All,

I'd like to float an idea here for some feedback that emerged from work
I am doing on the roles of knowledge in autopoietic organizations
(autopoiesis ~ self-production; see
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~bill.hall/ManagingMaintKnowledgeinLargeEngiPro
jects.pdf;
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~bill.hall/OrgAutopoiesisAndKM(final).pdf).


Background and Context
----------------------

By way of some explanatory background for some ideas that might
otherwise seem quite weird, I am an evolutionary biologist by training
(PhD Harvard, 1973 - where one of my thesis advisors was Ernst Mayr, who
has just passed his 100th birthday and still going strong -
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic07-05-04.html#1). Although all of my
graduate work was in biology, I started university as a physics student,
and consequently I have had hands-on experience working with all
generations of computer technology back to the hand-crank and
electromechanical calculating machines.

I also spent two years in the last half of the 1970's studying
scientific epistemology and scientific revolutions (see
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~bill.hall/Hall1983/Hall1983.htm) to understand
communication difficulties I was having with peer reviewers who could
not understand my approach to writing, and who eventually accused me of
being "unscientific". Karl Popper's epistemology and Thomas Kuhn's ideas
regarding the semantic incommensurability of different paradigms were my
primary sources of understanding to explain the basis of my science and
the communication difficulties. Paradigms are tacit world views that
provide semantic frameworks for our vocabularies. They are learned
tacitly within a discipline so intradisciplinary verbal communication is
relatively unproblematic. On the other hand, where different paradigms
influence semantic meanings of words, interdisciplinary communication
can be quite difficult because the same words have very different
semantic connections in the different disciplines. The issue is
particularly difficult, because an individual(s) paradigms profoundly
influence thinking but are normally completely invisible in normal
discourse. Consequently, attempts to communicate between paradigms is
often so uncomfortable and frustrating that they easily degenerate into
name-calling and ad-hominem attacks.

For the last 23 years or so I have been working with computers in
industry as a technical communicator, documentation and content
analyst/manager, and most recently as a KM systems analyst. The last 14
of these years have been with Tenix Defence - Australia's largest
defence contractor (http://www.tenix.com).

Because I have no formal training in knowledge management or systems
analysis, I have always looked at organizations as if they were living
things adapting and competing in a changing environment (the biological
equivalents to systems analysis are systematics and ecology). In
practical terms, the "biological" approach to understanding
organizational knowledge has served me well, and accounts for my
interest in autopoiesis - first proposed as a definition for what it
means to be alive.

However, in 2000 I started to write a book on the coevolution of human
cognition and cognitive technologies in response to paradigmatic "holy
wars" raging on technical writing sites over the way new technologies
were changing the nature of documents and writing (Application Holy
Wars: A Fugue on the Theory of Knowledge -
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~bill.hall/WebAbstract/Default.htm). The first
2/3 of the book was very easy to write, but I encountered great
difficulty and came to a halt trying to map academic knowledge
management theory to my understanding of organizations and knowledge,
until I understood that the issues with understanding were primarily
paradigmatic.


Conflicting Paradigms in Knowledge Management
---------------------------------------------

Knowledge management forums suffer the same kinds of flame wars I first
encountered in the technical writing world, as exemplified by Mark
McElroy's post
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/kmci-Virtual-Chapter/message/5216
on censorship in KM. Because knowledge management is a new field,
practitioners have brought a large number of tacit paradigms into the
field to create a virtual Tower of Babel. When I realised that the
understanding problems I was having with the literature and a lot of the
hot air were based on paradigmatic differences, I tried to identify
them. In my first list I identified conflicting paradigms ("views",
"methodologies", "approaches") within at least four different fields
impinging on KM:

o Epistemology
- personal knowledge (Michael Polanyi)
- objective knowledge (Karl Popper)
o Organization theory
- resource view
- environment view
- autopoietic view
o How to analyse knowledge in the organization
- individual view
- social view
- critical view
- alternative views
o How organizations create knowledge
- cognitivist view
- connectionist view
- autopoietic view

This is confusing enough, but at least a few authors have recognised
that these kinds of differences exist and have made some attempts to
name their frameworks and compare them with other frameworks. However,
another even more fundamental paradigmatic difference has registered on
my consciousness in the last couple of weeks that has already helped me
considerably to reconcile many of the different paradigms listed above.


Realism vs Constructivism
-------------------------

Realism

The physical sciences, engineering, and much of biology have strong
"realist" approaches to the world - believing that an external reality
exists that we can sense and work with directly. This has been the
dominant world view for many centuries.


