Information

Moving up the hierarchy to information, the way this is conceived metaphorically shows significant overlap with  data.  It is similarly conceptualised as being ‘corpuscular’ and ‘discreet’ with each item of information being imaginable as distinct from every other.  There is also a shared sense of its being ‘out there’, pre-existing our efforts to acquire it.  Also, with both data and information, when the volume of either is large, we begin to think of this in terms not of a collection of discreet particulate objects but as a kind of liquid.  We might talk of the ‘flow’ of information, or of ‘drowning’ in an excess of it.  In this sense it retains some of the properties of the corpuscular but also, like sand through an hour glass, can pass like a liquid.

This metaphor of substance that varies between solidity and liquidity may have its origins in the affordances that different substances present to the body, and a reading of the metaphor in terms of affordances also starts to allow a distinction to be identified between data and information.

Affordance is the term that Gibson (1977, 1979)  gives to the properties of (physical) entities that we perceive and to which we respond in an embodied way.  So for example, the handle of a tool presents itself to the body in such a way that its ‘handleability’ is experienced as a part of the perception of that object, in fact the primary perception. As part of a metaphor of information then, if we are looking for a substance metaphor which embodies this sense of there being something that might be ‘grasped’ as well as the possibility of there being ‘too much for us to grasp’, then substance metaphors are appropriate.  Small manageable amounts of information are conceptualized as hard particles of solid material whilst an excess of information is understood as being ‘impossible to get a handle on’, ‘hard to grasp’, or ‘slippery’, and we run the risk of ‘drowning’ in it.  In this latter regard, such a metaphorical substance acquires the properties of a liquid.

It might be intuited from this use of the language of affordance that there is, in the distinguishing of information from data, the beginnings of an implied human agent figuring in the ground of the epistemology.  Even though we have conceived of data in substantive terms, the presence of the body as the provider of an affordance to that substance is minimal.  As we begin to consider the organisation of information however there is a tacit understanding that such substance is under the approach of an intentional agent; the provider of significant form.  There is the feeling that what was previously inert data is beginning to lean in our direction and organise itself into structures of information which at least have the possibility of purchase, even if our grasp is inadequate and the structure too frail.

Jonathan Hey, in the essay ‘The Data Information Knowledge Chain’ (2004), draws out this epistemological distinction in the metaphor, suggesting that the point at which information parts company with data is in the sense of what Hey calls ‘attributes’.   He draws our attention to the idea that information can be ‘sensitive’ or ‘pertinent’.  It can be more or less ‘salient’ or ‘valuable’ in a way that ‘raw’ data cannot.  These attributes, which are awarded to the information in such a way that they seem to be part of its ontology, are actually derived from the relationship established between such potential information and the origin of this potential, which is the purposive human user.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_urjJhLrWjg

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GIBSON, J. J. (1977) The Theory of Affordances. IN SHAW, R. E. & BRANSFORD, J. (Eds.) Perceiving, acting and knowing: toward an ecological psychology. Hillsdale, Erlbaum; New York; London: Distributed by Wiley.

GIBSON, J. J. (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception, Dallas; London, Houghton Mifflin.

HEY, J. (2004) The Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom Chain: The Metaphorical link. http://best.berkeley.edu/~jhey03/files/reports/IS290_Finalpaper_HEY.pdf

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The Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Hierarchy

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

(Eliot, 1934)

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The ‘Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Hierarchy’ is an epistemological system usually associated with Russell Ackoff (Ackoff, 1989)  although elements of it are prefigured in the work of Milan Zeleny (1987), and in more poetic form in T.S. Eliot (above) and in the lyrics of a song by Frank Zappa[1].

