Mare Nostrum

Knowledge and forgiveness

David Weinberger at KMWorld makes an excellent point about knowledge in a recent column:

Knowing is not something apart from forgiveness. Forgiveness is not merely something we do, external to knowledge. The knowing that matters requires forgiveness as its condition, just as it requires language and other people. This most obvious of facts sounds odd because we have so thoroughly demeaned knowledge by considering it to be mere content. But if it were only content, how could we distinguish the content that is knowledge and the content that is, say, propaganda or a joke? Knowledge is knowledge because it is embedded in a social system. Social systems are composed of humans. Humans are fallible, even when we happen to be right.

Therefore, there is no knowledge without forgiveness.

That might sound like a paragraph from a book on the philosopy of science, but Weinberger has a point that's important for collaboration, basic content services, and enterprise content management--in other words, the entire spectrum of activity around content, from the informal to the formal, from the free-form to the regulated. Every day, we're caught between the two poles of life that Max Weber (pictured to the right) described in "Politics As A Vocation" and "Science As A Vocation." At times, we have to get things done (politics). However, we also have to understand what we're doing, and share that understanding with others (science).

We face obstacles when we move along both paths. Not everyone wants to participate in a project, or think it's a good idea. Politically, we have to win them over. We also have to convince them that our understanding of the pertinent facts (how well our marketing program is working, what are the obstacles in getting our product manufactured at a lower cost, etc.). That step may require an admission that they were wrong in their cherished beliefs. What Weber says about teachers therefore applies to pretty much everyone in this position:

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts--I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts. I would be so immodest as even to apply the expression 'moral achievement,' though perhaps this may sound too grandiose for something that should go without saying.

We have to admit what when we're wrong, too. That principle applies whether we're preparing for an important presentation (collaboration) or preparing pharmaceuticals for clinical trials (enterprise content management). A shorter way of saying the same thing is, That's life. The tools you use can make your life easier, or harder. I hope that the ones we build make both politics and science easier.