Knowledge

Trees of ParadiseLucas Cranach the Old.

Knowledge-Reid-Highsmith

Knowledge is familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, such as facts (descriptive knowledge), skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (familiarity knowledge).). In most cases, knowledge can be acquired in many ways and from many sources, such as perception, reason, memory, testimony, scientific research, education, and practice. The philosophical study of knowledge is called epistemology.

The term "knowledge" It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a topic. It can be implicit (such as practical ability or expertise) or explicit (such as theoretical understanding of a subject); formal or informal; systematic or particular. The philosopher Plato argued that there was a distinction between knowledge and true belief in Theaetetus, which led many to ascribe to him a definition of knowledge as "justified true belief". Gettier's problem with this definition have been the subject of extensive debate in epistemology for more than half a century.

Towards a definition of the concept

Tradition

Traditionally, knowledge has been presented as something specific to the human being that is acquired or related to the “belief” in the existence of the rational soul that makes it possible to intuit reality as truth.

It was considered that knowledge responds to the intellective faculties of the soul according to their three degrees of perfection: soul as the principle of life and vegetative self-movement, sensitive or animal soul and human or rational soul.

Book of the Consecration of All Regnos et Tierras et Señoríos that are for the World, et de las señalas et armas que han han. Anonymous author, centuryXIV.

According to these postulates, all living beings acquire information about their environment through their faculties or soul functions:

• Vegetative in vegetables to perform the minimum vital functions in an innate way, nutrition and growth, reproduction and death.
• Sensitive, in animals that produce adaptation and local self-movement and includes the previous faculties. In the degree of superior perfection appears memory, learning and experience, but in its degree you cannot reach the "true knowledge" of reality.
• Rational in the human being who, in addition to the previous functions, produces knowledge by concepts that makes language and the consciousness of truth possible.

Merely material beings, inert, lifeless and soulless, have no knowledge or information about the environment, as completely passive beings, only subject to material mechanical causality.

Experience, which is common with animals endowed with memory, does not yet offer a guarantee of truth because:

• It is a subjective knowledge of who has the sensitive experience; it is valid only for those who experience it and only at the time they experience it.
• offers only a momentary, changing truth, and concerning a single case. Retained in memory, it is only able to provide a probable truth content, by analogy, based on the likeness of cases and situations, as induction.

On the contrary, knowledge by concepts:

• It is unique to the human being thanks to the power of understanding.
• Because it is the immaterial concepts, independent of the material causes of experience, constitute an obvious proof of the existence of the rational soul which makes the human being a "spiritual being" in a certain way independent of the material.
• His truth does not depend on circumstances because his intuitive activity penetrates and knows reality as such, the essence of things and therefore science is possible.

This is so because the understanding as power or faculty of the soul, agent understanding according to Aristotle, is intuitive and penetrates into the essence of things from experience through a process of abstraction.

As for action, compared to mere emotions and feelings, which are passions because in these states the soul is passive, there is the faculty of the will that allows controlling passions and directing one's own action, as freedom that does not depend on the material causes of the experience.

Both the understanding and the will are considered active faculties of the specific human soul, independent of the action of material causes.

Both sensitive knowledge (experience and knowledge of perceptions stored in memory) and motivation (affections or feelings considered as passions) were considered the result of the material action of the environment on the soul, (the soul passively receives these data of information), while conceptualization and free action is the result of the immaterial action of the "rational human soul"; this is possible because the soul is spiritual and independent of the material.

This conception is currently completely outside the field of science; but it continues to have a great social and cultural influence through religious beliefs.

Currently

An essential activity of every individual in their relationship with their environment is to capture or process information about their surroundings.

This fundamental principle places the human activity of knowing in a general scope proper to all beings of nature. Knowledge, in the case of the human being, consists of its activity relative to the environment that allows it to exist and maintain itself and develop into its existence. The specific human case includes the social and the cultural.

So fundamental is this activity in life that we all "know" what is knowing and knowledge, as long as we don't have to explain it. Such is the situation that occurs with almost all truly important concepts: the word is perfectly known and its use perfectly mastered. But the word is so broad and its use in such varied contexts that the concept, so rich and nuanced, is very difficult to understand and explain.