To introduce this model, a brief description of what is meant by the ‘Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Hierarchy’ is in order. As indicated in the name, the model organises the range of epistemological phenomena into four categories, these are:

• Data – this indicates the set of individual facts, figures, sensory impressions, etc.  Data is regarded as essentially meaningless, although it is the raw material from which meaning is derived.
• Information – is regarded as data which has undergone some kind of organisation.  Data sets may be divided into categories according to some criteria; individual data items may be linked together according to some salient feature.
• Knowledge – this is, essentially, information which has been internalised by the person such that they might put it to use. An important feature of knowledge is that, whereas information and data may reside in texts, objects, and events, knowledge acquisition, ownership, and transfer can only be effected by human agents.
• Wisdom – this is seen as the possession of knowledge such that one is able not only to observe patterns of information within data and make intelligent connections between different patterns, but also to feel the principles which underlie the patterns themselves.  Wisdom allows one to see these various patterns in their contexts and to be able to remain independent of immersion in that context oneself.

What I want to argue is that this model draws on certain key metaphors.  These are partially spatial metaphors which, I will argue, map coherently onto those outlined in my previous analysis of ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’ knowledge in the work of Michael Polanyi (and indeed to the less formal ideas of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ knowledge).  In addition though, a close reading of the Data Information Knowledge Wisdom distinctions reveals a set of metaphors drawn not only from the properties of space but also to the properties of objects, specifically the substantial properties of hardness and softness, lightness and heaviness, liquidity, granularity, and evanescence.

Data

Data is understood primarily as a physical resource, and the metaphorical form of this resource has a number of properties which distinguish it from information and knowledge. Firstly it is conceptualised as a large number of individual, separate, atomistic, entities, like an aggregate of small stones, or a pile of leaves blown by the wind.  Items of data have an ontological irreducibility which prevents their being understood as composites themselves; just as when one is collecting pebbles from the beach one would not think to increase one’s collection by splitting each pebble in half, so individual datum cannot be divided.  Data is also understood as pre-existing any efforts to effect its collection; we conceive it as simply ‘out there’ waiting for some kind of exploratory practice to discover it.   Such entities might be ‘collected’, ‘mined’, ‘gathered’, or ‘stored’; on the other hand, because items of data are unconnected to every other item, they might also easily be lost, fall away from one another, disaggregate, or slip through the cracks.

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[1] The 1979 song ‘Packard’s Goose’ by Frank Zappa, on the Album ‘Joe’s Garage Act II and III contains the lines: Information is not knowledge/Knowledge is not wisdom/Wisdom is not truth/Truth is not beauty/Beauty is not love/Love is not music/and Music is THE BEST.(Tower Records, 1979).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2cORmA4MD8

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ACKOFF, R. L. (1989) From Data to Wisdom. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 16, 3-9.

ELIOT, T. S. (1934) The Rock, Faber & Faber.

ZELENY, M. (1987) Management Support Systems: Towards Integrated Knowledge Management. Human Systems Management, 7, 59-70.

Tacit Space

The other term in Polanyi’s apparent binary is, as already noted, ‘tacit’, and is familiar from its derivative, ‘taciturn’.  (‘Apparent’ because they are neither complementary not opposite, as Polanyi himself indicates they are terms which describe the structure of a ‘dimension’, not separate and isolated alternatives ). Both words have in common their origins in silence, and in that which is passed over in silence.  The difference that makes a difference is that, whilst taciturn suggests a reluctance or unwillingness to speak, tacit does not offer even the possibility.  .  Paralleling the physical principle of ‘subsidiary awareness’ outlined above, to be tacit is to be constitutive of expressibility but to take no part in that expression.  Though it has position within the body of the speaker, that position is disposition.   In contrast to explicit knowledge which folds out in the direction of a metaphorically external, distant object, tacit knowledge stays close to home and the condition of the subject.  In the spectrum of knowing and being, tacit knowledge blends into being.

