On May 22,2009, I delivered a lecture at Economics department of Lucknow University. Topic was “A New Approach of Teaching for Expanding Knowledge Base”. I covered topics like- what is knowledge, role of communication in expansion of knowledge, challenges before teaching community, how to face challenges of teaching, how knowledge base can be expanded, why use 0space, limitation of 0space.
I will try to present my ideas on above mentioned topic through series of blog post successively. In this post I will discuss what is knowledge. How we wrongly recognise information (knowing what) as knowledge (knowing how) in normal conversation.
In my opinion knowledge is organized set of believes or intuitions which are properly validated. This difinition is nearer to Plato's formulation of knowledge as Justified True Believe. Thus in absence of proper organization and validation we may get only hypothesis, believe or intuition. Different subject may have different validation technique. Physics has different validation rule than economics or sociology. Former is based mostly on experimental data while later depend upon observational data. What is common in both type of validation? All type of validation shows validation of experts opinion by users. I would like to divide users in two parts- students (novice) and applier in real situation. There is difference in both type of users. First one challenges expert opinion when fails to link expert opinion with his past experiences mostly from area other than area of experet while second one raise challenge when fails to apply expert opinion in real situation to which expert is assumed to belong. By accommodating both type of challenges, expert opinion gets expansion- horizontally and vertically.
Thus in large set of un validated believe and intuition there is small set of knowledge. Prof. Mujjamil (spelling may not be correct) modified this opinion as
In larger set of knowledge we know there is small set knowledge we posses. Knowledge we posses is real wealth and power (and not knowledge we know).
Thus for getting power from knowledge in our personal and social life, coordination between thought and action is necessary. Are our academic institution in social life and intellect in personal life well coordinated with action. Whether our intellectuals follow different rules for solving personal problems (action)? For example whether statistician handle randomness observed in personal life differently than common man.
I think in most of situation opinion of experts are validated by experts (some of them may be sponsored) and not by users. I hope situation will be changed with availability of new communication platform.
In next post I will discuss “Role of communication in expansion of knowledge”.
