What Constitutes Knowledge?

John Samuel


What constitutes "knowledge"? What and how "knowledge" is generated require more explorations and discussions.

During various periods of history, there have been privileged paradigms of "thought process" "analytical modes" of thinking and expressions. How "knowledge" get constituted, generated, documented and conveyed, need to be understood from a historical, linguistic, technological and political perspective.

For example, stories, parables and poetry ( Jathaka Kathas to one line Taoist sayings to biblical parables) were also means of expressing knowledge at a given point in time. Alchemy was also a knowledge process at one point in time. So was theology. Many of the religious rituals also might t have had a knowledge-constituting function. A novel like Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov may give us more insights, illuminations and understanding than a well-argued and academically valued book on Existentialism, Human Behaviour and personality types.

So "critical thinking"( and critical theory etc) are only one of the many modes of thinking. Knowledge get constituted through language, communities, communications, signs, symbols as well through socialization. Various modes of thinking and expressions of such thinking can be involved in such process. The old carpenter could easily find the "sthanam" or "location" for a well and a house, without the aid of any modern technology or “formal knowledge”. His modes of thinking and expressions of thinking and technology may be different from that of a formally trained water-engineer.- who would use 'scientific" tools to understand "water-table" etc

Our own "privileged" notions of what constitute knowledge may be because of particular Institutional acculturation, 'disciplines", and socialization of knowledge through the modes and modules of "education" many of us have gone through. It may also because of our own preoccupations with the credentials, degrees, skills and language competence

. To a large extent we see what we are trained to see, what we are "socialized" to see, what we are "used" to "seeing" and "reading". We all may have delusions about our own "knowledge" and "competence"- because we are all "products" of particular institutional model of "education" and "knowledge process". It is also because of a particular "disciplinary legitimation'
. For example, for someone publishing a paper in the Economic and Political Weekly( EPW) is seen as signifier of "knowledge generation". For some other's it may be something else. This is also that we have our own "received" notions about who is an "intellectual" or who is a "scientist" or who is an "expert" etc- due to specific forms of legitimation and institutionalized power in various arena and domains of knowledge process.

One of my relatives is a top-rate mechanic- a school drop out. He has deep "critical" understanding and "knowledge" of what will work and what will not work and how to make an Ashok Leyland truck run in the top conditions. His cumulative understanding and knowledge of repairing - around 10 thousand vehicles a year- is amazing. I am almost sure that it is better than a top-end automobile engineer (who got a formal systematized knowledge- acquired in a particular manner).

The only difference is that modes of acquisition and modes of expressions of such knowledge are very different from each other. While the society at a given point in time "legitimize" on form of knowledge because of the received “statuses, other forms and modes of knowledge generation in every day world get ignored.

( This is a part of a discussion on Media and Knowledge in the Fourth Estate Critique – an active google discussion forum moderated from Kerala, India)