The overall image that Polanyi provides is one in which an understanding of knowledge and knowing  maps onto our experience of being the being at the centre of phenomenal space and makes consistent use of metaphors of space as well as the different sensory modalities which function at different spatial removes.  That which is tacit and which is close to us, or which is interior to us, does not extend into space and cannot be visualized and objectified.  If it is sensed at all this sense is felt rather than observed, a sensorial engagement appropriate to its proximal intimacy.  That knowledge which is tacit is held in the necessary silence of our being.  As knowledge becomes explicit it coalesces into another being beyond the limits of our skin and the limits of our arms.  Performing its primal act, knowledge rolls out toward the horizon, leading our eyes to the object created by that unfolding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzcm3etAuQg

The Explicit

The term ‘explicit’ which Polanyi uses within his epistemological system has a range of applications outside of that usage.  In popular culture it has come to mean sexually provocative or, when applied to rap music for example, to mean containing uncensored and possibly offensive speech.  As far as the origins of the term go, whilst they may appear to lie elsewhere, they do suggest a continuity which embraces these contemporary vernacular uses and Polanyi’s application of the word to a form of knowledge.  Explicit comes from the Latin explicitus which translates as ‘to unfold’ or ‘to roll out’ (Hoad, 1986), and traces of the plicitus can be found in the modern usage plait of hair or plywood.  As noted in the same source, the words explicitus est liber could often be found at the end of medieval manuscripts where today we might find The End. The location of this sentence at the end of piece of writing makes literal and appropriate sense when that writing takes the form of a scroll, which is where one would originally find them.  In arriving at that point of the writing, the ‘explication’, one had literally unrolled the knowledge into the world and hence made it ‘explicit’.   The examples of modern usage in sexually-loaded images or potentially-offensive language can be seen to follow that tradition in metaphorical form.  The pornographic picture is explicitly provocative because it does not lie dormant on the page, but is felt to unfurl across the space between image and viewer and seems to touch his passions directly.  The obscenities and violence found in the lyrics to some music may, in this sense, be thought of as the unfolding of an arm and the throwing of a punch out at the listener.     The explicit knowledge of Polanyi shows a family resemblance to these metaphorical instantiations, and indeed to a raft of other uses, all of which link some work of the intellect to an outgoing occupation of space.

Walter Ong includes this term amongst those which he saw as relating knowing not only to the occupation of space, but also to vision, ‘when knowledge is likened to sight it becomes pretty exclusively a matter of explanation or explication, a laying out on a surface, perhaps in chart-like form, or an unfolding, to present maximum exteriority’ (Ong, 1977: 123).  There is the sense that the knowing which can be described, articulated, proposed, and declared, has extended itself outward from the person of the speaker, carving a clear path through space such that it stands as an object at the end of that path.

The close allegiance of the notion of the explicit is thoroughly exploited in Rebecca Schneider’s ‘The Explicit Body in Performance’(1997).  As part of a series of closely argued propositions about, particularly, the status and objectification of women in relation to body-based arts practice she says that:

Habits of perspectival vision have emblematically placed the female body at the vanishing point even as the primary scene or landscape of representation is feminized. … I argue that certain tenets of pespectival vision, particular the removed, invisible viewer, are still very much at play even in so-called antiocular economies of vision. (1997: 7)

I would not wish to unpack this paragraph in its entirety in terms of the various conceptual metaphors of space that it draws upon and which allow it to make a certain kind of sense; What we might note at this point is that the term explicit is clearly being adopted because of its implication of an unfolding across (possibly contested) space.  This application of the schema is used by Schneider along with a set of understandings concerning the politics of space, gaze, and objects.

We can see from these examples of other usage that Polanyi’s choice of the term ‘explicit’ to indicate a form of knowledge places it within the range of a particular set of metaphors and inferences.  In each case the explicit is that which is out there in the open, in plain sight and the light that sight requires.  It is laid out before us and stands apart from us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW3UcIogvxI

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HOAD, T. F. (1986) The Concise Oxford dictionary of English etymology, Oxford, Clarendon.

 

ONG, W. J. (1977) “I See What You Say”: Sense Analogues for Intellect. IN ONG, W. J. (Ed.) Interfaces of the word:Studies in the evolution of consciousness and culture. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press.

SCHNEIDER, R. (1997) The explicit body in performance, London; New York, Routledge.

