Comments on: Ask our readers: Is knowledge cumulative?

By: iris

iris — Thu, 03 May 2007 20:23:49 +0000

How does one distinguish knowledge from information?

Is truth a necessary condition for something to be counted as knowledge?

If knowledge is merely empirical fact, then certainly knowledge is cumulative, since one can count facts. e.g. George Washington was President of the U.S. George Bush is the President of the the U.S. Two facts. Two pieces of knowledge. Facts can be put together to form new facts. Facts about incidents of smoking + facts about incidents of lung cancer are put together to form facts about the relationship between the two.

There is all kinds of trickiness here though(probably investigated by Wiggenstein), but I don’t think anyone here means the accumulation of facts in a library. On sheets of paper. On hard-drives.. On stone, wood, and the skins of animals. Not some universal library, nor its superset, Borges’s library of Babel. We have to interpret these texts, to obtain knowledge. Information is there, in the medium, but underspecified, requiring decoders and decoding…and interpretation, to become knowledge, to become facts. And so knowledge is a living thing. As a living thing, knowledge is cumulative, but is bounded by our capability to process it, to make it relevant. In storage it is nothing, in activity, it becomes something. But we pour sand through sieves, accumulating but loosing at the same time. To keep it, you have to keep it in circulation.

As for anthropology’s problem: the problem of accumulation is the problem that no one knows what the facts are.

By: Roughtheory.org » Academy as Obsession

Roughtheory.org » Academy as Obsession — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 21:08:12 +0000

[...] I had promised Kerim Friedman that I would try to get back to his question about whether knowledge can be seen as cumulative – I’m not quite ready to make good on this promise, but I can at least flag that part of my answer, I think, would come from reflecting on these sorts of issues: I think knowledge potentially can build on knowledge, at least within a shared historical framework that enables us to agree on key aspects of what we are trying to “know”. I also think, though, that there are good reasons to be suspicious of many specific claims that a novel approach actually represents a meaningful contribution to social learning – that it represents either a true “discovery” or builds in some way on what came before. Sinthome has, I think, highlighted some of the structural factors that contribute to this result (others have been the subject of a number of posts on this blog). To begin to assess whether we are learning, we need critical distance – which, among other things, means working out ways of stepping sideways within our own time, gaining an appreciation for why a form of novel thought might appeal to fashion, and then differentiating the resonance of fashion from the resonance of truth… [...]

By: Roughtheory.org » Random Thoughts on Privilege and Critique

Roughtheory.org » Random Thoughts on Privilege and Critique — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 21:18:31 +0000

[...] Kerim Friedman from Savage Minds has recently been writing his own series of posts about what kinds of knowledge academics produce, reflecting on whether we can regard knowledge as cumulative, on whether anthropological knowledge in particular “matters” for government policy at the present time and, most recently, on whether we hold some responsibility for how our published words might come to be used. In this final post, Kerim cites a passage from Adrienne Rich’s “North American Time” (the original poem is available in full here) relating to the ways in which published words persist, and come to be reappropriated in unanticipated – and sometimes horrific – ways when historical circumstances shift around them: II Everything we write will be used against us or against those we love. These are the terms, take them or leave them. Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside history. One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill [...]

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Verbal Privilege

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:27:29 +0000

[...] Here is a different take on the legacy of what we write as scholars, and what kind of knowledge is produced as a result, a topic I’ve been exploring in some recent posts (here and here). This is from a poem by Adrienne Rich entitled “North American Time,” and posted (some time ago) to the blog Language Hat. II Everything we write will be used against us or against those we love. These are the terms, take them or leave them. Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside history. One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill [...]

By: Doyle Saylor

Doyle Saylor — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:29:44 +0000

Kerim writes;
What really interests me is not so much the answer to the question, but how people understand the implications of the answer they choose. If you think knowledge cannot be cumulative, what does that mean for the kind of anthropology you practice?

Doyle;
I agree the implications are worth investigating. This is like asking the set of all cats. We know house cats, but we include wild cats, and then we include all the cats big and small. This sort of cumulative knowledge is what is being explored here. How does one connect the knowledge in other words. Of course this is inspired by Google.

