Replying to LO30592 --
Dear Organlearners,
Hal Popplewell < GaltJohn44@aol.com > wrote:
>If one has knowledge, it can only be exhibited via action.
>Even if that action is talking or writing, it is still action.
Greetings dear Hal,
Thank you for this comment. It made me think further on the difference
between knowledge and information.
I do not know whether you have been long enough on this list to have
followed our dialogues on the 7Es (seven essentialities of creativity). Your
remark has bearing on one of them, namely
liveness ("becoming-being")
Your comment entails that knowledge has to exhibit the "becoming" (action,
even talking) of liveness. So i began to wonder whether we could not use
any of the other six 7Es to characterise knowledge too.
It seems to be the case. Consider the essentiality
openness ("paradigm-transform")
The knowledge of a person can change as a result of a paradigm shift in it.
However, the information in a document, once it has been formulated, has
its paradigms fixed permanently.
This made me think once again how cautious we should be when trying to
understand the information in documents hundreds of years and even
thousands of years old. We need to understand the paradigms used in
formulating that information. Then we need to transform that information
such that it connects to our present paradigms to understand it better.
An example is knowledge itself. Before the days of Copernicus, the truth
of knowledge was vested in authorities like kings, popes and emminent
philosophers. (The latter used the dialectis [logic] devloped by
Aristotle.) But since Copernicus the scientific method had been developed
over a couple of centuries to validate some thruth empirically.
>I am attempting to distinguish knowledge from information.
>I do not think anyone is confusing knowledge with action.
>The are related, and one is the only way to express the other.
>Outside of mind reading mind you. :-)
I think that most of us are trying to do it. Those who think that a
document can have information and knowledge, think of its knowledge as at
a higher level of its organisation than its information. The document has
also data, but that is at a lower level of organisation.
But i still think that the distinction between "knowledge which lives
within the mind" and "information which exists primarily outside the mind"
makes better sense to me. For example, consider the Michael Polanyi's
concept of "tacit knowing" which he described as "we know more than we can
tell". Knowledge has a tacit dimension wheras information cannot have it.
A document can only have a lack in information which may be supplemented
by formulating an additional document. The result is two separate documents.
But a person who has tacit knowledge can struggle to articulate some of it.
Yet that person's knowledge (tacit and articulate) remains one whole. Here
wholeness ("identity-associativity")
is another of the 7Es.
Trying to help a learner to articulate some of his/her tacit knowing is
one of the most difficult tasks for a teacher or mentor. In terms of the
LO and its five disciplines, this task fits into TL (Team Learning). Both
the mentor and the mentee has to learn as a team. The mentor has to learn
which tacit knowing the mentee may have by asking questions trying to
probe it. The mentee has to learn how the answers to these questions help
him/her to tell what was never done before.
The articulating of some tacit knowing is always an emergence. This is for
me beautifully captured in the etymology of knowledge. It comes from the
Saxon word "cnaw-lec". Here "cnaw"=emergence and "-lec"=like.
However, as far as i can ascertain, it is impossible for information
itself to be "cnaw-lec". Only the mind studying such information can be
"cnaw-lec". By this i do not say that it is impossible for some future
computer application to let emergences happen on the information it works
with. I only say that none exists presently. But should such a program
come to light, it wil make the distinction between knowledge and
information even more difficult.
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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