Therefore, there are still numerous theories that try to understand and explain it.

Today, science speaks of cognition or cognitive activities as a set of complex actions and relationships within a complex system whose result is what we consider knowledge.

The acquisition of knowledge involves complex cognitive processes:

Know and know

Spiral of knowledge

We differentiate, in a technical and formalized way, the concepts of knowing and knowing, even though, in ordinary language, they are sometimes used as synonyms, other times not.

Knowing, and its product knowledge, is linked to evidence that consists of belief based on experience and memory and is something common in the evolution of natural beings conceived as systems, from higher animals.

Knowledge, for its part, requires, in addition to the above, a fundamental justification; that is to say, a link in a coherent system of meaning and sense, founded on the real and understood as reality; beyond the knowledge of the object at the present moment as if it were final and complete. A system that constitutes a world and makes this fact of experience something with a consistent entity. A set of reasons and other independent facts of my experience that, on the one hand, offer a "know what" it is what is perceived as truth and, on the other hand, they guide and define behavior, as a "know-how" as an appropriate response and an assessment of all this with respect to the good.

Knowledge, truth and culture

There are many kinds of knowledge perfectly suited to your purposes, including:

• the mere accumulation of experience
• the knowledge of the language
• the legends, customs or ideas and beliefs of a particular culture, with special relevance of religious and moral beliefs
• the knowledge that individuals have of their own history
• the “knowing” in crafts and technology
• artistic knowledge
• science
• Gnosis or intuitive knowledge of all things.
• School knowledge

All this knowledge is developed in a common environment or field: the tradition-based culture of a given society. Information is generated at every moment; however the amount of human knowledge is necessarily limited, subject to conditions, and there will always remain problems for which the knowledge of a society or an individual is not sufficient:

• the universe
• the order
• the origin and end of life
• issues that, because they are beyond the possible experience, are outside the framework of experimental science but always open to philosophical reflection or belief in mythical explanations.

Reason will always question the conceptual frameworks, theories, that explain and expand the world as a field of investigation of the universe.

Scientific knowledge has special relevance in relation to the truth. The sciences constitute one of the main types of knowledge. It is properly the knowledge with the best guarantee of being the interpretation that best performs the representative function of language; or, what is the same, the best expression of the validly justified truth of reality; scientific truth is the one that best represents the truth recognized and assumed by Humanity as rational beings.

Classical definition of knowledge: validly justified true beliefs

This is so because the sciences are the result of systematic and methodical efforts of collective and social research in search of answers to specific problems as explanations in whose elucidation it seeks to offer us the adequate interpretation of the universe.

Today, given the interaction and mutual dependence between science and technology, we speak better of scientific-technical knowledge and research programs.

Knowledge is acquired through a plurality of cognitive processes: perception, memory, experience (attempts followed by success or failure), reasoning, teaching-learning, third-party testimony, etc. These processes are the object of study in cognitive science.

For their part, controlled observation, experimentation, modeling, criticism of sources (in History), surveys, and other procedures that are specifically used by the sciences, can be considered as a refinement or a systematic application of the previous ones. These are the object of study of epistemology.

The importance of this type of scientific-technical and cultural knowledge distinguishes humanity from other animal species. All human societies acquire, preserve, and transmit a substantial amount of knowledge, notably through language. With the rise of civilizations, the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge is multiplied through writing. Throughout history, humanity has developed a variety of techniques aimed at preserving, transmitting and processing knowledge, such as schools, encyclopedias, the written press, computers or computers.

This importance goes hand in hand with a question about the value of knowledge. Numerous societies and religious, political or philosophical movements have considered that the growth of knowledge, or its diffusion, were not convenient and should be limited. Conversely, other groups and societies have created institutions to ensure their preservation, development and dissemination. Likewise, the respective values of different domains and classes of knowledge are debated.

Books and Libraries

In contemporary societies, the diffusion or, on the contrary, the retention of knowledge, has an important political and economic role, even a military one; the same goes for the spread of pseudo-knowledge (or misinformation). All of this contributes to making knowledge a source of power. This role largely explains the spread of propaganda and pseudoscience, which are attempts to present things that are not as knowledge. This gives particular importance to sources of knowledge, such as the mass media and its vehicles, such as the press and the Internet, and the control of them.

