Knowledge and Knowing

Uggggh…epistemology. Epistemology both fascinates me, and convinced me early on that I was not meant to be a philosopher (okay, specifically, Kant did that. But still).

My colleague Melinda offered a good exposition of the Ineffability of Knowledge. I’d like to expand on her points about tacit social knowledge and the role of knowing, because I’m in the relatively unusual (certainly not unique) position of raising an autistic child while being “spectrumy” myself. A large portion of my life, since childhood, has revolved around breaking down, cataloguing, and figuring out how to apply all of that social knowledge that simply flows through the tacit dimension into knowing for most people. Nowadays, in conjunction with my son’s therapists, I spend even more of my time trying to make explicit all of that information that I’d kept in look up tables in my head. It’s certainly an interesting effort – and one that highlights how critical perception is to our reality, and how much more “knowing” there is in the world than we acknowledge.

Interestingly, I think it’s this “knowing” that Cook and Brown are themselves blind to in their article. As Polanyi illustrates, science is not value neutral, and problems are not simply selected from the air. Similarly, Cook and Brown, as philosophers, are also not coming from a value-neutral  tradition. While they try to acknowledge their biases (such as the predominance of Cartesian truth-seeking, as opposed to, for example, Socratic virtue-seeking, as a primary philosophic goal), I think they end up being blinded when they assert that our philosophic tradition privileges the knowledge of the individual. I would argue, contra, that we privilege individual knowledge within the context of accepted group normativity of knowledge and knowing. By which I mean, we only acknowledge as “knowledge” that individual knowledge which has already been negotiated as such; the dance of negotiation in practice has already happened, giving the appearance that we’ve privileged Concepts, when in point of fact, we’re looking at mere artifacts of our Stories. (Like I said, I struggle with epistemology. I got stuck in hemeneutics and have never been able to get back to a point where I can fully accept that our knowledge is ever “objective,” much less our communication).

Which brings us to…Hara. The need for communities of practice highlights that, while we believe, as good Cartesian (or post-Cartesian) Westerners that we privilege explicit individual knowledge, it is really group knowledge, both tacit and explicit, that defines us. As Hara points out (and this former lawyer can attest): “a shared professional identity is the glue that binds the members of a community together.” A law degree is simply insufficient to practice law on its own; it’s knowledge without knowing, which is why even solo practitioners needs a community of practice to teach them the stories, the gestures, the signals of the community; in other words, we need communities to teach us how to believe, behave, and belong. In the end, our knowledge (and knowing) are meaningful only when they are part of the generative dance, and much as we might prize the individual and explicit, because we can show them off as trophies, their value exists only in a social context, where much more is known than can be shown, and what we say is only a small part of what is said.

Works discussed:

Cook, S. D. N., & Brown, J. S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization science, 10(4), 381-400. doi:10.1287/orsc.10.4.381

Hara, N. (2009). Communities of practice: Fostering peer-to-peer learning and informal knowledge sharing in the work place. Information Science and Knowledge Management (Vol. 13). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Polanyi, Michael. (2009). The tacit dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original
work published 1966) URL: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/844340336