We all know what knowledge is, surely?
This may seem a foolish question, as surely we all know what knowledge is. Certainly in education, the term is part of the 'mental register' of terms commonly used in the teaching profession along with such other taken-for-granted terms such as 'learning', 'intelligent', 'thinking', 'concept' 'understanding', 'idea' and so forth.
Read about the mental register
As a constructivist, I would expect different people to have somewhat different meanings for such terms – each with their own nuances and associations. For some people intelligence is in essence the same as IQ, whereas others will have a much more encompassing meaning. It is quite possible for someone to have an idiosyncratic meaning for a term, and indeed to hold what might be judged an alternative conception.
People who work in education seem to share sufficient common meanings for such terms to usually be able to communicate effectively, so in everyday use individual nuance is not a problem. Yet if you ask people (teachers, graduate education students – I know I have tried it) to define some of these much used terms, it soon becomes apparent that they find it difficult to explain precisely what they mean by many mental register terms.
What is knowledge?
One traditional meaning for knowledge was those things a person believes to be true, and have good grounds to justify their belief, and which are actually true. On this definition, 'false knowledge' is an oxymoron there is only true knowledge – true, justified, and confidently committed to (believed) knowledge.
"The difference between the concept of 'knowing' and the concept of 'being certain' isn't of any great importance at all, except where "I know' is meant to mean: I can't be wrong."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This type of definition can only be used by some who is confident THEY know what is true so they can tell what is actually true and so can count as knowledge. Such omniscience is antithetical to the values of being a scientist – where all knowledge is considered provisional and open to being revisited in the light of new evidence or a better way of understanding the available evidence. Science teaching is not meant to about getting students to beleive ideas, but to understand (and ideally question and critique) them.
"Assume somebody points out that certainty is an essential part of knowledge in the sense that the meaning of the word 'knowledge' contains the idea of certainty. The answer is very simple: we have decided against the idea of certainty … We have thereby also decided against knowledge in the sense alluded to. If certainty is part of knowledge, then we simply do not want to know in this sense."
Paul Feyerabend
Often the science teacher is more concerned anyway with whether a student's ideas sufficiently match a curriculum model of some area of science – the version of science represented in a curriculum document which is often a considerable simplification of our current best guess at 'the truth'.
The learner's knowledge
Limiting knowledge to true, justified, belief makes the concept fairly useless to science teachers (if not an 'empty set') anyway. Teachers deal with students who are usually groping towards ideas they have been taught, perhaps juggling them against existing alternative conceptions.
A take on knowledge
Given these issues, I think a broader, more forgiving meaning for knowledge is useful in discussing teaching and learning:
"a learner's knowledge refers to what they believe to be the case or simply consider as a viable possibility. Their knowledge is the range of notions under current consideration as possibly reflecting some aspect of how the world is"
(Taber, 2013, 179)
That is how I tend to intend the term when I refer to someone's knowledge.
Works cited:
- Feyerabend, P. K. (1999/1961). Knowledge without foundations. In J. Preston (Ed.), Knowledge, Science and Relativism. Philosophical papers Volume 3 (pp. 50-77). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Taber, K. S. (2013). Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education: Developing representations of concepts, conceptual structure and conceptual change to inform teaching and research. Dordrecht: Springer.
