The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
2nd Draft March 2005
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6.1.1 Personal
& Tacit Knowledge
6.1.2.1 Innis, McLuhan & Réalism Fantastique
6.1.2.2 Thomas Shales & the
Re-Decade
6.2.1 Codified
& Tooled Capital |
Epithet There
are four classes of idols which beset men’s minds. To these for distinction’s
sake I have assigned names—calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the
second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market-Place; the fourth,
Idols of the Theatre. Francis
Bacon (1560–1626) Novum Organum, Aphorism
39 (1620).
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1. Having split knowledge as a Monad into a Dyad of Science (by reduction) and Design (by construction) we are still left with knowledge as an abstraction. For purposes of a knowledge-based economy such abstractions must be reified, i.e., take a concrete and economically meaningful form. Form, according to Francis Bacon, is “the real or objective conditions on which a sensible quality or body depends for its existence” (OED, form, n, 4 c). TDI reveals that knowledge takes the form of a Triad, i.e., “a group or set of three (persons, things, words, attributes, etc.); three collectively or in connexion” (OED, triad). And, as with the Dyad, it is relatedness rather than opposition that characterizes the Triad.
2. In effect, I am defying Francis
Bacon’s warning in the epithet of this section by erecting new “Idols of the
Market-Place” (Bacon 1620). In summary,
knowledge takes form as a Triad of personal & tacit, codified and tooled
knowledge. These forms, in turn, transform
into a secondary triad of inputs to the economic process as codified &
tooled capital, personal & tacit labour and toolable
natural resources. Finally, these
knowledge inputs are transformed in the production process into a tertiary
triad of final outputs of a knowledge-based economy - the Person, Code and
Work. These final outputs satisfy the
elemental, undifferentiated, biological human need to know in all its
polymorphous expressions. I will now
examine each Triad – primary, secondary and tertiary - and then reconcile them.
1. To date discussion about the knowledge-based economy has focused on two forms: tacit knowledge and codified knowledge. There has also, in passing, been some reference to ‘local’ knowledge (Cambrosio & Keating 1988, 244) but for my purposes I will subsume it under tacit knowledge. Both tacit and codified knowledge are recognized as factors affecting the production function of firms and nation-states (OECD 1996; Malhotra 2000; ANSI/GKEC 2001). Both, however, are subject to widely varying interpretation in the hands of analysts with important policy implications for the knowledge-based economy (Cowan, David & Foray 2000, 212-213). [A]
Indeed,
references to ‘tacitness’ have become a platform used
by some economists to launch fresh attacks upon national policies of public
subsidization for R&D activities, and equally by other economists to
construct novel rationales for governmental funding of science and engineering
research and training programs.” (Cowan, David & Foray 2000,
212-213)
6.1.1 Personal & Tacit Knowledge
1. For my purposes, I define tacit
knowledge in keeping with the work from which the term itself derives, Michael
Polanyi’s 1958 Personal Knowledge: Towards a
Post-Critical Philosophy. It should be noted that the second 1962 edition
is referenced. This second edition was
published the same year as Thomas Kuhn’s first edition of The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions which went through three editions (Kuhn
[1962] [1970] 1996). While Kuhn
makes only one reference to Polanyi they share a critical concept:
incommensurability. For Kuhn, it is the
incommensurability of specialized scientific knowledge resulting in distinct
paradigms; for Polanyi, it is the incommensurability of tacit and codified
knowledge (M. Polanyi 1962a, 174). Fuller argues that many of Polanyi’s
insights were subsequently and inappropriately attributed to Kuhn. He concludes that “it is not hard to see that
Kuhn owed more to Polanyi than the appreciative footnote to his magnum opus, Personal
Knowledge, would suggest” (Fuller 2000, 140).
2. It
is clear from Polanyi’s usage that tacit knowledge is ‘personal knowledge’. Put
another way, personal is living knowledge, knowledge fixed in an individual
natural person. From whence it comes –
demonstration, experience, experimentation, intuition or reading – does not
change its personal nature, nor does the fact that some of it can be codified while
other parts remain tacit unexpressed or simply inexpressible in semiotic code
of any kind, e.g., words, pictures or numbers.
3. From a neurophysiologic perspective, personal knowledge comes in two distinct forms. The first is the matrix of neurons that fix memories (knowledge) as part of one’s voluntary wetware, i.e., that part of the nervous system subject to conscious control, specifically, to recall. Memories can usually be described and codified, i.e., spoken and transcribed into language or drawn as a picture.
4. The second is what Polanyi calls
‘tacit’ knowledge in performance fixed in reflexes (part of one’s involuntary
wetware) composed of “the connected set of nerves concerned in the production
of a reflex action” (OED, reflex, n,
6 b). Reflexes refer to the memory of
our limbs and digits of how to do something, e.g., ride a bicycle.
Etymologically it is relevant that the word ‘reflex’ derives from ‘reflect’
in the sense of ‘to remember’. Such
memories or knowledge is fixed in one’s body parts and nervous system. This can involve the fine practiced motor
skills of a brain surgeon or of a professional bricklayer. What they share is that such knowledge is
tacit, i.e., it is not subject to
articulation and codification - spoken, transcribed or drawn. It can be gained, however, through demonstration,
repetition and practice leading to enhanced performance at a task. It is, I argue, such ‘knowing by doing’ that
Polanyi means by tacit knowledge (M. Polanyi 1962a,
175). The classic example in the philosophies of science and technology is the
hammer (Heidegger 1927; Polanyi 1962a, 174-75)
which becomes transparent in use, ceasing to be other, becoming an existential
phenomenological extension of our self.
5. Ultimately, however, all knowledge is personal. A code or a work always leads back to a
person acting as agent to decode or activate it. Personal and tacit knowledge is also one-dimensional,
a Monad: it is known (and fully knowable) only by one mind. It is the sum of what an individual knows
and, if one is what one knows then personal and tacit knowledge defines one’s individuality.
1. Codified
knowledge, as a term, does not have a seminal source in current public policy
debate about the knowledge-based economy.
In general, it refers to the use of a written language, symbols (including
mathematical symbols), sounds or pictures to encode the knowledge of at least one
person into a material matrix that subsequently – distant in time and/or space
– is decoded and assimilated as personal & tacit knowledge by another human
mind. The important function of writing
is that “it makes communications possible without immediate or mediate personal address; it is, so to
speak, communication become virtual. Through this, the communalization of man is lifted to a new level”
(Husserl quoted in Idhe 1991, 46). In
this sense, codified knowledge is two-dimensional engaging at least two minds –
the author and a distant reader/receiver.
Such knowledge, however, begins and ends as the personal & tacit
knowledge of a single human mind.
2. Four
qualifications constrain this definition.
First, technically, speech qualifies as codified knowledge. In
general I will ignored it except when fixed, i.e.,
recorded in a material matrix - written or otherwise. Oral or pre-literate cultures, as will be
seen, create and maintain knowledge through the mnemonics of chant,
incantation, poetry and fable. In this
regard, the legal status of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as well as
communal or collective copyright are controversial contemporary intellectual
property rights issues on the world stage today (Chartrand 1995; Farrer 1994; Shiva 1993).
Second, codified knowledge is restricted to ‘human-readable’ (analogue)
as opposed to machine-readable (digital or binary) as well as the
machine-readable (Hood 2002) genomic ‘code of life’ or “autobiography of a species”
(Ridley 1999). I include under this new machine/molecule-readable
code emerging
sun-disciplines such as proteomics, organic nanotechnology and molecular
biology in general. The distinction I am
drawing is between semiotic or symbolic knowledge communicated from one human
mind to another versus the operating instructions of a machine or a
molecule. As will be argued below,
machine/molecule-readable code is a form of ‘soft-tooled’ knowledge. Third, my focus is primarily on the
matrix or communications medium rather than content. In this sense, to paraphrase McLuhan: ‘the matrix is the message.’ Fourth, codified knowledge is both an
intermediate producer good, i.e., an input to the production process,
and a final consumption good, e.g., as books, magazines, motion picture
and sound recordings, no matter matrix of fixation.
6.1.2.1 Innis, McLuhan & Réalism fantastique
1. Through his study of communications,
Innis identified a fundamental relationship between
culture and communications media or what I call the physical matrix carrying
the message (Innis 1950, 1951). A culture is limited in space, but extensive
in time, i.e. it has duration, to the
extent its matrix is durable, e.g.,
stone, clay or parchment. Alternatively,
a culture is extensive in space, but limited in time, to the extent its
communications matrix is non-durable but easily transported, e.g., papyrus and paper. Using this hypothesis Innis
explains the rise and fall of empires. Five
examples demonstrate Innisian inductive analysis applied
to the knowledge-based economy.
2. First, acidic paper – cheap
and light weight - has been used for more than 150 years. Books, newspapers, periodicals and other
written records fixed in this matrix, however, are now disintegrating in
libraries and archives around the world (The
Economist, February 27, 1987: B-1). Meanwhile,
parchment and vellum from the thirteenth century have not
‘self-destructed’. From an Innisian perspective, this implies that European expansion
and colonization of the last century and a half should have been short-lived
because the dominant communications medium was light and easily
transportable. In fact, the
3. Second, the dominant
communications medium of today, in spite of the Internet, is television that
spans the world in an instant, i.e.
it is extensive in space. Television
takes the average citizen around the world to spaces and places of which his
ancestors never knew. A question,
however, has arisen about television's impact on attention span. Some argue that children do not read as well as
before because their attention span has been reduced by TV, i.e. the medium, while extensive in
space, has reduced the psychological duration of time.
4. Third, the new communications
technologies have arguably made the entertainment industry the largest sector
of final demand in the knowledge-based economy. But this industry is peculiar
in a number of ways. First, the hardware
including direct broadcast satellites, fiber optics, magnetic recording
technologies, and the compact disc player are based upon silicon and iron
oxide, i.e., stone, that, theoretically,
should endure for more than a century. On
the other hand, their content such as television programs circle
the globe in an instant. Second, production
of the medium is separated from production of the message. Thus “home entertainment” hardware is
dominated by Asian producers while programming is dominated by the American
entertainment industry, i.e.,
5. Fourth, behind the scenes
lurks a new nervous system, a new matrix, encircling planet Earth – the World
Wide Web, the WWW or ‘the Web’, for short.
In less than a decade, the Web has affected economics, education,
entertainment, health care, information, news and the nature of work itself. Among the many significant characteristics of
the Web, I will consider three. First, the
Web is economically bifurcated into intermediate and final knowledge goods and
services. Thus the ‘consumer’ Internet
is partnered by the ‘B2B’ or the business-to-business Internet that globally
links producers to suppliers with significant cost reductions for firms. In
effect, it has reduced the transactions costs (Coase
1992) of business and shifted the borderline between the firm and the marketplace,
e.g., outsourcing. Second,
mechanical and electronic devices are increasingly being plugged into the
Web. From automobiles, ships, trucks and
trains to home air conditioning, computers, heating, lighting and security
systems to microwave ovens, refrigerators, toasters, toilets and TV sets are
all being attached to the Web permitting two-way communication not just between
people but also between machines. The
Web therefore carries both human-readable and machine-readable code.
6. Third, distribution costs on the WWW
approach zero as do costs of duplication, reproduction or copying. In
considering this new matrix and the nature of authorship (a primary source of
new codified knowledge), the noted copyright lawyer, David Nimmers,
observes that:
These
questions simply adumbrate in miniature the completely unanticipated vistas
that a world of interactive authorship might show us. Most, if not all, doctrines of copyright law
are destined to become inapplicable, anachronistic, or at least severely distended,
in such a brave new world. For the High
Priesthood of copyright to even contemplate such potentialities might require
the utmost in retooling. (Nimmers 1992, 521-522)
7. Fifth, contemporary recording
technologies provide artists, celebrities and ‘historic’ events with something
that only literary and visual artists enjoyed in the past - life after
death. This is a life not as a ghost on
another plane, but as a shadow on the silver screen. There may never again be a Richard Burton,
but his image, his voice, his body language and his performance will now endure
like the plays of Shakespeare, part of our social genetic, the extra-somatic
knowledge that is the stuff of culture.
