Pedro, everyone,
There are two basic approaches to representational knowledge (knowing that) in philosophy. The traditional one is that knowledge is justified true belief. This goes back to Plato. It is an internalist account of the sort suggested by starting with a Cartesian perspective that what matters is my inner experience. A more recent one is that a representation is knowledge if it is reliable. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information is a primary source. As the title suggests, this approach is very compatible with information theoretical ideas. It is an externalist approach in that it rejects the Cartesian perspective that is such a big part of modernity, and takes it that whether there is knowledge is a matter of certain conditions occurring in the world. In either case, the representation must be true for it to be knowledge (this is almost universally agreed on, but philosophers are a disagreeable lot, and I am sure that at least some peripheral philosopher has argued that knowledge does not require truth). A representation is true, again pretty much universally among philosophers who talk about information (Peirce, for example), inasmuch as it contains (accurate) information about what it represents. Accuracy can be understood in terms of justification or reliability, giving us the two versions of knowledge. So that is the state of the art. There have been attempts (Solomonoff, which led to algorithmic information theory) to connect justification to information theory using the idea that a theory or idea compresses the information in what it refers to, and that the most accurate representation is the most compressed for. John Dorling has been a big advocate of this idea of justification, and I like it. Belief is sometimes seen as a psychological state, but sometimes as a logical state, and sometimes as both (e.g., Frege, Peirce). That pretty much covers the basics.
In my opinion knowledge is a not a natural kind. There are degrees of knowledge, and kinds. The justification account and the reliability account are both flawed, and each makes up for problems with the other. So, paradigmatic cases of knowledge will satisfy both, but as we relax either the justification or reliability conditions we tend to judge that knowledge claims are weaker, so that at the extremes, justification without reliability is not knowledge, and reliability without justification is not knowledge. So we have a two-dimensional set of degrees, and successful knowledge claims will map a fuzzy region within the range, with a bias towards the extreme of high justification, high reliability.
John
At 06:16 PM 2009/10/01, you wrote:
Dear FISers,
I was asked several months ago, in the context of the Leon conference
(BITrum & interdisciplinary elucidation of the information concept, last
June) to participate in the definition of some info-related concepts.
"Knowledge" was one of them (if I am not wrong). After some trials I
have realized that the task is outside the bounds of my competence
--except in a rather trivial, anthropomorphic sense, one gets caught in
regressions almost inevitably... Maybe one has to take care
simultaneously of the whole lot of basic characteristics pertaining to
informational entities ("concepts" included...). Well, sorry to the Leon
colleagues that I have failed to fulfill the compromise, but I think
there is interesting discussion to be advanced behind it.
best
Pedro
PS. We are starting the firs steps in the neurodynamic central theory
proyect (NCT). Interested parties might have openings yet, contact Fivos
Panetsos ([email protected]) and me ([email protected]).
--
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
50009 Zaragoza. España / Spain
Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
[email protected]
-------------------------------------------------
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