Knowledge is accumulative as that is the fundamental of language use in humans. Learning how to hunt with tools in hunter gathers is passed down from generation to generation.

Text is a treacherous media in relation to connecting the dots to ‘accumulate’ knowledge. The brain uses invariant features of the landscape to ‘know’ in terms of vision for example. The point is that some sort of economy must be imposed upon the gigantic external information landscape. Text though is way way too economical. So for example can we use pictures in a language like way?

The argument we can’t read everything is an argument about the engineered methods of connecting things to each other. Google is an engineering solution in which spiders index, and massive parallel computing architecture provides speedy access, relatively related material and so on.

A frame of input, say a standard piece of paper has a certain amount of information it can hold, and can we absorb that? So we ask as well how well we really use the connecting process. So if we cram in more to the frame can we read more information if it is a picture rather than text. The frame also includes time, so that information first appears in the brain system at about 1000th of a second. But what we see is built up until around a fifthieth of a second a whole visual frame is ’seen’. One eye is roughly 100 million receptors, cycling about every one hundredth of a second so that a second could hold roughly 1000 million different bits of information connected by say the common symmetrical laws of the forces of the universe. Which is immediately reduced to one to one hundred in the visual pathway.

In this case then the question is a little like Moore’s law about how many transisters will there be packed into a computer chip. Every 2 years roughly double. So the question is about how much connection can we make in a given frame.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

By: J.S. Nelson

J.S. Nelson — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 17:27:35 +0000

It depends on your stance on epistemology, views on social constructionism and there’s a hint of the private language argument somewhere in there. I’m an epistemology person so I’m comfortable talking about knowledge held by only one person even if it is a kind of tree falls in the forest thing. I can see why knowledge that would be shared and thus constitutive of social arrangement would be of a lot more interest to anthro people.

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 06:34:52 +0000

J.S.Nelson writes,

Given my pragmatic account of knowledge, I tend to think of knowledge as “useful information understood by a person”.

I wonder if it mightn’t be analytically useful to restrict a pragmatic definition of knowledge to “useful information understood by two or more persons.” The implication is that information that cannot be shared does not count as knowledge or, conversely, that information becomes knowledge only when information is shared.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 06:27:26 +0000

I appreciate Nelson’s point that certain communities of knowledge producers may create the conditions in which they are able to collectively accumulate certain kinds of knowledge for certain purposes over a limited time period. I think a lot of the recent emphasis on collaborative anthropology is about creating processes within which this can happen.

By: J.S. Nelson

J.S. Nelson — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 05:50:01 +0000

I think it’s an awkward sort of spatial metaphor. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of “knowledge” as a general substance capable of accumulation in some form where its embodiment and method of growth is not strictly specified. Given my pragmatic account of knowledge, I tend to think of knowledge as “useful information understood by a person”. I don’t think that the metaphor fits here because there isn’t really a central reservoir at which knowledge can accumulate uniformly but a lot of little ones (people.) This objection is perhaps just due to my technical use of the term and my general suspicion of impersonal forces understood apart from their specific mechanisms in human interaction. In speaking about knowledge do we include the vast and various various systems which serve to distribute knowledge among specific humans?
What is the process of accumulation? Is accumulation just more knowledge, or knowledge that builds off of previous knowledge or another method? Does accumulation happen in average knowledge across humanity or specific, measurably high concentrations of knowledge in individuals or in the concentration of distributed knowledge in groups that can make use of it collectively?
My personal view is that knowledge is in some ways cumulative on average but certainly not uniformly or like in a “great humanist project of betterment” way. We can define groups diachronically and find that they have gained very little over large portions of time, or even lost some knowledge. Some groups have gained quite a bit, though I don’t think they know just all the facts of the previous generation plus more. I think that accumulation is a kind of abstracting process here, in that over time knowledge becomes more easily digestible and integrated as it’s worked through by culture, and perhaps it loses some detail or gains some. When they invented calculus hardly anybody in europe could understand it, now high school students learn a heavily wrought version of it.
What’s made another difference is of course the changing natures of the way we distribute and produce information, which increases in some groups, the “potential cumulativity” of knowledge by making it more accessable though perhaps in some cases producing a lot of unreliable information (the internet, though don’t take this as an indication that I’m not a huge fan of wikipedia).
I almost slipped into extending knowledge in the pragmatic direction into another uncomfortable metaphor with technology, institutions, practices and culture but that’s surely not what you meant by the term.

