"knowledge is now the lifeblood of all companies. don't confuse it with information."

• there is a clear distinction between information and knowledge.
• information consists of differences that make a difference.
• information is commodity capable of yielding knowledge.
• knowledge is power and knowledge is business.

knowledge is an acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation, and; facilitates adaptation and performance.

explicit knowledge, which can be articulated in formal language including grammatical statements, mathematical expressions, specifications, manuals and so forth. this type of knowledge can be transmitted formally and relatively easily.

tacit knowledge is personal knowledge embedded individual experience and involves intangible factors such as personal belief, perspective, and the value system.

by organizational knowledge creation we mean the capability of a company as a whole to create new knowledge, disseminate it throughout the organization, and embody it in products, services, and systems.

the most unpropitious circumstances are unable to conquer an ardent desire for the acquisition of knowledge.

it is Cicero who laid down the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. "this pertains most of all to human nature, " he says, "for we are all drawn to the pursuit of knowledge; in which to excel we consider excellent, whereas to be ignorant, to be deceived, is both an evil and a disgrace."

knowledge is something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes views of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea.

knowledge is not a mere extrinsic or accidental advantage, which is ours to-day and another's tomorrow, which be got up from a book, and easily forgotten again, which we can command or communicate at our pleasure, which we can borrow for the occasion, carry about in our hand, it is acquired illumination, it is a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment. knowledge is capable of being its own end. such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.

it is clear that knowledge is a sub-class of true beliefs: every case of knowledge is a case of true belief, but not vice versa.

what character in addition to truth must a belief have in order to count as knowledge? there must be sound evidence to support the belief. evidence of certain matters of fact that are accepted as indubitable, and, on the other hand, of certain principles by means of which inferences are drawn from the matters of fact. it is obvious that this process is unsatisfactory unless we know the matters of fact and the principles of inference not merely by means of evidence, for otherwise we become involved in a vicious circle or an endless regress. we must concentrate our attention on the matters of fact and the principles of inference.

knowledge is a matter of degree. the highest degree is found in facts of perception, and in the cogency of very simple arguments. the next highest degree is in vivid memories. when a number of beliefs are each severally in some degree credible, they become more so if they are found to cohere as a logical whole. general principles of inference, whether deductive or inductive, are usually less obvious than many of their instances, and are psychologically derivative from apprehension of their instances.

the usefulness of concrete referents to anchored information has been persuasively argued in connection with the importance of metaphors for the development of abstract concepts. metaphors, or analogies are not merely convenient economies for expressing our knowledge rather they are our knowledge & understanding of the particular phenomena in questions.

in any theory of knowledge the notions of sensation and perception are fundamental; hence it is desirable to clearly establish the relation between them in the interest of a sytematic treatment of the entire discipline.

percepts themselves are the original data of knowledge.  they require no mediation to establish their validity as such. what is there in human mental activity prior to perception? and are not percepts the counterparts of the objects?

perception serves as an inlet of all knowledge.

knowledge is familiarity with existing things as encountered in nature. knowledge is familiarity with the qualities of existing things. knowledge, further, is familiarity with the behavior of existing things towards one another, that is, with their relations of reactivity.

immediate experience is basic to all knowledge in the sense that all that we become aware of has its origin and unity here. a segment of immediate experience is the initial subject of our elementary judgements.

the proximate or apparent objects or our common observation and thought are in the first instance, given data, and then things, selves, and perhaps nature as a whole.   any of these may be the subject of a judgmetn or of an inference and to any the ideal experiment of thinking may be applied.

we must recognize that when we know something we either do, or by reflecting, can know that our condition is one of knowing that thing, while when we believe something we either do or can know that our condition is one of believing and not of knowing: so that we cannot mistake belief for knowledge.

knowledge of any kind whatsoever depends on the possibility of communicating and comparing meanings within a community. hence, ability to communicate a meaning within a community becomes a criterion of whether one has knowledge or simply some private, esoteric, inner experience. accordingly, a second important characteristic of validity is the ideal that valid knowledge should be verifiable by all competent observers.

knowledge is nothing else than the successful relating of parts of our experience to the whole of our experience in such a way that the parts have meaningful places in the whole, i.e., stand in significant relationship with the rest of experience.

knowledge constitutes claims that are ultimately defensible.

Home | About | Services | Contact i2k | Help | Projects
copyright 2004 info2knowledge