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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Disciplinarity And Trandisciplinarity In The Study Of Knowledge, Jay H. Bernstein
Disciplinarity And Trandisciplinarity In The Study Of Knowledge, Jay H. Bernstein
Publications and Research
Scholarly inquiry about the nature and significance of knowledge has been shaped by disciplinary traditions and priorities that define “knowledge” differently and result in disconnected literatures. In the mid to late twentieth century, library science educator Jesse Shera sought to bridge the conceptual gap between epistemological and sociological approaches to knowledge in proposing a new discipline he called social epistemology. Around the same time, long-term projects by the economist Fritz Machlup and the physical chemist turned philosopher of science Michael Polanyi did not merely combine existing disciplinary approaches but transcended conventional frameworks for conceptualizing knowledge. These scholars can be viewed …
The Intellectual And Curricular Spaces Of Knowledge Studies, Jay H. Bernstein
The Intellectual And Curricular Spaces Of Knowledge Studies, Jay H. Bernstein
Publications and Research
The words “knowledge” and “information” are sometimes used interchangeably, but the connection between them is complex and problematic. Knowledge is a mental product gained from engaging with information. All educational subjects, scholarly disciplines, occupations, and activities produce knowledge as well as information. Because libraries encompass potentially all subjects, professional vision in librarianship would benefit from an examination of knowledge that transcends the methods and topical concerns of individual disciplines. An interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) framework in which to view knowledge was pioneered in the post-Sputnik age by Fritz Machlup and Michael Polanyi. Their insights have stimulated scholars to develop research, publications, …
The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy And Its Antithesis, Jay H. Bernstein
The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy And Its Antithesis, Jay H. Bernstein
Publications and Research
The now taken-for-granted notion that data lead to information, which leads to knowledge, which in turnleads to wisdom was first specified in detail by R. L. Ackoff in 1988. The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy is based on filtration, reduction, and transformation. Besides being causal and hierarchical,the scheme is pyramidal, in that data are plentiful while wisdom is almost nonexistent. Ackoff’s formulalinking these terms together this way permits us to ask what the opposite of knowledge is and whether analogous principles of hierarchy, process, and pyramiding apply to it. The inversion of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy produces a series of opposing terms (including misinformation,error, …