Wednesday, September 23, 2009

T.D. Wilson

Knowledge involves the mental processes of comprehension, understanding and learning that go on in the mind and only in the mind, however much they involve interaction with the world outside the mind, and interaction with others. Whenever we wish to express what we know, we can only do so by uttering messages of one kind or another - oral, written, graphic, gestural or even through 'body language'. Such messages do not carry 'knowledge', they constitute 'information', which a knowing mind may assimilate, understand, comprehend and incorporate into its own knowledge structures. These structures are not identical for the person uttering the message and the receiver, because each person's knowledge structures are 'biographically determined'. Therefore, the knowledge built from the messages can never be exactly the same as the knowledge base from which the messages were uttered.
In common usage, these two terms are frequently used as synonyms, but the task of the academic researcher is to clarify the use of terms so that the field of investigation has a clearly defined vocabulary. The present confusion over 'knowledge management' illustrates this need perfectly.
The consequence of this analysis is that everything outside the mind that can be manipulated in any way, can be defined as 'data', if it consists of simple facts, or as 'information', if the data are embedded in a context of relevance to the recipient. Collections of messages, composed in various ways, may be considered as 'information resources' of various kinds - collections of papers in a journal, e-mail messages in an electronic 'folder', manuscript letters in an archive, or whatever. Generally, these are regarded as 'information resources'. Thus, data and information may be managed, and information resources may be managed, but knowledge (i.e., what we know) can never be managed, except by the individual knower and, even then, only imperfectly. The fact is that we often do not know what we know: that we know something may only emerge when we need to employ the knowledge to accomplish something. Much of what we have learnt is apparently forgotten, but can emerge unexpectedly when needed, or even when not needed. In other words we seem to have very little control over 'what we know'.

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