Re: What and where is knowledge

David Russell (drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu)
Wed, 24 Apr 1996 09:21:31 -0500 (CDT)

Gordon writes:

>What I am trying to understand is what it is that is "in" both people and
>artifacts that can be referred to as "knowledge". Or to put it
>differently: people engaged in an activity know with the aid of
>artifacts, but what and where is "knowledge"?

Perhaps "knowledge", as (my) Dewey tried to say, might be more usefully
(for the purposes of analyzing learning and teaching) be better
conceptualized as "know-how," where the knowing and doing are inseparable
functions of human interaction. I think of this as something like what Jay
was getting at last year when he insisted, if I recall, that tools be
thought of for CHAT purposes always as tools-in-use. It's harder to ask
"where's the know-how?" than to ask "where is knowledge?"--a sign that we
might be overcoming the tendency of (scientific) English to
nominalize/reify (inter)actions into things (I'm thinking of Jim Martin and
Halliday's WRITING SCIENCE).

Tools in one use in one activity network/system (ongoing purposeful social
practice, in Leont'ev's sense) are sometimes stripped away by some
person(s)--appropriated--for another (sometimes related) use by another
activity network/system. For example, statements highly embedded in, for
example, the activity system of core researchers in biology, in the genre
of their research articles, are translated (in Latour's sense of changing
direction) into elementary textbooks to organize the interactions of
elementary biology curricula (another activity network/system). In this
sense, the tools are commodified (and their use changed) when they move
from one social practice to another. And we often point to such commidified
tools as "knowledge" or "facts." But it seems more useful to ask the prior
question of how this was "done" (I'm thinking of "fact" in the etymological
sense of something already "done").

In this analyis, one must always ask why certain interactions-with-tools
are, as Gordon puts it, "referred to as knowledge." The teacher of
introductory courses (and the professional activity network/system she
represents) have their reasons for referring to these commodified
statements as "facts" or "knowledge," historically conditioned ways of
treating certain interactions (certain tools in certain uses) as fact. Or
to use Leont'ev's terms, I think of "knowledge" always in terms of the
"object/motive" of some activity network/system.

In this way, I can (with great effort) sometimes get past the Cartesian
habit of separating knowing from doing. But the analysis gets awfully
messy awfully fast, because conditions are always changing dialectically,
tools and uses constantly transformed in the dialectic of activity
networks/systems. The researcher must "fix" (describe, circumscribe) these
interactions, as the videographer (to borrow Gordon's metaphor from another
strand) must sometimes pull stills shots out.

Though experiment: would it work to replace all uses of the term
"knowledge" (or even the term "skill") with the term "know-how" or even
"expertise"?

David R. Russell
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
USA (515) 294-4724,fax 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu