More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 26 - November 26, 2023
knowledge,
the state or condition of knowing fact or truth—is the pared-down and most essential definition* of the word,
“justified true belief”
justified true belief—the
a priori descriptive knowledge, the kind of knowledge that stems from deduction and reason and theory (such as mathematically calculated and deduced knowledge,
a posteriori descriptive knowledge, which is based on observation and experience.
The Rock,
Eliot considered the notion of society having too much knowledge—a
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.
DIKW signifies data, information, knowledge, and wisdom:
how knowledge is derived from or otherwise associated with the similar but separate notions of data and information—and
Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy, written in 1621 but seemingly wholly relevant today. He speaks of the excesses of information leading to a vast confusion:
Those who practice a certain economy of thought say that knowledge is quite simply information processed, cooked, placed into some kind of context, something understood. Knowledge is wholly subjective: one person may claim to know something, to have knowledge of something; another may have knowledge of other and quite different things and be quite ignorant of what the first person knows.
The waves struck the Andaman Islands in the midmorning, roaring up the island chain at some 500 miles an hour,
So varied are these areas of traditional awareness that anthropologists prefer to employ the plural form, knowledges
survivance, to use a term from the anthropologists’ playbook, meaning something rather more than mere survival, a continuation of tradition by way of the regular connection with the spirits of tribal ancestors, a connection that helps keep “a sense of presence over absence.” Second, the handing on of knowledge helps maintain for the future the very coherence of the community itself, in much the same way as some modern religious rituals—those of the Jewish tradition come to mind—that help to keep a vulnerable community intact, self-aware, and self-confident.
“Knowledge keepers,”
Why indeed did the transmission of knowledges that seem so potentially beneficial to us all get to be so drowned out by the noise of commerce and nationalism and war?
the apparent efficiency of writing knowledge down seemed to give it a value that its orally transmitted ancestor would soon no longer enjoy.
The teaching of children, in other words, is where the story of the transfer of knowledge truly begins.
Bengaluru—until lately, Bangalore—has
Shukla Bose
curiosity, the possession of which Samuel Johnson described three centuries ago as “one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.”
maximize his learning, his knowledge, by endlessly asking the who, the how or, most crucially, the why.
Daniel Berlyne,
He developed a classification system of different types of curiosity, which still makes sense today—and
Along the vertical axis, the ordinate, he classified curiosity according to the degree to which it is targeted—is
two Berlyne-fashioned terms: specific
diversive
The horizontal axis, the abscissa, indicates what motivates and stimulates the curiosity in the first place. Is it perceptual—Berlyne’s word—meaning, is it aroused by something surprising (What on earth is that sound?), by something new (Who could that stranger possibly be?), or by something uncertain (This creature—marmoset or raccoon? I just can’t tell)? Or is the curiosity epistemic, meaning: Is it aroused by a very real and urgent need for new knowledge about something?
Locating curiosity within one of the four quadrants of this grid
To a youngster, just about everything in every room is a surprise, and a daunting one, and curiosity needs to be applied to reduce its threat.
the desire to acquire knowledge is strongest between the ages of five and twelve, after which it lapses again into a kind of subintellectual languor, at least through the teenage years.
Dante re-creates Ulysses—the
around 3400 BC, the craft of writing was invented.
writing enabled the retention of records.
a written phonetic language could explore and record the entire range of human emotion.
The first imagery to be read and its contents deduced from the earliest Mesopotamian tablets is dated at around the thirtieth century BC, and was scribed in the drying mud
Sumerians.
The written language steadily morphed from being merely pictorial representations of things, becoming instead encoded representations of the sounds that people made
zodiac being a Babylonian invention,
one aspect of Babylon’s influence there is no argument: the fact that their mathematicians employed a sexagesimal base—the highly divisible number 60 being the local equivalent of our current numerical base of 10.
Some people would always rather believe than know, as belief gives solace, comfort, and assurance to millions.
Conditions in the West,
The Outline of History,
“The Minute on Indian Education,”
Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Madras—now Chennai—and
The Education of Henry Adams.
