All Life Is Problem Solving

My last post commented on Dave Snowden’s primary argument against a National KM Center, discussed in “Emperor’s Chess Board: Pt. 1” and “The Empire Repeats.” In addition to this argument, however, in “The Empire Repeats,” he wrote of two themes that emerged in the actkm discussion on National KM Centers and “connecting the dots.” The […]

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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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First, I think that true and false are terms we should apply to linguistic networks rather than single statements. Networks are necessary, because single statements generally assume a good deal of background knowledge illuminating the meaning of those statements. If the background knowledge is expressed in language also, we have a network of statements, and […]

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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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  This post is about “safe-fail experiments.” The essential idea in safe-fail experiments was expressed well by Dave Snowden in this way: “I can afford them to fail and critically, I plan them so that through that failure I learn more about the terrain through which I wish to travel.” And again, in another place, […]

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Types of Systems The very circumscribed and also very partial and incomplete take on the history of General Systems Theory I provided in my last post, leaves us in the following position with respect to the problem of classifying systems. There are three very important dichotomies which have emerged out of the history of General […]

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Introduction   One of the aspects of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin approach is the identification of three physical and five human “domains,” or “systems.” The physical systems are called “order,” “chaos,” and “complexity.” In the area of human systems Dave breaks “order” down into known (simple) and knowable (complicated) systems, and also adds a fifth “domain” […]

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Lascaux Horse One of the most popular techniques identified with Knowledge Management is storytelling. Led by Steve Denning, Dave Snowden, Katalina Groh, Larry Prusak, John Seely Brown, and Seth Weaver Kahan, storytelling has become a vibrant movement within KM with a life of its own. Two new books, due out in June 2004, by Denning, […]

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