|
EXPLANATIONS & JUSTIFICATIONS OF CHART |
Id |
Tr |
Bo |
|
Salient Aspects |
|
|
|
|
Emotional links – Damasio and others argue that mental
life is inherently emotional. Bonds address this by positing that they
arise out of organismal needs. |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Effects of existence – A big aspect of knowledge are
the politics of it including having it, hoarding it, using it against
someone, and so forth. Hierarchical societies reserve knowledge for
elites, give it an exalted form such as divine revelation. Scientific
society hoped that truth would be an equalizer, but it has naively
denied the privileging aspects rather than embrace them (and yes,
sometimes hid behind them much like earlier elites). |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Connectedness of knowers – Ideas and especially truth
believed essentially in a universal subjective viewpoint that everyone
who was appropriately diligent would share. This has had the effect of
denigrating the actual, idiosyncratic bonds of actual people. |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Processual knowing – Knowledge as a bond emphasizes
the making and breaking of bonds, a process. Ideas and truth were
supposedly of the eternal. Truth receives a lowercase "no" because,
although eternal, science emphasizes method as a way of getting the
eternal. Process should be considered in two ways – in acquiring or
growing a bond and as a bond that is maintained as a force of meaning
over time. Greek islanders acquire a taste for white painted houses as
kids; they have a meaning bond to houses that maintains them white. |
No |
no |
Yes |
|
Less intolerance – If knowledge is not something that
an individual has and develops, then the alternative today is
rightness which an individual must have. "Now the dilemma: On one
hand, arguing from and accepting claims on authority are the twentieth
Century’s definitive epistemic methods. On the other hand, the
medieval logicians’ chief reason for seeing the argument from
authority as a fallacy still holds: To invoke authority is to abort
debate." Willard, Charles Arthur. Liberalism and the Problem of
Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. University of
Chicago Press. 1996. p. 140. |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Neuronal circuits – Neurons themselves form bonds or
connections to other neurons. And their functionality derives from
their connections either becoming strengthened or weakened, more
connected or less connected. Their architecture is the strength and
connectivity of bonds. |
no |
? |
Yes |
|
Unconscious reactions – A good part of social life is
concerned with hiding our unconscious reactions or reveling in them as
testament to our true feelings. Similarly, there is an intense
interest in the subtle honesty of others as seen through their
inadvertent reactions. These reactions reveal how external events pull
on the personal side of our knowledge bonds. |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Knowledge as power – Power can be considered as
holding relationships in place. Knowledge relationships settle into
place around those lineaments of power relationships to cement that
power. The reverse is true for disruptions of power. Michel Foucault
is widely credited with showing the close interrelationship between
knowledge and power. Knowledge relations have a natural affinity for
such a property that the others are mute on. |
no |
no |
Yes |
|
Extended mind – This refers to the growing realization
that mind is distributed from the brain through the body and into the
environment.
"In light of all this, it may for some purposes be
wise to consider the intelligent system as a spatio-temporally
extended process not limited by the tenuous envelope of skin and
skull. Less dramatically, the traditional divisions among perception,
cognition, and action look increasingly unhelpful." Clark, Andy, Being
There: Putting brain, Body, and World Together Again, MIT Press, 1997.
pps. 220-1. |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Economic aspects of knowledge – The costs, the
investments made, the payoffs are aspects of knowledge that are shown
in institutions (witness corporations’ management of knowledge), in
personal lives, and in biology (e.g., the "resources" in calories and
protracted child-rearing times that early humans devoted to brains is
widely commented upon as only possible where the payoffs were worth
it). "(1) The economics of knowledge is an important but
underdeveloped branch of epistemology. It is__or should be__evident
that knowledge has its economic aspect of benefits and costs. (2) The
benefits of information are both theoretical and applied. (3)
Moreover, the management of information is always a matter of costs.
(4) Rationality itself has a characteristically economic dimension in
its insistence on a proper proportioning of expenditures and
benefits." Rescher, Nicholas. "Cognitive Economy: the Economic
Dimension of the Theory of Knowledge," U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.
P. 3. Cognitive bonds portray patterns to invest in and maintain;
ideas and truth are mute on this. |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Inherent body metaphors – The prevalence of these in
thinking speaks to the physical relational aspect of knowledge that
ideas and truth avoid. "Concepts arise from, and are understood
through, the body, the brain, and experience in the world. Concepts
get their meaning through embodiment, especially via perceptual and
motor capacities. Directly embodied concepts include basic_level
concepts, spatial_relations concepts, bodily action concepts (e.g.,
hand movement), aspect (that is, the general structure of actions and
events), color, and others.
