I have been presented with various views on the nature of knowledge as part of the course I am studying and in my own slow way I have been mulling them over. Now I have been asked to write about my personal view of knowledge (properly cited etc.) and I was eventually drawn back to the great Terry Pratchett’s description of teachers as “liars to children” (Pratchett, Stewart, & Cohen, 1999).
A couple of ways of thinking about knowledge were shared. (Burnard, 1996) listed these: Propositional Knowledge (facts and stuff), procedural (how to do stuff) and personal knowledge (experience of stuff). Then an alternative view was presented by Moon & Leach, 2008. They kept the first three with slightly different names (formal, procedural and informal). However Moon and Leach also added impressionisitic and self-regulatory knowledge.
The way I initially envisioned these was by thinking about a skill like driving. In order to drive you need to know what the pedals do, what road signs mean etc. (propositional). You also need to know the physical process of driving (procedural). But to drive well you need to have learnt things like how to anticipate the actions of other drivers, which is personal knowledge. To be a good driver you need all three types of knowledge.
We also looked at what how knowledge is acquired. Does knowledge represent fixed truths that are uncovered by the application of reason, logic and rational thought alone (rationalism)? Is knowledge the result of our experience of the outside world phenomena and established through empiricism? My initial feelings were to go to these. The other ways of looking at knowledge (Dewey) is that knowledge is constructed through experiencing the world in dialog with others. The final view is that knowledge is the process of “enculturation rather than cognitive development”. It took me a while to get my head round what that meant and so I initially rejected the second two views, probably prematurely.
But this brings us back to the Pratchett quote. He isn’t saying teachers deliberately deceive their students but that simplified or edited versions of what is currently understood are presented in order to help students learn the shape of subject or field. That understanding principles and ways of reasoning are more important than particular facts or theories, since (especially in science) these are constantly changing and being adapted. That acquiring the culture of a field, what it values and how it evaluates ideas and evidence, is crucial to mastering a subject.
Reflecting on my own subject (Computer Science), while there is a comfort in the idea of objective knowledge, limited to facts and procedures discovered through a mix of empiricism and rational reasoning, this isn’t what I actually teach, except in order to pass exams. Mastery in my field comes from ways of thinking rather than specific knowledge. Acquiring those ways of thinking, how to decompose a problem, how to identify ambiguities, requires a base of propositional and procedural knowledge but needs to progress rapidly from that. As a wise student once said to me “The difficulty of becoming a programmer is learning to think like a programmer”. He was right. And learning to think like a programmer is enculturation.
References
Burnard, P. (1996). Acquiring Interpersonal Skills: A Handbook of Experiential Learning for Health Professionals, 2nd edn. London: Chapman & Hall.
Moon, B., & Leach, J. (2008). The Power of Pedagogy. London: Sage.
Pratchett, T., Stewart, I., & Cohen, J. (1999). The Science of Discworld.