@tomp said that he didn't want to get into the meaning of knowledge, but that may be a very helpful issue to address briefly.
In a previous discussion, a book about knowledge graphs was criticized for defining them as "a graph of data intended to accumulate and convey knowledge of the world". The counterexamples of fiction and mathematics were mentioned as not being "knowledge of the world". I suggested that philosopher Ernst von Glasersfeld's definition of knowledge could be broad enough to encompass subjects such as fiction and mathematics: "knowledge refers to conceptual structures that epistemic agents, given the range of present experience within their tradition of thought and language, consider viable."
I'm going to illustrate why I said I didn't want to get into the meaning of "knowledge". I cannot understand Glasersfeld's definition, certainly not in any actionable way. And "viable" seems to be some kind of code word that may or may not be made clear in other parts of his work.
"what is knowledge? Philosophers disagree; but they do not disagree about the truth-condition; a false belief cannot be knowledge"
But even so:
Almost all epistemologists, at the time and since, have agreed that Gettier disproved the justified-true-belief conception of knowledge
[Gettier produced some examples of someone having a belief that turned out to be true, but was true for reasons that had nothing to do with the spurious justifications that the person had in mind].
Using von Glasersfeld's definition of knowledge, the name "knowledge building block" need not mean that the building blocks are used to assemble knowledge (although this is very often what a ZK is used for: even writing a story could be considered assembling knowledge in von Glasersfeld's sense); it can mean instead that the building blocks are conceptual structures that are viable for a given purpose.
Basically, this seems to mean whatever structures you like, use them. I don't need to read philosophy to see the point of this...
If you're doing science, you need conceptual structures that are viable for doing science; if you're writing fiction, you need conceptual structures that are viable for writing fiction.
In a personal knowledge base, what counts as viable is the business of the person creating the personal knowledge base, but if the purpose is one that other "epistemic agents" have shared in the past, it may help to learn from and adapt their knowledge—the conceptual structures that they found to be viable.
That sounds fine but I'm a physicist and engineer, and I couldn't really tell you what "building blocks" of science I would use in my Zettelkasten for notes about, lets say, the basics of quantum mechanics, or whether we "know" that dark matter exists. Perhaps they would turn out to be congruent with Sasha's six building blocks, but I'm not at all sure.
In my experience, inside or outside of a ZK, you muddle around for a while, then some things start to get clear, then maybe you see something to generalize. Sometimes you can solve a problem by first generalizing, then applying the generalization to the specific case. Sometimes you want to prove something by a syllogism but more often that's not possible, if only because most inputs to what might otherwise be a syllogism don't fit into a binary mold.
Philosophical discussions of "knowledge" aren't helping me.
I'm going to illustrate why I said I didn't want to get into the meaning of "knowledge".
OK, but you used the word knowledge above ("The story as a whole is not going to be an assembled work of knowledge") which seems to imply that the word knowledge means something to you. If you're going to use the word, wouldn't you want to be able to say what you mean by it? Defining what knowledge means would help clarify what you're saying.
The most common current definition knowledge (by philosophers) seems to be [...] "true justified belief"
That quote from the abstract of the source you cited is imprecise. The full text of the source says, more precisely: "The most common view among philosophers [...] is that propositional knowledge is justified true belief" (JTB). But propositional knowledge is only one kind of knowledge. I understand von Glasersfeld's definition to be more general, presumably applying to any kind of knowledge. (I don't claim that it's the best definition.) And von Glasersfeld's definition bypasses the controversy around the JTB definition that you understandably want to avoid. Philosophy need not be so esoteric.
And "viable" seems to be some kind of code word that may or may not be made clear in other parts of his work. [..] Basically, this seems to mean whatever structures you like, use them. I don't need to read philosophy to see the point of this...
There's nothing technical or esoteric about the word viable; it means what my English dictionary says: "capable of working successfully". (This is what a lot of philosophy of science boils down to: as Joe Morrison put it, "Logical empiricists thought that we are justified in accepting hypotheses on the basis that they work... falsificationists think we are justified in accepting hypotheses just so long as they continue to work...") Talking about viability implies at least some criteria of viability or working successfully, and the lack of explicit criteria in the definition is what makes the definition so general, but the definition implies that if you have no criteria of viability that you have used to evaluate your conceptual structures then you have no ground for calling your conceptual structures knowledge. The definition differentiates conceptual structures that have been evaluated for viability and those that have not. So use whatever viable conceptual structures you like, but if you don't know what is viable in your domain, then you have to do some research into that. It doesn't mean use whatever structures.
Philosophical discussions of "knowledge" aren't helping me.
I'm going to illustrate why I said I didn't want to get into the meaning of "knowledge".
