All Life Is Problem Solving

Joe Firestone’s Blog on Knowledge and Knowledge Management

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Statements, Beliefs, Justifications, and “the Burden of Proof”

September 2nd, 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making

Why Don’t We Write More About How We Ought to Evaluate Knowledge Claims?

September 1st, 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · KM Methodology · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Interpreting Popper’s Three Worlds Ontology for Knowledge Management: A Guest Reply by Richard Vines

August 2nd, 2008 · No Comments

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 starting […]

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Tags: Complexity · Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Interpreting Popper’s Three Worlds Ontology for Knowledge Management: Part Two

July 29th, 2008 · 1 Comment

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 category […]

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Tags: Complexity · Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Interpreting Popper’s Three Worlds Ontology for Knowledge Management: Part One

July 28th, 2008 · 1 Comment

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 psychological […]

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Tags: Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Untrue Knowledge

July 17th, 2008 · 2 Comments

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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Tags: Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Making