Knowledge information data 7329321335white101332758.

knowledge information data

7329321335white101332758

Introduction to Knowledge Systems


critical analysis of knowledge processes

• repositioning of discourses (self-awareness, situated knowledges)

• include diversity

• civic responsibility, driving democratic change, balancing power

• … or what? loss of capacity for social criticism


how structured knowledge systems operate

• relationship of knowledge systems to moral order

• deviance

• culture / nature

• naturalizing discourse

• memory (social, personal)

Origins of Knowledge Systems

knowledge systems• related to post-Enlightenment epistemology

• critical analysis of knowledge practices in particular time periods (discursive formations supported by institutions)

• concepts: ideology, hegemony

• assumption: knowledge systems are not neutral, they promote the interests of the ruling class

• situated knowledge • personal experience

• ‘communities of practice’ and information infrastructures supporting information flow


history of knowledge

• by subject? by period? as succession of epistemes?

• history or ‘archaeology’ of human sciences (Michel Foucault) avoids producing the traditional unity of subject,

spirit,or period


history of knowledge

• history of knowledge represented as a dynamic, constantly changing totality

• shift from a traditional historical inquiry into ‘what’ was known at a given moment to discursive practices that rendered something knowable

• discursive practices are first hand evidence to understand what was knowable


• analysis of an episteme = theorization of the grounds of knowledge by analyzing the representational paradigms which organize the theorization

• what could be knowable? boundary objects? anomalies? displaced categories?

• episteme = historically specific, dynamic field of representations of knowledge


episteme

• defined in Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: as the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems

• Foucault’s Order of Things (17th / 18th century shift): the problem of order as organizing episteme

• episteme is multiplied by communication among different disciplines

• language + technology of transmission + totality of people’s interactions + ...


constraints

• a range of fields in a given historical moment demonstrates a set of discursive practices common to all the fields

• constraints and limitations imposed on a range of discourses in the human sciences and other knowledge practices


post-Enlightenment epistemology

• ‘modernity’: ideas of progress, science, nature (as logical and ordered), reason

• reflected in the discourse of science and technology (technocriticism: Haraway)


studies of science and technology

• focus on nature / culture / discourse / + infrastructure (bureaucracy, institutional contexts for the circulation of knowledge)

• dichotomy of nature / culture (cf. Haraway’s natureTM or ‘nature as not nature’ and cultureTM )

Instead of a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the 'soul' of the knowledge to be remembered, the emphasis was on the discovery of the right logical category. The memory of this system of logical categories and scientific causes would exempt the individual from the necessity of remembering everything in detail ... The problem of memorizing the world, characteristic of the sixteenth century, evolved into the problem of classifying it scientifically.

(James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, 1992, 13)

In the late 18th century, science becomes established as cultural apparatus, in the form of materialized semiotic fields.

(Haraway, Modest Witness@Second_Millennium)

The Laboratory, or, The Passion of OncoMouse

(Lynn Randolph 1994)

From: Donna Haraway’s, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 46.

Knowledge and Society

knowledge and power, ideology, hegemony


• constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge systems (Foucault)

• hegemony (Gramsci)

• critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels; Marxist critics: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, etc.)


• hegemony (Gramsci; 1930s)

ability in certain historical periods of the dominant classes to

exercise social and cultural leadership and by these means,

rather than direct coercion of subordinate classes, to maintain

their power over the economic,political, and cultural

direction of the nation


• hegemony binds a society together without the use of force, under the leadership of the dominant classes

• how achieved? manipulations of images and meanings; institutions as producers of sense, knowledge, and meaning

• hegemony operates by winning of consent for unequal class relations

• realms of power: conscience and representations + cultural agency of institutions


consent is achieved in the realm of consciousness and representations

• a totality of social, cultural and individual experience is capable of being made sense of in terms that are defined,

established and put into circulation by the power bloc

Knowledge and Society consent is achieved in the realm of cultural agency of

institutions • the state, the law, the educational system, the media, the family are

prolific producers of sense, knowledge, and meanings• organizers and producers of individual consciousness, institutions

are taken as impartial or neutral, representative of everybody (no apparent reference to class, race or gender)

• institutions shape the knowable, and hide the fact that they are shapers of knowledge (they are ideological)

• institutions are sites in which hegemony can be established and exercised if captured or colonized by a power bloc

• power bloc finds allies in professionals and managers and intellectuals of various kinds (‘subaltern classes’ for Gramsci) who perceive their interest as congruent to or identical with those of the dominant group


Results?

• Hegemony naturalizes what is historically a class ideology, and renders it into the form of common sense

• Power is exercised not as force but as authority; cultural aspects of life are depoliticized; ideology is naturalized

• Culture is a form of superstructure which articulates the interests and ideologies of those who control the economic base of society (reductionism, economic determinism)

• Culture may be seen as mode of domination and liberation (cultural studies)


critiques of ideology and culture • analysis of culture in terms of its relationships to a mode

of production and its specific social formation (Marx-Engels; Marxist critics: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci)

• contribution of cultural analysis: analysis of art, literary form and ideology

• reading of cultural texts as expressions of social experience and ideology

• recognition that institutions are involved in distribution of power in society

Knowledge Structures: the link between of knowledge production and social control

• production of knowledge and handling of knowledge in organized systems (information infrastructures)

• how institutions such as bureaucracies moderate this process

• how process affects individuals• analysis of sites of struggle over representations

From Concepts and Reasoning

to

Classifications, Standards, and Information Infrastructures

Concepts > Categories

• individuals and categories ( cognitive process at root of forming beliefs and categorization)

• the importance of categorization: moving from disorder to order

• Borges, Funes the Memorious

From: Funes the Memorious

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of

the Quebracho ... … These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have hadsince the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal….