The Tacit Dimension

Leanard and Sensiper, writing on the role of ‘tacit knowledge’ in group innovation make the following claim:

Knowledge exists on a spectrum.  At one extreme, it is almost completely tacit, that is semiconscious and unconscious knowledge held in people’s heads and bodies.  At the other end of the spectrum, knowledge is almost completely explicit or codified, structured and accessible to people other than the individuals originating it.  Most knowledge of course exists between the extremes.  Explicit elements are objective, rational and created in the ‘then and there’, while the tacit elements are subjective experiential and created in the ‘here and now’. (1998: 113)

These terms, ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’ come from the writings of Michael Polanyi and signify types of knowing which it may be informative to relate to the overall schema informing this essay.  In Polanyi’s terms, explicit knowledge is simply that which can be communicated in symbolic form and has some overlap with ‘propositional’ or ‘declarative’ knowledge.  Explicit knowledge is typically ‘know that’ in character and corresponds with that which can be written, spoken, represented diagrammatically, or articulated in the form of instructions, rules, laws, and heuristics.  Explicit knowledge, in metaphorical terms, approaches the condition of the object in that it can be fixed, outlined, and rendered permanent through its encoding into language or other form.

The concept of tacit knowledge has been extended by writers since Polanyi such that it is sometimes taken to include almost any form of knowledge which is simply not expressed, (Leonard and Sensiper, 1998, Koskinen and Vanharanta, 2002).  Polanyi’s original understanding of the term was more precise however.  Polanyi saw tacit knowledge as providing the fundamental components from which other, more explicit forms of knowing might proceed, and as underpinning the most apparently autonomous, conscious, and explicit, see Tsoukas (1996).  Tacit knowledge may include the linguistic and cultural contextual information which is necessary for an article of knowledge to be understood, or in a more physically embodied sense, it might consist of those elements of perception which are unavailable to consciousness but nevertheless contribute to conscious observation.  In the essay ‘The Structure of Consciousness’ in Knowing and Being, (1969)  Polanyi gives the example of our ability to see the world in three dimensions.  This ability is the result of our having two eyes, set a few inches apart, each capturing a slightly different version of the visual field.  These two images, combined with the extra information provided by the differences between them, are processed by the visual system in the brain to produce the final image which is presented to consciousness; an image containing the dimension of ‘depth’ that was not present in either of the originating images.  What is significant here is that the images presented separately to the left and right eyes are not available to us consciously, and in fact we would have no way of bringing these images to consciousness (apart from closing one eye of course, which simultaneously dismisses this kind of depth perception).  The three dimensional image, which Polanyi referred to as constituting our ‘focal awareness’ cannot be decomposed back into its constituent ‘subsidiary’ elements.   Whilst the observable scene is explicit and can be spoken of descriptively, the subsidiary materials from which it emerges are necessarily tacit and, whilst obviously ‘known’, inasmuch as they figure in the process of cognition and composition, necessarily remain in silence.   As Polanyi observed in The Tacit Dimension, ‘we can know more than we can tell’, (Polanyi, 1983: 4).

It is significant that, for Polanyi, the processes through which tacit knowledge is composed and utilized do not necessarily ever become available as explicit knowledge.  Rather, such accumulations of subsidiary sensation and experience give rise to the play of hunches, guesses, intuitive leaps, and gut responses which he referred to as ‘passions’.   Tacit knowledge is not sterile and distant, but is rather threaded throughout with emotion and responses close to the heart of the person.  It is this understanding which underpins and gives the name to Polanyi’s best known work, ‘Personal Knowledge’ (Polanyi, 1958).