Constructivism (with postmodernist ramifications)

Constructivists believe that the world is constructed in our own minds,
and that the only reality cognitive individuals can know or respond to
is that which exists in their minds. Maturana and Varela's concept of
autopoiesis has provided a theoretical justification for this approach
[see http://autopoietic.net/; http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/].

Whitaker's web-based Encyclopaedia Autopoietica provides an invaluable
guide to Maturana and Varela's vocabulary and relationships to
constructivism. According to Whittaker

--------
'Constructivism' is the general label for an epistemological position
which (a) denies that individual knowledge directly accesses and
unequivocally mirrors an 'objective reality' verbatim and (b) claims
that individual knowledge is instead 'constructed' by the observer in
response to the medium, but in terms and on terms of the observer's own
constitutive features (e.g., modes of operation, conceptualizations,
conceptual capacities).
[http://www.enolagaia.com/EA.html#constructivism]
---------

Quoting from Kim, B. (2001). Social constructivism. In M. Orey (Ed.),
Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology:

---------
Social constructivism is based on specific assumptions about reality,
knowledge, and learning. To understand and apply models of instruction
that are rooted in the perspectives of social constructivists, it is
important to know the premises that underlie them.

Reality: Social constructivists believe that reality is constructed
through human activity. Members of a society together invent the
properties of the world. For the social constructivist, reality cannot
be discovered: it does not exist prior to its social invention.

Knowledge: To social constructivists, knowledge is also a human product,
and is socially and culturally constructed. Individuals create meaning
through their interactions with each other and with the environment they
live in.

Learning: Social constructivists view learning as a social process. It
does not take place only internally, nor is it a passive development of
behaviors that are shaped by external forces. Meaningful learning occurs
when individuals are engaged in social activities.
[http://www.coe.uga.edu/epltt/SocialConstructivism.htm]
--------------------

von Glaserfeld (http://www.oikos.org/vonobserv.htm), in discussing the
role of autopoiesis in radical constructivism stated that,

---------
The salient point in [the] closed circle [of autopoiesis] is the basic
condition that Maturana repeats so frequently, namely that what is
observed are not things, properties, or relations of a world that exists
"as such", but rather the results of distinctions made by the observer
himself or herself. Consequently, these results have no existence
whatever without someone's activity of distinguishing...., [T]he
cognitive subject can know only facts, and facts are items the subject
itself has made (Latin: facere). The observer, thus, arises from his or
her own ways and means of describing....

If everything said is said by an observer on the basis of his or her
operations of distinction, this must be considered valid not only for
particular domains of the experiential world but for everything we do,
think, or talk about. In Maturana's view of the world, one can request
neither external ontological foundations nor an "absolute" beginning....
"Foundation" in the ontological sense presupposes that one considers
access to an observer-independent world possible. Maturana denies that
possibility, and it is therefore quite consistent that he does not
specify an obligatory external starting-point, for this would be
equivalent to an "unconditional metaphysical principle" which would have
to be considered valid without experiential justification.
---------

Looking back over the feuds in the KM forums, most of the heat seems to
come from conflicts between constructionist and critical rationalist
(not quite simple "realism") approaches to knowledge - where people with
constructionist views of knowledge seem to have great difficulties
comprehending the need for fiduciary controls over their claims to
knowledge based on a theory of truly (as was so clearly absent in the
run up to America's unilateral declaration of war on Iraq).


Merging Critical Rationalism and Constructivism
-----------------------------------------------

To me, the most fascinating insight to emerge from comparing
constructivism and scientific realism has been that Karl Popper, in his
later works (1972 Objective Knowledge and after) established an
epistemological framework that when combined with the ideas of
autopoiesis (anticipated to some extent in Popper's discussions of
emergence) may actually bridge the gap between the two paradigms in a
way both sides can understand.

A key paper by a younger Chilean contemporary of both Maturana and
Varela, Hugo Urrestarazu (On Boundaries of Autopoietic Systems -
http://autopoietic.net/boundaries.pdf) provides a clearly logical
construction of autopoiesis based on a concept of "domains"
corresponding very closely to Popper's three worlds. In Objective
Knowledge, Popper distinguishes:

---------
...between two kinds of 'knowledge': subjective knowledge (which should
better be called organismic knowledge, since it consists of the
dispositions of organisms); and objective knowledge, or knowledge in the
objective sense, which consists of the logical content of our theories,
conjectures, guesses (and, if we like, of the logical content of our
genetic code) [my italics].
Examples of objective knowledge are theories published in journals and
books and stored in libraries; discussions of such theories;
difficulties or problems pointed out in connection with such theories;
and so on.
We can call the physical world 'world 1', the world of our conscious
experiences 'world 2', and the world of the logical contents of books,
libraries, computer memories, and suchlike 'world 3' [Popper's italics -
5: pp 73-74]

[There are] two different senses of knowledge or of thought: (1)
knowledge or thought in the subjective sense, consisting of a state of
mind or of consciousness or a disposition to behave or to react [i.e.,
the result of cognition], and (2) knowledge or thought in an objective
sense, consisting of [the expression of] problems, theories, and
arguments as such. Knowledge in this objective sense is totally
independent of anybody's claim to know; it is also independent of
anybody's belief, or disposition to assent; or to assert or to act.
Knowledge in the objective sense is knowledge without a knower: it is
knowledge without a knowing subject. [pp 108-109]
---------

Urrestarazu defines his domains as follows:

---------
o A "phenomenological domain" that contains interacting "dynamical"
objects forming the autopoietic entity and their activities. The
phenomenological domain corresponds precisely to the physical reality of
Popper's W1.
o The "'biological domain' in which living systems are observed as
biochemical dynamical systems capable of performing the conservation of
their organization in continuous interaction with their biochemical
environment" [p. 4] - i.e., the domain of "causal" and cybernetic
interactions. This corresponds to my understanding of Popper's W2, or
the domain of the subject's cognition.
o The "'languaging domain' [which is] the 'observer's point of view'
allowing him or her to talk about the existence of an observable
composite unit, clearly detached from its environment "... [where the]
observer's operations of distinction are ... hypothetical approaches ...
and what the observer says about his or her observations on the
interactions of the system with its environment are descriptions of what
he or she experiences in the phenomenological domain in which the system
behaves as such. It is the confrontation of the theoretical operations
of distinctions with the description of observational experiences that
allows the observer to claim that there is a formal correspondence
between his or hers languaging distinctions and his or hers descriptions
of observational experience"
---------

The epistemological significance of Urrestarazu's last sentence is
greatly expanded by Popper in his "tetradic schema" (P1 ? TS ? EE ? P2),
where P1 is a real-world problem faced by an entity, TS is a tentative
theory or solution put forth by the entity, EE is a process by which
errors (or the entity itself) is eliminated through trials against the
real world, and P2 is a restatement of the real world problems seen by
the entity as changed by the surviving solution. Popper generalised this
as his "general theory of evolution" [see Popper 1972: 244).

von Glaserfeld, himself, apparently without recognising the similarity
of what he wrote and Popper's epistemology also bridges the gap between
the critical rationalist and radical constructionist views of the world.
From the work previously quoted: "The function of cognition is adaptive
and serves the subject's organization of the experiential world, not the
discovery of an objective ontological reality." and from von Glaserfeld,
E. 2001. The radical constructivist view of science. Foundations of
Science. 6(1-3): 31-43 - "The most frequent objection [to
constructivism] takes the form of the accusation that constructivism
denies reality. But this it does not. It only denies that we can
rationally know a reality beyond our experience.]

Popper, in the later works also accepts a fallibilist view of our claims
to knowledge - in that it is impossible for us to ever prove the truth
(or falsity) of a claim. However, as discussed above, his evolutionary
theory of knowledge provides a logically valid and rational way to
connect our constructed views of the world to the genuine reality that
exists and to provide fiduciary controls to selectively eliminate
identifiably false views.


Conclusions
-----------

I believe that the conjunction of realist and constructivist
epistemologies enabled through the fusion of Karl Popper's evolutionary
epistemology of three worlds and autopoietic theory will provide a
foundation for developing a genuinely scientific theory of knowledge
management that will provide a solid theoretical basis for implementing
the kinds of KM programs espoused by KMCI.

I could go on, but I am running out of time.

I know the ideas presented are deeply theoretical, but I genuinely think
they will have practical applications. I am working on a proper academic
presentation, but would be interested to know if the abbreviated story
here makes any sense.

Regards,

Bill Hall
URL: http://www.hotkey.net.au/~bill.hall

Documentation Systems Analyst
Head Office, Engineering
Tenix Defence
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Phone: 03 9244 4820
Email:bill.hall@...
URL: http://www.tenix.com

Honorary Research Fellow
Knowledge Management Lab
School of Information Management & Systems
Monash University
Caulfield East, Vic. 3145
URL: http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/km/