Knowledge

For other uses, see Knowledge (disambiguation).

Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood hills. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”

Now maybe you’ve seen my TEDx talk where I talk about how I read a book a day. You know, I read a book a day not to show off it’s again about the knowledge. In fact, the real reason I keep this Lamborghini here is that it’s a reminder. A reminder that dreams are still possible, because it wasn’t that long ago that I was in a little town across the country sleeping on a couch in a mobile home with only forty seven dollars in my bank account. I didn’t have a college degree, I had no opportunities. But you know what? Something happened that changed my life. I bumped into a mentor. And another mentor. And a few more mentors. I found five mentors. And they showed me what they did to become multimillionaires. Again, it’s not just about money, it’s about the good life; health, wealth, love and happiness. And so I record a little video, it’s actually on my website, you can click here on this video and it’ll take you to my website where I share three things that they taught me. Three things that you can implement today no matter where you are.

Now, this isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme. You know, like they say if things sound too good to be true they are too good to be true. I’m not promising you that tomorrow you’re gonna be able to go out and buy a Lamborghini. But what I am telling you is that it can happen faster than you think if you know the proven steps. So, I record a little two minute video on my website. Like I said, now it’s not the most professional I just shot it here with my iPhone, but it’s real. Nobody can argue, this is my true story. And I’m going to give you the three most important things you can do today. So click the link, go there it’s completely free to watch it it’s just a couple minutes. Invest in yourself. Always be curious. Don’t be a cynic. Okay, people see videos like this and they say “Ah that’s not real that’s for somebody else.”

Don’t listen, don’t listen. Be an optimist. Like, Conrad Hilton, the man who started Hilton Hotel, he said that he was only fifteen years old when he read a book by Helen Keller, and that book changed his life. Books can change your life. And in that book, Helen Keller said “optimism” so if you’re a cynic, if you’re a pessimist you don’t need to click here. Don’t worry about it, I don’t need to talk to everybody. But if you’re somebody who knows that there’s something better, cause the dream is possible, you know, for some of you watching it’s not necessarily a Lamborghini, maybe it’s a new job, a new opportunity, starting your own company.

Maybe it’s a new lifestyle without so much stress, traveling the world, doing those things you know you’re destined to do. You can do those unless you understand finances. Money, I don’t call it money anymore, I call it fuel units. You must have enough fuel units to live out your dream and to live out your destiny. So, I’ll see you on my website, it’s a quick video and you’ll see there absolutely free. So just click this video and you’ll be taken there in a second, and uh, I’m excited to share this amazing stuff. You’ll see, not because of anything of me but because I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from mentors many years ahead of me. Not just in books like these, although I love books but also real in-person mentors. So let me share with you these three tips that have made all the difference in my life. They’re practical, you can do them today, you can start on them today. All right? See you there on my site

Theories of knowledge

Robert Reid, Knowledge (1896). Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

See also: Epistemology

The eventual demarcation of philosophy from science was made possible by the notion that philosophy's core was "theory of knowledge," a theory distinct from the sciences because it was their foundation... Without this idea of a "theory of knowledge," it is hard to imagine what "philosophy" could have been in the age of modern science.

— Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood hills. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”

Now maybe you’ve seen my TEDx talk where I talk about how I read a book a day. You know, I read a book a day not to show off it’s again about the knowledge. In fact, the real reason I keep this Lamborghini here is that it’s a reminder. A reminder that dreams are still possible, because it wasn’t that long ago that I was in a little town across the country sleeping on a couch in a mobile home with only forty seven dollars in my bank account. I didn’t have a college degree, I had no opportunities. But you know what? Something happened that changed my life. I bumped into a mentor. And another mentor. And a few more mentors. I found five mentors. And they showed me what they did to become multimillionaires. Again, it’s not just about money, it’s about the good life; health, wealth, love and happiness. And so I record a little video, it’s actually on my website, you can click here on this video and it’ll take you to my website where I share three things that they taught me. Three things that you can implement today no matter where you are.

Now, this isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme. You know, like they say if things sound too good to be true they are too good to be true. I’m not promising you that tomorrow you’re gonna be able to go out and buy a Lamborghini. But what I am telling you is that it can happen faster than you think if you know the proven steps. So, I record a little two minute video on my website. Like I said, now it’s not the most professional I just shot it here with my iPhone, but it’s real. Nobody can argue, this is my true story. And I’m going to give you the three most important things you can do today. So click the link, go there it’s completely free to watch it it’s just a couple minutes. Invest in yourself. Always be curious. Don’t be a cynic. Okay, people see videos like this and they say “Ah that’s not real that’s for somebody else.”

