Knowledge

Research studies make knowledge claims and seek to contribute to ‘public knowledge’.

“The paper cannot be published in a research journal in its present form, as it does not make any new contribution to knowledge.”

Critical comment from a peer review of a submitted article.

Traditionally knowledge was considered to be: “Justified, true, belief” (Bhaskar, 1981: 128)

Bhaskar, R. (1981). Epistemology. In W. F. Bynum, E. J. Browne & R. Porter (Eds.), Macmillan Dictionary of the History of Science (p. 128). London: The Macmillan Press.

Yet this begs the question of who is to decide what is true, and how indeed we might know something is true!

From a post-positivist standpoint, even scientific knowledge is considered to be provisional, and to always be open to review in the light of new evidence.

From a constructivist perspective, knowledge is personal construction and there is no available external, objective, viewpoint form which to judge anyone’s knowledge as definitely true.

"Knowledge is not a given, the theory says, it is built up, and transformed, and – such was the keyword – transposed.  The wound was twofold. For some people, especially for teachers, the statement was a threat to the unconscious belief that the world of knowledge was, so to speak, homogeneous, isotropic and indefinitely unblemished – therefore unquestionable." (Chevallard, 2007: 132)

Chevallard, Y. (2007). Readjusting didactics to a changing epistemology. European Educational Research Journal, 6(2 ), 131-134.

"For constructivists, therefore, the word knowledge refers to a commodity that is radically different from the objective representation of an observer-independent world which the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition has been looking for. Instead, knowledge refers to conceptual structures that epistemic agents, given the range of present experience within their tradition of thought and language, consider viable." (Glasersfeld, 1989: 124)

Glasersfeld, E. v. (1989). Cognition, construction of knowledge, and teaching. Synthese, 80(1), 121–140.

Arguably, from this perspective knowledge reduces to beliefs. Yet we can know things without fully believing them either!

Plausible mental constructions?

“Perhaps an alternative term is needed for what researchers tend to be interested in when they explore students’ thinking ... a term for ‘things the student thinks might be the case’. Within that category there is scope for different levels of commitment and different levels of match to what might be considered ‘true’ by others. We might report that we are researching into ‘notions that the learner entertains as possible mental representations of some aspect of the world’ but that is a rather convoluted expression. Slightly less clumsy might be ‘plausible mental constructions’.”

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: Springer.

Communication of knowledge

From a constructivist perspective, knowledge cannot be directly passed on, but has to be represented and then interpreted.

Index of topics