Knowledge is not necessarily social

[invisible]

at the moment im studying an information and knowledge management postgraduate degree. we are reading and discussing research about the nature of knowledge. the following is an excerpt from my learning journal that i am sharing here for anyone who might be interested in this, since it is not possible for me to share it with my class. i attempted to discuss this with my class, but every person who spoke disagreed with me, so it isnt really possible for me to discuss it with them any further.

*

At class this week there was a guest lecturer talking about practice theory. I liked her a lot but once again she mentioned that "all knowledge is inherently social". She mentioned this as though it were a verified fact. For some reason, it doesn't seem to bother anyone but me that this statement is being made in the complete absence of any empirical support but as though it is absolute truth. Why doesn't it bother anyone that this statement is being made without any evidence to support it? This is so unscientific, I can't understand it.

(Teacher) mentioned to me an alternative theory for what knowledge can be apart from social. But what I am more interested in is that we are making a conclusive statement that has zero empirical support. Obtaining an alternative theory is not necessary to criticising applications of current theory. The absence of an alternative plan for addressing the situation does not invalidate problems with the current way of thinking. I'm not an experienced information scientist and I would hardly know where to begin in formulating an alternative theory, but that doesn't change the fact that the way that theory is being applied in the discipline is not correct.

Let's take for example, the theory of "divine knowledge". (The nature of my own personal beliefs have no relevance to this as an academic question.) Divine knowledge is not social in any way, it is known only by God, who represents the single original creator of all other social beings, and existed prior to any possibility of social interaction. Scientifically, the hypothesis of divine knowledge cannot be empirically tested, it is a matter of belief, because we cannot access divinity for testing. However, a hypothesis of divine knowledge does not exclude a hypothesis of social knowledge, they can coexist: in the same conception of the universe, knowledge can exist in a form that is social, and another form that is divine. Similarly, any other possible hypothesis of knowledge could potentially coexist with a hypothesis of divine knowledge - say let's call it "individual knowledge". I have no idea what "individual knowledge" would consist of, let's just say it is another theory of knowledge that is not social. It may not necessarily deny the possibility of social forms of knowledge, and it may not necessarily exclude any other potential knowledge forms either. It just represents a theory of knowledge that has no social component. Maybe it is a theory of knowledge represented in terms of purely individually received sensory information from the world that we perceive through our senses - images and sounds? Or maybe of physiological feedback supplied from within our own enclosed physical bodies? It doesn't matter, it could be any theory. What matters is that it is an alternative that is available for exploration.

However, the statement that is repeatedly being made in the literature and by individuals in classes is that "all knowledge is social". This is a definitive statement to the effect that all knowledge, categorically and with no exception, is inherently social by nature. Not only is this hypothesis just as untestable scientifically as a hypothesis of divine knowledge, but it deliberately excludes any other possibility of what knowledge could be. How can we discover things that we do not know, if we are intentionally refusing to acknowledge their possibility? "It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible." (Aristotle)

As scientists, how can we ethically commit ourselves exclusively to an empirically unsupported conception of everything that knowledge can only ever be, when all that we can say for certain about the mind is that it is a strange and mysterious domain that we do not properly understand?

And this comes back to the most important practical question of all, the big reason of why people are employed or studying in this institution. What is the purpose of research if it is possible for us to already know the answer? The actual reason for why we are doing research on this is because we don't understand knowledge and the way it happens in the mind, or people's bodies, or whatever - we are doing research to explore our hypotheses about it and see what we can figure out, because we want to understand it better. So why is this fundamental idea, "all knowledge is inherently social", being taken for granted as the truth, without any need for research?

 

[barbad0s]

Lol. I see your point. It's a matter of the perspective a person is willing to take and the point that is most practical for an institution to communicate instead of objective fact. I can see how it's ironic in this situation. Next time maybe if you can refine your ability to make people see your point you will be more successful at it?

 

[invisible]

Lol. I see your point. It's a matter of the perspective a person is willing to take and the point that is most practical for an institution to communicate instead of objective fact. I can see how it's ironic in this situation. Next time maybe if you can refine your ability to make people see your point you will be more successful at it?

haha. i waffle on. but it is so difficult to communicate with people who have already decided what the truth is.