Concepts crucially make use of imaginative aspects of
mind: frames, metaphor, metonymy, prototypes, radial categories,
mental spaces, and conceptual blending." Johnson, Mark & George Lakoff.
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to
Western Thought. Basic Books. 1999. P. 497. |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Non-ideal cases – This is the real strength of
relational topographies such as neural nets that excel at the pattern
recognition of less than perfect conditions. Human minds excel as
recognizing familiar knowledge relationships with very imperfect
criteria (e.g., "I know it was him even though I couldn’t see him by
the way ..."). |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Reveals cares and loves – |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Covers "how-to" knowledge |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Covers personal acquaintance, familiarity |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Covers adaptations of organisms to surroundings (e.g.,
birds’ knowing air, cat’s knowing a territory)
"The self-evident quality of the boundary that divides
organism and environment becomes less and less obvious the closer we
approach it. Bateson, in his classic example of the man-axe-tree
circuit, suggests that only the total system of
tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree has the quality of immanent
mind. What occurs in this system is a series of transforms and what
happens in the environment is as essential to the circuit as the
sensory-muscular processes in the human participant. There is danger
in separating meaning and context, or participant and setting, of
falling into the trap of viewing one as independent variable and the
other as dependent variable." Bateson, Gregory et al. Rigor and
Imagination: Essays from the Legacy of Gregory Bateson. Barnlund,
Richard. "Toward an Ecology of Communication." 1981. p. 95. |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Allows transitive properties (e.g., my knowing A
related to B facilitates my knowing B) |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Covers pattern recognition and intuition |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Knowledge as love – It is often said that what we know
best is what we love. Familiarity is not allowed between enemies. The
Bible equates the words "to love" and "to know." To note how knowing
relationships carry most often our emotions mirrors the experiences
where we have symphonies of awe, appreciation, and longing in our
knowing. As a modern psychological commentator put it in describing
the soul which would be considered here the total field of our knowing
bonds: "When we consider the soul of relationship, unexpected factors
come into view. In its deepest nature, for example, the soul involves
itself in the stuff of this world, both people and objects. It loves
attachments of all kinds–to places, ideas, times, historical figures
and periods, things, words, sounds, and settings–and if we are going
to examine relationship in the soul, we have to take into account the
wide range of its loves and inclinations. Yet even though the soul
sinks luxuriously into its attachments, something in it also moves in
a different direction. Something valid and necessary takes flight when
it senses deep attachment, and this flight also seems so deeply rooted
as to be an honest expression of soul. Our ultimate goal is to find
ways to embrace both attachment and resistance to attachment, and the
only way to that reconciliation of opposites is to dig deeply into the
nature of each. As with all matters of soul, it is in honoring its
impulses that we find our way best into its mysteries." Moore, Thomas.
Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship.
Harper Collins. 1994. p. 3. |
yes? |
No |
Yes |
|
Reveals effects on knowers and on knowns |
|
|
|
|
Explains how knower’s perceptual and musculature
patterns are modified |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Explains how known’s future probabilities are modified |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Shows the selective effects on evolution by knowledge
(e.g., breeding) |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Supports participatory knowing |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Is corrupting (e.g., If too many people know about it,
...it will be ruined.) |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Is dangerous (e.g., "If I tell you, I’ll have to kill
you.") |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Covers the importance of both secrecy and popularity
(e.g., "The best kept secret in the Bahamas") |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Orients knower in a humble position |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Cognitive science evidence and Extended mind evidence |
|
|
|
|
Works with neural nets |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Acquired in discrete, cognitive steps |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Allows for thinking as conceptually loaded with body
metaphors |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Includes knowledge located within the body (the hands,
feet know) |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Includes efficiency of distributed storage (e.g.,
memory in environment) |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Covers perception-action circuits that are
fundamentally both |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Fundamentally biological – Relations are
goal-oriented. Relations are capable of adapting. Relations can change
strength by processes of reinforcement. Relations have Bateson’s
property where differences make a difference so that both little
differences and even a lack of difference can trigger another
relational response. Relations are the basis of pattern satisfaction
which is the fundamental property of thinking according to the
philosopher Edward De Bono and which is a property of organisms. |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Dynamic systems theory – "The thesis here is that the
human brain is fundamentally a pattern-forming, self-organized
system governed by nonlinear dynamical laws. Rather than compute, our
brain ‘dwells’ (at least for short times) in metastable states: it is
poised on the brink of instability where it can switch flexibly and
quickly." Kelso, J. A. Scott. 1995. Dynamic Patterns: The
Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior. MIT Press. P. 26. |
no |
? |
Yes |
|
Ecological psychology
"From an ecological point of view the central nervous
system is not a commander of the body nor a storehouse of ideas; it is
something much more amazing: a system that serves to maintain an
animal’s functional contact with its surroundings. The units of this
system–neuronal firings–are not themselves signals, messengers, or
symbols of either ideas or actions, as previous psychological theories
assume. Instead, these units embody a population of variable activity
that allows for an animal’s perceptions and actions to be selected via
environmental constraints, and thus come to be adapted to the
environment even within the constraints of ontogenetic and behavioral
time."
