Knowledge flat-talk: a conceit of supposed experts and a seduction to all.

• Author: Klein, Daniel B.
• Position: REFLECTIONS - Essay

About 1917, the eminent English economist Alfred Marshall wrote the following words intended for publication: "But the more I studied economic science, the smaller appeared the knowledge which I had of it, in proportion to the knowledge that I needed; and now, at the end of nearly half a century of almost exclusive study of it, I am conscious of more ignorance of it than I was at the beginning of the study" (qtd. in Keynes 1951, 138). Marshall tossed the sheet with those words into the wastebasket, from which it was retrieved by Mrs. Marshall but remained unpublished. Perhaps Marshall had the impulse to confess his ignorance of "economic science" as a way of highlighting something central to economic wisdom but lost his nerve.

F. A. Hayek famously spoke of the division of knowledge or dispersed knowledge or diffused knowledge, but even these expressions may not go far enough. Knowledge is not merely divided, like a sandwich cut down the middle, or dispersed, like the members of a crowd formerly amassed. Hayek's talk of knowledge was unfortunate in a way, for it allowed some to see the matter as one merely of asymmetric information. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the knowledge is out there, but the pieces are scattered around. Besides the adjectives divided, dispersed, and diffuse, we need disjointed. People perceive and pursue their own overlapping jigsaw puzzles, and only in a vague and abstract way can we talk about all of the jigsaw puzzles as a vast concatenation and judge its merits. A full appreciation of Hayek's oeuvre makes it altogether natural and proper to see Hayek as an expositor of knowledge's richness. In his talk of the division of knowledge, he was all along driving at deeper insights--not merely about articulate knowledge, but also about tacit knowledge; not merely about asymmetric information, but also about asymmetric interpretation--but he did not always clarify the deeper dimensions of knowledge.

Michael Polanyi (1962, 1967) explained that knowing how to ride a bicycle, "know-how," is highly inarticulate or tacit, even inarticulable; it hardly merits the designation "information." Meanwhile, articulate knowledge--"knowledge that'--is often designated as "information." Polanyi explained that articulate knowledge resides in and emerges from tacit knowledge.

In this article, I do not focus on subterranean, inarticulate knowledge. I work primarily within realms of articulate knowledge, but I criticize certain ways of talking about such knowledge and suggest a richer formulation that makes us more mindful of the tacit. Here, I usually drop the word articulate when I speak of articulate knowledge.

Knowledge Entails Information, Interpretation, and Judgment

In treating of knowledge, my approach is not foundational, but pragmatist, contextual, and formulated in terms of levels of frame within which "we" are situated and our discourse embedded. In communicating, we generally proceed from a working interpretation of matters. "Information" is what we call the facts we see within the working interpretation. Meanwhile, these "facts" reside in a more basic interpretive frame, in which "factual" statements are presumed acceptable to all parties of the communication. When Jane and Amy "argue over the facts," they are, as it were, revisiting what they propose to treat as factual for purposes of the conversation. If the argument is unresolved, Jane may be deciding that she and Amy are not a "we" and may instead be drawing a circle of "we" with some of the auditors to her exchange with Amy that does not include Amy. (However, although the facts remain unresolved between Jane and Amy, Amy may later reconsider matters and imaginatively enter the circle that Jane draws.)

Consider a situation in which we have no trouble agreeing to "we"-ness in our apprehension of the "facts." Suppose we sit down together with a telephone book. We call the ink markings on the page "the facts." Neither of us considers disputing statements about the printed patterns on the pages. We then proceed to talk plainly of them as phone numbers. We often forget this working lens--interpreting the facts as phone numbers--because we see through it. But one of us may propose another interpretation: Might the list of "phone numbers" contain secret knowledge encoded by spies?

Thus, we have multiple interpretations of the ink markings that some understand as "phone numbers." Here the quotation marks make the enclosed words mean: what the facts are called when they are seen through the working interpretation. But such quotation marks can be terribly distracting and confusing, and we often omit them. We often likewise just speak of multiple interpretations of the information (as opposed to multiple interpretations of the facts). Rather than interpretively pivoting off the "fact"-level interpretation--that the line reads 678-3554--I formulate things so as to pivot interpretively off what I have called "the working interpretation"--that 678-3554 is a phone number--a level up from the factual, and there the pivot turns: "Maybe the phone number is a secret encoded message?" This proceeding works because I build universal acceptance among the "we" into "the facts." That is, by construction, at the factual level no pivoting is necessary--none of us disputes that the line says 678-3554. Put differently, wherever you want to accommodate interpretive pivoting, move "factual" to somewhere down from there.

Figure 1 shows a drawing associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussion of a duck-rabbit illustration in his Philosophical Investigations. Working within the duck interpretation, we could cover up some of the pixels. Maybe you see only the "beak" and I see only the "back" of the head--asymmetric information. Beyond issues of information, however, is another interpretation: Maybe what we need to see is not all the pixels, but the other interpretation of them--that they represent a rabbit.

The illustration has two notable interpretations, but in human affairs, things evolve, and there is usually opportunity for further and better interpretation. Michael Polanyi notes the "peculiar opportunity offered by explicit knowledge for reflecting on it critically" (1963, 15). Interpretations evolve in dialectical fashion, each advance giving rise to further advance. New interpretations keep coming.

Meanwhile, life rolls on. The ball races toward the plate. If the batter waits for a better interpretation, he may be called out on strikes. The action facet of knowledge is judgment, our taking stock in an interpretation by acting on it--though this "action" may be only the act of deciding and not involve much muscular activity.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

As speakers, we judge of judgments--those both of our interlocutors and of agents existing within the descriptions we give of things. We convey our judgments of their judgments using judgmental terms. Favorable, approving terms, or commendations, include true, unbiased, right, better, superior, wise, good, enlightened, and so on. Unfavorable, disapproving terms, or pejoratives, include untrue, biased, wrong, worse, inferior, unwise, bad, unenlightened, and so on.

In sum, articulate knowledge consists of more than information: it also includes interpretation and judgment.

Common Knowledge

Theorists often make a particular move in their descriptions of things so as to ensure that interpretation is final and symmetric, a move that also...