The Helix of Human Cognition: Knowledge Management According to DIKW, E2E, and the Proposed View

Abstract

Motto: Attributing cognitive uncertainty and subjectivity of communicating entities to the communicated information is as delusional as attributing movements of the planet Earth to the Sun. Section 1: Introduction In some respects, our "age of information" resembles the pre-Copernicus era in astronomy. Cognitive problems of uncertainty and subjectivity that are experienced by communicating entities (informing entities and entities informed) are attributed to information they exchange. When information (a message or a communication) is viewed as anything "in form"--a pattern of physical states that plays a role only with regard to its form as a factor for operations (e.g., identifier, time, location in drone attacks)--it reminds us of blaming the messenger for the message, just as much of a delusion as attributing movements of our planet Earth to the Sun. Disparate views abound in scholarly literature. Frequently, a wide chasm separates views among academicians and the views of practitioners. This physical and pragmatic approach offers a platform and framework for verifiable reasoning of improved transparency and cohesion. Frank Blackler (1995), in his seminal study, outlined an alternative approach to knowledge. He considers the term, knowing, to be more appropriate, because he views knowledge as a complex process that is mediated, situated, provisional, pragmatic, and contested. Martin Fricke (2009) reviewed the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) Hierarchy as "part of the canon of information science and management." He identified a central logical error in DIKW, offered arguments that the hierarchy is unsound and methodologically undesirable, and offered some alternatives. About the same time, Jean-Baptiste P. L. Faucher, Andre M. Everett, and Rob Lawson (2008) embarked independently upon reconstituting knowledge management. These researchers move away from the hierarchical relationships among data, information, knowledge, and wisdom and offer a new model from Existence to Enlightenment (E2E) as a "cognitive system of knowledge" that redefines the scope of knowledge management. They criticize the current approaches, saying that they lack clear boundaries of knowledge, so they add Existence at the lower end and Enlightenment at the higher end. The latter two efforts partially complement each other, but both ignore most of Blackler's postulates regarding knowledge and the need for quality assurance and feedback in knowledge management, which is surprising in light of the nearly two-decade-long MIT Information Quality (MITIQ) Program (http://mitiq.mit.edu/MITIQ/MITIQ.aspx) that studies and promotes information quality. This paper proposes a further departure from the current way of thinking. On the one hand, one may accept some elements of their critiques: (a) Fricke's (2009) critique of the DIKW Hierarchy, and (b) the implicit critique by Faucher et al. (2008) of the hierarchy and the extension of the model by Existence (see Section 2). On the other hand, a physical and pragmatic approach to information is proposed, where data are purely human constructs and are subsets of information. Knowledge management must deal with a broad scope of information, data, and other elements of knowledge from the rigorous to the esoteric. This is a theoretical paper that presents the author's position in a positivist down-to-earth manner that views information and informing as natural physical phenomena that are interpreted pragmatically; it makes no references to ontology, about the nature of being, and to epistemology, which studies the nature of knowledge. Specifically, this approach: 1. views increments of understanding through the pragmatic lens of decision making to act 2. emphasizes the use of natural semantics of material pragmatic consequences 3. recognizes a gradual linear additive of the quantitative extension of understanding until a critical point is reached that triggers qualitative changes 4. …