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?

Arts creative, science logical?

Throughout my childhood and so-called education, I had the notion that the arts were “creative” and science was “logical”. And I clung to this belief for a long time, only gradually coming to realise that some profound paradoxes were involved.

On the one hand, with the help of Karl Popper I came to understand that scientific advance comes from intuitive creative leaps (to be later explored through experimental research).

Yet most scientists (and lay people) still appear to believe that the process is the other way around, and that logical deductive thought is the driver of new knowledge. More than that, my experience is that too many scientists and engineers seem to have a belief that they are not creative beings at all.

On the other hand, most musicians and artists go through rigorous executant training that enables them to become highly skilled practitioners in their particular field. Most artists and musicians (and people generally) assume that their achievements are driven by creativity, whereas my sense is that they are usually driven by learned skills.

Put simply – science is primarily driven by creativity and the arts by skill.

Why have we come to believe that it’s the other way around? And what might be the implications for our education system?

Definitionitis Syndrome

I find in academe (more than in the commercial world) that a great deal of time is spent in discussing definitions. This seems true of all disciplines, but of course it impacts on me particularly when people say, for example, “What exactly do we mean by innovation (or creativity or leadership or ideas or concepts or whatever)?”

It’s never appealed to me much as an approach. A great deal of time and intellectual energy is consumed getting to “Go”. Sometimes that process never seems to stop – as though finding the perfect definition is itself the purpose of the exercise. The consequence, of course, is that correspondingly less time is spent addressing the issue in hand.

The philosopher of science, Professor Karl Popper (of whom I wrote on October 11 - "Searching for flaws"), was equally dismissive of this syndrome, which I call definitionitis. Definitions, he pointed out, are by their nature tautological, and therefore of limited value in the problem-solving arena. A second consequence is that definitions laboriously arrived at can have the unintended effect of excluding interesting, speculative, lateral ideas – ideas which might lead to previously unconsidered new hypotheses, approaches and solutions.

Popper believed that discussion of the meaning of words can become not only unhelpful (and boring), but can actually be destructive. He was of the view that creative discussion itself, uninhibited by prior agreement around the meanings of terms being used, was more likely to lead to breakthrough ideas.

Have you been in situations where inability to move past the defining of terms led to short- or long-term paralysis?

By the way, it’s exactly a year since I started this blog. Let me know if there are particular issues you’d like aired in it.

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.

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