Dear John and colleagues, Very clear: thanks. For my own thinking, I make reference to different systems: we communicate discursive knowledge and we hold reflexively knowledge as persons. Both types of knowledge are reflexive, but with different dynamics. For example, discursive knowledge can circulate in networks relatively independent of specific persons. What is basic, is also different between these two knowledge systems. At the individual level "know how" may be more basic than "know what", but in the communication system one would expect "know what" to be more basic. The system can only "know how" by entertaining a discourse in the philosopy/history/sociology of science. Best wishes, Loet _____
Loet Leydesdorff Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681 <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net> l...@leydesdorff.net ; <http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ _____ From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of John Collier Sent: Saturday, October 03, 2009 8:40 AM To: fis@listas.unizar.es Subject: Re: [Fis] Definition of Knowledge? I accidentally sent this only to Pedro last time. 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 (fivos.panet...@opt.ucm.es) and me (marij...@unizar.es). -- ------------------------------------------------- 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 pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis _____ Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 http://www.ukzn.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html
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