Types+of+Knowledge

= Types of Knowledge =

Knowledge can be viewed as the production of one or more human beings. It can be the work of a single individual arrived at as a result of a number of factors including the ways of knowing. Such individual knowledge is called **personal knowledge** in this guide. But knowledge can also be the work of a group of people working together either in concert (also using the ways of knowing) or, more likely, separated by time or geography. Areas of knowledge such as the arts and ethics are of this form. These are examples of **shared knowledge**//.// There are socially established methods for producing knowledge of this sort, norms for what counts as a fact or a good explanation, concepts and language appropriate to each area and standards of rationality.

= Shared knowledge = Shared knowledge is highly structured, is systematic in its nature and the product of more than one individual. Much of it is bound together into more or less distinct areas of knowledge such as the familiar groups of subjects studied in the Diploma Programme. While individuals contribute to it, shared knowledge does not depend only upon the contributions of a particular individual—there are possibilities for others to check and amend individual contributions and add to the body of knowledge that already exists.

Examples:

•Physics is a subject discipline with knowledge that is shared. Many have access to it and can contribute to it. Much of the work done is by teams of people building on existing knowledge. While individuals can and do contribute to this body of knowledge, the work of individuals is subject to group processes such as peer review and replication of experimental results before it becomes part of the corpus.

•The knowledge required to build a computer is also shared. It is unlikely that there is an individual who has the knowledge of building such a device from scratch (rather than simply assembling it from pre-constructed components). Yet we know how to make computers. A computer is the result of a complex worldwide cooperative effort.

Shared knowledge changes and evolves over time because of the continued applications of the methods of inquiry—all those processes covered by the knowledge framework. Applying the methodology belonging to an area of knowledge has the effect of changing what we know. These changes might be slow and incremental—areas of knowledge possess a certain stability over time. However, they could also be sudden and dramatic, revolutionary shifts in knowledge or paradigm shifts, as an area of knowledge responds to new experimental results, say, or advances in the underlying theory.

There might be areas of knowledge that are shared by groups of us. The subjects studied in the Diploma Programme might fall into this category. Of course it is not the case that every IB student understands higher level biology or geography, but rather it is knowledge that is available subject to certain conditions. We are all members of other smaller groups too. We are members of ethnic groups, national groups, age groups, gender groups, religious groups, interest groups, class groups, political groups, and so on. There might be areas of knowledge that we share as members of these groups which are not available to those outside, such as knowledge that is anchored in a particular culture or in a particular religious tradition. This might raise questions regarding the possibility of knowledge transgressing the boundaries of the group.

Here are some examples of such questions:

•Is it really possible to have knowledge of a culture in which we have not been raised? •Are those outside a particular religious tradition really capable of understanding its key ideas? •Does there exist a neutral position from which to make judgments about competing claims from different groups with different traditions and different interests? •To what extent are our familiar areas of knowledge embedded in a particular tradition or to what extent might they be bound to a particular culture?

Thinking about shared knowledge allows us to think about the nature of the group that does the sharing. It allows international-mindedness into our exploration of knowledge questions.

= Personal knowledge =

Personal knowledge, on the other hand, depends crucially on the experiences of a particular individual. It is gained through experience, practice and personal involvement and is intimately bound up with the particular local circumstances of the individual such as biography, interests, values, and so on. It contributes to, and is in turn influenced by, an individual’s personal perspective.

Personal knowledge is made up of:

•skills and procedural knowledge that I have acquired through practice and habituation •what I have come to know through experience in my life beyond academia •what I have learned through my formal education (mainly shared knowledge that has withstood the scrutiny of the methods of validation of the various areas of knowledge) •the results of my personal academic research (which may have become shared knowledge because I published it or made it available in some other way to others).

Personal knowledge therefore includes what might be described as skills, practical abilities and individual talents. This type of knowledge is sometimes called procedural knowledge, and refers to knowledge of **how** to do something, for example, how to play the piano, how to cook a soufflé, how to ride a bicycle, how to paint a portrait, how to windsurf, how to play volleyball and so on.

Personal knowledge also includes a map of our personal experiences of the world. It is formed from a number of ways of knowing such as our memories of our own biography, the sense perceptions through which we gain knowledge of the world, the emotions that accompanied such sense perceptions, the values and significance we place on such thoughts and feelings.