Knowledge
Knowledge is information, understanding, skill, or awareness that a person or group has acquired through experience, study, observation, reasoning, teaching, research, or other means. Knowledge can concern facts, methods, concepts, relationships, processes, skills, interpretations, or explanations.
Knowledge is central to learning, teaching, research, science, and problem solving. It allows people to understand the world, preserve what has been learned, communicate ideas, develop technologies, make decisions, and solve problems in living.
Knowledge can be individual or collective. A person can know how to repair a machine, speak a language, understand a mathematical concept, or remember an event. A society can also preserve knowledge through books, schools, libraries, databases, oral traditions, scientific institutions, software, archives, and wikis.
One important challenge is not simply creating knowledge, but organizing it so that other people can find, understand, evaluate, and use it.
Types of knowledge
Knowledge can be divided into several broad categories.
Declarative knowledge concerns knowing that something is the case. For example, knowing that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen is declarative knowledge.
Procedural knowledge concerns knowing how to do something. Knowing how to ride a bicycle, repair a computer, perform an experiment, or write a computer program are examples.
Experiential knowledge develops through direct experience.
Tacit knowledge refers to knowledge that may be difficult to fully explain in words. A skilled craftsperson may know how something should feel or sound even if that judgment is difficult to reduce to a written procedure.
Explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be more easily documented, written, recorded, or transmitted.
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These categories overlap.
A skilled engineer may have explicit knowledge of formulas, procedural knowledge of engineering methods, and tacit knowledge gained through years of experience.
Knowledge and information
Knowledge and information are related but are not always the same thing.
A database may contain a large amount of information. That does not mean that every person who has access to the database understands the information.
Knowledge generally involves some degree of interpretation, organization, understanding, or ability to use information.
For example, a medical laboratory report contains information. Understanding what the measurements mean and how they relate to physiology requires additional knowledge.
Similarly, a manual can contain instructions for repairing a machine, but a person may still need practice before being able to perform the repair successfully.
This distinction becomes increasingly important as computers and artificial intelligence systems make enormous amounts of information easier to retrieve.
Access to information can support knowledge, but access alone does not guarantee understanding.
How knowledge is acquired
People can acquire knowledge through many methods.
These include:
- Observation
- Personal experience
- Reading
- Teaching
- Discussion
- Experimentation
- Practice
- Research
- Logical reasoning
- Measurement
- Historical records
- Apprenticeship
- Simulation
Different methods are appropriate for different questions.
A person can learn historical information by examining documents. Scientific questions may require controlled experiments. Practical skills may require repeated physical practice.
Some knowledge can be learned quickly. Other forms can take years.
Knowledge can also be revised. A person may discover that something previously believed to be true was incomplete or incorrect.
This is one reason why learning should not always be understood as simply accumulating more information. Learning can also involve correcting previous beliefs.
Knowledge and uncertainty
Knowledge does not require perfect certainty in every situation.
Much human knowledge involves probabilities, incomplete evidence, models, or conclusions that may later be revised.
Science often works this way.
Scientific knowledge develops through observation, hypotheses, experimentation, measurement, peer criticism, replication, and revision.
A scientific explanation can be strongly supported while still remaining open to improvement.
It is useful to distinguish between:
- What is known with strong evidence
- What is probably true
- What is uncertain
- What is speculative
- What is currently unknown
Good research does not only produce answers. It can also identify uncertainty more clearly.
Knowing what is not known can be useful knowledge.
Knowledge and teaching
Teaching is one of the major ways knowledge moves between people and generations.
Teaching can involve lectures, books, demonstrations, discussion, practice, mentorship, laboratories, online learning, and many other methods.
Effective teaching involves more than transmitting facts.
A teacher may need to help a learner understand:
- Why something matters
- How concepts relate to one another
- How to evaluate evidence
- How to apply knowledge
- How to find additional information
- How to recognize mistakes
- How to continue learning independently
Teaching can also improve the teacher's knowledge.
Trying to explain an idea often reveals gaps in understanding.
This creates a useful cycle between learning and teaching.
Knowledge and research
Research is one of the primary methods used to expand knowledge.
Research can involve asking new questions or revisiting old questions using improved methods.
Research activities can include:
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Research does not always produce positive results.
A failed experiment can still provide knowledge if it shows that a method does not work under particular conditions.
