In answer to the following questions:
- Why is there more to knowledge than merely true belief, or even justified true belief?
- What is the structure of knowledge? More specifically, must knowledge be grounded in epistemic foundations?
- What is the relationship between knowledge and rationality?
- Why, if at all, is knowledge valuable?
When we believe in things, we will pursue it – stick to it – care for it – hold on to it.
Believing does not create true knowledge but gives humans the fuel to preserve in exploring its mysteries. The journey to justify a true belief, is the formula to create knowledge that is stable and reliable. Because through the journey we attain the process / skill to create and recreate the knowledge.
As I go through Unit 1 to 5, it brought to mind my past study of innovation management where we do literature reviews of how companies organise their intelligence and research flows. One style of organisation is to compartmentalise work in the company, everyone is focused in their areas, lacking knowledge of other areas of work. This can protect trade secrets, and not everyone is aware that their activities and output feeds back to a team that may use the data and information to come up with business strategies.
Back then in my studies, I felt that this was a particularly silly way of organising work and people. I wasn’t able to nail down what exactly is wrong, but now after gaining some understanding of the different aspects of what makes knowledge “real” knowledge, I am starting to get a glimpse of why I felt the silo workflow design was not that good for organisation growth. Knowledge needs a coherent interconnected structure to be more grounded to support organisational growth (similar to coherentism).
With a silo organisation work structure, other than a few veterans who maybe aware of the inner workings of the company, silo workflows restrict employees to isolated tasks without giving them clear understanding of how their work ties in to overarching business strategies. Such isolation measure may negatively impact rational knowledge-building within the organisations.
While the performance bonus systems at workplaces are intended to serve as reward / punishment system, which may reflect virtue epistemology knowledge building principles, if one has worked for a while, then most are aware that an organisation’s reward system at times devolved to winning political games instead of rewarding and strengthening the “true” knowledge the company is pursuing or cultivating.
In the journey to understand what knowledge and the value of knowledge is, I come to realise that being aware of how knowledge is shaped into being, can help a designer positively impacts a lot of human domains e.g., design of organisation work and knowledge flows, AI systems, better ways to learn.