It is this characteristic of the Arts, maintenance of a collective
linkage with the past, which distinguishes knowledge in the Arts from other
sectors of the economy. It is one reason
why Art has displaced religion in the secular West, i.e., it provides an alternative re-ligio, or linking back. In some sectors new knowledge displaces the
old forever, e.g., in the natural
& engineering sciences where Kuhn observed that normal science has, in
effect, no real history (Kuhn [1962] [1970] 1996). In the Arts, however, the images and words of
cultures and civilizations long buried by the sands of time enrich and inspire
contemporary creators (Boulding July 1986).
8. Innis’ colleague,
Marshall McLuhan, extended the linkage between medium
of communication and duration of civilization to his famous aphorism “The
Medium is the Message”. McLuhan recognized that the material matrix affects both
reception of the message and shapes the fabric of society itself. From the hot, focused matrix of the printing
press with its linear phonetic alphabet (the first engine of mass production)
to the cool, passive medium of television with its cascade of images and sounds,
McLuhan believes a major transformation in
consciousness, of knowing, is underway: “the transition to the electronic phase
of simultaneous or acoustic man” (McLuhan 1978).
9. A similar conclusion had been
reached in
10. With respect to their contemporary
world of the 1960s, Pauwel and Bergier concluded that exposure of children to
vastly expanded audio-visual examples of roles models and life opportunities coded
in motion pictures, radio and television programs would engender a psychic
mutation reminiscent of McLuhan’s “simultaneous or
acoustic mad”. Their final chapter is X Reverie
sur les mutants, or dreams about the mutants (Pauwel & Bergier 1960, 607).
11. A ‘simultaneous or acoustic’ mind is
not the focused linear consciousness of the previous literate or textual mind. Where the literate mind acts like the eye
focusing on detail, the acoustic mind is an ambient consciousness awash in
images and sounds and aware of context, gestalt and pattern. In a way, McLuhan’s
‘acoustic’ mind is similar to Jaynes’ bicameral mind
with its active right-lobe speech center as will be discussed below (Jaynes 1975). The
addition of moving images to the stock of codified knowledge has brought,
according to McLuhan, visual pattern recognition to
the foreground of contemporary consciousness.
This was recently highlighted in Congressional testimony by the U.S.
Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, when he
contrasted the psychological effect of seeing pictures of prisoner abuse at
It is the photographs that gives
one the vivid realization of what actually took place. Words don't do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was
cruel, that it was inhumane -- all of which is true - that it was blatant, you
read that and it's one thing. You see
the photographs and you get a sense of it and you cannot help but be outraged.
(Rumsfeld 2004)
12. Three examples demonstrate the effect
of the new communications matrix and its cybercode. First is the invention of the computer
icon, the window and the mouse by scientists at
13. Second is the transition in
1990 of the Internet (text-based) to the World-Wide Web (graphic-based) with
the first graphic ‘browser’.
In
a mere decade, strands of ‘The Web’ have been spun out from a handful of
obscure physics labs into seven million Web sites and tens of millions of
workplaces and homes around the world. It has catapulted the high-technology industry
to unimagined heights, given meteoric rise to electronic commerce,
revolutionized research, and made phrases such as ‘download’ and ‘home page’
part of everyday conversation. (Ottawa
Citizen, “Web revolution began 10 years ago tomorrow”,
12. Third is the launch of Windows
’95. With the mass shift from a
text-based DOS interface to graphics, home and office computing took off. In short order, Microsoft became one of the
largest business enterprises in the world and Bill Gates, the world’s richest
man.
13. It must be noted, however, that there
has been a ‘Kuhnian loss’ in transition (Fuller 1992, 272). Much of the new codified media does not
require literacy. Accordingly, with the
cultural shift to an acoustic space there has been an apparent decline in attention
span and literacy, as noted above.
6.1.2.2 Thomas Shales &
the Re-Decade
1. Perhaps the most succinct statements
of the impact of new forms of codified knowledge was
made by cultural critic Thomas Shales in his 1986 Esquire article “The ReDecade”. Through the new recording technologies,
especially video, consumers now have nearly universal visual access to the
styles and tastes of all historic periods, at least as presented on television
and in motion pictures. Does one want to
watch the gangster movies or musicals of 1930s or witness the French Revolution
or Moses on the mountain? Does one want to
replay it, time after time, or erase it to capture images and sounds of another
time and place?
2. This access to the fashions and
styles of all historic periods produced what Shales
called the ReDecade, a decade without a distinctive
style of its own, a decade characterized by the pervasive stylistic presence of
all previous periods of history. The
impact of this phenomenon on consumer behavior is, at least in the short term,
confusion and disorientation. Time has become a significant dimension of consumer
behavior, and, more importantly, of one’s codified self-image. As noted by Shales:
It
does seem obvious that here in the ReDecade ... the
possibilities for becoming disoriented in time are greater than they have ever
been before. And there's another thing
that's greater than it has ever been before: accessibility of our former
selves, of moving pictures of us and the world as we and it were five, ten,
fifteen years ago. No citizens of any
other century have ever been provided so many views of themselves as
individuals or as a society. (Shales, 1986: 72)
3. As a prequel, the art critic Robert
Hughes, in his book and television program entitled The Shock of the New (1981), pointed out that since the turn of the
twentieth century modern abstract painting has been increasingly concerned with
the fourth dimension, Time, in contrast with the traditional dimensions of
space. Thus abstract painting may be
viewed as a precursor to the increasing disorientation in time characteristic
of the ReDecade.
4. It is not yet clear what will be the
long term impact of the ReDecade on consumer
behavior. It is likely, however, that
there will be a growing market for historic fashions, period piece furniture
and reproductions as well as other consumer cultural durables drawn from
historical human cultures. In effect, Shales’ ReDecade is an “overlapping temporal gestalten” (Emery & Trist
1972, 24), i.e., the Present is an
amalgam of anachronisms of the Past, and given the contemporary prominence of science
fiction, of the Future. Durable goods,
however, constitute a different form of knowledge – tooled knowledge.
1. Two years before Thomas Shales published “ReDecade”, William Gibson (1984) published his first novel, Neuromancer. This Hugo Prize winning science fiction novel
changed the way the computer/communications industry saw itself and the way the
public saw the industry. This was eleven
years before Windows ’95. Using a manual
typewriter Gibson coined terms like ‘cyberspace’ and created a chillingly
prescient vision of what would become the Web which as a literary genre became
known as ‘cybergothic’. From my perspective, however, he defined ‘cybercode’, my term for the way knowledge - as text,
graphic icon, sound and moving image – would eventually be codified and
presented on the WWW or world-wide web. Gibson
followed up and extended this vision with Count
Zero (1986), Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
and Virtual Light (1993). His most recent novel, appropriately for my
purposes, is Pattern Recognition
(2003). Set in the present, it is not
science fiction but rather a novel about contemporary ‘cool hunting’,
mysterious ‘footage’ on the Web and the global design and marketing industry as
a whole. Again, Gibson addresses code,
but this time fashion code.
2. My subsequent text will be punctuated,
from time to time, with references to Gibson’s Neuromancer vision of cybercode and his futuristic projections about intellectual
property. In the global knowledge-based
economy, Gibson’s vision is film noir,
not documentary. Nonetheless, it
portends a possible future for reasons more fully discussed under 9.0 Competitiveness. From a Canadian perspective, however, I see
Gibson as the new McLuhan.
1. The term ‘tooled knowledge’ is not currently part of the debate about the knowledge-based economy. The term itself appears in the classic The History of Economic Analysis, wherein Joseph Schumpeter refers to economics as “a recognized field of tooled knowledge” (Schumpeter 1954, 143). It is in this sense that a former professor, Giles Paquet, called economists tool-bearing animals with their heads as toolboxes. My usage, however, will be quite different. I will be dealing not with manipulation of ideas but rather with knowledge tooled into matter, or knowledge embodied as physical functioning things. My usage will also, however, be different from that in the philosophy of technology including Baird’s ‘thing knowledge’ (Baird 2004) and Idhe’s ‘instrumental realism’ (Idhe 1991). My focus is economics, i.e., on satisfying the unlimited human want, need and desire to know with limited means or resources. Its objective or lens is the final consumer, not the scientist, technologist or instrument-maker. In common with the philosophy of technology, however, there is a sense of tooled knowledge as three-dimensional connecting one mind to another through the hands, e.g., through reverse engineering. This is in keeping with Aldrich’s observation that: “technological intelligence does not come to rest in the eye or the ear. Its consummation is in the hand” (Aldrich 1969, 382).
2. I restrict myself to works of
technological rather than aesthetic intelligence because aesthetic works are
essentially semiotic or symbolic in nature intended to be decoded by another
human mind. Tooled knowledge, on the
other hand, is functional taking two-related forms: ‘hard-tooled’ and
‘soft-tooled’. Hard-tooled knowledge
breaks out into three types: sensors, tools and toys. Soft-tooled breaks out into four: computer and
genomic code, mathematics, standards and techniques. I will examine each by form and type.
1. By ‘hard’ I mean tooled knowledge as a physical artifact, specifically an artifact designed to:
· monitor activity in the world of matter and energy (a sensor) or;
· manipulate, shape or animate matter and energy (a tool or toy).
2. In summary, the purpose of sensors is measurement; the purpose of tools is manipulation; and, the purpose of toys is pleasure. Sensors and tools are located on the production-side of the economic equation; toys, on the consumption-side. Sensors and tools are utilitarian, i.e., they serve a higher purpose; toys are non-utilitarian, i.e., they have no purpose other than themselves. Collectively, sensors, tools and toys constitute ‘instruments’. Accordingly, the term ‘instrument’ should be read in context.
3. Another distinction must be made between ‘wetware’ and ‘dryware’. Living things can, using genomics or traditional cross-breeding, be designed to serve a utilitarian purpose, e.g., gene therapy (BBC News April 2002), or, a non-utilitarian one, e.g., genetically engineered fish that glow in the dark (Shaikh 2002). These constitute wetware, i.e., ‘living’ tooled knowledge. Traditional instruments are constructed out of inanimate matter, usually minerals, and constitute dryware. Both, however, are hard-tooled knowledge. Using this distinction, plastics are a cross-over, i.e., they are organically-based but generally derived from non-living sources, e.g., petroleum. The borderline between wetware and dryware is becoming increasingly obscure as the sciences of genomics, proteomics and nanotechnology mature. Thus, in theory, the genetic code used by marine organisms to produce biosilicates may eventually be used to make silicon chips for computers.
4. The three – sensors, tools and toys – can, from time to time, be one and the same. For example, a sensor may be active or passive. An active sensor monitors changes in nature by initiating such changes, e.g., a synchrotron or subatomic particle accelerator. Thereby the sensor becomes a tool. Furthermore, to the degree that normal science involves puzzle solving (Kuhn 1996, 35-42) then scientific instruments can, with no disrespect, be considered playthings or toys of scientists. Play-like behaviour is a generally recognized characteristic of creativity in all knowledge domains. In this regard, the search for knowledge-for-knowledge-sake is non-utilitarian in purpose, i.e., it has no objective other than itself. To this extent, all scientific instruments can be considered toys. In effect, scientific instruments are designed to produce new knowledge which, to the scientist, is like the pleasure derived from a toy. As will be seen, this relates to the subordination of Sensation to Reason as in Timothy Findley’s “intellectual priapism” (Findley 1999, 258).
