All Life Is Problem Solving

This entry continues the discussion of John Tropea’s “Knowledge Management as an Ecosystem.” In Part Twelve, I reviewed and critiqued a portion of the presentation up through the discussion of “the new KM.” Here, I’ll focus on John’s treatment of “the nature of knowledge” and in my next blog I’ll discuss his characterization of KM 2.0.

John begins by referring to the “need to understand the organics of knowledge,” and says that he is “more naturally favourable to flow model rather than a content management model.” He then moves on to consider heuristics for approaching “knowledge” offered by Dave Snowden and others.

An immediate problem with this approach is that it avoids John’s view about “the nature of knowledge.” There are disputes out there in philosophy and KM about whether knowledge is biological, mental, or cultural in character. Also, Dave Snowden thinks that knowledge has a dualistic nature and is both a thing and a flow, a view that I’ve critiqued in the past, and that, incidentally, has little basis in either philosophy or neural science. (Not that knowledge flow doesn’t exist. It does. But the fact that knowledge flows, doesn’t mean that knowledge is a flow.) I’m not claiming that John ought to get into these disputes in his presentation, but I am saying that if he’s not clear about his view of these things, then he’s hardly providing his view of the nature of knowledge in any coherent way.

The heuristics about “knowledge” used by John along with comments of mine on each one are provided below.

— Knowledge can only be volunteered, it can never be conscripted (You can’t make someone use or share knowledge if they don’t want to)

JMF: I think this means that you can’t force people to express what they know to other people, and while I agree that this can’t be done successfully, I’m not sure what this tells us about the nature of knowledge as distinct from information or other things that you can’t force people to give to others (e.g. love).

— We only know what we know when we need to know it (Knowledge is highly contextual and is recalled in context)

JMF: This one is also true, but it’s misleading because it leaves too much unsaid. First, we do only know what we know when we need to know it in the sense that we develop situational orientations to our concrete circumstances ay any point in our travels through space-time. Second, however, we not only recall “knowledge” in context, but we also create knowledge in context, so the “creating” must also be emphasized here in talking about our situational knowledge. Third, however, this suggests that knowledge is “mental” in character, but is not clear on what its biological elements are and says nothing explicit about knowledge expressions we create in situational contexts. And fourth, this heuristic tells us nothing about the notion of knowledge predispositions, i.e. tendencies toward developing knowledge orientations that exist in individuals and groups and that so important as pre-cursors of situational beliefs.

— We always know more then we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down (Some things can only be known through experience)

JMF: This is one of Dave Snowden’s favorites and is based on Michael Polanyi’s work. This may be true, but it is also systematically ambiguous about the “knowledge” one is talking about, and therefore may be highly misleading, about the relative importance of “mental” versus other types of knowledge. First, what we “know” mentally is known in an entirely different way than what we “know” in the sense of written statements. What we mentally “know” is in the form of non-linguistic belief networks that are not fully understood by psychologists. What we know in the biological sense is in the form of physical networks that we are learning more about, but still don’t fully understand. And what we “know” in the sense of “cultural knowledge” is in linguistic form asserting linguistic content. Can we really say that “we know more than we can write down,” when we’re talking about different classes of ontological phenomena? How can we measure relative quantities in comparing our mental knowledge networks that orient us toward situations, and the things we write down that affect those networks?

Second, moreover, even if it is true that we know more than we can tell, and we can tell more than we can write down, is it not also true that we can write down more than we can ever know? That is, if I pose a non-tautological theory of minimal complexity, the Tarskian class of logical consequences of the theory, its logical content, will be infinite, and no human, however, knowledgeable about his/her own theory, will be able to fully understand this infinite logical content. Thus, Newton not only could write down much less than he knew, but he also wrote down far more than he could ever know. The same applies to Einstein, and to Darwin, the implications of whose theory far exceed anything he ever imagined, including evolutionary epistemology.