 

[Solongo]

The assumption that "all knowledge is inherently social" and by "social"- meaning the knowledge is inherently for the purpose of aiding an individual in their life decisions and guiding them to live better "socially" - then I agree with the lecturer. ONLY because it is based on the idea that knowledge can be useless and only a theory if the individual cannot apply it immediately to improve their life situation whether it is on a social level or personal level.

Since you mentioned that the discussion was on practical theory - then i focus on the practical aspect and nothing is more practical than using knowledge to improve one's life situation and you do not need the scientific method to determine that. All you need is common sense to know if knowledge can help aid you or not and the "inherent" part to me implies that generally humans are interested in "knowledge" that help aid evolution and social part is a huge part of it.

Theoretical knowledge can be useless if an individual cannot use it to gain advantage or improve their lives and theoretical knowledge can be debated on forever - because it is "theory". You can try to prove the theory via scientific method - but common sense will tell us that "useful" knowledge is obvious because we are inherently attuned to filter out information that is useful to us or not.

 

[invisible]

The assumption that "all knowledge is inherently social" and by "social"- meaning the knowledge is inherently for the purpose of aiding an individual in their life decisions and guiding them to live better "socially" - then I agree with the lecturer. ONLY because it is based on the idea that knowledge can be useless and only a theory if the individual cannot apply it immediately to improve their life situation whether it is on a social level or personal level.

Since you mentioned that the discussion was on practical theory - then i focus on the practical aspect and nothing is more practical than using knowledge to improve one's life situation and you do not need the scientific method to determine that. All you need is common sense to know if knowledge can help aid you or not and the "inherent" part to me implies that generally humans are interested in "knowledge" that help aid evolution and social part is a huge part of it.

Theoretical knowledge can be useless if an individual cannot use it to gain advantage or improve their lives and theoretical knowledge can be debated on forever - because it is "theory". You can try to prove the theory via scientific method - but common sense will tell us that "useful" knowledge is obvious because we are inherently attuned to filter out information that is useful to us or not.

ah sorry i was making some assumptions that others would automatically understand jargon i have gotten comfortable with using. i find it very weird that i have forgotten that i did not always use these words automatically in these ways.

what is meant when people in my discipline are talking about knowledge being social, in the context of my discipline it is shorthand for "all knowledge is socially constructed". by this they mean that everything we know is created through social type interactions, both directly with others, and through socially constructed means, eg through books and human languages. but actually, they are making this statement with no evidence. there is no way of demonstrating that knowledge can only be socially constructed, because to put it simply we do not know what knowledge is, and we dont know the mechanisms of how it is created. it could potentially be created by an individual in a way that it is not social. we have no empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that it cannot be created in this individual way, so we should not not say so. evidence gathered through scientific research is the way we assess truth in this discipline, so we should not be making truth statements that have not been supported with this type of evidence. but for some reason, people in my discipline, including all sorts of researchers with prestigious publication histories, are continually making this statement, that has not been tested for truth value by the methods that they themselves uphold for verifying truth value. what they are in fact doing is making a statement of their own personal beliefs about the nature of knowledge, which they are entitled to in private, but is completely inappropriate in the context of a scientific discipline.

all this is pretty useless knowledge... but i enjoy thinking about it ;-)

 

[invisible]

there are a whole lot of reasons for why they say this stuff. it has to do with the way that the discipline has been historically. when it was sort of starting out, a lot of the research was about the way that people gain knowledge individually, because it was focused on increasing library usage. they thought if they could study how to make people use libraries better, they could get more people reading. this was pretty noble.

unfortunately, focusing on types of knowledge that you can get from books made it seem like this kind of knowledge is better than other kinds of knowledge. it made people who are perceived as not getting most of their knowledge from books seem "stupid". this is like, people who do work that is not seen as traditionally "professionally" skilled (whatever that means exactly - not "academic" or "scholarly" i guess), eg tradespeople, sportspeople, dancers. actually, there are some really excellent contemporary theories that most of the knowledge all of us get does not come from books or other related type things were people search for formal written-down knowledge, but from doing things, like getting training on the job, or talking with our friends, or playing tennis or doing a dance class, or going to the supermarket, etc. etc. this is excellent theory and has been validated through research.

