More about Knowledge Systems

In my last posting I focused on knowledge systems in various institutions. I have been reading a great book, The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, which gives a fictional but I think very accurate picture of leadership during the battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. It exemplifies, almost as a side issue, an important part of the knowledge system of the military, army intelligence. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia depended on cavalry lead by Jeb Stewart for intelligence about the Union forces of the Army of the Potomac. Stewart, according to the book, went off on an extended raid into Pennsylvania leaving the Confederate army blind, a dereliction of duty so serious that a number of Confederate generals asking Robert E. Lee to court marshal Stewart. Of course the military has other knowledge systems such as those dealing with logistics, personnel, and facilities but military intelligence is crucial when the military actually engages in battle.

I guess, like many people, I first thought of knowledge systems in the context of formal organizations, and the prototypical models for large formal organizations are the military and the church.

I suppose that Catholics and Protestants differ fundamentally with regard to their knowledge systems: Protestants ascribe authority primarily to the bible and the individual's reading of the translated texts while Catholics ascribe authority more to the interpretations and analyses of members of the church hierarchy, especially of the Pope. I don't know much about Islam, but clearly the Koran is central to the theology of the religion, but fatwas issued by religious authorities also have a place in the Muslim knowledge system. Perhaps all the world religions reach their own balance between the authority of written sources and that of authorities who have special knowledge and legitimization within the structure of the religious organization.

Other institutions also have their own knowledge systems. Consider for example the market. A market is not a formal institution but has its own knowledge system. A stock market, for example, has a system which allows potential buyers and sellers to track the prices of stock transactions, as well as a system that helps buyers and sellers find each other. We also find ancillary systems such as the information provided by companies, information which is warranted by auditors and regulated by the government.

I would suggest that even the most informal organizations, such as communities, include knowledge systems. I suppose the social networks that are so important to the Internet exemplify such knowledge systems. There is both a way to find information about members of the community, and ways to communicate information among members.

In the process of social and economic development, then, development of the knowledge systems becomes critically important, yet seldom recognized function.

An Aside On Arab Knowledge Systems

Incidentally, I have just been reading "What Arabs Read: A Pan-Arab Survey on Readership" by Hany Hanafy. He is an Egyptian professor of English literature, and in the paper he comments on a 2007 survey of reading habits in Arab nations. He suggests that Egyptians read very little, and that a significant portion of their reading may be the Koran but that few can easily understand the classical Arabic in which the Koran is written. Moreover, Egyptians apparently write less than the world average, and thus much less than do people in the most text emphasizing cultures.

If people don't read and write they tend to lose the ability to do so. Think about the implications for the plethora of knowledge systems on which a society must depend. Communication is more oral and less written. It is more necessarily synchronous and thus less asynchronous, thus harder to arrange. Information may be more often lost or degraded when left to memory rather than written.

Moreover, the process triggers viscous cycles. Fewer readers mean less money for news media, resulting in more spartan bundles of content in those media. Fewer media means that those which exist are easier to control by coercive governments. Focus of limited reading on the texts of religious institutions means less focus on reading of knowledge sources within economic, political, and commercial institutions.

We know that education is a key to social and economic development, and Americans believe that the three R's are the key to education -- reading, writing and 'rithmatic. Thinking about reading and writing in the context of the plethora of knowledge systems that make modern society work helps to explain why.