Knowledge: Meaningand Facets
1. Processes involved in knowledge acquisition/generation/
construction; this eventually enters into the domain of ways of acquisition/generation/construction of knowledge; to be precise it is ways of knowing;
2. Forms of knowledge; since knowledge is sum of human understanding, there ought to be different forms of understanding or types of knowledge; and
3. Purpose of knowing/knowledge. The purpose of knowing is different in different contexts.
Therefore, instead of labouring in understanding or defining knowledge in its product form, it may be appropriate to focus on knowing – the process, which explicates and explains and, to a large extent, determine the meaning and also nature of knowledge.
Activity 1
1. Collect various definitions of knowledge, and analyze the differences and similarities among them.
2. Think of various goals and functions of knowledge in different contexts. Discuss it with fellow student teachers.
3. Organise a group discussion to deliberate on the various forms of knowledge and their uses.
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object). The knower’s engagement and relationship begins with his/her contact with to be known. The contact takes place through senses in a context – physical, biological, socio-cultural and others. In this context, the knower own initiatives for seeking knowledge employing different ways assume significance.
Activity 2
Select a piece of knowledge (e.g. physical exercise is good for health, one should drink a lot of water, etc.) from your daily life. Try to establish relationship between the knower and the known for the selected piece of knowledge.
wAys oF Knowing AnD ForMs oF KnowLeDge As described earlier, knowing is both a process and a product. As a process, it refers to the method of coming to know the phenomenon. Knowledge, as a product, is resultant of knowing–the process. Knowing happens through perception, reason, and emotion; and codification is done in the language. Similarly, there are means or source of every way of knowing. These sources are the knower’s senses and mind. Different sources of knowing construct different forms of understanding and different types of knowledge.
Activity 3
Select a piece of knowledge from your school textbook.
Reflect on the various processes or ways of producing that particular knowledge. Prepare a flow diagram.
Discuss it with others.
Sense Perception: The Beginning of Knowing
The acquisition of knowledge begins with the reception of external stimuli by our sense organs, which is immediately converted into the form of perception. Perception refers to having knowledge about a stimulus that impinges on our sense organs. Thus, knowledge starts with experience of the facts or matters through sense organs – individually and collectively – at the individual level or while participating in
Knowledge: Meaningand Facets
social activity. The ultimate source of all human’s knowledge, says Nathaneil Branden (1971), is the evidence of reality provided by the senses. Through the stimulation of various sensory receptors, the humans receive information which travels to his brain in the form of sensations (primary sensory inputs). These sensory inputs, as such, do not constitute knowledge; they are only the material of knowledge. Human’s brain automatically retains and integrates these sensations with the already available information in the brain – thereby forming percepts. Percepts constitute the starting point and base of man’s knowledge: the direct awareness of entities, their actions and their attributes. Since the sense-organs play vital role in the origin of knowledge, these are considered as ‘gateways of knowledge’. The Indian philosophy, in fact, refers senses as ‘gyanendriyas’. Each sense organ, namely eye, ear, nose, tongue, and skin, by the way of coming into contact with the object, provide ‘information’ about the quality/property of the object. Integration of these ‘discrete information’ about different qualities/properties of objects into meaningful concepts is the knowledge proper of that object. This integrating role, it is believed, is done by the mind.
Will Durant (1966), by conducting a journey into antiquity, brings up the irrefutable role of sensation in establishing not only knowledge but also in its validation (i.e.
the establishment of the truth). According to him, the senses are the test of truth. But all the senses; one alone may well deceive us, as light deceives us about colour, or distance about size; and only another sense can correct the error which one sense has made. Truth is consistent sensation.
But again, ‘sensation’ must include all that we learn from the instruments with which we enlarge and sharpen sense. The sensation must include the internal sense; our inward ‘feel’
of our own life, and mind is as immediate and trustworthy as any report, to that life and mind, from the sense-organs that variously touch the external world. There are other persons than ourselves in this world, and their senses—
and therefore their ‘truths’—will not always agree with ours.
Therefore, truth must be socially consistent sensation; and when more than one moment of time is concerned, it must be permanently consistent sensation. Sensation, however
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consistent may be, provide us with ‘information’ about the phenomenon; but it is the persistent reason that translates perception into meanings and concepts. Let us see how this process is constructed.
Learning Check 2
1. Describe the characteristics of sensation.
2. How is sensation converted into perception? Give an example from your real life.
Perception to Conception
The first requisite for building-up of knowledge is obtaining perceptions, that is, making observations arising out of various relationships with phenomena. Secondly, having entered into relationship with phenomena and obtained observations about them, we must go on to formulate judgments or propositions about them and their properties and relations.
All the animals have perceptions, and their perceptions contain definite, concrete ‘information’ about things. In the absence of those concrete things in the context, animals fail to ‘perceive’ things; this is what Adler calls ‘Perceptual Abstraction’, an abstraction that is possible only in the presence of an appropriate sensory stimulus and never in its absence. However, humans perceive things even in their absence due to their conceptual faculty. The unique ability to conceptualise things and express them in the form of ideas, propositions, and laws enables humans to create or generate knowledge. However, there is a basic difference in active and conscious role of the knower in the process of moving from sensation to perception and perception to conception. It must be remembered that the process by which sensations are integrated into percepts is automatic. However, the integration of percepts into concepts is a deliberate effort on the part of human beings. It is a volitional process that man must initiate, sustain and regulate. Thus, perceptual information is the given, the self-evident. On the other hand, the conceptual knowledge requires a volitionally initiated process of reason.
