Masood Mortazavi's Weblog

Friday February 25, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Shared Knowledge

When multidisciplinary minds like John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid get together, as they have in their Harvard Business School Press book The Social Life of Information, they will invariably have insightful things to say.
I will be looking and referring to this book occasionally in some upcoming weblogs, as I've done in a few previous ones.
We are used to thinking of knowledge as bits of "facts". This is in the habit of Hilbertian and von Neumanian mathematical logic but the modern mathematical logician and set theorist knows a bit better, given model theory and theory of recursive functions and degrees. The rigid "axiomatic thinking" was actually a project broadly spoused by Hilbert but its extension to everyday life fails repeatedly. (Daniel C. Dennett's Martians visiting earth come to mind. His Martians are the axiomatic thinkers.) Even Hilbert's life shows that. He did much of his best work on a big blackboard at home in full view of his colleagues and closest students.

Here, regarding what is special about shared knowledge, I'd like to quote from Seely and Duguid's The Social Life of Information:

Shared knowledge differs significantly from a collective pool of discrete parts. In this pool of knowledge, where one person's knowledge ends and another's begins is not always clear . . . [No one has a] decisive "piece" of knowledge . . . Thus we tend to think of knowledge less like an assembly of discrete parts and more like a watercolor painting. As each new color is added, it blends with the others to produce the final effect, in which the contributing parts become indivisible.

The Social Life of Information (p. 106)

Shared Knowledge, Philosophy, Information, Collaboration, Art, Painting, Mathematics

2005-02-25 10:31:18.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Comments:

Masood, Based on your post of several weeks ago, I have been re-reading some parts of "The Social Life of Information." However, when I saw your title, Shared Knowledge, I thought of something different. My copy of the text is one that I ordered over the web as a used book. When it came, it had many notes, questions, and comments written in the margins. The writing style and characters look very similar to how a grad student wrote that I once had from South Korea. This person in the text had carried on a complete dialog with him/herself, and I was indeed, "Sharing his/her Knowledge." I’m looking forward to more of your comments. Best, Ralph

Posted by Ralph Hannon on February 26, 2005 at 05:43 PM PST #

Ralph, You're right.

What people write on the margins of books turn out to be quite important. As you said, they give us a record of their dialog with the book, however faint.

In medival times, writing on the margins, at least among the philosophers in West Asia, must have been a common practice. I used to feel guilty because I was always in the habit of writing on the margins of books. Later, well much later, professor Dreyfus lent me a book of his to read. It was by Mark L. Johnson: The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. In it, there were many comments on the margins. I had before me, both the book and Dreyfus' comments. It was certainly wonderful to have the immediate comments right there. They were not all that he had to say about the book but were start for me to formulate questions I had for him regarding his impressions.

Posted by M. Mortazavi on February 27, 2005 at 10:31 PM PST #

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