From: Funes the Memorious

… The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. ...... It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. ...

Classical Categories

• “Classical” categories (also: Aristotelian, all-or-none, rule governed)

Examples: grandmother = “mother of a parent”even number = “integer exactly divisible by

2”bachelor = “unmarried man”

Classical Categories vs. Family Resemblance Categories

• Family Resemblance Categories (prototypes; best example of a kind)

Classical Categories

• Aristotelian, all-or-none, rule-governed• Examples:

even number=‘integer divisible by 2’grandmother=‘mother of a parent’

• Theory: concepts are definitions in the head to sort out, map concepts in relation to each other

• list of properties common to all the members of a category (necessary conditions) and

• list of properties common only the members of that category (sufficient conditions)

• concepts are difficult to define (critique: Wittgenstein) (anomalous concepts: “game” = fun & amusing (chess?) / winners & losers (solitaire? child throwing a ball against a wall?)

Prototypical Categories

• Prototypes• There are no common properties; different properties are shared by

different subsets

• Therefore, a family has a prototype (prototype chair, prototype bird, prototype bachelor)

• Different properties shared by different subsets (“game” = winner/loser (baseball and chess); hard thinking (chess & solitaire); physical activity (child bouncing a ball against the wall)

• Unclear cases: Is avocado vegetable or fruit?

What about categories that do have a definition?

“Bachelor”• Arthur has been living happily with Alice for the last five years. They have a two

year old daughter and have never officially married.

• Bruce was going to be drafted, so he arranged with his friend Barbara to have a justice of the peace marry them so he would be exempt. They have never lived together. He dates a number of women, and plans to have the marriage annulled as soon as he finds someone he wants to marry.

• Charlie is 17 years old. He lives at home with his parents and is in high school.

• David is 17 years old. He left home at l3, started a small business, and is now a successful young entrepreneur leading a playboy’s lifestyle in his penthouse apartment.

• Eli and Edgar are homosexual lovers who have been living together for many years.

• Faisal is allowed by the law of his native Abu Dhabi to have three wives. He currently has two and is interested in meeting another potential fiancée.

• Father Gregory is the bishop of the Catholic cathedral at Groton upon Thames.

Evidence for the psychological reality of family

resemblance categories

• Psychological reality of prototypes is witnessed by studies

People agree on goodness of membership (bird: robin=higher score, chicken=lower score)

People classify prototypical members faster (is a robin a bird?)

Kids use word with prototypical exemplars first

So are Classical Categories fictitious?

• The mind contains both family resemblance categories and classical categories

• Fuzzy and all-or-none judgments coexist in people’s minds

7 is prototypical odd number (447 not so good)

Mother is a good example of female; waitress, comedienne, professor not so good

A Second Major Fact about Categories

• Every entity belongs to many categories, related in a hierarchy

• But one level of categorization is psychologically most natural (Eleanor Rosch - the “Basic Level”)

• Basic Level is highest level at which objects– Share many attributes

– Allow similar actions to be applied to them

– Have similar shapes

– Can be identified from average shape

Why the Basic Level?

• Purpose of categories: to infer unseen properties from seen properties (i.e. if it barks, it’s a dog, if it bites chases sticks)

• Subordinate categories (e.g. black lab) allow lots of inferences but are hard to assign

• Superordinate categories (e.g. animal) are easy to assign but don’t allow so many inferences

• Basic level: in between

Deductive / Inductive Reasoning

• Deductive inference: general to specific > certain

Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. :: Socrates is mortal.

• Inductive inference: specific to general > probabilistic

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are men. Socrates is mortal. Plato is mortal. :: Aristotle is mortal.

Normative vs. Descriptive models

• Normative model: How people should think• Descriptive model: How people do think.

• A normative model for deductive inference: logic

• A normative model for inductive inference: probability theory

Sources used:

• Steven Pinker (MIT): lecture slides, “Concepts and Reasoning”

• Bowker & Star: Sorting Things Out (MIT Press, 1999)

We live in a ‘classification society.’ (Bowker & Star

1999, 323)

Classifications are powerful technologies when embedded

in working infrastructures

Rethinking the nature of information systems (enabling

work practice) by rethinking categorization tools

The myriad of classifications and standards that surround

and support the modern world, however, often blind

people to the importance of the ‘other’ category as

constitutive of the whole social architecture (Derrida 1980,

quoted in B&S 1999, 301)

Categories > Information Infrastructures

• Communities of practice • Processes of naturalization and categorization• Boundary objects enable production and maintenance to

achieve coherence across intersecting communities (mathematics, medicine, statistics for scholarly communication; ‘laws of nature,’ ‘scientific objectivity and claims to truth’ are completely naturalized and become standards in the Western world)


• Categorization work: category of the ordinary and other category

• Borderlands, cyborgs, the ethics of ambiguity• Naturalization is powerful because it defines the

boundary of ordinary / other (social control; hegemonic thought associated with the cultural leadership of one group, exclusion of other perspectives)

• ethical and political understanding of information systems whose categories attach to individuals


• Need to manage multiplicity of naturalizations (in concrete representation through information technologies)

• Tension bw unified and universally applicable information system and chimera-like, distributed, boundary-object driven information system fully respectful of the needs of the variety of communities it serves (tension of local:global)

• combine bureaucratic tools for classification and local variation (e.g. hospital information system)

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