Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Dave Elder-Vass on the social construction of knowledge
Short post on the social construction of knowledge. Highly relevant to issues under discussion here, especially with respect to orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Well worth the little time it takes to read.
Read it at Understanding Society
Response to Little
Dave Elder-Vass | senior lecturer in sociology at Loughborough University and author as well of The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency
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5 comments:
I 'know' how to ride a bike. Knowledge to me is knowing.
I can read a recipe book, but I don't know how to cook most of the meals. I can believe anything I want, but that doesn't mean I know. Most of what passes for knowledge is actually just information, passed on from user to user. As soon as i put my finger on something, it changes!!!
It is better to know than believe. Because people live in concepts rather than knowledge, the world is a wacky place ....
jr,
Interesting: "It is better to know than believe."
IMO I "know" 2+2=4 while others "believe" 2+2=4...
So related, many others "believe" 'printing money causes harmful inflation' but I 'know' this is false...
rsp,
jrbach,
"The issue here is not that social influence undermines the reliability of knowledge: all knowledge by its very nature depends on social influence, in the sense that claims only come to be accepted as knowledge if they have been obtained in socially approved ways. But some kinds of knowledge forming practices (and thus some kinds of social influence) may produce more accurate knowledge than others. In strongly differentiated modern societies, there is perhaps space for more accurate knowledge forming practices to develop in some domains, such as the natural sciences and everyday empirical knowledge, even when those in others remain more contestable.
This leaves us with a perspective on knowledge that recognises it is always at risk of being wrong, but also accepts that some knowledge claims may be well founded. This is not a perspective that undermines itself, but it is certainly one that demands humility over the possibility of error."
Matt:
IMO I "know" 2+2=4 while others "believe" 2+2=4...
Yes: I know how to ride a bike - while others believing they know how to ride a bike or have a concept about riding a bike, fall off ... !!
I think there are three types of knowledge and also three types of information, and I also think that two of the three types of each are socially constructed. I don't think reliability is an idea that has been adequately explicated yet, and I also think that the idea of socially approved and authoritative knowledge is too authoritarian. In this respect I agree with both Feyerabend and Karl Popper.
In any event, my views on knowledge are here: http://www.kmci.org/media/Whatknowledgeis%20%28non-fiction%20version%29.pdf and also are placed in the broader context of philosophy here: http://www.kmci.org/media/Corporate_Epistemology.pdf for those interested.
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