless pontification, of no practical value
>to managers in the real world? Not at all. These ideas translate
>into a style of Knowledge Management strategy and practice that
>is profoundly important to performance in business, but which is
>as different from other styles of KM as democracy is from
>communism. And yet we tend to gloss over them. I will pursue
>this claim further only if asked to do so, for I have already gone
>on far too long here.
I will speak of your KM as IM (Information Management). I think that IM is
crucial to any worker having passed secondary school and not only
managers. The traditional term of someone leaving secondary school and no
able to manage information is called "functional illiterate". But i think
of it in much broader sense than being unable to make sense of "words in
writing". It can also involve numbers and other forms of symbolic
presentations.
It is shocking that "functional illiteracy" (in its broad sense, i.e.,
lack of IM) is steadily increasing among students who enter university. We
might be inclined to say that here in South Africa it may be the result of
slipping back into a 3rd world country. But in the USA Alan Bloom was one
of the first to identify its increase in his "The closing of the American
Mind". He wrote on p62 that he began to notice this in the late sixties. I
was not aware of "functional illiteracy" until i became a teacher in 1972.
I only began to notice as a lecturer its increase in the late seventies.
Then there is also such a thing as managing the knowledge which lives in
the mind which obviously cannot be called KM.. For me this has to be done
by the person self. It places a high premium on me as a teacher not trying
to meddle in a learner's mind, but to act as a mentor.
Yes, you have written a long and complex contribution. Thank you very much
for it. It gave me once again the opportunity to reconsider my own
thoughts on this topic. It also made my reply even longer and complexer.
But hopefully some fellow learners, when they have struggled through it up
to this point, will have had enough opportunities to reflect upon their
own thinking on this topic.
One last thought. The fact that we differ in what knowledge and
information are, ought not to cause a controversy. Try as hard as i can, i
cannot find any way to validate either my viewpoint or yours as either
true or false. The only way to know which viewpoint is the better, is to
see how far each goes without getting too deep into inconsistencies. This
points to a paradigm shift in the making.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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