Third, these days, there is far too much mystification of our “mental” knowledge at the expense of our linguistic knowledge, and perhaps also at the expense of our biological knowledge. Michael Polanyi began the trend toward emphasizing mental and tacit knowledge in reaction to the modern focus in philosophy on linguistic knowledge and philosophy. This has been an important corrective to a too heavy emphasis on knowledge as a linguistic phenomenon. But now, perhaps, things are going the other way and we face a tendency to discount the importance of quality linguistic knowledge as part of our ecology of rationality. We see this in KM in the tendency to think that “tacit knowledge” is much more important than “explicit knowledge.” Actually both mental and linguistic forms of knowledge are very important and are in constant interaction. KM is, or should be, about both.

— If people need knowledge in the “context” of a real need it will always be shared

JMF: I think this one is largely the case if there is a shared felt need to solve a problem in a particular context. But I also think that it is too loosely stated since there can be a real need on the part of some people, while others who have the knowledge to fulfill that need do not or will not share because the need and the problem are not theirs. That is, even if they are aware of the context, they do not share it in the same way as those who are subject to the “real need.”

— “People don’t share knowledge in the anticipation that you need it” (“Asking people to store away knowledge on the basis of future needs”)

JMF: And I think this one may be over-stated in the other direction. I agree that the expectations of First Generation KM that people would share knowledge outside their work contexts and altruistically to boot were and are unrealistic. But we know too many instances of scientists and many others who create knowledge in anticipation of the needs of others, to be able to say that the above heuristic applies to any and all situations. It doesn’t. There are collegial peer situations in which people will share knowledge for the hell of it.

In characterizing the nature of knowledge, John also draws on the work of Shawn Callahan.

— “Types of tacit knowledge” (“Stuff people understand, but take for granted. Stuff nobody understands. Stuff that is hard to explain or articulate (even if you understand it).”)

JMF: I think that what Polanyi meant by “tacit knowledge: is something mental in character and that the notion of “ineffability” is heavily involved.. But I’m not sure how that fits with Shawn’s categories. Stuff people people understand and take for granted, may yet be expressed explicitly somewhere, so how is that necessarily “tacit.” And, if it’s not expressed explicitly somewhere, then how do we know what it is?

What about “stuff nobody understands?” What sense of “understand,” is at issue here? Is there any “tacit” knowledge that people really don’t “understand?” Can there be mental knowledge without “understanding,” even when it’s unconscious? If so, then what is “understanding?” Polanyi talks about the “ineffability” of tacit knowledge. But he did not mean by this that understanding was absent. Rather, we understand how to ride a bike even if we can’t articulate it. The surgeon, understands the patient’s anatomy, even though his understanding proceeds from intution and ineffability of thought and inference.

The category of stuff that is hard to explain or articulate even if we understand it, is part of what Polanyi meant in pointing to tacit knowledge. However, the part we can’t articulate is the tacit or ineffable part. The part we can is at most implicit knowledge that, with difficulty can be brought into the focal area of our gestalt fields and can be articulated and explained.

There are many other problems with this typology, as well, and many more than I can discuss here, however, the most important additional problem, is that the types of tacit knowledge typology leaves knowledge predispositions unaccounted for. It therefore fits into a conception of mental knowledge that recognizes the tacit and the explicit, but not the predispositional, an extraordinarily important element of our knowledge since it includes our attitudes and value orientations. I have an account of a much broader psychological framework that the tacit explicit framework than is generally used in KM, here.

— “Not outcomes based (more about learning)” (“elicit/nurture/hang-out/participate/cultivate”)

JMF: I have no issue with the importance of learning in generating knowledge, and I think that eliciting, nurturing, hanging out, participating, and cultivating, are all very important in making knowledge. In fact, the knowledge production aspect of the Knowledge Life Cycle framework is based on a selectionist learning theory. However, I don’t see either the advantage, or the basis in philosophy, or psychological theory, or in social psychology, or any other discipline for denying that learning has knowledge outcomes. Such formulations are a quest for novelty for its own sake. Processes have products. Learning is a word we use to describe process and activity; knowledge (of the mental variety) is one of the words we use to describe the outcome of learning; and attempts to remove knowledge as a product, from the process of learning are about as useful as attempts to remove adapted life forms from the process of evolution.

My next entry will get to John’s characterization of KM 2.0

To Be Continued