Other Knowledge Binaries

Like the distinction that Polanyi makes between tacit and explicit knowledge, many taxonomies of knowledge rely on an apparent binary division which separates what are seen as two prototypically different forms of knowing.  A list of such pairings, particularly as they are applied to mathematics, is provided by Haapsalo and Kadijevic

• conceptual vs. practical knowledge

• manifest (structural) vs. instrumental content

• knowing that – knowing how

• declarative vs. procedural knowledge

• facts/propositional vs. skills/procedural knowledge

• hierarchies of cognitive units – condition-action rules

• relational representations – condition-action rules

• understanding – algorithmic performance

• conceptual competence – procedural competence

• rich vs. poor in relationships/algorithms

• theological vs. schematic knowledge

• deductive vs. empirical knowledge

• meaningful vs. mechanical knowledge

• logical/relational vs. instrumental understanding

• connected networks – sequences of actions

• connections between conceptions – computational skills

• words specifying concept – mental images/processes

• definitions/connections – rules/connotations

• proceptual vs. procedural thinking

• structural vs. operational thinking

(2000: 141)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSKzBtpqiUo

 

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HAAPASALO, L. & KADIJEVICH, D. (2000) Two Types of Mathematical Knowledge and Their Relation. Journal für Mathematik-Didaktik, 21, 139-157.

 

KOSKINEN, K. U. & VANHARANTA, H. (2002) The role of tacit knowledge in innovation processes of small technology companies. International Journal of Production Economics, 80, 57-64.

LEONARD, D. & SENSIPER, S. (1998) The role of tacit knowledge in group innovation. California Management Review, 40, 112-132.

POLANYI, M. (1958) Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

POLANYI, M. (1969) Knowing and Being, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

POLANYI, M. (1983) The tacit dimension, Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith 1983.

TSOUKAS, H. (1996) The Firm as a Distributed Knowledge System: A Constructionist Approach. Strategic Management Journal, 17, 11-25.

Metaphors of Subjective and Objective Knowledge

What I would like to argue in upcoming posts is that there are a set of fairly coherent metaphors which articulate the different forms of thought that we refer to as ‘knowledge’.  In order to open these metaphors out I want to use the familiar (although problematic) distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ knowledge as an axis around which other understandings might turn.  The dominant metaphors that I want to lay out across this axis are as follows:

Proximity/Distance – I will suggest that objectivity is characterised using metaphors of distance, such that the object of this knowledge (what I will refer to as the ‘knowledge entity’) is placed at some remove from the body, detached from physical contact.  Conversely, those knowledge entities which might be understood as ‘subjective’ are conceived of as being proximal to the body with no sense of detachment.  This proximity of the subjective might be such that close contact is extended into a sense of interiorisation.

Sensory Modality – Correlating with the proximity/distance metaphorical schema, the play of sensory modality metaphors understands different locations on the subjective/objective axis as falling within range of the different senses.  Objective ‘distant’ knowledge entities are predominantly conceptualised using metaphors of sight, appropriate for objects at some remove.  Subjectively proximal or interior knowledge entities on the other hand are metaphorically accessed through the poetics of taste, smell, and touch.  Other entailments of sensory modality are implied in this construction; so, for example, the objective detachment which projects knowledge entities into the realm of the metaphorically visual also suggests the presence of light which makes that vision possible.

Materiality – This third set of metaphors is applied to the knowledge entity itself and draws upon the variables which mark out the distinctions between objects within lived experience.  Knowledge entities which approach the condition of the objective  tend to be figured as materially solid, well-bounded, resiliant, opaque, and possessing mass and weight.  Conversely, those up-close and personal entities of subjective knowledge usually present themselves with opposite characteristics; they tend toward the  evanescant, vaporous, transparent, fragile, fuzzy, motile, and often weightless and ephemeral.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuRyip4cttM

Subjectivity

It may be useful to remind ourselves here that when I am referring to the organization of knowledge I am not talking about taxonomies, indexes, cladistic disciplinary structures, or allocations of library shelf space.  The topic of that knowing; its content; what programme of study it might form part of or what occupation it might prepare one for is not relevant at this point.  What is important is that there are apparent differences in the forms that this knowing takes, with corresponding differences in perceived value, application, and transferability.  The organization I am talking about here is that which arranges knowledge into the various types I indicated at the top of this writing; ‘objective’, ‘subjective’, ‘tacit’, ‘implicit’, ‘carnal’, ‘occult’, etc.