5. Similarly, new scientific instruments – the foundation of experimental research – may subsequently become industrial tools used in economic production, e.g., the scanning electron microscope, ion implantation and the synchrotron (Brooks 1994, 480). They may also become toys intended for amusement or entertainment, e.g., the cathode display tube developed to monitor laboratory experiments became a standardized tool of science and industry and then evolved into the television set in the family room.
1. As a sensor or ‘probe’ (M. Polanyi 1962a, 55), tooled knowledge extends the human senses of touch, taste, sight, sound and smell. It monitors the world of matter and energy above (macroscopic), at (mesoscopic), or below (microscopic) the threshold of our native senses. The information or ‘readings’ generated, when organized, structured and systematized, become codified knowledge that can be shared as a statement of objective, empirical fact.
2. To the degree they measure phenomenon above and below the threshold of our natural senses, scientific instruments realize a Platonic ideal: “belief in a realm of entities, access to which requires mental powers that transcend sense perception” (Fuller 2000, 69). Furthermore, the ‘language’ of sensors realizes another ancient Greek ideal, that of Pythagoras, by reporting nature by the numbers. My term ‘sensor’ roughly corresponds to Baird’s ‘measuring instruments’ (Baird 2004).
3. The effects of sensors is profound, for example: “the idea of a world governed by precise mathematical laws was transmitted… through Galileo’s and Huygen’s conversion of the mechanical clock into an instrument of precision” (Layton 1974, 36). Or, consider the impact on our “image” of the world (Boulding 1956) of Galileo’s innovative use of the telescope resulting in his “artificial revelation” (Price 1984, 9). [B]
4. To the degree that the natural sciences are about acquiring knowledge of the physical world then, to that degree, all scientific instruments are sensors, i.e. their primary purpose is to monitor, not manipulate. That scientific instruments embody knowledge is alluded to by Shapin when he reports:
much empirical work has addressed the embodied nature of
scientific know-how and the embodied vectors by which it travels, whether that
embodiment is reposed in skilled people, in scientific instruments, or in the
transactions between people and knowledge-making devices(Shapin 1995, 306).
With respect to the later category, he notes the emergence of new non-human actors including cyborgs – part human and part machine (Shapin 1995, 313).
5, The
history, philosophy and sociology of science are replete with allusions to the
role of scientific instruments.
Experimental science was, is now, and probably always will be, rooted in
tooled knowledge (Price 1984). For
example, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
will begin operation in 2006 while the recently upgraded Fermi National
Accelerator Lab’s “Tevatron” is already sensing
nature at levels beyond the sensitivity of previous instruments. The ‘Canadian Light Source’ synchrotron at
the
6. It has also been argued that new
sub-disciplines, i.e., new categories
of knowledge, within the natural sciences and related technological disciplines
emerge in response to new instruments (Price 1984). [C] This conclusion is reinforced by
7. Beyond the knowledge embodied in scientific sensors and the new knowledge they generate, their social and metaphysical importance lays in the fact that they generate consistent objective evidence about the state of the physical world. Such evidence is objective in the sense that collection is not mediated by a human subject. Instruments extend the human senses beyond the subjectivity of the individual observer. Once calibrated and set in motion a clock – atomic or otherwise – will tick at a constant rate per unit time until its energy source is exhausted. Again, such measurement is ideally achieved without mediation by a human subject.
8. In this regard it is important to note that sensors also pattern the modern way of life. The simple household thermometer is an example. It tells us when we have a fever and when to seek medical intervention. In turn, a medical thermometer is used to monitor the progress of such intervention (Shapin 1995, 306-307). [E] Put another way:
By encapsulating knowledge in our measuring
instruments, these methods minimize the role of human reflection in
judgment. They offer a kind of
“push-button objectivity” where we trust a device and not human judgment. How many people check their arithmetic
calculations with an electronic calculator?
... Putting our faith in “the objectivity” of machines
instead of human analysis and judgment has ramifications far and wide. It is a qualitatively different experience to
give birth with an array of electronic monitors. It is a qualitatively different experience to
teach when student evaluations – “customer satisfaction survey instruments” -
are used to evaluate one’s teaching. It
is a qualitatively different experience to make steel “by the numbers,” the
numbers being provided by analytical instrumentation. (Baird 2004, 19)
1. If sensors extend the human senses then tools extend the human grasp. They are extensions of our own bodies “forming part of ourselves, the operating persons. We pour ourselves into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence” (M. Polanyi 1962a, 59). Tools are the means by which humanity animates nature. They move and change nature to suit human purposes and ends. Empirically, before art, culture or language, there was tool making. Tools provide primae facia evidence of the arrival of our species: artifacts left by ancestors some two and a half million years ago (Schuster 1997).
2. Using its opposable thumb, humanity reached out to shape the material world to compensate for its elemental frailty – no great size, no claws or talons and tiny canine teeth. To eat and survive predation, the human brain reached out with finger-thumb coordination to grasp and shape parts of the physical world into tools with which to then manipulate other parts, e.g., to kill game or plant seeds. It appears, from the fossil record, that the opposable thumb preceded, and in a path-dependent manner contributed to, the subsequent and extraordinarily rapid evolutionary growth and development of the human brain itself.
3. In this regard, the word ‘concept’ derives from the Latin concipere ‘to conceive’ that in turn derives from ‘to take’ and, as I understand it, colloquially, meant ‘to grasp firmly with the hand’ or, in Sicilian, ‘to steal’. Thus a concept is a grasping and manipulation of the world – inner or outer – using mental tools, the evolutionary descendents of finger and thumb exercises of prehistoric humanity.
4. As noted, matter is tooled to extend the human grasp of the physical world to shape and mold it to serve human purposes. In this sense tools have an in-built aim or purpose, i.e., they are teleological (Layton 1988, 90-91). We recognize a tool by its purpose (M. Polanyi 1962a, 56). [F] Or, put another way, a tool is created when “a function couples purpose with the crafting of a phenomenon. A function is a purposeful phenomenon” (Baird 2004, 123).
5. The teleological nature of tooled
knowledge is atavistic, an epistemological throwback to a time before the
Scientific Revolution when medieval animism ruled, i.e., when objects and natural phenomena were believed possessed of
purpose. This was effectively displaced
by the mechanistic causality characteristic of the episteme (Foucault 1973) of
the first Scientific Revolution of the mid-17th century which provided a
“description of reality in terms of a world of precision, free of all
considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning,
and aim” (Layton 1988, 90). While this displacement is appropriate for
understanding the natural world, it is inappropriate in the world of human-made
things, that is, in “the sciences of the artificial” (quoting Herbert Simon Layton 1988, 91).
6. Purpose and value are inherent in a tool. It is designed to do a job; it is not valued in-and-of-itself, like a work of art, but rather for what and how well it can do that job. The knowledge required to make a tool becomes embedded in it, i.e., it becomes tooled knowledge. For example, if it is intended to do a job in the weightlessness of outer space then its shape, size and tolerances will be very different than if designed to do the same job under conditions of terrestrial gravity or the enormous pressures of the ocean’s depths.
Material agency is revealed in our mechanical contrivances… Much as we
control concepts through the exercise of our literary skills, we control
material agency through the exercise of our making skills. (Baird 2004, 47)
7. Tools are located on the production-side of the economic equation. They are intermediate goods used to produce final goods and services that are purchased by consumers (excepting the handyman). In this sense, they are utilitarian in that they are valued for what they can do, not for what they are in-and-of-themselves.
8. A final distinction can be drawn between specific purpose and general purpose tools, or what David calls ‘general purpose engines’ (David 1990). A specific purpose tool has but one purpose, e.g., a hammer or a drill press. A general purpose tool is one that has multiple applications and which “give rise to network externality effects of various kinds, and so make issues of compatibility standardization important for business strategy and public policy” (David 1990, 356). Modern general purpose tools also generate “techno-economic regimes” involving a web of related installations and services. Such is the case, for example, with the internal combustion engine. When embodied in an automobile it requires manufacturing plants, refineries, service stations, parking lots, car dealerships, roads, insurance, et al. In temporal succession, general purpose tools include the printing press, steam engine, electric dynamo, internal combustion engine, radio-television, the computer and genomics.
9. Such techno-economic regimes display
path dependency. Specifically, once introduced
all subsequent additions, changes and/or improvements to a general purpose
engine must conform to existing standards.
The example of 110 versus 220 voltage used in
1. If sensors are for measuring and tools are for manipulating then toys are for pleasure. Sensors and tools are located on the production-side of the economic equation. They serve as inputs to the production of final goods and services. In the case of sensors, monitoring information may be used either as an input to the production of knowledge or the production of other goods and services. Toys are final goods and services. They are appreciated for their own sake, not for any contribution to the production of other things. In this sense, toys are non-utilitarian, pleasure-giving devices. This includes the pleasure of learning, i.e., knowledge as a final consumption good. It also includes the aesthetic experience of works of art. They are appreciated for their own sake; they are physical artifacts that embody the knowledge of the artist in making an artwork ‘work’. I am, however, compelled to use the word ‘toy’ because there appears to be no other word in the English language denoting a work valued in-and-of-itself with no other purpose or utilitarian value. One plays with a toy; one works with a tool.
2. If, as according to Bentham, pleasure is the only objective of life then tooled knowledge, like personal & tacit and codified knowledge, must reflect the full spectrum of human wants, needs and desires subject only to cultural, legal and financial constraints. Aesthetic distancing, morality and scientific objectivity are not epistemological constraints in economics. As toys, tooled knowledge has extended the human playpen to the globe and beyond; it has extended our sense of time and place beyond the dreams of previous generations. In this sense, it is ‘natural’ that one of the first and most successful of the first adapters of new computer/communications technologies such as the video recorder and the WWW was, and is, the pornography or ‘XXX’ industry.
1. An instrument, as a physical artifact, must be activated or otherwise used by a human operator if it is to fulfill its function. Operation of an instrument – sensor, tool or toy – is generally associated with tacit and/or codified knowledge in the form of computer and genomic programs, mathematics, standards and techniques. In summary, computer programs are machine-readable code used to operate many modern instruments – sensors, tools and toys. Genomic programs are molecular/machine code read by machines to analyze and/or synthesize biological compounds and living organisms (Hood 2002). Standards are codified knowledge physically designed into an instrument defining its operational properties, e.g., a 110 or 220 volt electric razor. Mathematics is the language in which standards are set and in which most instruments are calibrated. Techniques are personal & tacit and/or codified knowledge defining the manner of use and application of an instrument to attain its intended purpose.
2. Soft-tooled knowledge is tied to hardware. In effect, one has no purpose (software) and one has no function (hardware) without the other. Soft-tooled knowledge exists on both sides of the economic equation – consumption and production.
6.1.3.2.1 Computer & Genomic Programs
1. The purpose of tooled knowledge is manipulation of the natural world. A computer program, while codified and fixed in a communications medium, is intended to be decoded by a machine not by a human mind. It is intended to manipulate the flow of electrons in a circuit. In turn, such circuits may activate other machines and/or machine parts, e.g., industrial robots in steel mills, auto plants and other fabricating industries. The distinction between ‘machine readable’ and ‘human readable’ forms of expression fuelled the 1970s debate about software copyright (Keyes & Brunet 1977). Recognition of software copyright in 1988 represented a break with a long legal tradition restricting copyright to ‘artistic works’ (Chartrand 1997a) or what can be called semiotic works. For my purposes, this distinguishes computer programs as soft-tooled, i.e., machine-readable rather than codified human-readable knowledge.
