Comments

• Andy

  July 4

  Thanks for sharing this, and welcome to the forum!

  Let me be totally honest with you. My initial response to your writing is very critical. There is a lot of theoretical exposition without, as far as I can see in a cursory reading, much serious consideration of counterarguments, as if "instrumental conceptions" of technology and Bruno Latour's actor network theory (ANT) are the only two alternatives, with "instrumental conceptions" serving almost as a straw man. And once the straw man is knocked down, ANT dominates the essay without any acknowledgment (unless I missed it) of its limitations, especially how ANT overlooks the importance of human psychology.

  This sentence epitomizes the problem:

  Each platform durably encodes particular methods and assumptions about knowledge work, shaping what practitioners come to understand as effective knowledge management.

  Here platforms strangely seem to have more agency than people, as if people are being shaped by them without even knowing that it is happening. This may be true for some people, but not everyone is so ignorant, and some of us have developed sophisticated models of what is happening, so we need a more in-depth consideration of human differential psychology within the context of embodied cognitive science. You might object that this is not the subject of your essay, but acknowledging these areas of study and the challenge they pose to your application of ANT is part of the consideration of counterarguments.

  If you're not familiar with Ronald Giere, I'd suggest reading his criticism of Latour and similar theorists. I think Giere is basically right against you and Latour, so my dissatisfaction with your thesis is unsurprising. For example, here's Giere in "The problem of agency in scientific distributed cognitive systems", Journal of Cognition and Culture (4)3-4, 2004, 759–774:

  It may not be an exaggeration to say that for Latour there is no such thing as a cognitive agent. There are only "actants" connected in more or less tightly bound networks, transforming material representations, and engaged in agonistic competition with other networks. Actants include both humans and nonhumans in relationships that Latour insists are "symmetric." Thus, in his recent book, Pandora's Hope (1999, 90), Latour writes of Joliot trying to produce the first nuclear chain reaction: "Such was his scientific work: holding together all the threads and getting favors from everybody, neutrons, Norwegians, deuterium, colleagues, anti-Nazis, Americans, paraffin..." [...] Contrary to Latour, I think this asymmetry is fundamental for understanding science as a cultural activity. This is not to say that neutrons are not causally active. One might even say that they are causal agents, but this does not make them comparable to human agents. On the other hand, being a thoroughgoing naturalist, I would not claim that human agents operate outside the causal order of nature in some sort of Kantian “kingdom of ends.” It is enough that humans are a highly evolved form of life capable of sustaining a culture which has developed the conception of human agency outlined above.

  At the start of that paper, Giere said:

  From the perspective of cognitive science, it is illuminating to think of much contemporary scientific research as taking place in distributed cognitive systems. This is particularly true of large-scale experimental and observational systems such as the Hubble Telescope. Clark, Hutchins, Knorr-Cetina, and Latour insist or imply such a move requires expanding our notions of knowledge, mind, and even consciousness. Whether this is correct seems to me not a straightforward factual question. Rather, the issue seems to be how best to develop a theoretical understanding of such systems as distributed cognitive systems.

  Following Giere's line of thought here, and to repeat what I already said, I don't think you have an adequate theoretical understanding of PKM in your thesis because you don't pay enough attention to the human aspect of distributed cognitive systems, and specifically how people differentially model their cognitive systems.

  Some other publications by Giere that may be helpful:

  • Cynthia Passmore, Julia Svoboda Gouvea, & Ronald N. Giere (2014). "Models in science and in learning science: focusing scientific practice on sense-making". In: Matthews, M. R. (ed.), International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching (pp. 1171–1202). New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7654-8_36
  • Ronald N. Giere (2012). "The role of psychology in an agent-centered theory of science". In: Proctor, R. W. & Capaldi, E. J. (eds.), Psychology of Science: Implicit and Explicit Processes (pp. 73–85). Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199753628.003.0004
  • Ronald N. Giere (2012). "Scientific cognition: human centered but not human bound". Philosophical Explorations, 15(2), 199–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2012.677850
  • Ronald N. Giere (2010). "An agent-based conception of models and scientific representation". Synthese, 172(2), 269–281. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9506-z

  I expect that studying more psychology of science and technology would be helpful too, for example: Jason R. Finley, Farah Naaz, & Francine W. Goh (2018). Memory and Technology: How We Use Information in the Brain and the World. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99169-6
• Andy

  July 5

  At the start of section 3.3 on "atomic notes", this thesis also repeats the misconception that Luhmann invented the practice of "writing discrete, interlinked notes". People have often said on the Internet that Luhmann invented this practice, but there is no need to repeat this misconception as uncontested fact. In fact, among English speakers, people were already using and theorizing about highly granular (atomic) knowledge elements several decades before Luhmann's slip-box became widely known. This section's history and conceptualization of "atomic notes" is just one among many possible such histories and conceptualizations, but it doesn't acknowledge that there could be alternatives.

  In my previous comment, I pleaded for more attention to how people differentially model their cognitive systems. I would add that this entire thesis is an example of its author modeling cognitive systems, but nothing is revealed about the author. Perhaps this is partly due to the choice to write in an "impersonal" academic style, and/or perhaps it is due to the theoretical deprecation of human agency that I mentioned in my previous comment? Does the author's theory apply to the author as well, and how (examples?), or is the theory only about other people's knowledge? Whatever the reasons for this lack of attention to the author, I don't consider it a virtue. In the book Qualitative Literacy (Small & Calarco, 2022), one of the criteria for high-quality qualitative research is self-awareness, the extent to which the researcher understands and communicates the impact of who they are, and their life path, on their research. Why did the author choose to apply ANT to PKM instead of (in my opinion) a better theory? Small & Calarco's criterion is specifically for ethnographic research, but I think it also applies to theory when a theory is about people who are doing more or less what the theorist is doing, as in a theory of PKM.
• Andy

  2:04PM

  Although I have been very critical of the thesis shared above in its present state, this morning I was thinking that it does point to a way to improve a template by Giere that I have mentioned previously in the forum, such as in a discussion on "how to improve thinking skills". There I quoted Giere, who wrote:

  I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes.

  Giere replaced the variables in that sentence with letters to give the form:

  S uses X to represent W for purposes P.

  This formula can be considered an instance of what the thesis calls an "instrumental conception" of science and technology, because it abstracts away the effects (E) of technical artifacts and other things (T) on the people, models, representational processes, purposes, and perhaps even the aspects of the world being represented, depending on on what those aspects are. (Although it should be noted that Giere's conception of X already includes T.)

  So, despite my criticism of the thesis, it has been helpful in pointing out to me that this particular formula of Giere can be expanded to include other causal factors, perhaps like this:

  S uses X to represent W for purposes P, involving T that have effects E on S, X, W, and P.

  Where I still think that ANT is insufficient as a theory of PKM is where it assumes that we can ignore the first half of that sentence, the so-called "instrumental" half concerned with cognitive agents and their representational processes. That is still the most important part for a theory of knowledge, especially an epistemological theory of knowledge about knowledge or meta-modeling, although it's true that the effects of technical artifacts and other things shouldn't be ignored, and indeed are often impossible to ignore, as most of us have probably experienced when struggling with our technical artifacts.