Rebuilding the foundations

What distinguishes academic knowledge

No rational person will claim that knowledge should not be useful. And yet there are good reasons why practical skills such as cooking and automobile repair have not been admitted to the university. Academic knowledge is the knowledge of principles; it is knowledge that is rigorously founded in time-tested academic methods and procedures.

Our standards of excellence and ideas of what constitutes good or academic knowledge and knowledge work have been evolving since antiquity, and they now find their foremost expression in science and philosophy. We are about to see that the fundamental insights reached in the 20^th century science and philosophy legitimize, and indeed demand that we take a further step in this evolution. We shall see how this naturally leads to the creation of principles that inform our handling of life's basic issues. We shall see why even the most honorable notion of fundamental work or "basic research" can justifiably be applied to the development of the methods and the social processes by which those principles are created.

The technical word is paradigm. We use this word to point both to the just mentioned emerging paradigm in knowledge work, and to the larger paradigm in cultural and societal evolution that may be expected to result from its application.

When making a case for a new academic paradigm, we are not making a case against the prevailing one. Those paradigms are (to use Thomas Kuhn's useful keyword) incommensurable – each of them is more suitable for certain purposes than for others. The purpose we have in mind is, once again, to functionally inform our society.

Ideograms

Not all images are worth one thousand words

But the ideograms are! They play a similar role in knowledge federation as mathematical formulas do in traditional science. An ideogram can condense a wealth of insights and many pages of text into an image whose message can be recognized at a glance. Recall the Newton's formula, or Einstein's ubiquitous E=mc² – those too are ideograms! But the possibilities behind the ideographic approach are endless, and they vastly surpass the conventional maths.

The creative possibilities of ideograms also surpass our illustrations – and are yet to be developed through creative use of new media.

The ideogram we are about to see next renders the essential ideas behind our initiative in a nutshell.

A better way to be creative

Modernity ideogram

The Modernity ideogram renders also the nature of our and our civilization's present condition in a nutshell.

By representing our civilization as a bus, and our handling of information as its candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram points to a root cause of the contemporary issues. Strangely (aren't we living in the Age of Information?), information is that one thing, centrally important, that we've somehow forgotten to modernize.

Imagine us riding in that bus with candle headlights, through obscure and uncharted terrain, and at an accelerating speed. The direction that the bus will take is determined by our likes and dislikes, decisions and priorities. The movement of the bus is the result of our creative work, of our efforts to reach a better condition. To be meaningfully directed and sustainable, posits the Modernity ideogram, our movement into the future must be suitably informed. The information we have is not at all suitable for that purpose. It has evolved based on an old principle of operation and technology, and for an entirely different purpose. A new approach to knowledge is needed, which combines the new purpose with the new technology.

Knowledge federation

You may now easily understand knowledge federation as a prototype of a socio-technical 'light bulb'. You may understand our project as an initiative to create new 'headlights', and to put them to practical use.

No sequence of improvements of the candle will lead to a light bulbs. Hence we created this prototype. And we are now raising this banner on the academic and creative frontier where the real thing can continue to be developed and improved.

Systemic innovation

The Modernity ideogram has also another, more subtle and more general message. It points to a better way to use our creative capabilities in general.

To see it, notice that the headlights are a tiny part of the bus. Their cost and value are negligible in comparison. And yet the design of the headlights can determine the value of everything else – and ultimately decide whether the bus will be a mass-suicide machine, or a vehicle of taking us to any place or condition we may reasonably choose and want to be in. What we are calling systemic innovation is "innovation toward wholeness" – i.e. innovation whose goal is to improve the system or systems in which what is being innovated has a role.

Notice that systemic innovation is indeed a lot more than a technical principle; it points to, and depends on, a profound change of values, and even of our way of being in the world. Notice that as long as we learn our profession as a social role and perform in it competitively, as long as we cater to "market needs" and use the technology to speed up and enhance what the people are already doing, as long as we treat information as a commodity, systemic innovation is not going to take hold and prevail.

A new way to establish facts

Federation as justification

Information that points to direction – of which the Modernity ideogram is an example – need to be made reliable through suitable justification. In what follows we provide a justification of the claim made by the Modernity ideogram with the help of a series of four ideograms. Each of them is further is justified in a separate document by 'connecting the dots' or 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. Hence we both establish the claim we made about new approach to knowledge, by grounding it on already established facts and insights – and demonstrate some suitable techniques.

Each of the first four ideograms presented here will point to a reversal of the conventional academic practice. The fifth will explain knowledge federation as practice. Click on the name of the ideogram to open the document where the reversal or the practice is justified and explained.

Reversing the purpose

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Reversing the method

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Reversing the direction of growth

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Reversing the structure

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Federating knowledge

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Selected examples

How to "change course"

The examples we show below all have to do with "changing course" – they are selected in areas that are pivotal to the direction our societal evolution has taken.

Redirecting innovation

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Redirecting the pursuit of happiness

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Redirecting democracy

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