You may like to know the process involved in converting perception into conception and, thereby, resulting knowledge
Knowledge: Meaningand Facets
in some detail. The sense perception reproduces things as they immediately appear to sense organs. The senses give only particular pieces of information about particular things conditioned by the particular circumstances under which we perceive them. After that, due to conceptual faculty, particular properties, relations and motions of particular things, are unified to more comprehensive knowledge having their own laws of existence, change and interconnections. In the first stage, our knowledge expresses merely ‘the separate aspects of things, the external relations between such things’.
In the second stage, we arrive at judgments which no longer represent the appearances of things, their separate aspects, or their external relations, but embrace their essence, their totality and their internal relations. The passage from the first stage to the second stage involves, in the first place, active observation. In the second place, it does also involve a process of thought arising from observation—a process of sifting and comparison of observations, of generalisation and formation of abstract ideas, of reasoning and drawing conclusions from such generalisation and abstraction. The first stage of knowledge is ‘perceptual knowledge’, because it confines itself to summarising what is received by the sense organs, and the second stage, i.e. the conceptual knowledge, is concerned with making the perceptual knowledge rational, logical and comprehensive. To avoid the risk of over simplification, the whole discussion about ways of knowing and thereby resulting forms of understanding and types of knowledge is given in Table 1.
Table 1
ways of Knowing and Forms of Understanding
NoSl. Means of
Knowing Modes of
Knowing Forms of Understanding/
Type of Knowledge 1. Senses Experience Perception;
Description of facts of matter;
Perceptual knowledge;
Empirical knowledge.
2. Mind Reason Reasoning;
Rational Knowledge;
Conceptual Knowledge;
Causal knowledge;
Knowledge of Relationships;
Interpretative Knowledge.
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Activity 4
Select any school textbook. Organise a discussion in the class to identify topics, chapters, subjects that fall into different modes of knowing and different forms of understanding.
Learning Check 3
Mention the characteristics of conceptual knowledge.
Differentiate between sensory, perceptual, and conceptual knowledge.
Along with the above mentioned two fundamental sources, it is argued that emotion (such as joy, happiness, sorrow, etc.) is one more source/means of knowing that is situated within individual person. ‘Emotion’ also acts as means and contributes to the construction of knowledge. However, at the same time, critics consider that the emotions are obstacle in the pursuit of ‘real’ knowledge.
Language as Means of Knowing
Apart from the above mentioned sources/means of knowing, the culture or the social context into which a child is born, acts, in more fundamental ways, as the means of knowing. As knowing is a meaning making process, the meanings to the concepts are provided by the language of the society and the cultural context. You must have experienced that meaning of the same object or thought varies from one cultural context to another. For example, a person considered to be intelligent in one cultural context may not be considered so in another culture. Studies have shown that a person who speaks less but places the arguments in its right perspective is considered intelligent in Asian and African context. In contrast, the European and African cultures value the person who is fast and talks more. Thus, the very process of experiencing reality is facilitated by the cultural tools.
Therefore, in a distinct way from internal sources, culture acts as means of knowing and knowledge. This is also true in the case of school knowledge. Because, school knowledge is textual and begins with words; in a way it is worded world. It is primarily conceptual knowledge. In conceptual knowledge, words play vital role in understanding abstract meaning of
Knowledge: Meaningand Facets
concrete. In fact, says Nathaniel Branden (1971), “Words, enable man to deal with such broad, complex phenomena as ‘matter’, ‘energy’, ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ which no mind could grasp or hold if it had to visualise all the perceptual concretes these concepts designate.”
Activity 5
In your school, you will notice that children come from different backgrounds. Observe them and note down the variations in their conceptual understanding of same objects, events, or phenomenon.
It may be further noted that the ideas do not merely represent things in their immediate existence as presented to the senses, but represent properties and relations in abstraction from particular things. This is a product of the second signal system in human brain. Sensations are signal’s immediate connections with concrete particular objects. Words are ‘signals of the first signals’, and their reference is not only to particular, concrete things which are signaled by sensations, but to the things in general which produce sensations of a definite kind. Hence, by means of words, we can express general conclusions about things and their properties, and about how they are to be used. The second signal system, from which comes the use of words, does not and could not arise and develop as the personal or private possession of individuals. The second signal system, therefore, can develop only by the formation of a language, common to a social group.
Culture and Knowing
The preceding discussion highlights the role of social and cultural factors in knowing and construction of knowledge. You must have read that Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, described intelligence in terms of assimilation, accommodation, and adaptation. He viewed that cognitive development among children takes places through four stages. These are sensory-motor stage (0-2 years), pre- operational stage (2-7 years), concrete operational stage (7- 12 years), and formal operational stage (12+ years). However, Piaget was criticised for overlooking the effects of social and
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cultural environment in knowing and cognitive development among children. The stages of cognitive development observed by Piaget are not necessarily ‘natural’ for all children because, to some extent, they reflect the expectation and activities of children’s culture. Lev Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development suggests that our cognition is a function of both social and cultural forces. People use psychological tools—
language, signs, symbols, etc.,— to master the function of perception, memory, attention and so on. As each culture has its own set of psychological tools, one might observe cultural variations in the meaning attached to a situation/object/ event.