...And "viable" seems to be some kind of code word that may or may not be made clear in other parts of his work. [..] Basically, this seems to mean whatever structures you like, use them. I don't need to read philosophy to see the point of this...
There's nothing technical or esoteric about the word viable; it means what my English dictionary says: "capable of working successfully".
And Mirriam-Webster on line says "capable of growing or developing", pretty close.
(This is what a lot of philosophy of science boils down to: as Joe Morrison put it, "Logical empiricists thought that we are justified in accepting hypotheses on the basis that they work... falsificationists think we are justified in accepting hypotheses just so long as they continue to work...") Talking about viability implies at least some criteria of viability or working successfully, and the lack of explicit criteria in the definition is what makes the definition so general, but the definition implies that if you have no criteria of viability that you have used to evaluate your conceptual structures then you have no ground for calling your conceptual structures knowledge. The definition differentiates conceptual structures that have been evaluated for viability and those that have not. So use whatever viable conceptual structures you like, but if you don't know what is viable in your domain, then you have to do some research into that. It doesn't mean use whatever structures.
I would say, whatever structures seem (to you) to be useful when you want to apply them. Actually, I don't think we are very far apart. I just don't think we need to depend on philosophical theories of "knowledge" or "structures". But however that balances out, it takes practice to develop skill in how to identify structure (or at least patterns) that work well for our notes in the context of why they are written.
I'm going to illustrate why I said I didn't want to get into the meaning of "knowledge".
OK, but you used the word knowledge above ("The story as a whole is not going to be an assembled work of knowledge") which seems to imply that the word knowledge means something to you. If you're going to use the word, wouldn't you want to be able to say what you mean by it? Defining what knowledge means would help clarify what you're saying.
I think that there this call needs to be qualified. I am regularly torn between supporting the call to analyse the words we use. On the flip side, I share Taleb's anti intellectualism. A quote (hopefully, the original quote):
My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them. source
I had such discussions with students of natural science (physics, chemistry, biology) and they were always sceptical about the value of scepticism. The possibility of being wrong was absolutely no reason for them to ditch the default naive realism that I accused them of.
The open task is the mass seduction to the metacognitive inquiry that is philosophy done right. The problem seems to follow the pattern of religious argumentation. The value of deep language analysis is not obvious and needs both rational and emotional justification.
This encapsulates the challenge perfectly:
Philosophical discussions of "knowledge" aren't helping me.
That's too bad. They have helped me!
An example of my coaching: I advertised systems thinking to a client regularly. He is smart, ambitious and surprisingly self-aware. But only when I showed him how to use a simplified version of the stock-flow model patterns presented by Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems to create a bottom-up analysis of the current field of physical AI automation, he crossed the threshold of motivation to engage with the book.
@tomp said:
That sounds fine but I'm a physicist and engineer, and I couldn't really tell you what "building blocks" of science I would use in my Zettelkasten for notes about, lets say, the basics of quantum mechanics, or whether we "know" that dark matter exists. Perhaps they would turn out to be congruent with Sasha's six building blocks, but I'm not at all sure.
I would be surprised if these structures weren't present:
Concepts define a specific part of the world. You draw a boundary and say, “This is X.”
Arguments transfer the truth of a set of statements to another via a logical structure.
Counter-arguments disrupt the transfer of truth provided by arguments.
Models relate entities to each other and provide part-to-part relationships and part-to-whole relationships, often to map a part of reality or a fictional reality.
Hypotheses and theories formulate statements on how reality actually is. The difference is that a hypothesis is an isolated statement, while a theory comes with an inventory of methods.
Empirical observations are results of sensory probing on how reality actually is.
Don't you
define specific parts of the world ("with X I mean Y")
transfer the truth of a set of statements to another via a logical structure ("if this is true, then this is true also")
disrupt the transfer of truth ("it's not correct that if this is true, then that is true also")
relate entities to each other and provide part-to-part relationships and part-to-whole relationships
formulate statements on how reality actually is
conduct observations
?
I definitely share the reservations against the direct value of a lot of philosophical inquiry. However, based on my experience, I can attest that @Andy is right. What @Andy is suggesting is to engage in metacognition.
This is a short essay from 2012 of mine (machine translation):
I choose these terms because the terms I consider more appropriate are already established within academic philosophy. The distinction between practical and theoretical philosophy lies in the question “What should we do?” draws its boundary. Everything connected to this question belongs to practical philosophy; everything else belongs to theoretical philosophy.
