All Life Is Problem Solving

One of the concepts George Soros emphasizes the most is “reflexivity.” Here’s his presentation of the idea from The Age of Fallibility (pp. 6-7). ”On the one hand, we seek to understand our situation. I call this the cognitive function. On the other hand, we seek to make an impact on the world. I call […]

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Every once in awhile someone in Knowledge Management will state the view that organizational knowledge is the set of beliefs on which there is an organizational consensus. This viewpoint fits with constructivist approaches to knowledge because, according to the constructivists, knowledge comprises the belief filters we humans create to interact with the world, and then […]

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Over the past years, I’ve spent many enjoyable Saturday afternoons participating in Washington, DC’s Cafe Philo group (a face-to-face public philosophy group), and have occasionally participated in its list serv. Over the past couple of days a friend responded to my support of the statement “No statement can be justified,” by asking whether I was: […]

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There’s remarkably little attention given to the discussion of how we ought to evaluate knowledge claims in spite of the fact that this issue is rather central to both knowledge processing and KM. I’ve argued for the importance of KCE in the past. Here I want to illustrate its importance with a critical take on […]

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I think, Joe, you have raised some very interesting and reflective comments in your two blogs on “Popper’s three worlds ontology.”   Firstly, let me state, that I think it is inevitable that some reformulation of the three worlds ontology needs to be explored and will be explored by those that see the merit in […]

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Comparative Evaluation of the Two Theories Let’s compare the two theories of the three worlds, world-by-world, as it were. First, Popper’s W1 has the disadvantage that it blurs the distinction between the living and the non-living, since both are included in W1. This also has the effect of including knowledge in W1 without specifying a […]

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Popper’s Three Worlds Ontology In his Objective Knowledge (1972), Karl Popper introduced the idea of three ontological worlds or domains. The first world is the world of material objects, events, and processes, including the domain of biology. The second world is the world of mental events, processes, and predispositions– the world of beliefs and other […]

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Historically, since Plato, the most frequent definition of knowledge has been Justified True Belief (JTB). Until recently (the 20th century), philosophers believed in a foundation for JTB. The Cartesian Rationalists believed that some beliefs were certain because they were self-evident truths that survived Descartes method of doubt. The empiricists believed that some beliefs were self-evident […]

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