Don’t listen, don’t listen. Be an optimist. Like, Conrad Hilton, the man who started Hilton Hotel, he said that he was only fifteen years old when he read a book by Helen Keller, and that book changed his life. Books can change your life. And in that book, Helen Keller said “optimism” so if you’re a cynic, if you’re a pessimist you don’t need to click here. Don’t worry about it, I don’t need to talk to everybody. But if you’re somebody who knows that there’s something better, cause the dream is possible, you know, for some of you watching it’s not necessarily a Lamborghini, maybe it’s a new job, a new opportunity, starting your own company.

Maybe it’s a new lifestyle without so much stress, traveling the world, doing those things you know you’re destined to do. You can do those unless you understand finances. Money, I don’t call it money anymore, I call it fuel units. You must have enough fuel units to live out your dream and to live out your destiny. So, I’ll see you on my website, it’s a quick video and you’ll see there absolutely free.

So just click this video and you’ll be taken there in a second, and uh, I’m excited to share this amazing stuff. You’ll see, not because of anything of me but because I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from mentors many years ahead of me. Not just in books like these, although I love books but also real in-person mentors. So let me share with you these three tips that have made all the difference in my life. They’re practical, you can do them today, you can start on them today. All right? See you there on my site. In contrast to this approach, Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, following Moore's paradox, that one can say "He believes it, but it isn't so," but not "He knows it, but it isn't so." He goes on to argue that these do not correspond to distinct mental states, but rather to distinct ways of talking about conviction. What is different here is not the mental state of the speaker, but the activity in which they are engaged. For example, on this account, to know that the kettle is boiling is not to be in a particular state of mind, but to perform a particular task with the statement that the kettle is boiling. Wittgenstein sought to bypass the difficulty of definition by looking to the way "knowledge" is used in natural languages. He saw knowledge as a case of a family resemblance. Following this idea, "knowledge" has been reconstructed as a cluster concept that points out relevant features but that is not adequately captured by any definition.

Communicating knowledge

Los portadores de la antorcha (The Torch-Bearers) – Sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington symbolizing the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next (Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain)

Symbolic representations can be used to indicate meaning and can be thought of as a dynamic process. Hence the transfer of the symbolic representation can be viewed as one ascription process whereby knowledge can be transferred. Other forms of communication include observation and imitation, verbal exchange, and audio and video recordings. Philosophers of language and semioticians construct and analyze theories of knowledge transfer or communication.

While many would agree that one of the most universal and significant tools for the transfer of knowledge is writing and reading (of many kinds), argument over the usefulness of the written word exists nonetheless, with some scholars skeptical of its impact on societies. In his collection of essays Technopoly, Neil Postman demonstrates the argument against the use of writing through an excerpt from Plato's work Phaedrus (Postman, Neil (1992) Technopoly, Vintage, New York, pp 73). In this excerpt, the scholar Socrates recounts the story of Thamus, the Egyptian king and Theuth the inventor of the written word. In this story, Theuth presents his new invention "writing" to King Thamus, telling Thamus that his new invention "will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians" (Postman, Neil (1992) Technopoly, Vintage, New York, pp 74). King Thamus is skeptical of this new invention and rejects it as a tool of recollection rather than retained knowledge. He argues that the written word will infect the Egyptian people with fake knowledge as they will be able to attain facts and stories from an external source and will no longer be forced to mentally retain large quantities of knowledge themselves (Postman, Neil (1992) Technopoly, Vintage, New York,pp 74).

Classical early modern theories of knowledge, especially those advancing the influential empiricism of the philosopher John Locke, were based implicitly or explicitly on a model of the mind which likened ideas to words. This analogy between language and thought laid the foundation for a graphic conception of knowledge in which the mind was treated as a table (a container of content) that had to be stocked with facts reduced to letters, numbers or symbols. This created a situation in which the spatial alignment of words on the page carried great cognitive weight, so much so that educators paid very close attention to the visual structure of information on the page and in notebooks.

Media theorists like Andrew Robinson emphasise that the visual depiction of knowledge in the modern world was often seen as being 'truer' than oral knowledge. This plays into a longstanding analytic notion in the Western intellectual tradition in which verbal communication is generally thought to lend itself to the spread of falsehoods as much as written communication. It is harder to preserve records of what was said or who originally said it – usually neither the source nor the content can be verified. Gossip and rumors are examples prevalent in both media. As to the value of writing, the extent of human knowledge is now so great, and the people interested in a piece of knowledge so separated in time and space, that writing is considered central to capturing and sharing it.

