The issue with thinking of Knowledge as Action, is that there isn’t something called, “Knowledge for the sake of pure Knowledge” anymore.
If we’re to be a bit more extreme, I’ll adopt a line of thinking from Sellars and Davidson. There is no neutral thing such as “knowledge for the sake of knowledge”, from which actions then happen. You always have an active action frame that dictates what matters and what doesn’t, in a way that imposes real consequences on the world.
Note: We could get into all the philosophical quarrels we want about these kinds of topics and the philosophy of science (I really want to write a philosophy post on Hasok Chang’s Inventing Temperature - thanks
adamShimifor the recommendation.), but again: this blog is about creating beacons.
One big reason for my retreating to STEM is precisely because I thought that the ambiguity and dependence on social and material capital in the real world was too “accidental”. We further reify this intuition with this word called “passion”, and boom, it’s a nasty ball of what is “right” versus “wrong”. It’s this weird desire to be decoupled as much as possible from possible barriers (e.g. I don’t want to be subject to needing other people to supplement my knowledge, for example).
The sort of “obvious” response is: well, duh, the real world is dependent on all of these accidentals, and you’re going to have to live with it. I think this is the optimal, rational response.
I want to explore: what if we tried to make a solitary knowledge base? Is this even coherent? If so, how can you enforce this properly, without flailing around?
I don’t have an answer to this. I’ve thought about this concrete problem for a few days now and have no response. I keep on running up against the dichotomy of this abstract fiction called “passion” and the weirdly pragmatic inversion of the real world, real people, and real action mattering. As opposed to this thing called “real knowledge”.
I think there is something here by dismissing the foundationalism required for “real knowledge”, yet not letting it collapse all into action and consequences. I mean, this is my blog, and I want to kind of stay alone here. But I don’t know what I want.
A start is “solitary knowledge bases”. I like the word “solitary” here, because in real knowledge bases, many practices are explicitly engineered around other people (an example in science: shared standards of reproducibility. an example in business: ownership, auditable processes). I think I want to minimize the dependency on other people as much as possible - where “people” has a wishy washy definition that needs to be explored more.