Given that knowledge always involves a knowing person, it could be argued that all knowledge is tacit, and what can be articulated and made tangible outside the human mind is merely information. As such, a common view is that knowledge is the product of a synthesis in the mind of the knowing person, and exists only in his or her mind. On the other hand, in line with the constructivist theory of knowledge, it has also been argued that knowledge is subjective and constructed from personal interpretations. However, it needs to be noted that from the pragmatist perspective the adjective ‘true’ is the word applied to the beliefs which have been justified, and that justification is relative to an audience and to a range of truth candidates. Thus, it has been argued that “one can say ‘He believes it, but it isn't so’, but not ‘He knows it, but it isn't so’“. Plato’s original definition, “justified true belief“, while sometimes challenged, is still largely accepted in the philosophical and scientific communities. error), and all knowledge of truths has some degree of doubt. According to Russell, knowledge of truths (unlike knowledge of things) has an opposite (i.e. Whilst some authors discriminate between book and practical knowledge, others differentiate between knowledge of truths and knowledge of things. Nevertheless, literature explicates a number of dimensions, including that knowledge is a subjective/internal phenomenon, is context dependent, tacit, embedded, and socially constructed. Similarly, it has been argued that knowledge management, the term that originated in US think tanks and management schools, is not clearly defined or distinguishable from related research areas. Knowledgeįrom an epistemological perspective, philosophers and scientists have been struggling with the definition of knowledge for thousands of years. Others have argued that the concept of information is difficult to define due to its multidimensional nature. On the other hand, information, which reduces uncertainty at the receiver, can be viewed as a subjective/internal phenomenon. But, more broadly, any binary representations that are stored on or communicated via a digital medium are referred to as data. For instance, in the context of cryptography, encrypted information can be considered as data. In other words, data can be viewed as an external/objective medium for communication and storage that is encoded from information by a sender and interpreted into information by a receiver. Whilst some of these definitions seem to imply a linear relationship from data to wisdom, it has also been argued that data emerges from information and that information emerges from knowledge. data with meaning), and knowledge as information incorporated in an agent's reasoning resources. As such, data can be considered as patterns with no meaning, information as interpreted data (i.e. In line with information theory, data has been defined in terms of thermodynamic (physical) entropy, information in terms of Shannon (symbol) entropy, and knowledge in terms of cognitive (context) entropy. As a result, developing clear, consistent, and unambiguous definitions of the terms and their relationships is imperative. However, given that most information systems literature relies on these concepts, abandoning the hierarchy does not seem feasible. Some have gone even further, arguing that the hierarchy is based on flawed assumptions and that it should be abandoned altogether. Given the definitional challenges involved, it has even been suggested that it is beyond the scope of computer science as a discipline to provide a general definition of these terms. On the other hand, it has also been argued that, data is not information and that information is not knowledge. Similarly, in the context of data mining, knowledge has been equated with useful information, and described as pattern that exceeds some threshold determined by the user. For instance, the terms data and information are often used synonymously. Since only limited consensus regarding definitions has been reached, the terms as well as their relationships remain ambiguous. The concept of wisdom in particular has received very limited discussion. What exactly is the difference between data and information? And, what are knowledge and wisdom? While the hierarchy itself is often quoted, and explicitly or implicitly applied in the literature (information is usually defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge) there has been limited direct discussion of the content and the structure of the hierarchy.
0 kommentar(er)