Major libraries today can have millions of books of knowledge (in addition to works of fiction). It is only recently that audio and video technology for recording knowledge have become available and the use of these still requires replay equipment and electricity. Verbal teaching and handing down of knowledge is limited to those who would have contact with the transmitter or someone who could interpret written work. Writing is still the most available and most universal of all forms of recording and transmitting knowledge. It stands unchallenged as mankind's primary technology of knowledge transfer down through the ages and to all cultures and languages of the world.

Situated knowledge

Situated knowledge is knowledge specific to a particular situation. It is a term coined by Donna Haraway as an extension of the feminist approaches of "successor science" suggested by Sandra Harding, one which "offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others' practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that makes up all positions." This situation partially transforms science into a narrative, which Arturo Escobar explains as, "neither fictions nor supposed facts." This narrative of situation is historical textures woven of fact and fiction, and as Escobar explains further, "even the most neutral scientific domains are narratives in this sense," insisting that rather than a purpose dismissing science as a trivial matter of contingency, "it is to treat (this narrative) in the most serious way, without succumbing to its mystification as 'the truth' or to the ironic skepticism common to many critiques."

Haraway's argument stems from the limitations of the human perception, as well as the overemphasis of the sense of vision in science. According to Haraway, vision in science has been, "used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere." This is the "gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation." This causes a limitation of views in the position of science itself as a potential player in the creation of knowledge, resulting in a position of "modest witness". This is what Haraway terms a "god trick", or the aforementioned representation while escaping representation. In order to avoid this, "Haraway perpetuates a tradition of thought which emphasizes the importance of the subject in terms of both ethical and political accountability".

Some methods of generating knowledge, such as trial and error, or learning from experience, tend to create highly situational knowledge. One of the main attributes of the scientific method is that the theories it generates are much less situational than knowledge gained by other methods. Situational knowledge is often embedded in language, culture, or traditions. This integration of situational knowledge is an allusion to the community, and its attempts at collecting subjective perspectives into an embodiment "of views from somewhere."

Knowledge generated through experience is called knowledge "a posteriori", meaning afterwards. The pure existence of a term like "a posteriori" means this also has a counterpart. In this case, that is knowledge "a priori", meaning before. The knowledge prior to any experience means that there are certain "assumptions" that one takes for granted. For example, if you are being told about a chair, it is clear to you that the chair is in space, that it is 3D. This knowledge is not knowledge that one can "forget", even someone suffering from amnesia experiences the world in 3D.

Even though Haraway's arguments are largely based on feminist studies, this idea of different worlds, as well as the skeptic stance of situated knowledge is present in the main arguments of post-structuralism. Fundamentally, both argue the contingency of knowledge on the presence of history; power, and geography, as well as the rejection of universal rules or laws or elementary structures; and the idea of power as an inherited trait of objectification.

Partial knowledge

One discipline of epistemology focuses on partial knowledge. In most cases, it is not possible to understand an information domain exhaustively; our knowledge is always incomplete or partial. Most real problems have to be solved by taking advantage of a partial understanding of the problem context and problem data, unlike the typical math problems one might solve at school, where all data is given and one is given a complete understanding of formulas necessary to solve them.

This idea is also present in the concept of bounded rationality which assumes that in real life situations people often have a limited amount of information and make decisions accordingly.

Intuition is the ability to acquire partial knowledge without inference or the use of reason. An individual may "know" about a situation and be unable to explain the process that led to their knowledge.

Scientific knowledge

Sir Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is Power"

The development of the scientific method has made a significant contribution to how knowledge of the physical world and its phenomena is acquired. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning and experimentation. The scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. Science, and the nature of scientific knowledge have also become the subject of Philosophy. As science itself has developed, knowledge has developed a broader usage which has been developing within biology/psychology—discussed elsewhere as meta-epistemology, or genetic epistemology, and to some extent related to "theory of cognitive development". Note that "epistemology" is the study of knowledge and how it is acquired. Science is "the process used everyday to logically complete thoughts through inference of facts determined by calculated experiments." Sir Francis Bacon was critical in the historical development of the scientific method; his works established and popularized an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry. His famous aphorism, "knowledge is power", is found in the Meditations Sacrae (1597).