Some questions of practical philosophy are:
What should I do? (Moral philosophy)
What is “oughtness”? (Ethics)
How should people be governed? (Political philosophy)
Some questions of theoretical philosophy are:
What exists in the world? (Ontology)
What can I know, and how can I know it? (Epistemology, Philosophy of Science)
What is language, and how does it exist in the world? (Philosophy of Language)
An incident during my philosophy studies led me to draw a new distinction. I wrote a term paper on the question of whether personality can serve as a criterion for personal identity. Put simply, the paper dealt with whether a person’s personality can change so profoundly that they are no longer the same person.
As an example of such a transformation of personality, I wanted to use the events of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. My intention was that a real case study—something that had actually happened—would have significant relevance to our lives. I assumed that my argument would therefore be especially convincing, because I was not referring to some far-fetched fiction but to the world as it actually exists around us.
My instructor’s counterproposal was to replace the experiment with a thought experiment in which a mad scientist, using some extraordinary device, radically alters a person’s personality. He was right that this example would be far less vulnerable to criticism. In the thought experiment, the personality change itself cannot be challenged, because it is simply stipulated. In the real experiment, by contrast, one could still question the alleged changes, the methods, and so forth. Academically speaking, my argument would have been stronger.
Nevertheless, I was not satisfied at all. I wrote the paper with the aspiration that, in some circumstances, I could also approach non-philosophers and non-academics and say: “Look here. Personality and personhood are related in this way.”
I wanted to formulate an answer that might have relevance for legal theory, or even for philosophical counseling. I wanted to formulate an answer that had something to do with life itself. A mad scientist with absurd machines—just imagine a lawyer presenting that in court as an argument for a reduced sentence on the grounds of radical personality change. Incidentally, Philip Zimbardo actually attempted something along those lines. I wanted to provide philosophical support for that argument.
This is what marks the distinction. Academic philosophy plays only by the rules of the university, of science, of the academy itself. It does so without necessarily concerning itself with whether it actually answers the question, “What should I do?” Philosophy of practice, by contrast, seeks to provide an answer to that question that can directly inform action. The distinction follows the same pattern by which basic research is separated from applied science.
The gap I see is this: applied philosophy is not taught, even though the question “What should I do?” is so central to human life. The result is that, on one side, there is a vast philosophical wasteland of academic research, and on the other side there are people who are searching for answers and genuinely need them, yet cannot find them because they mistake uncultivated land for barren land.
Thus the philosopher is confined to the ivory tower, even though a good philosopher belongs in the tent where the shaman once sat.
Comments
I'm going to illustrate why I said I didn't want to get into the meaning of "knowledge". I cannot understand Glasersfeld's definition, certainly not in any actionable way. And "viable" seems to be some kind of code word that may or may not be made clear in other parts of his work.
The most common current definition knowledge (by philosophers) seems to be (source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-26551-3_2)
and
But even so:
[Gettier produced some examples of someone having a belief that turned out to be true, but was true for reasons that had nothing to do with the spurious justifications that the person had in mind].
That's not helpful either.
Back to @andy:
Basically, this seems to mean whatever structures you like, use them. I don't need to read philosophy to see the point of this...
That sounds fine but I'm a physicist and engineer, and I couldn't really tell you what "building blocks" of science I would use in my Zettelkasten for notes about, lets say, the basics of quantum mechanics, or whether we "know" that dark matter exists. Perhaps they would turn out to be congruent with Sasha's six building blocks, but I'm not at all sure.
In my experience, inside or outside of a ZK, you muddle around for a while, then some things start to get clear, then maybe you see something to generalize. Sometimes you can solve a problem by first generalizing, then applying the generalization to the specific case. Sometimes you want to prove something by a syllogism but more often that's not possible, if only because most inputs to what might otherwise be a syllogism don't fit into a binary mold.
Philosophical discussions of "knowledge" aren't helping me.
@tomp said:
OK, but you used the word knowledge above ("The story as a whole is not going to be an assembled work of knowledge") which seems to imply that the word knowledge means something to you. If you're going to use the word, wouldn't you want to be able to say what you mean by it? Defining what knowledge means would help clarify what you're saying.
That quote from the abstract of the source you cited is imprecise. The full text of the source says, more precisely: "The most common view among philosophers [...] is that propositional knowledge is justified true belief" (JTB). But propositional knowledge is only one kind of knowledge. I understand von Glasersfeld's definition to be more general, presumably applying to any kind of knowledge. (I don't claim that it's the best definition.) And von Glasersfeld's definition bypasses the controversy around the JTB definition that you understandably want to avoid. Philosophy need not be so esoteric.