When we use conceptual metaphors (of perception, object manipulation and bodily movement) to organise these types of knowledge spatially or geographically we seem to use one of two possible maps corresponding to very different metaphorical spaces.  Sometimes we use a cartographic projection which is oriented on ourselves, placing our own experience at the centre of epistemological organization; elsewhere I referred to this as ‘Subjective Space’.  At other times and in other contexts we use a different map and a different space, one more akin to the intersubjective space that gives us the ‘view from nowhere’ that Thomas Nagel refers to.  What I want to outline initially is the experience of knowing that emerges from the first of these spaces, that of subjectivity.

This type of mapping is the most literal and (probably) the most intuitively obvious.  After all, our phenomenology is configured such that we experience our bodies as existing at the axis of a circle of vision, with the significance of objects being largely determined by the degree to which they loom in our presence.  A glance around the room or the view over the landscape tells us that those objects which are closest to us are also the largest and most imposing, (with the grandest being our own body; the hand held up against the sky that blots out the sun). Also, the nature of our situated embodiment as figures in that landscape allows the more remote objects around us not only to diminish in size but also to suffer occlusion.  Our singular viewpoint geometricises the space around us and the objects in that space are prey to the logic of that geometry.  The close obscures the distant and the man walking his dog some way up the path ahead is rendered invisible and irrelevant by the rapidly approaching cyclist who has overtaken him and is now not only blocking him and his dog from view, but also has a dangerous salience that  commands solid attention.  Our embodied experience constantly reminds us that proximity is a measure of this salience, and those objects, entities, and events which appear closest to us are the most actual in terms of their (possibly literal) impact on our lives.

Not only is the stuff which is closest to us larger and uppermost in our perception, but it is also that which is most likely to hurt us, kill us, feed us, have sex with us, or otherwise affect our well-being, and we would be well advised to give particular attention to those approximations.  We hold such entities, important as they are, in the light of necessary constant awareness, since neglecting their presence is likely to be costly.  They do not seep in and out of consciousness the way that more remote phenomena do; the shops and houses that flow past the vision of the driver whose firm focus is on the child who looks like they might step out into the road just up ahead; the church tower and the mobile phone mast on the horizon, tiny and vaporous and partially obscured, if noticed at all, are barely remembered.  Within the ongoing cartographic imagination such peripheral entities barely exist at all.  They are intangible, ineffable, at the edge of sight and almost out of mind.  They have the impermanence of wind, blown by cherubs at the periphery of old maps. The conferring of salience upon those objects which loom and snuggle, on the other hand, gives them a permanence and definition which is absent from these more distal visions.  They are assertively, undeniably solid, and you’d better believe it.

So the subjective arrangement of objects in space around a phenomenal centre brings with it a corresponding set of relationships to do with size, visibility, contact, affordance, substance etc. and such arrangements also correspond with personal salience.  This arrangement then forms the basis for the metaphorical schema which organises knowledge around our subjectivity, and these relationships carry over as entailments of the metaphor.  Objects of knowledge which we consider to be close to our personal centre of being have priority over those which are less intimate and pressing, regardless of any ‘objective’ status such knowledge might have.  A critical word from a loved one, which might have little relevance or status outside the confines of our own small area of knowing and being, may be experienced as huge and imposing, dominating the conceptual landscape and hiding any prior compliments in its shadow; as solid and factual as a slap to the face or a punch to the gut.  The converse of this is the apparent irrelevancy and evanescent vagueness that more apparently ‘distant’ knowledge displays.  Our newspapers carry facts about climate change, diminishing resources, over-population, and the rest, but there is little impact.  These are the church towers and the mobile phone masts that we drive past unaware.  The man walking his dog is obscured by the approach of the cyclist.