Classical philosophical vision

... science is true opinion accompanied by reason.

δογογου δογοn δογοn ετα λογογου

Plato, Teeteto

Plato dedicates the dialogue Theaetetus to the study of the problem of knowledge, although in other dialogues (especially Meno and The Republic) there are also important reflections on the subject. In the first part of Theaetetus the relativistic theory of the sophist Protagoras is discussed and refuted with numerous arguments, according to which each opinion (doxa) is true for those who hold it. However, it must be recognized that there are false opinions or beliefs. In the last part of the dialogue the so-called "Platonic definition" of knowledge (episteme), according to which this is constituted by true and justified beliefs or opinions. This definition is not accepted in the dialogue itself, despite which, historically it has been the point of starting point for practically all further research on the subject (including up to the present).

In the Theaetetus, Plato acknowledges that the simple elements are therefore "irrational", since no reason can be given for them. Later in the Sophist he attempts to go beyond the elemental to its foundation, to the "Idea" (Logos), the rationality that serves as the foundation or, as Zubiri says, that makes possible the "true" of things and facts as reality. Knowing the truth, thus conceived, is an "open fact" as an intellectual process and not a definitive achievement, A set of reasons and other facts independent of my experience that, on the one hand, offer a "knowing what" is what is perceived as truth and, on the other hand, guide and define new perspectives of knowledge and possible experience.

Plato in his allegory of the cave intends to show the state in which, with respect to education or lack of it, our nature is found, that is, the state in which most human beings find themselves with relation to knowledge of truth or ignorance. Thus, the prisoners represent the majority of humanity, slave and prisoner of their ignorance and unconscious of it, clinging to the usual customs, opinions, prejudices and false beliefs. These prisoners, like most human beings, believe they know and are happy in their ignorance, but they live in error, taking for real and true what are nothing more than shadows of manufactured objects and echoes of voices.. This aspect of the myth serves Plato to exemplify, through a language full of metaphors, the distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible world (ontological dualism), and the distinction between opinion and knowledge (epistemological dualism).

The main function of the myth is, however, to expose the process that must follow the education of the ruling philosopher, central theme of book VII. This process is represented by the journey of the released prisoner from inside the cave to the outside world, and culminates in the vision of the sun. The myth implies that education is a long and expensive process, plagued with obstacles and, therefore, not accessible to everyone. The released prisoner must gradually abandon his old and false beliefs, the prejudices linked to custom; he must break with his previous life, comfortable and comfortable, but based on deceit; he has to overcome fears and difficulties to be able to understand the new reality that he has before his eyes, truer and more authentic than the previous one. Hence, the prisoner must be "forced", "forced", "dragged", by a "rough and steep climb", and gradually get used to the light outside, until he reaches the knowledge of the truly real, the eternal., immaterial and immutable: the Ideas. But the task of the philosopher does not end here: once formed in the knowledge of the truth, he must "descend into the cave again" and, although at first he appears clumsy and also needs a period of adaptation, he must deal with human affairs, those of the sensible world. In The Republic, thorough knowledge, while rational, is characterized as necessarily true, and as founded on non-hypothetical principles. These principles can only be achieved by the dialectical faculty, which must "break through, as in battle, through all objections."

Methodology: observation, hypothesis, theory, technical application

On the other hand, the knowledge of the "arts", (as the classics understood it, they refer to what we now call sciences including mathematics), start from simple hypotheses, therefore offering a conditioned and not categorical knowledge.

Of course, beliefs and opinions, even if they are true, are considered ignorant of the reality of things and are relegated to the realm of the probable and the apparent.

Traditionally, the link between knowledge, truth and necessity is part of every claim to philosophical and scientific knowledge.

Current Epistemology

Currently, however, this doctrine is opposed by fallibilist positions, according to which strict truth is not an essential characteristic of authentic knowledge or science.