I prefer a different metaphor, which I haven’t quite worked out. Instead of knowledge as a substance which accumulates on its own, perhaps digestion works better. Some of it is passed over, some is taken in, transformed and reconfigured to provide growing materials for a more complex body?

PS. I don’t really see the connection to memetics? From my limited understanding of the whole memetics thing, the cumulativity of it was extremely downplayed. Perhaps there was a kind of like, fitness landscape type metaphor, but in general I remember memetics or at least Dawkins’ initial conception of it as a relatively synchronic thing without much concern for the whole underlying structure of knowledge through time.

By: eric

eric — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 16:01:30 +0000

Reading this, I am reminded of articles I see quite often in the field of Applied Linguistics, in which the collective energies of cognitive science, psychology and computer modeling are deployed in the search for a “language learning model.” The articles frequently end with a rhapsodic return to originary desire: if only we had more studies, more research, more grants, more subjects, more data points, we’d be able to refine our model sufficiently that it would accurately approximate how people learn a language. Other articles take it as their sole purpose to portray a novel visualization of the model, looking like flowcharts with boxes and lines leading the speaker through the deicisions between using the past tense or the present perfect. There is a profound ideological slippage here though in that the accumulation of knowledge is directed towards the end of knowledge – the final accurate model – which we know of course will never materialize otherwise they’d have to shut down whole departments of applied linguistics.

Models of knowledge therefore act as ideological constructs which promote or detract from various research strategies. Is there some correct model of knowledge? I’m going to come down on the side of ‘probably not.’ For my own purposes, I see knowledge not as the some heap of facts but as the dialectically constituted connections between them. As an anthropological bricoleur, I draw on whatever ideas or notions, anthropological and other, that strike my fancy and seem pertinent to the question at hand. That’s why we can take something like Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and make it into a kind of anthropological knowledge.

And then if I am asked, is your research contributing to the heap of facts or is it an intervention into contemporary political concerns, I can answer “neither”; I’m just putting ideas out there that someone (maybe even an applied linguist) might find useful some day.

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 06:58:50 +0000

Is knowledge becoming more abstract? Or simply more fragmented since the total volume of what might be known has long since reached the point that what any one of us can know becomes a vanishingly small fragment of a constantly expanding universe?

Isn’t the more interesting question how we respond to this situation, with some sharply restricting input to be able to drill down and become microfield experts, some elaborating grand theories in an effort to still make some sense of the whole, some functioning like honeybees or brokers, flitting from one domain to another carrying ideas that others may bring to fruition?

One of the hot new books from the Harvard Business School Press is Frans Johansson (2006) The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation, which focuses on folks who adopt a fourth approach, close study of two apparently disparate domains, placing themselves at an intersection where radically new ideas appear. (One of my favorites is a French telecoms engineer whose interest in ant behavior led to a breakthrough algorithm for routing Internet traffic.)

By: Kerim

Kerim — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 01:19:59 +0000

The concept of knowledge as destructive abstraction strikes me as remarkably Hegelian. It was in this sense that Hegel thought his own mind could embody all of the thought that had previously gone before him. So even though it is destructive, it does strike me as a vision of cumulative knowledge …

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:48:16 +0000

>>Isn’t saying that knowledge will become more and more abstract simply another way of saying that is is cumulative? (Sorry, my previous posting was cut off).
Not necessarily. Abstraction becomes informative of what we know of things when we start to abandon empirical positions which have limited application. For instance, Aristotle’s notion of motion implies F=mv, which makes sense if you roll a ball on the ground. But taking friction into account, the accurate description of motion is F=ma, but this is counter intuitive to everyday experience. In this example, F=ma is abstract as it does not rely on experience; indeed, Newton’s dropping apple is a perfect thought experiment that leads one to see the contradiction in F=mv, and support F=ma. But an understanding of motion, for the student or researcher, is not dependent on retaining an earlier knowledge of motion. In fact, I would suggest the abstraction destroys the earlier view, thereby countering the implication abstractions are cumulative.
But I do suggest knowledge is redactive. One of the unique aspects of mathematics is that certain problems keep cropping up time and again within different algebras or calculi. In one sense, this shows that the new method has validity as it generates the same old answer, but that it is also valuable as it provides additional power to resolve new problems. I suggest this lends to knowledge a cumulative appearance, but the redactive nature proves validity and while applications increase range.

>>What really interests me is not so much the answer to the question, but how people understand the implications of the answer they choose. If you think knowledge cannot be cumulative, what does that mean for the kind of anthropology you practice?

I think what this means is that there is no single correcting path towards knowledge, but that knowledge is always competitive with alternatives. For instance, linguists can choose either a Generative model (Minimalist/Principles and Parameters), a non-linear model which allows for interactions between centres for semantics/phonology and morphology, or Optimality theory (“Emergence of the unmarked”). These are not just competing theories, which can be dealt with in some Popperian sense, but they require commitments that have to be made for personal reasons. Here is where I think I am answering your question: knowledge is personal choice, it involves a degree of commitment, not in believing, but in pursuing.
(Note, I am not entirely satisfied with this answer, as it seems to blend into Peter Berger’s Social Constructionism).

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:44:21 +0000

>>Isn’t saying that knowledge will become more and more abstract simply another way of saying that is is cumulative?>What really interests me is not so much the answer to the question, but how people understand the implications of the answer they choose. If you think knowledge cannot be cumulative, what does that mean for the kind of anthropology you practice?

By: Johannes Wilm

Johannes Wilm — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 22:35:42 +0000

An interesting distinction you’re making between acitivist and “pure research” anthropologists there. At least in Norway the former really needs to get somewhat more of an acceptance instead of just being labeled as “shallow”.

In concerns of the cumulative character of research: While it is true that all production is a done in a social fashion (and connecting one name of one individual researcher who with some piece of research is therefore generally in reality somewhat misleading), there is also the research that does not get built upon. And it is not just a random function that determines what is built upon further and what gets forgotten.

For example, during my studies in Oslo, all research that I ever read abotu came from Norway, the US, Britain and a few select pieces from Sweden/Denmark, Westgermany and France. Now givent hat w could be presented with research from Westgermany, whatever happened to the theories built up in the former East Germany? While I am far from being a Stalinist, it is hard for me to believe that there was absolutely nothing of value in the works of the researchers of the former GDR.

Another example, for which I can find even less explanations, is the total absence of anything bilt upon the economic analysis of the CEPAL – the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe. It is generelly taught in Norwegian founding courses of sociology and anthropology that the development models in the earl post war years built upon the ideas of Raul Prebisch, Secretario General of the CEPAL for many years (published CEPAL reviews http://www.eclac.org/revista/default.asp?idioma=IN ), which led to strategies of import substitution. However, when you then come to the oil crisis, somehow only neoliberal models of handling the debt crisis are presented. On top you generally get some culturalists who are supporters of “alternative developments paths” saing that somehow other cultures are not as inclined to develop as our Norwegian.
When I tried to find out aboput what the CEPAL actually proposed as a solution to the debt crisis in the early eighties, I was rather surprised to find that our university library at the university of Oslo actually didn’t have any of the reviews. The only place in Oslo they would have them was at the house library of the central bureau of statistics. But also their access is restricted and I had to sneak myself in by acting as if I held a position a the university (and getting a guest label printed). The librarian also had a hard time finding the CEPAL reviews, but finally I was lead down some stairs and for the next hours I could copy some of the articles of the CEPAL collection they have in the cellar. Secret knowledge, if you ask me…