2 Similarly, a genomics program, while codified and fixed in a communications medium, is intended to be decoded by machines and molecules, not by a human mind. It is intended to manipulate the chemical bonds of atoms and molecules to analyze or synthesize biological compounds and living organisms with intended or designed characteristics. Such code is being used by a rapidly increasing range of scientific instruments (Hood 2002). Compared to the cost of ‘Big Science’ in physics, instrument costs in genomics are relatively low while instrument capabilities are accelerating rapidly.
3 As with computer program copyright, legal questions are arising about genomic copyright. There are two levels of concern. First, copyright logically adheres to genomic databases as documentation - hard-copy, electronic or fixed in any future matrix. Second, copyright may, or may not, be determined by the courts to adhere to gene segments themselves. The question in law appears to be originality. Naturally occurring sequences according to some observers are facts of nature and hence copyright cannot adhere. In the case of original sequences, however, i.e., those created by human ingenuity, a.k.a., artificial, there appears no reason for copyright not to adhere to genomic programs as they do with computer programs. Whether this is appropriate is another question. Restricting copyright to semiotic works, however, is my personal bias.
4. Genomic programs, however, involve not just sensors and tools but also toys. In the fine arts, one author - David Lindsay (Lindsay 1997) - has tried to copyright his own DNA with the U.S. Copyright Office (without success) and mounted a web page: “The Genome Copyright Project’. Since his initial effort in 1997 a private firm - the DNA Copyright Institute – has appeared on the world-wide web (DNA Copyright Institute 2001). It claims to: “provide a scientific and legal forum for discussion and research, as well as access to valid DNA Profiles, among other Services, as a potential legal tool for deterrence and resolution of situations where there is suspected DNA theft and misappropriation.”
5. Steve Tomasula speculatively writes about the rabbit Alba, the
first mammal genetically engineered as a work of art in “Genetic Arts and the
Aesthetics of Biology” (Tomasula
2002). He compares incipient gene artists with Marcel Deschamp
(1887-1968). While the above remain speculative, the fact is that Mike Manwaring,
a graduate student at the
1. The Pythagorean concept of a cognate
relationship between mathematics and the physical world is, perhaps, the single
most important inheritance from the ancient world reflected in the material
well being of contemporary society. It
finds fullest expression in ‘the calculus’, i.e., the mathematics of motion and
change through time. The following is a
short history of its development. As
will be seen, the ability of a knowledge domain and/or its component
disciplines to achieve mathematical articulation tends to raise its epistemological status from a Mechanical to a Liberal Art.
2. If the computer represents a ‘general purpose engine’ (David 1990) then mathematics is a general purpose concept, i.e., a mental general purpose tool. It serves as the most effective interface yet discovered (or invented) between mind and matter, between user and instrument, between human readable and machine-readable forms of expression. In this regard, it is important to remember that music was the only ‘fine art’ admitted to the classical and medieval Liberal Arts curriculum. Balance, harmony, proportion and resonance are critical mathematical elements that Pythagoras expressed with the music of a string – halves, quarters, thirds, fourths, fifths, etc. All are audible properties of a string. The conceptual metaphor is one employed in a number of disciplines. For example, in cosmology, Jeff Weeks and his team recently explained fluctuations in readings about the physical dimensions of the universe by comparing them with the sound waves of musical harmonics (Roberts 2004).
3. For the
ancient Greeks (and the humanist Renaissance), balance, harmony, proportion and
resonance were everything. They capture
the ancient Greek meaning of kosmos – the right placing of the multiple parts of the
world (Hillman 1981,
28). They are inherent in the music of
the spheres, i.e., astronomy, and in
the design of cities (Steiner, 1976). [G]
4. Similarly in temples and public
buildings, the ancient Greeks used the proportions of the human form for their
columns. According to Marcus Vitruvius, writing in the 1st century before the Common
Era, the Doric column represents the proportions of a man; the Ionian column,
those of a mature woman; and, the Corinthian column, those of a young maiden (Vitruvius 1960, 103-104).
Thus in ancient
5. But beyond the human form lay the
universal forms of the circle, square, triangle and variations on their themes,
e.g., the parabola. Captured in
6. After the fall of
7. In the early 15th century, the
mathematical laws of perspective were discovered (or rediscovered) by the
architect Filippo Brunelleschi
(1377-1446). In accounting, innovation
of the double entry ledger by Luca Pacioli (1445-1515)
facilitated the commercial revolution first in the
8. Beyond the astronomical mathematics
of Kepler and Galileo (the later taking the
telescope, invented by Hans Lipperhey in 1608, and
changing the way we see the universe), it was canon fire that provided the
terrestrial impetus for development of a true mathematics of motion. In fact, the mathematics of cannon fire (and
its patronage) provided the opportunity for many of the experiments of Galileo
(Hill 1988) which are generally recognized as the beginning of the first Scientific
Revolution. Mechanics began to drive
mathematics.
9. In the 1670s, what was previously
known as ‘the geometry of infinitesimals’ achieved a breakthrough with the simultaneous
invention of ‘the calculus’, independently by
1. A quarter of a century before Adam Smith published his analysis of the division and specialization of labour in The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1776), the French military changed its weapons purchasing policy imposing strict standards for the production of parts and final weapons systems, e.g., artillery (Alder 1998). Standards were codified into mechanical drawings and mathematically defined tolerances subject to various physical forms of testing. Previously production was a craft activity with each part and weapon a unique artifact. This change meant that parts became interchangeable, e.g., bayonets. This had a significant impact on the performance of the French revolutionary armies of Napoleon (Alder 1998, 536). [H]
2. Standardized parts production was
the first step towards ‘mass production’. It was followed early in the next century by
introduction, in
3. It was not in
4. The American System, however, was
not restricted to the military. It was
extended to most manufacturing industries in the
5. If standardized parts and the assembly line began mass production, it was innovation of “techno-economic regimes formed around general purpose engines” (David 1990, 355) that completed the transformation of traditional into modern life-styles. The steam engine, railway, internal combustion engine, electric generator and computer require standardization not only of internal components but also external connectors (Alder 1998, 537). [L] As previously noted, general purpose tools, once innovated, establish a ‘path dependency’, i.e., standards and specifications established at the onset become ‘locked in’ and all subsequent improvements, innovations or adjustments must comply. In a manner of speaking, the path dependency of general purpose tools corresponds to ‘tradition’ for the medieval craftsman who inherited and was limited by ‘best practices’ established in a distant past.
6. The importance of standards in the production of stand-alone artifacts and technical networks is recognized in an emerging sub-discipline called metrology (O’Connell 1993). To anticipate discussion of technique, such networks produce what O’Connell calls ‘societies’ or what I call ‘technical subcultures’ including:
“a society of
health care facilities that share the same measure of body composition, a
society of laboratories that share the same electrical units, and a society of
weapons that share the same electrical and dimensional standards” (O’Connell
1993, 131).
7. In this regard, at the international
level, engineering standardization began with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1906. The broader based International Federation of
the National Standardizing Associations (ISA) was set up in 1926 and, after the
Second World War, the International Standards Organization
(ISO) was established in 1947. Today the
ISO has forty distinct fields of standardization ranging from Environment to
Image Processing to Domestic Equipment. [M] In most fields mathematically defined
standards are codified and then designed into hard-tooled knowledge to ensure
compatibility anywhere in the world (Alder 1998, 537).
1. The French word ‘technique’ was introduced into English in 1817. Among its several meanings is: “a body of technical methods (as in a craft or in scientific research)” (MWO, technique, n, 2a). Quite simply such methods involve the effective use and application of hard-tooled knowledge - as sensor, tool or toy. Such use requires acquisition of personal & tacit knowledge about a new instrument, its codification into operating manuals, and, then transfer of the instrument to a final user who, in turn, must decode the manual and then develop the necessary tacit knowledge to become skillful in its use.
2. In a way, hard-tooled knowledge is a nucleating agent around which routinized patterns of human behaviour develop. In the tradition of the ‘old’ Institutional Economics (e.g., Commons 1924, 1934, 1950), a routinzed pattern of collective human behaviour is an ‘institution’. In this regard Price has called the instrument/technique relationship an ‘instrumentality’, i.e., the nucleus plus the orbiting behaviours (Price 1984, 15). For my purposes, the instrument is hard-tooled while the methods associated with its use constitute soft-tooled knowledge. They are, in economic terms, ‘tied goods’ like the punch cards required to run an old-style mainframe computer. [N]
3. In genomics, Cambrosio & Keating have documented the nucleating role of instruments in their study: “Art, Science, and Magic in the Day-to-Day Use of Hybridoma Technology”. They define scientific technique as an “embedded system of practices”. They highlight how much of technique can only be learned by doing and/or through instruction, i.e., it cannot be fully codified and much remains personal & tacit (Cambrosio & Keating 1988, 258). [O]
4. Similarly,
5. Discussion of technique brings us full
circle back to personal & tacit knowledge.
In Heidegger’s existential phenomenology the hammer is one with us in
action. It becomes transparent as
‘other’, or as Polanyi puts it, tools form “part of ourselves,
the operating persons. We pour ourselves
into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence” (M. Polanyi 1962a,
59). [Q]
It appears coincidental that Heidegger’s hammer - the basis of
contemporary philosophy of technology - is paralleled in the philosophy of science
by Polanyi’s hammer with its derivative ‘tacit knowledge’ as part of the
lexicon of the knowledge-based economy (American National Standards
Institute and the Global Knowledge Economics Council 2001). Both
were German-speaking but I can find no reference that they knew each other or
each other’s work. Heidegger published
his article ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in 1949; Polanyi published his
first edition of Personal Knowledge
in 1958. Heidegger had, however, first
mentioned the hammer metaphor in his 1927 book Being and Time (Idhe 1991).
1. Tooled knowledge exhibits four characteristics: design, density, fixation and vintage. As introduction, design refers to the synthesis of different sub-domains of knowledge, e.g., biology, chemistry and physics, to create an instrument, i.e., a sensor, tool or toy. Density refers to the operational opacity (or transparency) of the resulting instrument. Fixation refers to embedding knowledge into a functioning material matrix. Vintage refers to the temporal coefficient (historical date) at which current knowledge is embedded, fixed or frozen. I will examine each in turn.
1. As a verb, the word ‘design’ entered the language in the 14th century, meaning: to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan; to have as a purpose” (MWO, design, v, 1). As a noun, it entered in 1588 meaning: deliberate purposive planning; the arrangement of elements or details in a product or work of art; the creative art of executing aesthetic or functional designs (MWO, design, n, 1a). Critically, for our immediate purposes, engineers use the word design “in framing membership criteria for the professional grades of engineering societies” (Layton 1974, 37). [R] More generally, however, in Design
we have come to recognize the processes which bring
about creative advances in science, the new paradigms as processes of human
design, comparable to artistic creation rather than logical induction or
deduction which work so well within a valid paradigm... the norms of artistic
design (are) “inherent in the specific psychic process, by which a work of art
is represented” and thus in the creative act, not in the created object - in
the process not the structure .(Jantsch,
1975, 81)
2. From the
dictionary definitions I extract the terms ‘arrangement’ and ‘purpose’ in order
to distinguish tooled from codified knowledge.
With respect to purpose, both codified and tooled knowledge are extra-somatic,
i.e., fixed outside a natural person.
The purpose of codified knowledge, however, is transmission of knowledge
between natural persons while the purpose of tooled knowledge is measurement
and manipulation of the natural world.
3. With respect to arrangement, codified knowledge involves manipulating an alphabet, grammar, syntax and vocabulary, i.e., a language including mathematics, intended to communicate with other natural persons. Arrangement of tooled knowledge, however, involves the coordination of different forms and types of matter and energy to subsequently and artificially manipulate or animate the natural world. This may include synthesizing specific bits of biological, chemical, cultural, economic, electric, electronic, ergonomic, mechanical knowledge and/or organizational knowledge into a single working device or instrument. Put another way:
The term “design” covers the
mutual employment of the material and the propositional, as well as hybrid
forms such as drawings, computer simulations, and material models. However, design must be understood to embrace
material knowledge as well as ideational knowledge. The “design paradigm” is the most promising
recent development in the epistemology of technology, but it must not lose
track of this central insight about design.
