Week 4

Knowledge

"All theories are legitimate and none of them are important. What matters is what one does with them"

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentine writer and poet, 1899-1986)

   Knowledge is a way of asking and answering questions that recognize multiple points of view. Throughout the history of epistemology, there have been many ways of understanding knowledge: a theoretical knowledge where there is plenty of reason and logic but very little action taken, a practical knowledge built without any reasoning from the experience, the practice, the day-to-day, or an intuitive knowledge where the logic is out of place and emotional and unconscious elements play an important role. This is sometimes more powerful than any other knowledge built with logic and reasoning.

   Ideally, the reason, heart and action should go together in order to build the knowledge, but this denies the reality: our imperfection to know. However, even though imperfect, there are a thousand ways to learn and build knowledge.

   Knowledge is in the person, not in anywhere else, and is indistinguishable from the person. What I know is the sum of all my life experiences, absolutely all of them which have left a residue at any time. It manifests itself in everything we do, in what we say, in what we do not say, in what we dream...

   There is not knowledge, for example, inside a book. A book can build, contribute, and enrich so much knowledge as different interpretations that its readers make of it. The person who writes it know what every sentence means, but prior knowledge of each reader will make that the words, phrases and ideas are interpreted in one way or another. Sometimes the lack of prior knowledge makes that the reading of the book does not tell us absolutely nothing, in other occasions, a limited prior knowledge makes that the reading of the book tells us little, but often occur that the prior knowledge of the reader creates exciting new interpretations of the text: applications to other fields (perhaps unimagined by the writer), relations with other concepts and ideas, etc.

   In short, everything we do is building our knowledge, which is manifested in all what we do, think, want or feel. In this sense, the knowledge could be defined as an inseparable combination of thought, emotion and action.

   All knowledge, concepts and ideas are built over other knowledge, concepts and ideas, but to get certain types of knowledge, it is required a journey because knowledge is not open to anyone, it is only open to those who want to make a conceptual journey that will lead them to be able to assimilate a new idea. Beyond the considerations of whether the knowledge has to flow or has to be stored, I think we should act and interact from knowledge.

   Knowledge, this that is so hard to define, is perhaps what best defines each one of us (is our identity?), I talk about a knowledge that has an indissoluble combination of thought, action and desire, not about a computer hard disk. We are not machines. My knowledge is how I act, how I think and how I want or feel, and also, what I do, what I think and what I want or feel.