Introduction
All aspects of out life are influenced by and determined by knowledge. Our life is based on and depends upon out knowledge about things and processes, people and social relations, etc. Thus, the metaphor of knowledge has a different meaning for people from different social classes and backgrounds, for people of different professions and educational different opportunities, for a pragmatic and romantic person. The paper will examine two opposing metaphors: knowledge and ignorance.
Discussion
The metaphor of knowledge can be explained as a way of knowing about something and acquired information about events and processes. Each person has access to personal knowledge that others–including experts and loved ones–lack and cannot possibly obtain. A nutritionist, for example, does not know what foods my family and I like the taste of, are allergic to, or can prepare, store, afford, and find in the local market. I am saying nothing about such claims. It may well be true that most of what we know is made possible by a shared and “socially constructed” conceptual structure. But however we obtain our personal knowledge, the analysis presented here focuses entirely on the fact that this knowledge is unique to each of us and is largely inaccessible to others. The first-order problem of knowledge arises from the fact that access to personal (and local) knowledge-regardless of its source–is highly restricted (Doren 44).
For a pragmatic person, knowledge is the only possible way to understand the world around us and prosper in life. For a romantic person, knowledge can be seen as a universal truth and ways we see the world. One reason is that most of what we know is tacit or inarticulate knowledge. You may be very adept at performing some task, say, driving a car or playing a musical instrument, and be entirely unable to explain to someone else how such a task should be performed. Or you may be intimately familiar with a portion of a city and yet, when asked by a stranger for directions, be entirely unable to explain accurately how to find a place that you would have no difficulty finding yourself. When we are unable to articulate what we know, we sometimes try to convey our knowledge by showing others how we do it. Law professors, for example, do not normally try to teach the method of legal reasoning by explaining how lawyers reason, but by demonstrating it and compelling their students to try to replicate the method (Maturana and Varela 65).
The metaphor of ignorance is connected with lack of knowledge about something: it can be lack of knowledge about etiquette or communication principles, lack of professional knowledge and skills. For instance, for a pragmatic person, lack of knowledge about etiquette will be the main problem in communication. Thus, for a non-practical person, this situation will course any problem in communication. Ignorance can be a direct result of poor education and upbringing, different social and cultural norms of the community. For instance, for a high class poor knowledge of classical music and painting is often considered as ignorance (Doren 48). Thus, for a low class these problems are not considered as poor education. Local knowledge is public and therefore potentially accessible to others. Despite this, because it is costly to gain access to such knowledge, as a practical matter access to all local knowledge is limited. In a very real way, we are all “experts” in some domain of local knowledge to which others lack access. Add to this the vast repository of largely inaccessible personal knowledge dispersed among billions of persons and there arises a problem. The problem is for each person to make use of the water that is there, while taking into account the part that is empty (Maturana and Varela 69).
In sum, both metaphors demonstrate that the constellation of perceptions, preferences, and opportunities is so situation-dependent that there is virtually no chance that the personal knowledge reposed respectively in two different people will be identical in every respect. It is then neither simplistic nor imperialist to describe–and then take seriously–a feature common to all human beings when such a feature allows both for the functional similarities among persons and cultures and for the seemingly infinite individual and cultural diversity that human beings manifest. I am not claiming that all people invariably make more knowledgeable choices for themselves than others could possibly make for them. We all know of circumstances where persons lack information that would bear importantly on their choices to which others have access. That we can sometimes articulate or demonstrate what we personally know and thereby communicate it to others does not mean that we can always do so or that we can do so for more than a small fraction of our store of personal knowledge. The fact that a large part of our personal knowledge is both inarticulate and incoherent does not mean that no information can be communicated to or shared with others. For the flip-side of the claim is that all persons are situated differently, insofar as their perceptions, preferences, and opportunities differ. Considered in isolation, any particular preference is probably shared by many people.
Works Cited
Doren, Ch. A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future. Ballantine Books, 1992.
Maturana, H. R., Varela, F. Tree of Knowledge. Shambhala; Rev Sub edition, 1992.