Knowledge Matters™

Just over a month ago, and before the current debate on wisdom management began in earnest on actKM, I had a brief exchange with Professor Bruce Lloyd on the relationship between knowledge and wisdom. Bruce kindly pointed me to a number of his papers. I've reproduced them below, some with hyperlinks. ...

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I am happy to enter into a discourse on “what is knowledge” but that is not the intent of this post. Rather I want to explore the idea that knowledge representation is becoming more visual. In his 1997 book ‘The Measure of Reality ’ Emeritus Professor Alfred Crosby suggested that visualisation and measurement were the two factors most responsible for the rapid development of all of modern science. Now this is an interesting proposition, and one I think I largely agree with.

The first attempts to represent knowledge were probably pictorial, and can be seen in the elegant cave paintings of our ancestors. Indeed some of these are still maintained by indigenous people today – see for example the Aboriginal rock art of the Gagudju people of Northern Australia, one of the oldest cultures on the planet. Numerals and text soon followed and have been the mainstay of knowledge representation for at least the last 6,000 years. But is this changing? ...

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Time, like the term knowledge, is an elusive concept. Like knowledge, a definition of time that is satisfactory to everyone has defied the greatest minds from Antiphon to Newton, and on to Einstein and Planck. Yet time is pervasive across cultures, and at least in the Western world, drives much of what we do. Time is also intrinsically linked to knowledge management, and provides some insights as to why knowledge management is so difficult.

Take for example the common platitude –“just in time knowledge management”. I take this to mean that the right information (I have chosen my words carefully) should be available to decision-makers at the right time and in the right place, and not before or after the time it is actually required! Now this begs all sorts of questions, like:

• How do we determine what is the right information?
• How do we know who should receive that information?
• What is the right format for the information, so it can actually be used?
• How do we know what the right time is?

I could go on but you should get the idea of just how difficult, if not impossible this is. This brings me to my second idea – knowledge management is about the effective use of data or information at some future point in time. ...

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Yesterday I posed the question – “Is the word ‘knowledge’ content free? ” I addressed the propositions that knowledge consists of facts, and facts represent either analytic or synthetic truths. I now want to introduce beliefs to the equation, because most, but not all, knowledge management models have a ‘justified true belief’ foundation.

Beliefs are something that we hold to be true. To the individual beliefs are facts that are derived from either analytic or synthetic truths, or some other source such as an authoritative reference or person. Our dictionary definition of knowledge says it consists of facts and truths. So a belief is a truth; yet it is possible to hold a mistaken belief – that is we believe something to be true when in fact it is false. Clearly then a mistaken belief should not be considered to be knowledge. But how do we determine whether a belief is true or otherwise? ...

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In my second blog-post I implored those who profess to be knowledge practitioners to read some basic philosophy, and in particular some epistemology. To fill this hole I thought over the next couple of blog-posts I would introduce ‘truth types’ and ‘belief’.

In my opinion one of the problems with the knowledge management discipline is we can’t define what it means, and in particular we can’t define in a consistent way what we mean by knowledge. The Macquarie Dictionary provides eight definitions of knowledge. The first says knowledge is ‘acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, from study or investigation.’ Another says knowledge is the ‘perception of fact and truth and being cognisant or aware of fact or circumstance.’ The last definition says knowledge is the ‘body of truths or facts accumulated by human beings in the course of time'. From these definitions we might deduce that in order to have knowledge one must first have some facts. ...

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