Know What?
In my last post I discussed the confusion that exists among many postmoderns who lump data, information, and knowledge in the same bucket as synonyms. I worked with the DIKUW acronym and the etymology of the word, “inform” to try to make helpful distinctions—distinctions with enormous consequences for teaching and learning.
“We tend to think knowledge is information, facts, bits of data, ‘content,’ true statements. . .We conclude that gaining knowledge is collecting information—and we’re done—educated, trained, expert, certain.”
Esther Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing
We are exploring epistemology. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that answers the question of what it means to know. This includes a related question: What counts as evidence? The Oxford English Dictionary includes in the concept of epistemology “the distinction between justified belief and opinion.”
The standard view of epistemology since Plato has been the “Justified True Belief” model.“According to this epistemology, for A (a person, knower) to know that p (a proposition), A must believe that p, p must be true, and A must be justified in believing that p.”
Lankshear, et al.
The first thing to observe is that knowledge requires a knower. In contrast to information, “knowledge refers to something people possess, i.e. a cognitive capacity, while information refers to something passive that needs to be interpreted by those who have the cognitive capacity.” (Kauppinen)
Not all who engage with information have the cognitive capacity to handle it responsibly.
“In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, . . . ‘receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,’ they would ‘be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.’ They would be ‘filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.’”
Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?
The Internet didn’t invent shallow thinking, but it invites it to an unprecedented degree. Search engines and skimming are no substitute for scholarship and critical reflection. The traditional “Justified True Belief” model of knowledge calls out those who substitute belief as the only criterion for truth. The traditional criterion of justification calls for a weighing of evidence that will stand in the courtroom of the well-informed and not just “make sense to me.”
I cannot be said to know if I do not have the ability to personally justify what I say I know. Quoting someone else’s justification shows that I’m treating them as a source of information.
The goal of most of education today is the transfer of a body of factual information, rather than a systematic process of justification of concepts and propositions that conveys personal ownership of knowledge.
I’m not down-playing factual information. Facts are significant as a major source of evidence for justifying a line of reasoning. They can also be the means of calling out error. “The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” (Thomas Huxley) Assuming for a moment that the facts are true (as most facts are), facts are the conclusions that others have arrived at through a process of logical justification. If I’m to advance beyond DIK to U (understanding), I’m going to have wrestle also.
“Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality.”
Esther Meek, Longing to Know
Individuals must struggle to pay attention to relevant clues (and reject the red herrings). Humans are marvelously wired to find patterns in seemingly disordered data/information, but it takes concentration and commitment to persist until we finally “see it.”
Once we see a “coherent pattern” we treat it as reality and use it to make predictions that will extend the pattern beyond its original habitat and show the utility of the insight that the pattern represents. A pattern that continues to hold its own when applied in this way is personally satisfying (because we own it) and powerful. We have no trouble remembering the pattern, because “we” invented it (even if others got there first).
Knowledge is invariably personal, but it is not just personal.
All human knowers are glimpsing the same reality. As a result, our knowing should overlap and coincide at many points with the knowledge of others. We don’t live in a private universe or communication would be impossible.
Knowledge is personal, but it is also communal. Sir Isaac Newton said “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” There is a community of learners past and present that I utilize and engage with.
“Over the course of a discovery or a ‘learning,’ we must first entrust ourselves to the tutelage of an authority who teaches us how to see and what to look for. It means submitting to being retaught. . . .to reassign significances, . . .It involves challenging previous expectations of the way things ought to be.”
Esther Meek
Others can be my guides. They can help me avoid pitfalls. They can keep me off dead-end streets. They can’t do my learning for me, but they can help my learning to be more efficient—if I have the humility to be “retaught.”
In a timely New York Times piece “The U.S. is Getting a Crash Course in Uncertainty” there is a discussion of what the struggle to know involves when the struggle is public and under time pressure. The struggle I’m referring to is to gain knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 while we are in the middle of a pandemic. As a microbiologist with training in virology, I have lived this struggle. I’ve been on several health advisory boards who are asked to give guidance to appropriate public health measures.
Public Health professionals have been squeezed for the past 18 months by a public that simultaneously wants certainty when recommendations are made and insists on a return to normalcy. (Peace, peace, when there is no peace—not yet).
Much has been learned in the past 18 months that will change how we respond to the next pandemic. The importance of aerosol transmission of respiratory diseases and the use of masking to stymie it has replaced older and misguided misunderstandings that died as they were put to the test in the crucible of ongoing disease spread around the globe. This is how knowledge advances.
Vaccines that utilize thirty years of molecular biology research to produce extremely efficacious mRNA vaccines that nearly eliminate the possibility of death from COVID-19 are another fruit of the pandemic and the foresight of Operation Warp Speed. Do they maintain their potency over years? We weren’t able to answer that question with integrity because we haven’t had them for years. When the data were adequate to make the call, booster vaccination was called for—not a huge surprise.
Similarly, epidemics of whooping cough (pertussis) in the early 2000’s made it apparent that a booster vaccination was called for and that is the current CDC recommendation. How do we avoid the whooping cough epidemics that plagued colleges then? With mandatory vaccination for pertussis at appropriate intervals.
“Justified True Belief” in the scientific community is being modeled before our eyes in the current pandemic.
The understanding of infectious disease began in the mid-1800’s. We’ve learned a great deal along the way, but we’ve never studied a virus quite like SARS-CoV-2. We’ll know a lot more next year than we know now.
“The public disagreements and debates [about COVID-19] played out in public, instead of at obscure [scientific] conferences, give the false impression that science is arbitrary or that scientists are making things up as they go along.
“What a non-scientist or the layperson doesn’t realize is that there is a huge bolus of information and consensus that the two people who are arguing will agree upon.”
NYT, A Crash Course in Uncertainty
Nicholas Carr:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
Justified True Belief:
Lankshear C, Peters M and Knoble M (2000) Information, knowledge and learning: some issues facing epistemology and education in a digital age. Journal of Philosophy of Education 34 (1): 17–39.
Knowledge vs. Information:
Kauppinen I (2013) Different Meanings of ‘Knowledge as Commodity’ in the Context of Higher Education. Critical Sociology 40 (3): 393–409. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920512471218
Esther Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing, (2014), p. 2.
Esther Meek, Longing to Know, (2003) p. 13.
A Crash Course in Uncertainty: