Knowledge: does it really exist?

So many universities have vision or mission statements based around the notion that they are in the business of “knowledge transfer”.

It always seems to me a very doubtful proposition.

Ever since I encountered the work of Karl Popper, I’ve been less than entranced by the idea of “knowledge”. It seems like practically every day that some apparent certainty, some aspect of “knowledge” or other, is overturned and replaced by new thinking.

In truth, the best one can say for the new formulation is that it may represent our Best Current Thinking. Even the most significant – Newton, Darwin, Einstein – they all developed ideas that had the ring of final truth. Not so.

So much more open to creative new possibilities, Best Current Thinking. So restrictive, knowledge.

Is it possible for universities to let go of all that emphasis on certainty and embrace something more open-ended?

Searching for flaws

At last week’s Brand Renovation Masterclass at Cass Business School, our guest speaker David Walker talked about the need to use testing and research not as stop/go indicators, but rather as springboards to improving the innovation or renovation.

It put me in mind of the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper. Popper totally rejected the commonly-held notion of scientific method – that research leads to knowledge and that knowledge leads to ideas or hypotheses.

Popper held that the only reason for conducting research is because you have an idea in the first place (however sketchy it is) – and the purpose of research is to test the idea rigorously, so that it can be improved. In short, in research we are not looking for confirmation of the concept, rather trying to identify flaws, so that they can be problem-solved.

As he put it: “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.”

So often, in the commercial world, managements want the warm and comforting feeling from the data that they are backing a winner – and end up going to market with an innovation that does not work in practice in some way or other because there are still issues that need to be addressed.

And in academia, I often seem to read papers that apparently have no idea behind them at all. Often the work is prefaced by a question to be answered, where no one has interrogated the idea behind the question. The result is usually just to add to the bottomless pit of never-to-be-seen-again “knowledge”.

A useful way of thinking about all this is to focus at each stage on the question, “What’s our BEST CURRENT THINKING?”, and go forward from there.

Views?