This arrangement of epistemology according to the logic of the spatially located being may be the default setting for how knowledge is evaluated and awarded substantial status, at least to the extent that it seems explicable in terms of evolutionary history and current embodiment.  And  given this natural propensity that we have to orient experience around our own phenomenal centre of existential gravity, a tendency built into the fabric of our embodiment and hence into the architecture of our understanding, it is pretty remarkable that we are not entirely locked into this solipsistic viewpoint (at least those of us who are not teenagers).   We do not habitually adopt only an epistemological position on reality which parallels the geographical position we uniquely occupy.  Whilst we are undoubtedly objects apparently located in three-dimensional space; and whilst we have organs of sense and organs for processing that sense which mediate that space in specific ways, and whilst we are (made) subject to the defining logic of this condition with its concomitant features; horizons, perspectives, occlusions, movements toward and away from, front/back distinctions, etc; we also seem to be able to adopt other conceptualizing positions.

Most of us would be uncomfortable with the idea that the status of any particular article of knowledge was entirely dependent upon its perceived salience or metaphorical proximity to any one individual, including ourselves.  We recognize that, whilst some knowledge is appropriately located using this phenomenological map, (insults and compliments for example), it would not be right to follow such idiosyncratic organization for all elements of knowing.  We like there to be such things as ‘objective facts’; knowledge objects which don’t go away when you stop looking at them and which have a permanence and solidity which is not dependent upon their transitory appearance within the phenomenology of any one individual.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYmp93vQ3uA

Body Space Image

As I have noted elsewhere, the different capacities that Mark Johnson indicates as allowing meaning and thought to emerge; perception, object manipulation, and bodily movement, cannot be entirely disentangled from one another, or indeed from the ‘capacity’ of space which also acts as a conceptual metaphor for the organisation of thought and meaning.  It is much more the case that these capacities work together, and in this working together an enriched and integrated vocabulary of embodied information is produced that might then lend structure to meaningful thinking.

So for example, the faculty of visual perception does not operate on its own, separate from the space in which that vision takes place or from the objects and entities upon which it falls.  Objects and their availability for manipulation are also intimately dependant upon the location of these objects in space and the bodily movement enacted in this manipulating.  The movement that bodies make requires space for this movement to occupy and is accompanied by a wide ranges of perceptual changes and potential collisions with objects.

Not only are these capacities deeply interwoven so that it is impossible to talk about one without invoking others, but there is also a set of organised relationships between the functioning of these capacities.  The extended space through which we routinely move is partially structured according to proximity and distance; small movements take us into the proximal spaces nearby whereas more extended movement places us at some distance from where we started.  Alongside this spatialisation through movement however there is also an experiential difference in the sensory mode through which we access that the objects in that physical space.  Whilst we can only see objects at a distance we can touch and possibly even taste objects that are close up.  In other words there is a consistent relationship in which spatially distant object only appear within visual perception whereas more proximal objects fall within reach of the hands, the skin, and the tongue.

There are also more elaborate correspondences which emerge from the properties of objects and the physics of our world.  Objects that feel hard and heavy in the hand tend to move downward through space toward the ground (through the influence of gravity) whilst those that feel lighter, more diaphanous or evanescent and which are difficult to grasp may dissipate in different ways, perhaps flowing or evaporating away invisibly.

There are also intersubjective differences and variations in salience that play our across the terrain of perception, objects and movements in space.  Events that we see are obviously outside of our body, possibly even a considerable distance from our body, and therefore do not have a direct and immediate ‘impact’ on our wellbeing.  Objects and events which are apprehended through the sense of touch, on the other hand (sic) do, by definition, have a direct impact on the body doing the touching, they are in extreme proximity to that body, and are likely to have a much greater significance for the person touched than for someone else who is not in contact with the object, (touching a flame causes a significantly different response than seeing one).  Visualised objects are also usually also visible to other people, existing in interpersonal shared space, which means that objects apprehended visually are likely to have similar significance for all viewers (seeing a tiger is likely to cause anyone in visible range to run away).  Touching is not only up close, but it is also usually personal and cannot be adequately shared.  Those objects that we put inside ourselves and which appear only as tastes are removed from interpersonal space entirely.  They can neither be manipulated nor moved around, nor are they entirely separable from our selves.