There's nothing technical or esoteric about the word viable; it means what my English dictionary says: "capable of working successfully". (This is what a lot of philosophy of science boils down to: as Joe Morrison put it, "Logical empiricists thought that we are justified in accepting hypotheses on the basis that they work... falsificationists think we are justified in accepting hypotheses just so long as they continue to work...") Talking about viability implies at least some criteria of viability or working successfully, and the lack of explicit criteria in the definition is what makes the definition so general, but the definition implies that if you have no criteria of viability that you have used to evaluate your conceptual structures then you have no ground for calling your conceptual structures knowledge. The definition differentiates conceptual structures that have been evaluated for viability and those that have not. So use whatever viable conceptual structures you like, but if you don't know what is viable in your domain, then you have to do some research into that. It doesn't mean use whatever structures.
That's too bad. They have helped me!
And Mirriam-Webster on line says "capable of growing or developing", pretty close.
I would say, whatever structures seem (to you) to be useful when you want to apply them. Actually, I don't think we are very far apart. I just don't think we need to depend on philosophical theories of "knowledge" or "structures". But however that balances out, it takes practice to develop skill in how to identify structure (or at least patterns) that work well for our notes in the context of why they are written.
I think that there this call needs to be qualified. I am regularly torn between supporting the call to analyse the words we use. On the flip side, I share Taleb's anti intellectualism. A quote (hopefully, the original quote):
I had such discussions with students of natural science (physics, chemistry, biology) and they were always sceptical about the value of scepticism. The possibility of being wrong was absolutely no reason for them to ditch the default naive realism that I accused them of.
The open task is the mass seduction to the metacognitive inquiry that is philosophy done right. The problem seems to follow the pattern of religious argumentation. The value of deep language analysis is not obvious and needs both rational and emotional justification.
This encapsulates the challenge perfectly:
An example of my coaching: I advertised systems thinking to a client regularly. He is smart, ambitious and surprisingly self-aware. But only when I showed him how to use a simplified version of the stock-flow model patterns presented by Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems to create a bottom-up analysis of the current field of physical AI automation, he crossed the threshold of motivation to engage with the book.
I would be surprised if these structures weren't present:
Don't you
?
I definitely share the reservations against the direct value of a lot of philosophical inquiry. However, based on my experience, I can attest that @Andy is right. What @Andy is suggesting is to engage in metacognition.
This is a short essay from 2012 of mine (machine translation):
I choose these terms because the terms I consider more appropriate are already established within academic philosophy. The distinction between practical and theoretical philosophy lies in the question “What should we do?” draws its boundary. Everything connected to this question belongs to practical philosophy; everything else belongs to theoretical philosophy.
Some questions of practical philosophy are:
Some questions of theoretical philosophy are:
An incident during my philosophy studies led me to draw a new distinction. I wrote a term paper on the question of whether personality can serve as a criterion for personal identity. Put simply, the paper dealt with whether a person’s personality can change so profoundly that they are no longer the same person.
As an example of such a transformation of personality, I wanted to use the events of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. My intention was that a real case study—something that had actually happened—would have significant relevance to our lives. I assumed that my argument would therefore be especially convincing, because I was not referring to some far-fetched fiction but to the world as it actually exists around us.
My instructor’s counterproposal was to replace the experiment with a thought experiment in which a mad scientist, using some extraordinary device, radically alters a person’s personality. He was right that this example would be far less vulnerable to criticism. In the thought experiment, the personality change itself cannot be challenged, because it is simply stipulated. In the real experiment, by contrast, one could still question the alleged changes, the methods, and so forth. Academically speaking, my argument would have been stronger.
Nevertheless, I was not satisfied at all. I wrote the paper with the aspiration that, in some circumstances, I could also approach non-philosophers and non-academics and say: “Look here. Personality and personhood are related in this way.”
I wanted to formulate an answer that might have relevance for legal theory, or even for philosophical counseling. I wanted to formulate an answer that had something to do with life itself. A mad scientist with absurd machines—just imagine a lawyer presenting that in court as an argument for a reduced sentence on the grounds of radical personality change. Incidentally, Philip Zimbardo actually attempted something along those lines. I wanted to provide philosophical support for that argument.
This is what marks the distinction. Academic philosophy plays only by the rules of the university, of science, of the academy itself. It does so without necessarily concerning itself with whether it actually answers the question, “What should I do?” Philosophy of practice, by contrast, seeks to provide an answer to that question that can directly inform action. The distinction follows the same pattern by which basic research is separated from applied science.
The gap I see is this: applied philosophy is not taught, even though the question “What should I do?” is so central to human life. The result is that, on one side, there is a vast philosophical wasteland of academic research, and on the other side there are people who are searching for answers and genuinely need them, yet cannot find them because they mistake uncultivated land for barren land.
Thus the philosopher is confined to the ivory tower, even though a good philosopher belongs in the tent where the shaman once sat.
I am a Zettler