Thought and design are not restricted to processes conducted in
language. (Baird 2004, 149)
4. As an example, consider the common electric hand drill. Functionally it makes a hole. Without a drill one can use a simpler tool like a spike. This requires knowledge of materials technology, e.g., balsam won’t work well. One either pounds away or rotates the spike with little control or effect unless one spends a very long time developing the tacit knowledge of how to do so. If instead one mounts the bit and turns a crank handle to drive a hardened specially shaped shaft (embodied knowledge of mechanics as well as materials technology) then the operator can achieve much more control and effect. One has invented the hand drill. If one powers the crank by electricity (knowledge of electric motors), then at the push of a button one hand can achieve more control and effect. If one then computerizes the button, one frees the hands, body and mind of the operator. One has invented a computerized machine tool that embodies knowledge streams of materials technology, mechanics, electricity and computers - all in one.
5. Layton, quoting
Herbert Simon, defines the “sciences of the artificial” as involving synthesis or
what I call ‘design’ rather than analysis or what I call ‘reduction’ as in the
natural sciences. Furthermore: “the
engineer is concerned with how things ought to be - ought to be, that is, in
order to attain goals, and to function” (Layton 1988, 90-91).
[S]
6. Polanyi also recognized the artificial nature of tooled knowledge. He observed a machine can be smashed but the laws of physics continue to operate in the parts. He concluded that: “physics and chemistry cannot reveal the practical principles of design or co-ordination which are the structure of the machine” (M. Polanyi 1970). [T]
7. Put another
way, in another context, by another author: “technology is about controlling
nature through the production of artifacts, and science is about understanding
nature through the production of knowledge” (Faulkner 1994, 431). In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics “art is
identical with a state of capacity to make, involving the true course of
reasoning” (McKeon 1947, 427). The
connection between the Arts and tooled knowledge is captured in the aesthetic
term elegant, i.e., “ingenious simplicity and effectiveness” (OED, elegant, a, 5a). This term, of course, is also applied in
mathematics. Put another way: “design
involves a structure or pattern, a particular
combination of details or component parts, and it is precisely the gestalt or
pattern that is of the essence for the designer” (Layton 1974, 37). [U]
8. This gestalt is generally expressed in visual rather than verbal terms. In fact, the earliest expression of engineering knowledge in the West takes the form of design portfolios and the “natural units of study of engineering design resemble the iconographic themes of the art historian” (Layton 1976, 698). [V] Even in the natural sciences, this is true. Quoting Ackerman, Idhe observes:
Visual thinking and visual metaphors have
undoubtedly influenced scientific theorizing and even the notation of
scientific fact, a point likely to be lost on philosophers who regard the
products of science as a body of statements, even of things. Could modern scientific world be at its
current peak of development without visual presentations and reproductions of
photographs, x-rays, chromatographs, and so forth? ... The answer seems clearly
in the negative.” (Idhe 1991, 93)
9. There is, however, a Western
cultural bias towards ‘the Word’ and away from ‘the image’ – graven or
otherwise (Chartrand 1992a). This has contributed to the epistemological
suppression of tooled knowledge relative to ‘scientific’ knowledge which is
usually presented in a documentary format (the article or book) while tooled
knowledge appears first as an artifact which must then be transliterated into a
written format that “savour of the antiquarian” (Price 1965,
565-566). [W]
10. Another connexion between tooled knowledge and the Arts is found in the expression “from art to science” (Cambrosio & Keating 1988, 256). This transition has been documented in biotechnology (Hood 2002) and engineering (Schön, 1983) with respect to experimental techniques or protocols. Such protocols generally begin as the unique tacit knowledge of a single researcher. This is called ‘magic’ by Cambrosio & Keating. Over time, this tacit knowledge becomes embodied in an experimental piece of hardware, i.e., tooled knowledge. This stage they call ‘art’ because operation of the prototype requires a high level of tacit knowledge or skill. In turn, the prototype may be commercially transformed into a standardized instrument requiring less skill of its operator who, in effect, transforms from a scientist into technician (Rosenberg 1994, 257-258). [X] This, according to Cambrosio & Keating, is the ‘science’ stage when the now standardized instrument can be routinely used in the ongoing search for new knowledge. The protocol, however, has effectively become embodied in a standardized, calibrated scientific instrument. Put another way:
In the language of technology studies, these
instruments “de-skill” the job of making these measurements. They do this by encapsulating in the
instrument the skills previously employed by the analyst or their functional
equivalents.” (Baird 2004, 69)
11. In summary, design refers to the synthesis of different forms of knowledge – cultural, economic, organizational as well as scientific. Tooled knowledge is thus synthetic and integrative rather than analytic and reductive. Through design it enfolds or integrates many different forms of knowledge, including economic knowledge, into an efficient instrument (technically and economically) that works and performs its function. In this sense, tooled knowledge achieves what the ancient Greeks called kosmos: “the right placing of the multiple parts of the world” (Hillman 1981, 28). When this is achieved the world is in harmony; the world works. In more prosaic terms:
Development of the design is coordinated and
iterative, and the end product succeeds in integrating all of the
necessary knowledge. (Faulkner 1994, 432)
1. Among its several meanings, the word density refers to “the degree of opacity of a translucent medium” (MWO, density, n, 3a). With respect to tooled knowledge, density refers to the operational opacity (or transparency) of an instrument. The more tooled knowledge is embodied in an artifact, relative to its function, the denser, the more opaque, the instrument becomes, i.e., it requires less and less personal & tacit or codified knowledge to operate. In other words, the denser an instrument, the more ‘user friendly’ it becomes.
2. At one extreme
are ‘one-offs’, customized instruments common in the natural sciences. A
particle accelerator or synchrotron is unique.
No two are alike; the personal & tacit and codified knowledge
required to maintain and operate it is large.
It requires a great deal of what is called ‘local knowledge’ (Alder 1998, 537; Faulkner 1994,
445). In this sense the covers are kept
off the machine. It is transparent requiring
constant looking inside and tinkering to make it functions correctly. Its operation involves the “craft of
experimental science” (Price 1984). This sense is captured by an aphorism told to
the author by Professor Tom Steele of the Department of Physics &
Engineering Physics about the Canadian Light Source synchrotron at the
3. At the other extreme is the consumer ‘black box’ – push the button and it operates itself. The leading edge of black box tooled knowledge, today, is voice activated computer control. Just a verbal command and the tooled knowledge works. The black box hides its ‘thing-ness’ (Baird 2004, 146). [Y]
4. Between the extremes are many shades of grey. Standardized research instruments like scanning electron microscopes or MRI scanners require highly trained technicians to operate. They can do so, however, without the detailed personal & tacit and codified knowledge available to an experimental scientists. This again involves a ‘de-skilling’ of the operator and transfer of knowledge into the instrument (Baird 2004, 69).
5. The process of standardizing experimental scientific instruments by replacing manual with automatic control is well documented (Cambrosio & Keating 1988; Hood 2002; Price 1984; Rosenberg 1994). It involves conversion of a transparent scientific sensor into an opaque industrial tool that, in turn, may become a black box toy in final consumption, e.g., the cathode display tube as TV.
6. The impact of soft-tooled knowledge in this process, especially standardization, cannot be underestimated:
For all the diversity of our consumer cornucopia, the
banal artifacts of the world economy can be said to be more and more
impersonal, in the sense that they are increasingly defined with reference to
publicly agreed-upon standards and explicit knowledge which resides at the
highest level of organizations, rather than upon local and tacit knowledge that
is the personal property of skilled individuals. (Alder 1998, 537)
1. Tooled
knowledge is fixed in a functioning material matrix as a sensor, tool or toy.
Fixation
is a condition for intellectual property rights such as patents and copyrights. I will discuss the nature of such
intellectual property rights below. For
now it is sufficient to ask if tooled knowledge can be extracted from such a matrix? The answer is
yes through reverse engineering. In
effect, “engineers learn the state of the art not just by reading printed
publications, going to technical conferences, and working on projects for their
firms, but also by reverse engineering others’ products” (Samuelson & Scotchmer 2002, 70-71). [Z]
1. Vintage refers to the temporal coefficient (historical date or time) at which existing knowledge is embedded, embodied or tooled into a matrix. Unlike design, density and fixation, vintage has been the subject of formal economic investigation since Robert Solow (1960) considered the question of the distribution of capital equipment including new and old technologies and why different vintages coexist. Subsequently, Solow introduced the concept of ‘embodied technological change’ (1962).
2. Like codified
knowledge when the hand having written moves on, tooled knowledge exists at a
given moment of time – a given state of the art. Once embedded, it is ‘frozen’ (Boulding 1966, 6) and
subject to update with significantly more effort and cost than revising a
written document. Vintage thus refers to
the state of the art current when knowledge is tooled into matter. Furthermore, and excepting defense and the
natural sciences, it is subject to economic constraints (M. Polanyi 1960-61,
404). [AA]
3. One further vintage distinction can be drawn: technical versus functional obsolescence. On the one hand, a given product or process embodying tooled knowledge may be displaced by one that is faster and/or more cost-effective. The old is now technically obsolete. It can continue, however, to perform the same or similar function. On the other hand, a given product or process may be displaced because the function it performs is no longer required (for whatever reasons). The old is now functionally obsolete. An example is hydrogen re-fuelling stations for zeppelins.
1. Knowledge takes three forms – personal & tacit, codified and tooled. Knowledge is fixed in a person as neuronal bundles of memories and as the trained reflexes of nerves and muscles. It is fixed as code in a medium of communication or matrix that allows knowledge to cross time and space until another person reads or decodes it and thereby adds it to his or her personal & tacit knowledge. Knowledge is tooled into a functioning physical matrix as an instrument such as a sensor, tool or toy, or more generally, as a work of technological intelligence. The knowledge tooled into an extra-somatic matrix remains a meaningless artifact, however, until someone makes it work by pushing the right buttons and uses in the right way. This requires, of course, personal & tacit knowledge that comes with practice and experience. Thus, once again, we can conclude that all knowledge is ultimately personal and tacit.
1. Having split knowledge as a Monad into a Dyad (Science by Design) and reified it as a Triad as personal & tacit, codified and/or tooled knowledge, the question arises: How do such forms of knowledge enter the economic equation of supply and demand? Economics is about the satisfaction of human wants, needs and desires subject to limited means or resources. On the one hand, this involves the nature of such wants, needs and desires as well as how they vary between cultures and individuals and evolve through time. On the other hand, it involves the production of the means to satisfy such needs. The first is ‘demand’ examined by consumer theory; the second is ‘supply’ examined by production theory or ‘the theory of the firm’. These constitute the foundation of the last ideology left standing after the Market/Marx wars of the 20th century – the Standard Model of market economics.
2. The economic value of knowledge lays in its ability to:
a) directly satisfy the biological need ‘to know’ in all its polymorphous forms and combinations; and,
b) indirectly as a means to produce final goods and services to satisfy such needs.
3. In economics the means to produce final goods and services are alternatively called resources, factors of production or inputs. I choose the term ‘input’ to avoid any sense of false concreteness associated with the terms resources and factors of production. As a noun, the first use of ‘input’ was in 1753 meaning “a sum, a contribution” (OED, input, n, 1). In 1883 it took on the meaning of “that which is put in or taken in, or which is operated on or utilized by any process or system (either material or abstract).” In 1902 the meaning “energy supplied to a device or system” was added. J..D. Black then introduced the term to economics in 1926 meaning “the total of resources necessary to production, including raw materials, use of machinery, and manpower, which are deducted from output in calculating assets and profits.” In 1948 its meaning expanded yet again to include “data or program instructions that are fed into or processed by a computer; also, the physical medium on which these are represented”. The psychological meaning of inputs as “the resources of mental and sensory stimuli available to an individual” was introduced in the 1954 issue of the Canadian Journal of Psychology (OED, input, n, 2 a, b, c, d, e).