Until recent times, at least in the Western tradition, it was simply taken for granted that knowledge was something possessed only by humans — and probably adult humans at that. Sometimes the notion might stretch to (ii) Society-as-such, as in (e.g.) "the knowledge possessed by the Coptic culture" (as opposed to its individual members), but that was not assured either. Nor was it usual to consider unconscious knowledge in any systematic way until this approach was popularized by Freud.

Other biological domains where "knowledge" might be said to reside, include: (iii) the immune system, and (iv) in the DNA of the genetic code. See the list of four "epistemological domains":   Popper, (1975); and Traill (2008: Table S, page 31)—also references by both to Niels Jerne.

Such considerations seem to call for a separate definition of "knowledge" to cover the biological systems. For biologists, knowledge must be usefully available to the system, though that system need not be conscious. Thus the criteria seem to be:

• The system should apparently be dynamic and self-organizing (unlike a mere book on its own).
• The knowledge must constitute some sort of representation of "the outside world", or ways of dealing with it (directly or indirectly).
• Some way must exist for the system to access this information quickly enough for it to be useful.

Scientific knowledge may not involve a claim to certainty, maintaining skepticism means that a scientist will never be absolutely certain when they are correct and when they are not. It is thus an irony of proper scientific method that one must doubt even when correct, in the hopes that this practice will lead to greater convergence on the truth in general.

Religious meaning of knowledge

In many expressions of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Anglicanism, knowledge is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The Old Testament's tree of the knowledge of good and evil contained the knowledge that separated Man from God: "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil..." (Genesis 3:22)

In Gnosticism, divine knowledge or gnosis is hoped to be attained.

विद्या दान (Vidya Daan) i.e. knowledge sharing is a major part of Daan, a tenet of all Dharmic Religions. Hindu Scriptures present two kinds of knowledge, Paroksh Gyan and Prataksh Gyan. Paroksh Gyan (also spelled Paroksha-Jnana) is secondhand knowledge: knowledge obtained from books, hearsay, etc. Prataksh Gyan (also spelled Prataksha-Jnana) is the knowledge borne of direct experience, i.e., knowledge that one discovers for oneself. Jnana yoga ("path of knowledge") is one of three main types of yoga expounded by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. (It is compared and contrasted with Bhakti Yoga and Karma yoga.)

In Islam, knowledge (Arabic: علم, ʿilm) is given great significance. "The Knowing" (al-ʿAlīm) is one of the 99 names reflecting distinct attributes of God. The Qur'an asserts that knowledge comes from God (2:239) and various hadith encourage the acquisition of knowledge. Muhammad is reported to have said "Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave" and "Verily the men of knowledge are the inheritors of the prophets". Islamic scholars, theologians and jurists are often given the title alim, meaning "knowledgable".

In Jewish tradition, knowledge (Hebrew: דעת da'ath) is considered one of the most valuable traits a person can acquire. Observant Jews recite three times a day in the Amidah "Favor us with knowledge, understanding and discretion that come from you. Exalted are you, Existent-One, the gracious giver of knowledge." The Tanakh states, "A wise man gains power, and a man of knowledge maintains power", and "knowledge is chosen above gold".

As a measure of religiosity (in sociology of religion)

According to the sociologist Mervin Verbit, knowledge may be understood as one of the key components of religiosity. Religious knowledge itself may be broken down into four dimensions:

• content
• frequency
• intensity
• centrality

The content of one's religious knowledge may vary from person to person, as will the degree to which it may occupy the person's mind (frequency), the intensity of the knowledge, and the centrality of the information (in that religious tradition, or to that individual).

See also

• Outline of knowledge – guide to the subject of knowledge presented as a tree structured list of its subtopics.
• a priori and a posteriori
• Analytic-synthetic distinction
• Descriptive knowledge
• Epistemic modal logic
• Explicit knowledge
• Figurative system of human knowledge
• Inductive inference
• Inductive probability
• Intelligence
• Knowledge engineering
• Knowledge extraction
• Knowledge management
• Knowledge relativity
• Knowledge representation
• Knowledge retrieval
• Metaknowledge
• Philosophical skepticism
• Procedural knowledge
• Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
• Tacit knowledge

External links

• Knowledge at PhilPapers
• "Knowledge". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "The Value of Knowledge" entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "The Analysis of Knowledge" entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Knowledge by Acquaintance vs. Description" entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Knowledge at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project