Rebuilding knowledge work

The issue of epistemology

Our ideas about what constitutes good knowledge have evolved since antiquity, and now find their foremost expression in science. Science has also become, through an evolutionary process, our trusted source of knowledge. What we'll be talking about here is the possibility of continuing this evolution a step further, and in a new direction – where (what we've learned from) science is adapted to what is now a vital task – of giving us the people the kind of information we need.

During the past century fundamental insights have been reached in science and philosophy that now enable us to develop knowledge work on entirely new premises. And to repurpose knowledge and knowledge work on this new basis, by adapting them to their increasingly vital social role – the role of informing people. We shall summarize those insights briefly in our very first story in Federation through Stories. Here, however, we shall represent them largely by the insights of a single scientist – Albert Einstein. Already a handful of brief excerpts from his texts will turn out to be sufficient for our purpose. Einstein here appears in his usual role of an icon, representing "modern science".

Blueprint of a socio-technical lightbulb

If the word "epistemology" does not mean much to you, consider what is being told here as simply a description of a new principle of operation for the socio-technical lightbulb. That fire can provide us light, that we've known since before the civilization. But now we'll see that, metaphorically speaking, electricity can provide us an even much stronger light, which we can point at will to illuminate whatever needs to be seen. What will be described is both what 'electricity' here means, and how a lightbulb with suitable properties may be constructed.

Steps toward big picture science

We'll show how the characteristic approach to knowledge that has been developed in the sciences can be generalized and made applicable to any theme or issue. And most importantly, we shall see how this approach can be adapted to the need of creating big-picture information, and provide insight and orientation.

We shall at the same time use some elements of this big-picture science, notably the ideogram. As we have seen, the ideogram play in this generalization of science a similar role as mathematical formulas do in physics – they provide a general message about how the things are related, that can be recognized at a glance. An important use of ideograms here is to provide a gestalt – an insight into a nature of situation, which points to a way in which the situation may need to be handled.

Repurposing science

The academic mirror

On every university campus there is a mirror. Busy with article deadlines and courses, we do not normally see it. But it is there! When we see ourselves in this mirror, we see the same world that we see around us. But we also see ourselves in the world.

The mirror here represents the insight, reached in so many ways in 20th century's science and philosophy (see Federation through Stories), that we cannot really build our knowledge work solidly on the age-old assumption that the purpose of knowledge is to mirror reality "objectively", as it truly is.

When we see ourselves in this mirror, we see that it is really us that have created both our knowledge and our knowledge work. We realize that we are not disembodied spirits hovering over the world and looking at it objectively – but people living in the world, and responsible for it.

As the case is in Louis Carroll's familiar story, this academic mirror too can be walked right through! And when we do that, we find ourselves in an entirely different academic reality. (You may now understand Knowledge federation as a model or prototype of that reality.)

We cannot really know reality

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.

During philosophy’s childhood it was rather generally believed that it is possible to find everything which can be known by means of mere reflection. (...) Someone, indeed, might even raise the question whether, without something of this illusion, anything really great can be achieved in the realm of philosophical thought – but we do not wish to ask this question. This more aristocratic illusion concerning the unlimited penetrative power of thought has as its counterpart the more plebeian illusion of naïve realism, according to which things “are” as they are perceived by us through our senses. This illusion dominates the daily life of men and animals; it is also the point of departure in all the sciences, especially of the natural sciences.

But if our, when constructing good knowledge work, is is to distinguish good knowledge from illusion – how can we rely on a criterion that is impossible to verify? And which itself tends to be a result of illusion?

A new foundation for knowledge

We emphasize that the new foundation we are proposing does not depend on what's just been said. Even if depicting reality in an objective way were possible; and even if science really did that – even then this way of founding knowledge would be rigorous.

The reason is that this new foundation is independent of the very notion of reality. It simply circumvents it altogether.

This is done by resorting to what Villard Van Orman Quine called truth by convention. It's the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let x be... Then..." It is meaningless to ask whether x "really is" as stated. In "Truth by Convention", Quine posits that

The less a science has advanced, the more its terminology tends to rest on an uncritical assumption of mutual understanding. With increase of rigor this basis is replaced piecemeal by the introduction of definitions. The interrelationships recruited for these definitions gain the status of analytic principles; what was once regarded as a theory about the world becomes reconstrued as a convention of language. Thus it is that some flow from the theoretical to the conventional is an adjunct of progress in the logical foundations of any science.

What makes 'the magic' possible, of 'walking through the mirror', is that the truth on the other side is (by convention) the truth by convention. We call this basic convention the methodology.

By creating a methodology, the age-old preoccupation with truth and reality is established on the academic terrain that Herbert Simon called "the sciences of the artificial" – which is of course just a technical term for our metaphorical reality on the other side of the mirror.

The sciences of the artificial, according to Simon, do not study what objectively exists in the natural world – but man-made things, with the goal of adapting them to the purposes they serve in the human world.

Generalizing science