4. The noun ‘output’, on the other hand, appears for the first time as ‘out put’ in 1858 as a technical term in British iron-works and coal-mines. It did not take on its economic meaning, however, of “the act or fact of putting or turning out; production; the quantity or amount produced; the product of any industry or exertion” until after 1880. Its first non-economic use occurred in 1879 in Dowden’s phrase: “It is the out-put of a large and vigorous mind” (OED, output, n, 1 a). It took on the meaning “energy produced by a device or system” in 1884. In 1948 it entered the computer age as “data or results produced by a computer; also, the physical medium on which these are represented” (OED, output, n, 1 d). The BBC Handbook 1957 then added the meaning of the product of a radio or TV studio (OED, output, n, 1 c).
5. ‘Input’ and ‘output’ are brought together in the term ‘input-output’ introduced in 1914 in reference to testing electrical motor performance. The term was extended to computers in 1947 and to economics in 1953. Its economic meaning is captured by the 1964 definition in the Dictionary of the Social Sciences: “Input-output tables show the interrelations among the major industry groups of the economy... Tables or matrices are constructed which show the goods-and-services inputs and outputs of each on a ‘from-whom to whom’ basis” (OED, input, n, 5 c).
6. In the Standard Model, inputs include: capital which earns interest or profits; labour which earns salaries & wages; and, natural resources that earn rent. These factors are combined to inject utility into a final good or service to satisfy a consumer’s wants, needs and desires. In economics, how to combine these inputs to maximize output while minimizing cost is called ‘technology’. In turn, a change in technology or ‘technological change’ is defined as any new knowledge that either increases output using the same quantity of inputs or produces the same output using a smaller quantity of inputs. Traditional economic inputs - capital, labour and natural resources – can now be expressed for a knowledge-based economy, i.e., in terms of personal & tacit, codified and tooled knowledge.
6.2.1 Codified & Tooled Capital
1. The
definition of capital is an unresolved problem for economics. To Marxists, it is theft. To the mainstream, however, its definition
remains problematic as noted by T.K. Rymes of
2. The
concept of capital has mutated and expanded through history. To the Mercantilists of the 17th century,
capital was gold, silver, land and slaves.
To the Physiocrats of pre-Revolutionary
3. For my purposes, capital is codified
and tooled knowledge, i.e., knowledge
fixed in an extra-somatic physical matrix.
Alternatively, capital is “knowledge imposed on the material world” (Boulding 1966, 5),
or, “frozen knowledge” (Boulding 1966, 6). It includes:
· codified knowledge in the form of human-readable information management systems and databases, operating manuals and libraries as well as associated intellectual property rights such as copyrights, patents, registered industrial designs and trademarks; and,
· ‘hard-tooled’ knowledge in the form of physical plant and equipment, i.e., sensors and tools, plus related ‘soft-tooled’ knowledge including machine-readable computer & genomic programs, standards and techniques.
4. Codified and tooled knowledge, as
previously demonstrated, are fixed in material form; both have vintage; both
are extra-somatic, i.e., they exist
outside the natural person. I will briefly examine some softer forms of capital
expressed as knowledge - cultural, financial, human, legal and social capital -
and distinguish them from their practice which is personal & tacit in
nature. I take it as given that physical
plant and equipment, i.e., physical
capital, is a form of tooled knowledge.
1. Cultural capital, as artworks, books, photographs, plays, recordings, etc., is codified knowledge. As broadcast & recording studios, conservatories, libraries, museums, parks, printing presses, sets, props & costumes, theatres and other venues, it is tooled knowledge. In this view, cultural capital (codified and tooled) contrasts with cultural practice or performance which is personal & tacit in nature.
1. Financial capital as currency, equities, bonds, mortgages and other financial instruments is codified knowledge, i.e., fixed on paper or in human readable electronic format. Anti-counterfeiting measures such as electronic strips, chips or encryption are forms of tooled knowledge. Debit and ‘smart’ cards are contemporary examples of financial capital as tooled knowledge. In this view, financial capital (codified and tooled) contrasts with financial practice which involves personal & tacit knowledge.
2. It is as personal & tacit knowledge, however, that financial capital plays its primary role. As a generally accepted medium of exchange, store of value or unit of account, financial capital as money involves tacit knowledge routinely recognized and accepted by a natural person on one’s own behalf or as an agent of a body corporate or another individual. [BB] In this sense, financial capital, including the price system (Hayek [1974] 1989), is an institution, i.e., a routinized pattern of collective human behaviour. Like a physical reflex, e.g., riding a bicycle, a human being learns to recognize, accept and exchange financial capital. In different cultures and periods of history what constitutes money and financial capital differs (K. Polany 1944; Humphreys 1969). In other words, financial capital is a cultural artifact, a form of organizational technology that is tacit, i.e., ‘generally accepted’ in a given society.
1. Human capital generally refers to the stock of skills and education possessed by a worker. Given human capital is embodied in a living human being, there is no extra-somatic component, i.e., there is no capital as frozen knowledge. The term ‘human capital’ is thus a misnomer. Human capital is personal & tacit knowledge and somatic to the individual. Additions to this stock reflect learning, education, experience and training on the memory and reflexes of the individual.
1. Legal capital as law books, statutes, judicial and quasi-judicial decisions is codified knowledge. Legal capital as court houses, handcuffs, prisons and police cars is tooled knowledge. In this view, legal capital (codified and tooled) contrasts with legal practice which involves personal & tacit knowledge.
1. Social capital can be codified and fixed on paper or in human-readable electronic format as customs and conventions of behaviour, educational curricula, public rules and regulations as well as public safety standards, e.g., drinking water standards. Social capital as schools, hospitals, roads, sewage & water systems and telecommunication systems is tooled knowledge. In this view, social capital (codified and tooled) contrasts with social practice including market sentiment which involves personal & tacit knowledge.
2. Social capital, according to some
scholars, can be extended to include “values and beliefs” (Maskell
2001, 2). Such values and beliefs can be
codified, e.g., the Bible, Koran
& Vedas. Or they can be tooled into
monuments and other works of aesthetic intelligence reflecting social ideology,
e.g., socialist realism. Values and beliefs, however, take on meaning
only when practiced or perceived by a living human being. In this sense, there
is no extra-somatic component, i.e.,
there is no capital or asset that can be exchanged for money. [CC]
Put another way, “Money can’t buy you love”.
3. With respect to economics, such
values and beliefs include market sentiments.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments
and The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
stresses the role of Sentiment in market exchange, e.g., trust (The Economist
4 To the degree that various forms of capital –
cultural, financial, legal, physical and social – can be expressed as codified
and tooled knowledge, one may speak of ‘a knowledge theory of capital’. As will be demonstrated, however, such a
theory is a corollary to a more general ‘labour theory of knowledge’.
1. If the definition of capital remains unresolved, the economic definition of labour is problematic in the extreme. In conventional terms, labour refers to the physical and mental effort of a human being applied to the production of goods and services. Labour, unlike capital, has arguably been subject to definitional reduction through time rather than expansion. It has been subject to capitalization rather than humanization as a factor of production. Thus education and training add to the stock of ‘human capital’, that is something alienated from labour and subject to managerial control as a corporate or national asset. Similarly, entrepreneurship and management have become detached from labour even though separation of ownership from control in the modern corporation (and government) makes the manager an employee or agent, not a principal or owner. In effect, labour becomes warm hot bodies applying muscle not brains. Effort is organized according to a division and specialization of labour (brawn) determined by a specialized class of employee called management (brain).
2. But why should one class of labour ‘work’ and another ‘manage’? This was the subject of Richard Bendix’s historically exhaustive Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (1956; 1976; 2001). Bendix traces the conceptual history of modern management back to feudal times. He finds, in effect, a theory of positive thinking: managers have a positive self-image and can defer gratification while workers do not and cannot. Bendix thereby captures perhaps the last embers of the Classical ‘Iron Law of Wages’. Classical economics accepted, with relative equanimity, the starvation of labour who must then accept lower real wages or who, alternatively, with higher real wages simply breed increasing the labour supply and thereby lowering wages through competition. Full employment, under the Classical model, was assured on the backs of labour, or what Marx called “the surplus army of the unemployed”.
3. John Kenneth Galbraith in his New Industrial State (1967) went further and described the modern corporation as governed by a self-replicating technostructure of managers produced by and selectively chosen from graduates of so-called ‘B’ or business schools. It is they who direct workers on behalf of an ever increasing and diffuse pool of shareholder-owners. Galbraith also explored the relationship between large corporations and a newly emerging class of labour - creative talent, specifically artists (Economics & The Public Purpose, 1973). While the classless genius emerged with the Renaissance’s artist/engineer/ humanist/scientist, by definition, it is exceptional and has not, historically, constituted a distinct class of labour. As will be seen, however, in the hands of Reich (1990) and Drucker (1998), a new class of creative workers has emerged called, respectively, ‘symbolic’ or ‘knowledge’ workers. In fact, there are three distinct classes of knowledge workers: productive, managerial and entrepreneurial.
1. Productive workers are those on the shop floor actually producing goods and services. They are concerned with output. Their knowledge is technical to a given industry or firm. In effect they combine codified and tooled with personal & tacit knowledge (memory and reflex) usually learned on the job. Their knowledge involves making something or making something work. In this sense the competitiveness of a firm or nation “depends not only on sensible decisions about what to do, but on the availability of the skills that are required to do it” (Loasby 1998, 143). According to the World Economic Forum, in the developed world less than 15% of the workforce is engaged in the ‘hands-on’ production of physical goods (World Economic Forum & Institute for Management Development 1992)
1. Management, among other things, means “a governing body of an organization or business, regarded collectively; the group of employees which administers and controls a business or industry, as opposed to the labour force. It also means the group of people who run a theatre, concert hall, club, etc” (OED, management, n, 6). The role of management is to make available the means (inputs) so that production workers can perform their tasks and then to market and distribute that output. In many ways management is like a choreographer, music or theatre director. This sense of modern management is caught by Aldrich:
Thus the total operation is a performing art with
blueprints for score or choreography, the difference being that in this
technological case neither the co-ordinated
performances (ballet) of the skilled workers nor the finished product is put on
exhibit simply to be looked at, contemplated.
It is a useful performing art.
Its value is instrumental.” (Aldrich 1969,
381-382) [D]
2. According to Schlicht,
it is:
the fit of the organizational elements, rather than the
elements themselves, that characterizes a firm.
Just as the quality of an orchestra performance cannot be adequately
measured by the average quality of the performances achieved by the individual
instruments, but depends crucially on the way the instruments are played
together, so the productive value of a firm - as opposed to a set of individual
contracting relationships - emerges from the quality that has been achieved
through mutually adjusting the various activities that are carried on. (Schlicht 1998,
208)
3. One crucial characteristic of the
firm is custom including tacit understandings of entitlements and obligations
between productive, managerial and entrepreneurial workers. This constitutes part of what is commonly
called ‘the corporate culture’. Such entitlements and obligations are based on
Sentiment, i.e., of a sense of right
and wrong, of fair and unfair, rather than the rule of Reason. Management of a firm involves maintaining an
“an island of custom in the ocean of the market” (Schilcht
1998, 207). The role of Sentiment has
found expression in the work of Howard Gardner and his concept of ‘emotional
intelligence’. This, and Garnder’s other forms of multiple intelligence, have now
been formally introduced into the management literature with his new
1. With the notable exception of firms
like Microsoft (Bill Gates) and Walmart (Sam Walton),
most modern corporations do not follow an original founder/owner but rather a
‘hired gun’, or business entrepreneur. The
word ‘entrepreneur’ comes from the French entre meaning ‘between’ and prendre meaning ‘to
take’. The English ‘middleman’ retains
this original sense. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, European traders (especially
from
2. Entrepreneurial knowledge is
essentially intuitive. It involves
seeing and realizing a vision of future markets, products and/or other
opportunities. Ignorance is the opposite
of knowledge, i.e., want of
knowledge. To deal with uncertainty and
ignorance economists have recognized the entrepreneur as possessing this
non-rational form of knowledge – intuition or revelation – expressed by Keynes
as ‘animal spirits’ (Keynes 1936, 161).