Falibilism was widely disseminated by Karl Popper in the XX century, and along with the contributions of the sociology of science, Thomas Kuhn, and the insufficiency of the methods, Feyerabend, among other factors make the new epistemology have an open foundation.

From fallibilism and the Platonic definition, it is considered that knowledge is essentially sufficiently justified beliefs. Position expressly maintained by the Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro among others. Reflection on one's own knowledge generates its own science and philosophy:

• Gnoseology/Epistemology, also called Theory of Knowledge.
• Philosophy of Science

Scientific-technical vision

In science, it is common to assume the existence of a progressively complex and organized continuum, made up of data, information, knowledge and wisdom, which allow solving a certain problem or making a decision (knowledge " actionable").

Scheme on knowledge from the point of view of the information sciences, as generated and as applied.

To achieve knowledge, the so-called scientific method is applied, and there are multiple ways to achieve it: empirical method, historical method, logical method, statistical method, analogy, etc.

In general, for a belief to constitute scientific knowledge, it is not enough that it be valid and logically consistent, since this does not imply its truth. For a theory to be considered true, it must exist, from the point of view of science, supporting evidence. That is, it must be possible to demonstrate its plausibility using the scientific method, in accordance with empirical logic and an experimental method.

This, however, is seriously complicated if questions related to the sufficiency of said method are introduced, such as, for example, the transparency of the facts (are there pure facts or rather interpretations?), the feasibility of the claim of objectivity and value neutrality (is it possible to understand reality from a neutral point of view, such as that of a god, or are we condemned to perspectives?), etc.

Cultural traditions and religious vision

However, the concept of knowledge is more general than that of scientific knowledge. Thus, cultural traditions and religious beliefs constitute a special type of knowledge different from scientific knowledge: a type of knowledge lived as a belief within the social and cultural environment and taken as accumulated experience or revelation received from the ancestors.

Knowledge and life

Experience acquires multiple nuances and contents in one's life and in social and cultural life and, therefore, also true contents and knowledge, which depend on a context or field of reality, and do not have to be coincide with the contents and meaning of scientific knowledge. Life and knowledge of life, as experience, is a much broader field than science. Scientific knowledge is not always the most adequate to live and coexist better. That is why we must admit a relative truth because knowledge itself is always relative.

The belief in the possession of true knowledge, as a definitive explanation, as definitive evidence, easily leads to fanaticism.

Types of knowledge and features that characterize them

Given the enormous complexity of cognitive activities and their multiple fields of application, some methodological classifications and characteristic features are necessary for their better consideration and study.

General features

• Every human knowledge has a profound cultural dimension, both in its origin and formation and in its application.

• Some knowledge has the possibility of being expressed through language, thus acquiring an objective, intercommunicative and codified dimension, which allows its transmission and conservation as well as its interpretation among various individuals, diverse cultures and different languages.

• Knowledge is not always objective and communicaable or conscious, but in any case they guide and direct action as behavior. This is particularly applicable to those who are the fruit of mere experience.

Due to the specificity of your application

Knowledge can be:

Theoretical

As long as they claim to manifest a truth as a representation or interpretation of reality, they can be:

• scientists, when they are the result of systematic and methodical efforts of collective and social research in search of answers to specific problems such as explanations in which elucidation seeks to offer us the proper interpretation of the universe;
• philosophical, when attempting to base the same knowledge, and to embrace the universe as a whole of meaning, broadening the general perspectives of all knowledge through the critique of the very foundations;
• of beliefs, which are accepted as obvious truths.

These can be:

• theological, based on a divine revelation;
• traditional, culturally transmitted. These in turn can be:
  • local, a knowledge developed around a defined geographical area.
  • global, formed through networks or communities, belonging to disparate geographical sites even culturally.

Practical knowledge

Knowledge according to Israel Nuñez de Paula. Univ. Havana

As long as they are oriented to carry out an action to achieve an end:

• concerning the norms of social behaviour;
• ethics concerning the reflection and substantiation of morals with respect to a final sense or purpose;
• concerning the foundation and organization of social power;
• artistic, as an expression of aesthetic sensibility, attending to beauty;
• technicians, responding to the usefulness of the results of the action in many different fields.
  • economic production
  • political and social leadership of social organizations
  • the domestic economy
  • personal skills

For the structure of its content

• Formats: They lack any material content. They only show a logical structure through previously defined relationships and operations of symbols without any significance (logic and mathematics)
• Materials: All other knowledge that is not formal, because they have a content or matter about which they offer information.
  • Orientated, when referring to causal relationships between concepts: descriptive law or explanations.
  • Axiomatic, when it comes to explanations of final causes or events founded a priori as true: theories or foundations of science.

Due to the nature of its disclosure

• Public, if it is easy to share, and consists of a knowledge created/dissembed by society.
• Private, if it is personal built by the individual himself; it is the basis of public knowledge.
• Explain, if it can be transmitted from one individual to another through some formal means of communication.
• Tacit or implicit, usually rooted in personal experiences, mental models and habits that, however, inform personal modes of knowledge.
• Codified, if you can formally store or specify so that no information is lost. By contrast, uncodified knowledge is one that cannot be codified, since it is difficult to express or explain.

By its origin

• Analytical or a priori knowledge, when your information consists of the logical form of the logical relations between the contents of which it deals. It is therefore an independent knowledge of the experience, as it is tautological or merely logical-formal. Its foundation is deduction.
• Synthetic or posteriori knowledge, because its understanding as a concept and language derives and depends on the experience. Its foundation is induction.
• Empirical, whose content consists only of mere experienceso it hardly has conceptual content and is difficult to be expressed in words. It usually applies to emotions and feelings of the individual.

Purpose

• Science: when you intend to properly interpret reality.
• Communicative: when you intend to transmit information.
• Express: when you intend to convey emotions and feelings, as well as aesthetic experiences.

For the support of its preservation and dissemination

• Cultural, very said; when it is owned by an organization, terms, nomenclatures and procedures agreed internally are used. Cultural areas can go from a civilization to a specific or spatially determined political society or a small social group: scientists, a business group, a sports club, a sect or even a group of friends.
  • Bibliography: dictionaries, books and literary supports.
  • Artistic: sculpture, painting, literature, music, theatre, etc.
  • Computerized or digitalized

Types

Due to the way it was acquired

• Academic, when acquired in institutions subject to defined rules and purposes.
• Professional, when acquired in the exercise of a particular profession.
• Vulgar, when it is the product of the mere exchange of information between the equals.
• Traditional, when it responds to a cultural hereditary transmission.
• Religious, when it is developed in such a social institution.

Formal generation of knowledge

Knowledge from the formal point of view can be generated in various ways. A systematic way of generating human knowledge has the following stages:

1. Basic research (sciences). Publication of contributions predominantly through memories of congresses and specialized articles.

2. Applied research or analysis (technology, humanities, etc.). Publication of contributions as in basic sciences.

These first 2 stages can interact and cycle since there can be an article with a very small contribution and then one that gathers the contributions of two or more articles. Applied research is based on knowledge of the basic sciences but also on any manifestation of knowledge. Applied research can generate more knowledge even if basic research does not; however, new contributions in basic sciences bring a great deal of new potential for the generation of applied knowledge.

3. Scientific or technical books. A scientific or technical book is grouping, cataloging and summarizing the knowledge existing in a given subject. An updated book should include the latest contributions that have been generated on the subject concerned.

4. Disclosure. Based on existing knowledge or the flamante, various articles are published in journals or outreach books with the intention that knowledge be explained to the general (non-specialized) population. It is at this stage when knowledge reaches the population massively. You can also get through electronic media, such as Wikipedia.

Access routes to knowledge

Black drink: a social and cultural experience and different cultures. S engraving. XVII: Timucua (Florida) ceremony and the presence of Westerners

Knowledge about the world can come from different sources:

• Intuition: such knowledge is considered as direct and immediate of the known object. It is not usually based on empirical confirmation, nor does it follow a rational path for its construction and formulation. That is why it cannot be explained or even verbalized.
• Experience: the known is a content of experience. Its reference and foundation, ultimately, is the direct or indirect testimony (through apparatuses) of the perception of the senses.
• Tradition: it is the culture that a generation inherits from the previous ones and reaches the following. Cultural knowledge and the learning of social norms that are not often questioned are at stake here.
• Authority: the truth of a knowledge is established taking as reference the source of it. The influence of authority relates to the status it possesses: Scientific, moral, political, artistic etc.
• Science: it is the set of rational, certain or probable knowledge, which are obtained in a methodical way, verified and contrasted with reality, which refers to objects or concepts of the same nature that are valued and accepted by the scientific community. Although scientific knowledge is not always accepted by the social community.

Historical and epistemological approach

Representation of knowledge, in Greek ΕπιστημEpisteme) at the Celsus Library in Ephesus, Turkey.

All philosophers, in one way or another, dealt with the problem of knowledge. The relevance that it has now taken begins with the idealistic positions. When consciousness, in Descartes, is a priority, and when in Kant human reason is the shaper of the object, knowledge begins to be a central problem. The times of spontaneous realism of all antiquity and the Middle Ages thus came to an end.

In Greece, ontological problems predominate. From Descartes, Berkeley, Malebranche, Leibniz, Locke, Hume and others, gnoseological problems will predominate. In them the subject is relevant, but they still do not feel led to think that the subject deserves a special discipline of study. It will be Kant who with full awareness will establish that knowledge requires a special "theory". Later authors, explicitly or implicitly, later came to consider that the problem of knowledge was fundamental in philosophy.

The meticulous description of what happens in human knowledge gave rise to a "phenomenology of knowledge". Here, what is involved is to make effective a description of what punctually appears in the fact of human knowledge. It claims to be a "pure" description and does not attend to the generator, or genetic.

The root problem consists in delimiting the relationship that occurs in knowledge between the knowing subject and the known object.

Knowing takes place when the knowing subject apprehends or appropriates the known object. The coexistence of both factors is rigorous. The emphasis placed on one or the other of the two components, determines that some philosophers, by giving predominance to the object, derive in realistic positions. Conversely, those who give prominence to the subject will lean towards idealistic attitudes and theorizing.

The problem of the possibility of knowledge as truth is another of those presented in the analysis:

• Scepticism, from the Greeks, denies that possibility. It has always been found in this position, a contradiction. The knowledge of the truth is denied since the affirmation of the knowledge that something is not possible.
• On the other hand, dogmatism of course gives true knowledge as a fundamental assumption.

Most frequently, both in skepticism and in dogmatism, the positions are moderate or syncretic.

The origin of knowledge

• Empirists estimate that the contribution of the senses is the fundamental being the mere generalizations of the experience. They hold positions tending to a concept of skeptical, probable and non-dogmatic truth. Such a current in ancient times was present in the Sophists and Pyrronians. In the Middle Ages the nominalists and in the Modern Ages the English empirists.

• Rationalists tend to value conceptual and logical knowledge while making possible deductive reasoning. Your reason model is formal analysis. And mathematical science your model. Here it will be common to sustain the presence of “innate ideas” in man, who possess themselves outside the competition of any outside contribution.

Currently this problem is fully assumed by science with completely new approaches to the fact of the Theory of Evolution and cultural anthropology.

Knowledge and truth

It is traditional the definition of the truth of knowledge as adequacy between what is contained in the intellect and the thing.

In this regard, in the XX century, Heidegger will introduce a different approach, which in his opinion was already in the most outstanding and forgotten of the great Greek philosophers: truth as discovery or unveiling of being, by the mere fact of showing itself as a primary phenomenon.

This position is an extreme intuitionism, which has also been present in other thinkers, as a way of grasping what is true. Among them Bergson, who supported the possibility of intellectual intuition, different from any rational treatment or deductive inferences.

In any case, the truth appears as a perspective, (Ortega y Gasset), "respective" as mundane reality, (Zubiri op. cit.) or "relative" to a logical system, (Gödel), and in any case, (Popper), with an asymptotic relationship with the real or as an "analogical hermeneutic" as Mauricio Beuchot puts it. What inevitably makes the truth the "being" history", in addition to constituting itself as a "historical fact" in all aspects of its "realisation" as known truth, reality as actualization of possibilities of the real.