Knowledge is limited.
Knowledge deficits are unlimited.
Knowing something – all the things you do not know collectively is a form of knowledge.
There are many forms of knowledge – think of knowledge in terms of physical weight, for the moment. Vague consciousness is a form of “light” knowledge: low weight and intensity and duration and emergency. Then a specific consciousness, perhaps. Notions and observations, for example.
Somewhere just beyond consciousness (which is vague) could be knowledge (which is more concrete). Beyond the knowledge ”, could be an understanding and beyond understanding the use and beyond those of the most complex cognitive behavior allowed to know and understand: combine, revise, analyze, evaluate, transfer, create, etc.
When you move from left to right on this hypothetical spectrum, “knowledge” becomes “heavier” – and is re -stated as discreet functions of increased complexity.
It is also worth noting that each of them can be both causes and effects of knowledge and is traditionally considered as cognitively independent (that is to say different) of “knowledge”. “Analysis” is an act of reflection that can lead or improve knowledge, but we do not consider analysis as a form of knowledge in the same way that we do not consider jogging as a form of “health”. And for the moment, that’s good. We can allow these distinctions.
There are many taxonomies that try to provide a kind of hierarchy here, but I am only interested in seeing it as a spectrum populated by different forms. What are these forms and which is “the highest” is less important than the fact that there is are These forms and some are considered “more complex” than others. (I created the Teaching learning taxonomy / Heick As a non -hierarchical taxonomy of thought and understanding.)
What we do not know has always been more important than what we do.
It’s subjective, of course. Or semantics – or even pedantic. But to use what we know, it is useful to know what we don’t know. Do not “know” in the sense of having the knowledge because – although we know it, so we would know it and that we would not need to know that we did not do it.
Sigh.
Let me start again.
Knowledge concerns deficits. We must be aware of what we know and how we know that we know it. By “conscious”, I think I mean “knowing something in form but not essence or content”. HAS vaguely know.
By engraving a kind of border for what you know (for example, a quantity) and to what extent you know it (for example, a quality), you not only make a list of knowledge acquisition tasks for the future, but you also learn to better use what you already know in the present.
In other words, you can become more familiar (but perhaps not “know”) the limits of our own knowledge, and it is a wonderful platform to start using what we know. Or use GOOD.
But it can also help us understand (knowing?) The limits not only of our own knowledge, but also of knowledge in general. We can start by asking: “What is known?” and “there is thing Is that unknowable? And this can encourage us to ask: “What do we know (collectively, as a species) and how do we know?”
For an analogy, consider an automobile engine disassembled in hundreds of parts. Each of these parts is a bit of knowledge: a fact, a data point, an idea. It can even be in the form of a tiny machine apart from a way in which a mathematical formula or an ethical system are types of knowledge but also useful as its own system and even more useful when combined with other knowledge bits and exponentially more useful when combined with other knowledge systems.
I will come back to the metaphor of the engine in a moment. But if we can make observations to collect bits of knowledge, then train theories that are testable, then create laws according to these theories testable, we do not only create knowledge, but we do it by eliminating what we do not know. Or maybe it’s a bad metaphor. We are come to know Things not only by eliminating the bits previously unknown, but in the process of their lighting, are then creation Countless bits and systems and potential for theories and tests and laws, etc.
When we become at least aware of what we do not know, these gaps have integrated into a system of knowledge. But this integration and this contextualization and its qualifications cannot occur as long as you are not at least aware From this system-which means to understand that in relation to knowledge users (that is to say you and me), knowledge itself is characterized both by what is known and unknown-and that the unknown is always more powerful than what is.
For the moment, simply allow any system of knowledge to be composed of both known and unknown “things” – knowledge of knowledge and knowledge.