Negative results, errors, and unsuccessful approaches can be valuable when they are documented accurately.
Organizing knowledge
Knowledge becomes more useful when it can be organized and retrieved.
Humans have developed many systems for this purpose.
Examples include:
- Libraries
- Encyclopedias
- Dictionaries
- Archives
- Databases
- Catalogs
- Scientific journals
- Classification systems
- Wikis
- Knowledge graphs
- Search engines
A wiki is particularly useful because pages can connect related concepts through hyperlinks.
A page on energy can connect to pages on physics, electricity, engineering, economics, environmental science, and technology.
This makes a wiki useful not only for storing facts but for showing relationships between ideas.
Categories, portals, indexes, and structured links can help learners move from one subject to another.
Open knowledge
Open knowledge generally refers to knowledge that people can access, use, study, modify, and share with relatively few restrictions.
Open educational resources, open scientific publications, open data, open-source software, and open hardware can all contribute to the broader availability of knowledge.
Open knowledge can help people learn without needing permission from a central gatekeeper.
It can also allow knowledge to be improved collaboratively.
However, openness does not guarantee accuracy.
Open information still needs evaluation, sourcing, testing, and criticism.
The value of openness is that more people can participate in that process.
Knowledge and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence systems can increasingly assist with finding, organizing, summarizing, generating, and analyzing information.
They can help people:
- Search large bodies of text
- Compare sources
- Explain difficult topics
- Generate study materials
- Organize notes
- Analyze data
- Develop research questions
- Produce drafts
- Connect related ideas
AI systems can also produce incorrect or fabricated information.
This means AI can be useful for learning and research, but information generated by an AI system should be evaluated like information from other sources.
The ability to generate an answer is not the same as possessing verified knowledge.
Research methods, citations, experimentation, and independent verification remain important.
Knowledge and problems in living
Many problems in living can be understood partly as knowledge problems.
People may lack information about how to solve a problem.
Relevant research may exist but may not be accessible.
Different groups may possess separate pieces of useful knowledge but fail to communicate.
A solution may be known but expensive or difficult to implement.
In other cases, the necessary knowledge may not yet exist.
Examples can include:
- How to prevent a disease
- How to generate inexpensive clean energy
- How to build affordable housing
- How to improve transportation
- How to reduce conflict
- How to manufacture a difficult technology
- How to extend healthy human life
- How to organize resources more efficiently
Learning, teaching, research, and experimentation can therefore be viewed as tools for solving problems.
Knowledge alone may not solve a problem, but solving complex problems usually requires relevant knowledge.
Preserving knowledge
Knowledge can be lost.
Libraries can be destroyed. Digital files can disappear. Websites can shut down. Languages can become extinct. Skilled workers can retire without documenting what they know.
Preserving knowledge is therefore an important task.
Strategies can include:
- Maintaining backups
- Using open file formats
- Creating archives
- Publishing documentation
- Recording oral histories
- Preserving source code
- Maintaining libraries
- Teaching skills to new people
- Creating redundant copies of important information
Long-term preservation is especially important for knowledge that would be difficult or expensive to rediscover.
Discussion questions, essay ideas, and learning related AI prompt ideas
- What is knowledge?
- What is the difference between knowledge and information?
- Can a person know something without being able to explain it?
- What is the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge?
- How should uncertain knowledge be represented?
- How does science differ from other methods of acquiring knowledge?
- Can incorrect beliefs still contain useful knowledge?
- What kinds of knowledge are most difficult to preserve?
- How can societies reduce the loss of institutional knowledge?
- What information should be considered common knowledge?
- How can open knowledge contribute to solving problems in living?
- How should people evaluate information produced by artificial intelligence?
- What is the best way to organize a large body of human knowledge?
- Ask an AI system to compare declarative, procedural, tacit, and experiential knowledge.
- Ask an AI system to design a system for preserving technical knowledge for one hundred years.
- Develop a research project that examines how people distinguish reliable from unreliable information.
- Compare wikis, encyclopedias, libraries, databases, and knowledge graphs as methods of organizing knowledge.
Wikipedia readings
- Knowledge
- Epistemology
- Information
- Tacit knowledge
- Declarative knowledge
- Procedural knowledge
- Knowledge management
- Open knowledge
- Scientific method
- Learning
- Research
- Encyclopedia