Like some ancient priest-king, the entrepreneur ‘knows’ the future and
leads his people (investors, managers, workers and consumers) into it – right
or wrong - to success or failure. Prophets
today seek profits, not souls. Ideally,
of course, this approach works best when it takes the form of “informed
intuition” (Jantsch 1975). All available information, knowledge and
opinion will have been explicated and then an intuitive, inductive judgemental vision
is conjured. As will be seen, the business entrepreneur or CEO has assumed the
mantle of the Western Cult of the Genius along side the artist, inventor and
scientist.
6.2.3 Toolable
Natural Resources
1. At first glance, natural resources would appear to have no relationship to knowledge. By definition, they exist in “the State that Nature hath provided” (quoting Locke, Dooley 2002, 4). They are just part of the environment until the knowing mind recognizes them as useful. Thus oil lay in the ground virtually untapped until invention of the internal combustion engine. Just as Polanyi (1962a, 56) says we recognize a tool by its purpose, we similarly identify natural resources by the human ends we attribute to them. [FF] At a given point in time a naturally occurring substance is seen as nothing but an environmental feature. Take a pathway through the jungle one day and you see a large rock outcrop. The next day, with new knowledge, the same path leads not to a an environmental feature but to a bauxite deposit that can be converted into aluminum. It has now become a toolable natural resource. Yet it has not changed, one day to the next, rather knowledge allows us to see it in a very different light.
2. This ‘changed way of seeing’ is captured with respect to all factors of production and output by Loasby when he writes:
Menger begins by arguing that an object becomes a good only
when someone discovers how to use it to satisfy some human need. Goods are endogenous, created by new
connections between human need and physical or human resources; and their value
is derived from the need which each of them serves and - crucially for this
paper - from the knowledge that it can serve this need and also the knowledge
of how it can be made to do so. (Both of
Ryle’s categories are important.) The creation of goods, and of technology,
rests on the creation of knowledge, and therefore on previous uncertainty - or
indeed sheer ignorance.” (Loasby 2002, 6)
1. In a knowledge-based economy economic outputs can also now be expressed in terms of personal & tacit, codified and tooled knowledge. If all human wants, needs and desires are transliterated into ‘needs to know’ then some final goods and services satisfy basic physical needs such as to know heat on a cold winter day. Some satisfy abstract psychic needs like to know God. In this sense, knowledge satisfies ignorance, i.e., want of knowledge (OED, ignorance, 1 a) – in economics, no matter its source or nature or réalism fantastique (Pauwel & Bergier 1960). Again, there is no aesthetic distancing, moral judgement or scientific objectivity in economic epistemology. Every good and service from food to pornography to religion and science are admitted, i.e., whatever a human being wants to know is the legitimate subject of economic investigation. For my purposes, there are three knowledge outputs – the Person, the Code and the Work.
1. The Person comes in two forms: as an intermediate and as a final good. As an intermediate output the Person is utilitarian, i.e., valued for a purpose other than oneself. As a final output, the Person is non-utilitarian, i.e., valued in-and-of-oneself. Arguably, the Person is the ultimate output of a knowledge-based economy. This perspective reflects, among other things, democratic republicanism and its principle of one person one vote as well as the U.N.’s Declaration of Universal Human Rights.
2. As an intermediate output, it is through education, training and experience that personal & tacit knowledge is somatically fixed into neuronal bundles of memories and conditioned reflexes. Examples include the tailor, tinker, soldier and spy as well as astronomer, athlete, sub-atomic particle physicist and genomicist and, lest we forget, the accountant, economist, engineer, lawyer, physician, et al. In this sense, all Persons are knowledge workers whether they rely upon the processing of memories fixed in neuronal bundles or the trained reflexes of nerve and muscle engaged in handling physical products. In this view, a manual labourer is a knowledge worker. Lack of knowledge, e.g., of how to lift heavy objects, has economic consequences such as workman’s compensation. This excludes, of course, artificial or ‘legal persons’ called bodies corporate.
3. The Person, as final knowledge
output, in a biological sense, fulfills the teleological need to know. Consider the 2004 Summer Olympics in
4. Beneath the surface of conscious and
volitional knowledge, however, lays the twin domains of the personal and collective
unconscious or “a structural layer of the human psyche containing inherited
elements, distinct from the personal unconscious” (Sharp 1991). Socrates is famous for, among other things, recognizing
that one knows but knows not that one knows.
Such knowledge forms part of the personal unconsciousness and the
Socratic method is a traditional way of raising such personal
knowledge to consciousness. Another is
the ‘talk therapy’ of analytic and Freudian psychology. As to the collective unconscious, it
“contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution, born anew in the
brain structure of every individual” (Jung, The
Structure of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 342 quoted in Sharp 1991). Analytically, access to such collectively
unconscious knowledge is through active imagination, fairy tale, myth and
legend generally via art and
religion.
5. For a metaphysical perspective, however, I must change terms. The word ‘Person’, according to the OED, is sometimes used “as a substitute for Man” (OED, person, n). The word ‘person’ itself comes from the Old French persone out of the Italian meaning “a mask used by a player” (OED, person, n, I 1). The word ‘man’, as in ‘human’, is rooted in the classical Latin humus and the ancient Greek chthonic meaning ‘earth’” (OED, man, n. 1, Etymology). Thus the word ‘Man’ derives from humus or earth and our species, homo sapiens, means ‘the wise earth’ or ‘earth wise’.
6. Beyond sapience, however, two other characteristics distinguish our species: ‘humour’ and ‘humility’, words sharing the same root as homo. Quoting the holy woman Therese of Lisieux: “Humility isn't at all about denying one's abilities and accomplishments. Humility is simply knowing the truth about yourself, and about where you come from, and about Who gets the ultimate credit” (Ruof, December 5, 1996). This catches the sense of homo sapiens sapiens, i.e., the man that knows he knows. As to humour, Ruof notes that “to be human is to know humor. And to have humor is to have the ability to see through things. It's the knack, as it were, of seeing two different or conflicting things at once, which when brought together are simply funny. The classic example … is the elegant-looking gentleman in top hat and tails slipping on a patch of ice and falling on his tail” (Ruof, December 5, 1996).
7. The creation myth of the world’s
three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – share,
among other things, the belief that Man was created from the earth, or more
precisely God created ‘them’- male and female.
These ‘people of the Book’ share the First Book of Moses called Genesis in which it is written:
Genesis 1.26 And
God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the
cattle, and over every creeping thing that creepeth
upon the earth.
Genesis 1.27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female
created he them.
8. While this text has been subjected to more exegesis and analysis than any document in human history, I am compelled to offer yet another. First, why did God create ‘them’? Thomas Mann answers that:
“The Angels,” so ran the train of thought, “are
created after Our image, but yet not fruitful. The beasts, on the other hand, lo, they are
fruitful, but not after Our likeness. Let Us create man - an image of the angels,
yet fruitful withal!” (Mann 1944, 4)
9. Second, dominion over the world was granted to ‘them’, male and female. It is later in Genesis (2.22) that a splitting off of the original or first Adam (male and female) produces a submissive and passive Eve. Accordingly, use of the word ‘Person’ is intended to escape sexist implications. For most of human history, however, sexual apartheid has been the norm in which men were encouraged to develop Reason in its reductive sense while women were encouraged to develop Sentiment in its relational sense. In the secular West (as opposed to the religious West) sexual apartheid and its epistemological corollaries have, more or less, been rejected. This rejection, however, has, in turn, alienated much of Islam (as well as ‘fundamentalist’ Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity) fuelling the so-called ‘war on terror’ that has come to dominate life in the first decade of the 21st century. In other words, Al Quaeda’s effort to establish a global caliphate is rooted in opposition to the equality of women and of ‘women’s knowledge’.
10. Before the appearance of Eve, however, God created, for the original androgynous Adam, a Garden of Eden in which there was “the tree of life … and the tree of knowledge” (Genesis 2.9). God permitted Adam to eat of all the trees in the garden but warned: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2.17). The serpent, the story goes, convinced Eve that instead “in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3.6). And when Eve, in turn, convinced Adam to eat of the fruit, “the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3.22) expelled the duo from the garden and “placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cher’-u-bims, and a flaming sword which turned everyway, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 3.24).
11. Significantly, perhaps, there was no injunction against eating of the tree of life before the Fall from what traditionally is called ‘innocence’ but which, in this context, is ignorance. The price paid for the fruit was not just knowing good and evil but also knowing death. And it is knowledge of death that ultimately distinguishes a Person from extra-somatic forms of knowledge such as Code or Works which can never ‘know’ death.
12. Dominion over Nature was not, however,
withdrawn after the Fall and its key was arguably
found by Francis Bacon in the instrumental experimental scientific method. Arguably, this leads us back to the tree of
life in the guise of the DNA helix and genomics promising, if not life
everlasting, a significant increase to the
Consequently, I said a bit distracted, we would have
to eat again from the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence. Indeed, he answered, this will be the last
chapter in the history of the world. (quoted in Jantsch 1975, 263)
13. The ‘sensational’ or ‘earthy’ nature of human knowledge cannot be ignored. Consider the classic miser counting his gold as having carnal knowledge with his money (OED, knowledge, n, II, 7). By ignoring the mortality of neuronal bundles and reflexes, we metaphysically slip abstracting ourselves beyond the realm of human knowledge into that of artificial intelligence. Thus Hubert L. Dreyfus, one of the leading critiques of artificial intelligence,
asserts that in order to think, one must have (be) a body. The rationale for this assertion comes from existential phenomenology, particularly that of Merleau-Ponty. Since computers do not have (human) bodies, they thus cannot think (humanly). It is this identification of body as a necessary condition of thought which is of primary interest here. (Idhe 1991, 69)
14. One last Biblical reference needs to
be raised. Judaism, Christianity and
Islam also share the paradigm of ‘the Covenant’. Unlike other world religions, a human
community contracted with God, most especially through the man from
1. Codified knowledge, as output, also
comes in two forms: as intermediate and final good. Before addressing both, I must distinguish my
argument from current discussion and debate about codified knowledge. Unlike Romer (1996, 204) and
others, I insist on a fundamental distinction between human-readable and
machine-readable code. First,
machine-readable code can never be a final output, i.e., valued in-and-of-itself.
It always remains a utilitarian tool serving a purpose other than
itself. Second, the primary purpose of
machine-readable code is information processing using the binary bit which, as
demonstrated, does not provide a measure of knowledge. A third characteristic that distinguishes
human-readable from machine-readable Code, is that “we can use words in a sense
previously unknown to the linguistic community and make ourselves understood by
means of the context for example, in using original metaphors” (University of
Chicago, Media Glossary,
2004). The depth of the necessary cultural context of Code is captured by
Roman Jakobson when he writes: “No doubt, for any speech
community, for any speaker, there exists a unity of
language, but this over-all code represents a system of interconnected subcodes; each language encompasses several concurrent
patterns which are each characterized by a different function” (Jakobson 1958).