An example of something we didn’t know
Let’s do this a little more concrete. If we learn tectonic plates, this can help us use mathematics to predict earthquakes or design machines to predict them, for example. By theorizing and testing the concepts of the continental drift, we were a little closer to plates tectonics, but we did not know that. We can, as society and species, know that the traditional sequence is that learning a thing leads us to learn other things and could therefore suspect that the continental drift could lead to other discoveries, but although the tectonics of the plates “ existed ”, we had not identified these processes thus to us, they did not “exist” when in fact they had all along.
Knowledge is strange in this way. Until we gave a word to something – a series of characters that we used to identify and communicate and document an idea – we consider it non -existing. In the 18th century, when the Scottish farmer James Hutton began to make clearly motivated scientific arguments on the ground of the earth and the processes that form it and changed it, it helps to solidify modern geography as we know it. If you know that the land has billions of years and believe that it is only 6000 years old, you will not “look” or will not form theories on processes that take millions of years.
The belief therefore counts and language too. And theories and arguments and evidence and curiosity and a sustained investigation. But humility too. Start by asking what you do not know how to reshape ignorance into a kind of knowledge. Taking into account your own deficits and knowledge limits, you mark them – either unknowable, not currently known, or something to learn. They stop blurring and darkening and becoming a kind of self -activating – and clarification – treatment – to come to know.
Learning.
Learning leads to knowledge and knowledge leads to theories, just as theories lead to knowledge. Everything is circular in such an obvious way because what we do not know has always more important than what we do. Scientific knowledge is powerful: we can divide the atom and make bombs that choke in species or provide energy to feed us. But ethics is a kind of knowledge. Science asks, “What can we do?” While the humanities could ask, “What should we do?”
The fluid utility of knowledge
Back to the car engine in hundreds of metaphor parts. All these bits of knowledge (parts) are useful but they become exponentially more useful when combined in a certain order (only one of the billions) to become a functional engine. In this context, all the parts are relatively useless until a knowledge system (for example, the combustion engine) is identified or “created” and activated, then all are critical and the combustion process as a form of knowledge is trivial.
(For the moment, I will ignore the concept of entropy, but I should probably not because it could explain everything.)
See? Knowledge concerns deficits. Take this same non -assembled collection of engine parts which are simply parts and not yet an engine. If one of the key parts is missing, it is not possible to create an engine. It is good if you know – knowledge – that this part is missing. But if you think you already know what you need to know, you will not look for a missing part and do not even know that a functional engine is possible. And that is partly why what you don’t know is always more important than what you do.
Each thing We learn that it is like checking a box: we reduce our collective uncertainty in the smallest degrees. There is a less unknown thing. One less uncocket box.
But even it is an illusion because all the boxes can never be checked, really. We cook a box and 74 take its place, so it cannot be a question of quantity, of quality only. Knowledge creation creates exponentially more knowledge.
But clarifying knowledge deficits qualify the sets of existing knowledge. Knowing that it is humble and humble is to know what you do and do not know and what we have in the known and not known past and what we have done with all the things we have learned. It is to know that when we create work economy devices, we rarely save work but rather moving it elsewhere.
It is a question of knowing that there are few “big solutions” to “big problems” because these problems themselves are the result of too many intellectual, ethical and behavioral failures. Reconate the “discovery” of “clean” nuclear energy, for example, in the light of Chernobyl, and the apparent unlimited toxicity that it added to our environment. What if we replace the show of knowledge with the show to do and the short and long -term effects of this knowledge?
Learning something usually leads us to ask, “What do I know?” And sometimes, “How can I know that I know?” Are there better evidence for or against what I think I know? And so on.
But what we often don’t ask for when we learn something new is: “What is I missing from?” What could we learn in four or ten years and how can this kind of anticipation change what I think I know now? We can ask, “Now that I know, what now?”
Or rather, if knowledge is a kind of light, how can I use this light while using a vague sense of what is just beyond the edge of this light-areas still? How can I work outside, starting with all the things I don’t know, then heading for the now clear and more humble meaning of what I do?
A closely examined knowledge deficit is an amazing type of knowledge.