however, when people have been trying to swing things back in this direction of looking at other types of knowledge other than what is gotten through books and similar ways that are considered more formally or traditionally educational, is that they have somehow started to say that all knowledge is socially constructed. this has been kind of like, marketing speak i guess, to generate interest in the new hypotheses about book learning being not all that important. but it has started to be accepted as being the truth about the construction of human knowledge.

this unintentionally creates a problem, because it blinds us to other possibilities, and it creates a scholarly culture in which certain other research possibilities are actively discouraged. this is an ethical problem for justifying funding for research in universities, because we are just doing research to validate our beliefs, rather than to explore possibilities. we should never close off possibility in research, because it could generate some very interesting outcomes that could potentially have wonderful practical applications. this is what the research dollar is meant for when it is given to pure research that has no immediately apparent practical application - the possibility that practical applications could become accidentally apparent through exploring the weird and wonderful.

for me, it creates an additional moral problem. this is because i am a personal believer in the power of individuals to create dissent. i think it is unfair to those individuals to say that their ideas have been constructed socially. it robs them of recognition for their achievements. of course, in achieving amazing intellectual things, people stand on the shoulders of giants, and no one would deny that. but they deserve full credit for what they achieve. and the fact that they could create something entirely new, well it just makes you think doesnt it, that maybe there was an aspect to their knowledge construction process that was not social in nature.

 

[Y0u]

If by knowledge they mean understanding with words, I would say it's purpose is definitely social... you can know and understand many things without words or social cues though, like knowing how to climb a tree etc. IMHO, the foundation of knowledge and understanding are learned responses from changes in perception. Words serve to express that knowledge, but there are also non-verbal cues. It's much easier to gain understanding with social cues, which are maybe just more cues to what is to be understood.

 

[Matt3737]

haha. i waffle on. but it is so difficult to communicate with people who have already decided what the truth is.

Why communicate it with people at all then? If it is indeed non-social, it needn't (or cannot) be conveyed at all.

The private language argument is of central importance to debates about the nature of language. One compelling theory about language is that language maps words to ideas, concepts or representations in each person's mind. On this account, the concepts in my head are distinct from the concepts in your head. But I can match my concepts to a word in our common language, and then speak the word. You then match the word to a concept in your mind. So our concepts in effect form a private language which we translate into our common language and so share. This account is found for example in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and more recently in Jerry Fodor's language of thought theory.

Wittgenstein shows, in his later work, that this account of private language is inconsistent. If the idea of a private language is inconsistent, then a logical conclusion would be that all language serves a social function. This would have profound implications for other areas of philosophical and psychological study. For example, if one cannot have a private language, it might not make any sense to talk of private experiences or of private mental states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument

 

[invisible]

Why communicate it with people at all then? If it is indeed non-social, it needn't (or cannot) be conveyed at all.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument

in my words that you have quoted i was trying to say that i found it difficult to communicate with my classmates when they had already made up their minds in the absence of evidence. it seems to me that you and i may agree on the fundamental issues but im not sure i understand your meaning. i cant obtain any degree of certainty that it is necessary for knowledge to be communicated or to be able to be communicated or formulated in language or to be externally apprehendable in any way at all in order for it to nevertheless represent a viable knowledge form within the internal world of any given person.

 

[invisible]

If by knowledge they mean understanding with words, I would say it's purpose is definitely social... you can know and understand many things without words or social cues though, like knowing how to climb a tree etc. IMHO, the foundation of knowledge and understanding are learned responses from changes in perception. Words serve to express that knowledge, but there are also non-verbal cues. It's much easier to gain understanding with social cues, which are maybe just more cues to what is to be understood.

i could argue about the details and that could be interesting but basically i think that what you said is pretty spot on. + 1 here.

 

[invisible]

such as, for example of a knowledge form that cannot be communicated, a memory of pain.

 

[sprinkles]

For practical purposes, a lot of the knowledge that humans find pertinent is social. It is social because it is mostly acquired through proximity to other humans.

Out of curiosity though, I'd like to see some quotes verbatim from people who have claimed that all knowledge is necessarily social, since this is the first time I've heard of it. And if I have seen it I probably took it as slightly hyperbolic rhetoric.

 

[CogentPursuit]

I learned how to pick my nose; something I learned that is anti-social.

There is knowledge that is learned/constructed outside of a social environment. Although knowledge is never really constructed but only found.

 

[CogentPursuit]

Why isn't an individuals new idea considered non-socially constructed if it isn't learned socially? He may have a base structure of knowledge that was build by social means but his own ideas are created outside of that structure and hopefully implemented within the structure making social knowledge grow. In fact, social knowledge is only created by non-socially constructed ideas. Or chicken in the egg perhaps?

 

[invisible]

For practical purposes, a lot of the knowledge that humans find pertinent is social. It is social because it is mostly acquired through proximity to other humans.

i agree. a lot of human knowledge is socially constructed.

Out of curiosity though, I'd like to see some quotes verbatim from people who have claimed that all knowledge is necessarily social, since this is the first time I've heard of it. And if I have seen it I probably took it as slightly hyperbolic rhetoric.

hyperbolic rhetoric is cool with me but has no place in rigorous scientific discipline. the problem that is happening in the discipline that i am studying, is that whether these sorts of statements are rhetorical or not, they are having such an effect on the scholarly culture of the discipline that research possibilities are being actively discouraged by senior scholars. we have guest lecturers with doctoral degrees who comfortably make declarations to us such as "of course all knowledge is socially constructed", and the students just lap it up. but in fact there is no evidence whatsoever that all knowledge is socially constructed. its a conjectural statement that has been implicitly accepted as factual. i study at a large, internationally respected research university in an alpha+ city, where the lecturers are part of an international milieu, where this is just the accepted perspective. it is so accepted that if i challenge it in a class, i instantly have 10 people trying to argue me down, including the lecturer.

According to Talja (21, p. 123), the major distinctive characteristic of the information practice approach is that it represents "a more sociologically and contextually oriented line of research." Kimmo Tuominen, Talja, and Reijo Savolainen (54, p. 328) point out that particularly from the constructionist perspective, the concept of information practice is preferred over information behavior, since "the former assumes that the processes of information seeking and use are constituted socially and dialogically, rather than based on the ideas and motives of individual actors. All human practices are social, and they originate from interactions between the members of community."

Savolainen, R. 2007, 'Information Behaviour and Information Practice: Reviewing the "Umbrella Concepts" of Information-Seeking Studies', Library Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 109-32.

is this enough to show that these sorts of ideas are being reproduced in library and information science scholarship? maybe i am overreacting and overstating my point. but anyway, i dont have any problem at all with examining ideas about knowledge from a perspective that treats it as socially constructed. what i do have a problem with is when the idea of perspective is effectively eradicated by the researchers making statements such as "all human practices are social", which are not empirically supported.

 

[invisible]

There is knowledge that is learned/constructed outside of a social environment. Although knowledge is never really constructed but only found.

knowledge can only be found - meaning that it already exists before it is found? that is an interesting idea but i think it seems to suggest that knowledge is an apprehendable feature that exists "inside things", such as like, the statistical mean of dairy cows heartbeats preexisting inside the cows. well using this as an example, statistics is an analytical tool that has been invented by humans rather than preexisting. and i tend to think that knowledge of dairy cows heartbeats is produced through a process of constructive interpretation, and would describe the heartbeats themselves as phenomena rather than knowledge.

i think the idea that knowledge already exists and awaits discovery is an essentialist type idea, similar to ideas about the soul. it is a religious type idea. it may be true, im not sure, but it is not a hypothesis that can be tested scientifically.

Why isn't an individuals new idea considered non-socially constructed if it isn't learned socially? He may have a base structure of knowledge that was build by social means but his own ideas are created outside of that structure and hopefully implemented within the structure making social knowledge grow. In fact, social knowledge is only created by non-socially constructed ideas. Or chicken in the egg perhaps?

interesting thoughts. i think this is a lot of the problem. i think that people in my discipline would say that because the new knowledge that has been made has required an already existing social scaffolding in order to be formulated, that there is an inherent aspect to it that is social by nature. but i get very annoyed by this, because as you mention, it seems to take credit away from the person who formulated the new idea. it seems that there is an element to it, that somehow came out of their own mind in some place, some feature like "inspiration", that may not necessarily be social by nature. so then saying "all knowledge is inherently socially constructed" is no more meaningful than saying "all knowledge is inherently constructed by an individual's inspiration", both may be necessary and neither more meaningful than the other. anyway, we shouldnt be saying these things at all, because we just dont know to what extent knowledge is socially constructed or is not.

the other problem i have is that maybe an idea that an individual has was not constructed using preexisting knowledge structures that were socially acquired by that individual. we just do not know that this is impossible. it is entirely within possibility.

 

[sprinkles]

[MENTION=1814]invisible[/MENTION]
Yeah that's enough, thanks. And yeah I'm pretty sure they're wrong for stating that as a fact in such a way.

I think this arises from a conflict of two different paradigms that oppose each other's weaknesses. Young minds tend to be more rebellious and open, while established scholars tend to be more closed and traditional.

The problem is that the young minds are often reckless and don't have as much experience, and are more likely to espouse things in haste, making the claim that anyone who doesn't agree is just closed minded but it turns out that they're really wrong and can't see it because they're inexperienced and trying to rush into something novel, and therefore the veteran scholars feel they must guide the young and keep their zeal in line.

The issue being that when young and open people catch one mistake from the established scholarly community, they tend to think that the entire community is wrong and use that to go crazy and espouse things that make no sense. And because the young minds do this, the established community some times has a hard time knowing when they SHOULD listen to the more ambitious and imaginative young ones. And you end up with stubborn, unquestioned notions like this as a result, and the cycle repeats itself.

 

[sprinkles]

[MENTION=1814]invisible[/MENTION]

Elitism and hubris are also problems. I know a couple people who are going for PhD's who seem to think they've become gods, or that it's ok to leave their head stuck up their ass.

 

[CogentPursuit]

knowledge can only be found - meaning that it already exists before it is found? that is an interesting idea but i think it seems to suggest that knowledge is an apprehendable feature that exists "inside things", such as like, the statistical mean of dairy cows heartbeats preexisting inside the cows. well using this as an example, statistics is an analytical tool that has been invented by humans rather than preexisting. and i tend to think that knowledge of dairy cows heartbeats is produced through a process of constructive interpretation, and would describe the heartbeats themselves as phenomena rather than knowledge.

If knowledge were constructed by the individual it would be different depending on the individual who constructed it, assuming if they had never spoken or known each other. Statistics is knowledge and it can be found to be the same by multiple individuals who have never communicated with each other because the data is inherent in the fabric of our reality(It is objective). Language is art and is constructed. It cannot be 'found' by any individual because it would be unique to each individual until it is shared between the individuals(It is subjective).

 

[invisible]

@invisible
Yeah that's enough, thanks. And yeah I'm pretty sure they're wrong for stating that as a fact in such a way.

I think this arises from a conflict of two different paradigms that oppose each other's weaknesses. Young minds tend to be more rebellious and open, while established scholars tend to be more closed and traditional.

The problem is that the young minds are often reckless and don't have as much experience, and are more likely to espouse things in haste, making the claim that anyone who doesn't agree is just closed minded but it turns out that they're really wrong and can't see it because they're inexperienced and trying to rush into something novel, and therefore the veteran scholars feel they must guide the young and keep their zeal in line.

The issue being that when young and open people catch one mistake from the established scholarly community, they tend to think that the entire community is wrong and use that to go crazy and espouse things that make no sense. And because the young minds do this, the established community some times has a hard time knowing when they SHOULD listen to the more ambitious and imaginative young ones. And you end up with stubborn, unquestioned notions like this as a result, and the cycle repeats itself.

AGREE! 100%. Thank You.

and, very insightful.