"Selectionist accounts of neural processing have been
proposed before but none of these neural selectionist theories has
provided an account of the environmental structures involved in the
selection process. I have argued here that the relatively persisting
affordances of the environment and similarly persisting information
for those affordances constitute the environmental basis of the
neuronal selection process." Reed, Edward S. 1996. Encountering the
World: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Oxford University Press. P.
82. |
no |
? |
Yes |
|
Advantages |
|
|
|
|
Is context rich, facilitating specifics |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Reveals perceptual and self-interested biases |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Allows an understanding of bias/prejudice |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Allows social cohesion around best knowledge
"Dynamic objectivity aims at a form of knowledge that
grants to the world around us its independent integrity but does so in
a way that remains cognizant of, indeed relies on, our connectivity
with that world. In this, dynamic objectivity is not unlike empathy, a
form of knowledge of other persons that draws explicitly on the
commonality of feelings and experience in order to enrich one's
understanding of another in his or her own right. ... Dynamic
objectivity is thus a pursuit of knowledge that makes use of
subjective experience (Piaget calls it consciousness of self) in the
interests of a more effective objectivity." Fox Keller, Evelyn,
Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale, 1985, p. 117. |
yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Is context rich, thus allowing more specificity |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Clarifies the distortions and manipulations of mass
media |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Reveals the unfoldment of knowing |
No |
no |
Yes |
|
Allows for associative thinking |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Covers situated knowledge (specific knowledge of
particular people and circumstances; e.g., ethnic knowledge) |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Reveals culture as knowledge relational
clusters/attractors |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Fosters knowledge refinement without totalizing
control |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Draws attention to the inherent creativity of
knowledge |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Points at wisdom more than informational acquisition |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Does not promise final or ultimate points of view |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Does not push slight effects into fuzzy "spiritual"
dimensions |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Aspires to a planet covered in an opulent, enlivening,
creative noosphere of massive relational interplay rather than perfect
stasis |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Sees communication as the push and pull of relational
weaving rather than the parroting of perfections |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Carries the emotional bonds revealed in therapies |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Reveals the grasping attachments discounted in
Buddhism |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Opens to the receptive grace as demonstrated in
Christianity or Islam |
yes |
No |
Yes |
|
Sociological evidence |
|
|
|
|
Covers the knowledge as culture argument of
sociologists of knowledge |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Covers narrative and discourse theories where
knowledge ridges split us into groups |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Describes the complexification rather than
simplification of knowledge spread |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Transmitted by rituals and institutions |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Dispenses with philosophical "extra" categories |
|
|
|
|
Is integral to action (not knowledge plus agency) |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Is integral to clear thinking (not knowledge plus
logic, reason) (Use difference that makes a difference and pattern
satisfaction and weak links here in explanation) |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Is integral to integrity (not knowledge plus morality) |
no |
No |
Yes |
|
Is integral to aesthetics (not knowledge plus beauty) |
no |
no |
Yes |
|
Explains thinking by analogy/metaphor/association |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Is interactionist (neither constructivist nor
objectivist) |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Does not presume the "God’s-eye-view" |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Linguistic/semiotic compatibility |
|
|
|
|
Explains the relational gymnastics of rhetoric |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Allows for paralanguage (e.g., gestures, body
language, etc.) |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Allows for origin of signs (transitive reinforcement
between two bonds) |
No |
No |
Yes |