2. Human-readable Code is semiotic in
nature using signs, sounds, symbols and images including written alphabets that
are ‘readable’ only with prior knowledge of their cultural context. This sense of Code is captured in Krystyna Pomorska’s “Tolstoy
contra Semiosis” in which it is argued that Tolstoy’s
“protagonist’s behavior [is] an attempt to supersede the artificial cultural
code (behavior and speech) of his class and move into another code which is
considered more natural” (Bagby & Sigalov 1987, 473).
Cultural context, of course, extends beyond class to, among other
things, the incommensurable paradigms of the natural & engineering sciences
which require specialized knowledge and education to ‘read’ or decode. It is in this sense that Northrop Frye writes
“man is a child of the word as well as a child of nature” (Frye 1981, 22) [GG]
3. Code invokes language – directly as the spoken or written word and indirectly as the language of sound or music, of motion or dance as well as of body language and dress codes. As demonstrated language presents a meta-methodological problem for ‘knowledge about knowledge’.
4. Code is extra-somatically fixed in a communications medium permitting access by another mind distant in time and space. As final and intermediate output, Code takes the form of articles, books, correspondence, magazines, technical and training manuals, memoranda, motion pictures, radio and television programs and sound recordings insofar as they are carriers of semiotic meaning. As will be demonstrated, it is the distinction between the non-utilitarian or utilitarian nature of the carrier or matrix that distinguishes Code, protected by copyright and trademark, from Works, protected by patent and industrial design rights. Ultimately, however, every Code, as intermediate or final output, requires a Person to read and convert it back into personal & tacit knowledge.
1. Like the Person and Code, the Work
may take the form of an intermediate or final output. A Work involves tooling knowledge into a
material matrix as works of aesthetic or technological, intelligence, i.e., sensors, tools & toys and
works of art. Like a Code, a Work is
frozen knowledge fixed in time with vintage.
And as will be demonstrated, like personal & tacit knowledge, Work
is duplex in nature. The term also
provides a connecting nexus between knowledge and the dollar & cents
economy.
2. ‘Work’ is a very old English word. It is both a noun and a verb. As a noun it has three branches with thirty-five meanings and over sixty sub-meanings. The first branch refers to something to be done, something being done, or something already done by an agency – divine, human or mechanical (OED, work, n, I). The second branch refers to the thing done or made or constructed including works of art, machines and buildings (OED, work, n, II), i.e., works of aesthetic and technological intelligence (Aldrich 1969, 381). This sense also reflects ‘the effect or consequence of agency’ (OED, work, n, II, 9 b). The third branch involves ‘work’ in phrases such as workplace (OED, work, n, III).
3. As a verb, work has three branches – as a transitive and intransitive verb and in association with adverbs. It has forty meanings and over 100 sub-meanings. The first branch, as a transitive verb, generally refers to construction, creation, design, direction, execution, herding, making, management, manufacturing, performing or producing anything from works of art and books to buildings and miracles. The second branch, as an intransitive verb, generally refers to the action, agitation, effect, fermentation, influence or other operation of an agency – divine, human or mechanical - in doing or making something. The third branch deals with work in relationship to adverbs such as work in, work with, work off, etc.
4. Two other definitions are required: a scientific and an economic. In physics and mechanics ‘work’ means “the operation of a force in producing movement or other physical change, esp. as a definitely measurable quantity” (OED, work, n, I, 8). In the natural & engineering sciences work may be ‘a definitely measurable quantity’, but in other knowledge domains, it is not. How much physical force does it take to pen a political polemic that ignites a revolution or a comprehensive audit that restructures governmental departments or agencies? Knowledge encoded therein produces “movement or other physical change”. Is knowledge therefore a force, a power or work?
5. In economics, work is related to labour or “human effort, physical or mental, used to produce goods and services” (Mansfield & Yohe, 2004, A6). In the Standard Model, work is treated as disutility, i.e., pain, for which a worker is compensated by a wage used to buy goods and services from which to extract utility, i.e., pleasure. Work is rewarded according to its disutility, i.e., the greater pain, the higher the wage.
6. ‘Work’, as a verb in real life, however, is about much more than disutility and the real wage. Among other things, it concerns motivation. If work is simply disutility then opportunistic behaviour may occur, i.e., slacking off. This is the implication of Liebenstein’s x-efficiency, i.e., consumption in the act of production or, put another way, how many coffee breaks does it take to make an unproductive worker (Liebenstein 1966, 1978, 1992)? But if work is not just disutility then the concept of ‘psychic income’ comes into play, i.e., a worker receives satisfaction from work above and beyond the real wage.
7. Since the introduction of universal compulsory education in the Anglosphere (Bennett 2000) during late 19th century, vocational training, i.e., training for work, has progressively crowded out ‘education’ meaning “culture or development of powers, formation of character” (OED, education, 4). Culture, in this sense, is the source of traditional ‘consumption skills’ (Chartrand 1987b) or appreciation, i.e., “estimating qualities” (OED, appreciation, 2 a). This was the basis of the pre-revolutionary aristocratic leisure society in which one’s social standing was a function of one’s appreciation not just one’s birth. In this regard, growth of a leisure economy involves increasing appreciation. Alternatively, a recreational economy involves recreating the ability of workers to work.
8. Work has, of course, been subject to
increasing division and specialization of labour since the time of Adam Smith
generating increasing incommensurability of knowledge. Today in the Anglosphere, work, rather than
culture, has become the focus of ego and social identity with skill
specialization, rather than appreciation, being the apex of ambition. [HH]
How the social fabric is maintained in the face of such fragmentation is
a question to be more fully addressed below.
For now it is sufficient to note the influence of a political glue in
the guise of republican egalitarianism and a communications nexus generated by
a pervasive mass media broadcasting ‘public opinion’ creating and recreating
consistent and coherent ‘pictures in our heads’ (Lippman 1922, 1).
9. Beyond the puritan and republican
traditions of the Anglosphere, and in contrast to the catholic and aristocratic
traditions of continental Europe (Scitovsky, 1976),
this crowding out of education reflected a need, from the mid-19th to late-20th
centuries, to develop repetitive industrial skills among what initially was an
uneducated, rural work force. While the
deadening effects of the Smithian division of labour
were arguably mitigated by mass education, the effects remain problematic. [II]
10. By the late 1970s, Marshall McLuhan observed that the production skills in the new
economy are non-repetitive, adaptive and judgmental invoking pattern
construction and recognition - characteristic of traditional consumption
skills. In this new economy, the worker/consumer becomes the ‘electronic man’
for whom “logic is replaced by analogy, and communications are… superseded by
pattern recognition” (McLuhan, 1978). [JJ]
11. Similarly, Robert Reich in The Work
of Nations (1992) recognized that displacement of manual workers by
automation and computerization together with increasing
12. The dilemma of shareholders and
managements in dealing with these new ‘knowledge workers’ is captured by Peter Drucker in his 1998 article “Beyond the Information
Revolution”. Quite simply, a higher real
wage is not enough to satisfy such workers.
Rather Drucker concludes that it is necessary
to find some way of “satisfying their values, and by giving them social
recognition and social power” (Drucker 1999, 57). [KK]
In fact, a higher real wage can, contrary to the Standard Model, have a
negative effect on a worker’s “intrinsic motivation” (Schlicht
1998, 125). [LL]
13. I will use the second meaning of the noun ‘work’, i.e., the thing made or ‘a work’, and the transitive meaning of the verb, i.e., making or designing a Work, a Code or a Person, as in Hamlet’s phrase: “What a piece of work is Man.” Individuals do, in fact, design themselves or rather individuate (Sharp 1991) subject to cultural constraints. Individuals are ‘custom-ized’ by their culture, e.g., to drive on the right or left (Schlicht 1998). And while customs differ between cultures, they are subject to what Schlict calls ‘clarity criteria’ that are essentially aesthetic in nature and include simplicity, regularity, conformity and conservatism. These criteria engage and reconcile the different knowledge faculties of the individual, i.e., Reason, Revelation, Sentiment and Sensation, through, among other things, cognitive dissonance (Schlicht 1998, 12-13). [MM] One can thus identify distinct patterns of culture (Benedict [1934] 1959) and distinguish individuals ‘custom-ized’ to each.
14. Notwithstanding the ambiguous nature of the Person as a Work, I will restrict the meaning of a Work to a functioning material matrix, i.e., sensors, tools and toys, into which extra-somatic knowledge is tooled. Similarly, works of aesthetic intelligence or art works, other than in the literary art, are ambiguous in that extra-somatic knowledge is tooled or worked into a material matrix, e.g., a painting or sculpture. What is tooled or fixed, however, is semiotic meaning or Code rather than material function. As will be demonstrated, it is the distinction between the non-utilitarian or utilitarian nature of the carrier or matrix that distinguishes Code protected by copyright and trademark from Works protected by patent and industrial design rights. Ultimately, however, every Work, as intermediate or final output, requires a Person to operate (or, in the case of a work of art, interpret) it using personal & tacit knowledge.
1. The ambiguity that plagues analysis of knowledge as economic input and output arguably reflects the biological rather than the mechanical nature of knowledge. Thus Code is an extra-somatic projection of knowledge intended to be assimilated by the living mind of a natural Person. Similarly, a work as sensor, tool or toy is an experiential extension of the senses and grasp of the natural Person.
2. Before reconciling these ambiguities, I must ask why the concept of capital has been subject to such extensive development over time in the Standard Model while labour has remained essentially the same – sweat and muscle. In my opinion, the explanation lies in the great schism between Marxism and market economics, or the Market/Marx wars. Marxist economics attributes all economic value to labour; market economics, in defense, focuses on capital. In a manner of speaking, the Standard Model tends to capitalize rather than humanize labour as an economic factor of production. Arguably the Market/Marx wars are over and the Standard Model is the only global ideology left standing. It is therefore ironic that in the new knowledge-based economy Adam Smith’s, Karl Marx’s and Bohm-Baverk’s labour theories of value can be restated as ‘the labour theory of knowledge’ with ‘a knowledge theory of capital’ as its corollary.
3. Knowledge takes form as a primary Triad of personal & tacit, codified and tooled knowledge. This, in turn, progressively mutates into a secondary Triad of inputs to and a tertiary Triad of outputs of a knowledge-based economy. By definition, personal & tacit is the inherent and inalienable possession of the Person and hence the economic input ‘labour’ is transliterated as personal & tacit labour. Codified and tooled is knowledge frozen or fixed in an extra-somatic material matrix as semiotic meaning (codified) or function (tooled). Such extra-somatic matrices are objects external to the Person and subject to possession or ownership by others. The stock of extra-somatic matrices constitutes a nation’s or firm’s stock of knowledge capital. To this stock all matter in nature is potentially toolable natural resources. Whether or not a given part of the natural environment is toolable is a function of the changing knowledge-base of humanity.
4. The secondary knowledge triad of inputs is used to fix or tool knowledge into final knowledge goods and services valued in-and-of-themselves rather than as a means to an end. In this sense, inputs are utilitarian and outputs are non-utilitarian. Knowledge outputs take one of three forms: the Person, Code and Work.
5. Knowledge outputs are, however, ambiguous in nature. For example, the Person can be considered a Work produced through education, experience and training. A Work of aesthetic intelligence can be considered Code in that it carries semiotic meaning. A Work of technological intelligence can be considered the experiential phenomenological extension of the senses and grasp of the Person.
6. For clarity, I restrict Person to the natural person in possession of personal & tacit knowledge. I restrict Code to matter coded to carry knowledge as meaning and I restrict Work to matter tooled to carry knowledge as function, i.e., to measure and/or manipulate the physical world as sensor, tool or toy. A Code or Work, however, takes on meaning or function only through the agency of a Person.
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy