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May 13 - May 15, 2023
The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge.
Before language, before writing, before electronics, there was the simple impact of experience, in its effect so often profound and formative, the wellspring of all that was and would be known. Not all that could be known, but all that would at that time be both knowable and known. Would was a task for the now. Could—which involved much more than experience, most notably that natural offspring of curiosity, inquiry—was a matter for the future.
Karl Popper noted, the amount of ignorance will always outweigh the totality of knowledge—there
If our brains—if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us—no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential intellectual crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?
The apprehension of fact or truth with the mind; clear and certain perception of fact or truth; the state or condition of knowing fact or truth.
Knowledge as justified true belief, this concept of JTB, validated so very long ago, has ever since formed a cornerstone of the science of epistemology—the study of knowledge, from the Greek word epistēmē.
The basic idea within the thickets of DIKW is that knowledge now has tendrils easily distinguished, one from the other, and only when considered all together as an interlocking whole do they represent the complete spectrum of our relationship with Plato’s justified true belief.
The new acronym DIKW signifies data, information, knowledge, and wisdom:
The teaching of children, in other words, is where the story of the transfer of knowledge truly begins.
curiosity, the possession of which Samuel Johnson described three centuries ago as “one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.”
Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth. —Wole Soyinka, The Man Died (1972)