These completely embodied ontological differences and relations of difference suggest that there is a structured and organised set of variations in experience.  These include; the perceptual sense that is primarily used to access that experience, corresponding differences in the proximity of the stimulus to the body, the substantiality of the stimulus (whether it is hard or soft, heavy or light) and the degree to which an experience is shared amongst a number of experiencers.

What I would like to argue that this complex network of relations not only describes the organisation of lived experience in the physical world but also provides a template for the organisation of abstract thought.  This is a theme that I would like to develop by considering how the abstract idea of ‘knowledge’ might exist within this network and how variations in our use of the term might be seen to map differently across it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52bjOmTsmoo

Knowledges

The concept of ‘knowledge’ covers a wide variety of different expressions, with a correspondingly wide range of applications, values, and inclusions.  A small sample of these might include: objective, subjective, tacit, explicit, declarative, propositional, carnal, occult, procedural, possessive, performative, proactive, and situated.  Whilst some of these terms come in pairs, the tacit/explicit binary for example, most of them appear unconnected one to another and their coexistence within an overall category that one might call ‘knowledge’ seems a matter of convenience rather than structure.  The diversity in these terms appears to offer no overall epistemological picture which we might use to relate the different terms, and likewise the objects and events to which these terms are applied, the contents of all these different types of knowing, can also appear unconnected.  And to the extent that such contents of knowing are related, in the dewey decimal system of libraries, encyclopedia, school and university prospectuses, and in the various ‘trees’ of knowledge that have been produced, such relationship smacks of the arbitrary.  A good example of such trees include that centerpiece of Enlightenment thought, the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers of Diderot and  D’Alembert, with its exhaustive arboreal analysis of not only rational knowledge but also poetics, metaphysics, and Black Magic.  Whilst such a mapping may give the appearance of connectedness and ultimately of coherence, this is ultimately an exercise in taxonomy rather than structure, of categorization rather than consilience.

We might be tempted to say that knowledge organization has moved on considerably since the 18^th century when the Encyclopédie was written, and it is certainly true that few modern encyclopedias would give the same page space to divination as to the dressing of chamois leather which one finds in Diderot and D’Alembert.  However, in terms of the development of a coherent image of how the different forms of knowing operate little has changed, and improvements have largely consisted of the cultivation of those branches of the tree which support the weight of scientific progress, and the vigorous pruning of those limbs which do not.

Taxonomic strategies of knowledge organization do not reveal the inner working of the great body of knowledge, rather they place the bones here, the viscera there, substituting the living pattern that connects with the geometrical placing of  body parts in neatly labeled amphora.

What I will be arguing here is that knowledge in all of its forms does have a coherence, and that this coherence comes from the way our minds and our bodies work in relation to that knowledge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZhCiis0_uQ

Bodily Movement

“Walking return the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable, but walking itself extends into the world as do those tools that augment the body.  The path is an extension of walking, the places set aside for walking are monuments to that pursuit, and walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it.  Thus the waling body can be traced in the places it has made, paths, parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire; walking sticks, shoes, maps, canteens, and backpacks are further material results of that desire. Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world” (Solnit. 2001: p.29).

The last part of the Mark Johnson quotation that I have been drawing upon for this section of the writing cites ‘bodily movement’ as one of the capacities within which meaning and thought emerge.  By this I take him to mean that moving is a coherent, organised activity involving a set of eidetic invariants which give the act of moving a schematic structure.   The structured cognition that represents the act of moving is then available for repurposing such that other kinds of conceptual content can be organised using this structure.  Later in this writing I will indicate some examples of how this might work.

Some of the particular structures that moving provides emerge from the way perception changes as the body moves through space.  A walk through a forest or through a city causes the sights before one’s eyes to change from a single static viewpoint to a seeing that is set in motion;  trees come into new alignments as one passes them and the pebble on the path up ahead grows in size as the body moves toward it.  The sounds of those birds on the fence to your left becomes the sounds of birds behind you, growing quieter and quieter as you proceed until their song is lost among the approaching sound of cars on the road up ahead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6DXmQyY17o

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SOLNIT, R. (2001). Wanderlust: a history of walking. London, Verso.