Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
Perhaps it would be possible to distinguish between social knowledge, which is *out there* in encyclopaedias, data banks, log tables and so on, and personal knowledge. (The former always begins as the latter, and is then encoded for more general use).
The relationship between personal knowledge and thought is, I would have imagined, intimate. Seen from this angle, thought would be the process by which knowledge is rearranged to deal with new data. If you think of personal knowledge as arranged in networks - something like Hannibal Lecter's memory palace - then thought occurs when you need to shift the objects around to make room for a new item.
Sometimes the rearrangement is fairly minor: we shift a couple of books around so as to slip a new acquisition into its alphabetically designated place. Sometimes it's more radical: a new book put the whole of your present classificationn into question.
Of course, the library may resist: there's a finite number of shelves and only so many ways you can divide the space. Similarly, the brain may have some semblance of organization built into it. It may be, as the neo-phrenologists have it, that the child is born with a number of discrete faculties, as Howard Gardner insists. We have a language faculty, a maths faculty, a kinetic faculty and so on - the numbers vary. It may also be that there are ways of thinking - as TGS suggested - that are so deeply embedded that we do not even consciously summon them or recognize that they are there most of the time.
If so, it is perhaps these faculties, and the ways of thinking that allow us to catch a glimpse of Aristotle's thought through the translation, through the differences in time, through the robe that the church has wrapped him in, and through our own education and experience. |
Tim, I am afraid that it might be a little more complex that making two piles one marked personal and the other social.
When I instruct one of my "coworkers" to keep his mouth shut about something we are doing, I tell him knowledge is power. Where do you put that kind of knowledge, let's say corporate knowledge? in the social? Not on my dead body, you do not.
Without being so graphical, imagine that in a negotiation one party has some inside knowledge on the other party rationale. This gives to one party a huge advantage over the other (power). How do you classify that kind of knowledge? Important, useful, may be noble and very high, it depends on the negotiation and the parties involved.
I can follow better the second part of your post, where you apply the metaphor of rearranging books to the acquisition of new stuff and the problems of incorporating it.
One old construct, that is more and more in fashion in the so called soft sciences to update knowledge with new data, is the Bayesian approach. In this you have some preexisting information that you use to infer some conclusions. So the actual knowledge is made of a) the inference mechanism, it is sometime called likelihood, b) the preexisting information, c) the fresh information you just used to infer the conclusion d). When something new comes again in your hands you update the preexisting information with the previous conclusions and use the new information to infer new conclusions. Easily iterable. Excellent pages on this on Stanford Enciclopedia.
The third part of your post about the readability of classics, I have hard time to follow, therefore I skip it. No offence.