Structures and Diversity in Everyday Knowledge: From Reality to Cognition, Knowledge and Back

The notion of knowledge is omnipresent in the field of knowledge management and knowledge organisation. This chapter begins with an epistemological reflection on the systems involved in the processes of representing, transferring and managing knowledge. It will be shown that knowledge is fundamentally tied to the process of cognition. By implication, knowledge has to be understood as a highly dynamic process emerging from the interaction between a cognitive system, its natural environment and its non-natural environment (for example artefacts, symbols and so on). Based on these epistemological insights, a framework will be developed to offer some orientation in the ‘jungle’ of notions and concepts of knowledge. The various dimensions of knowledge (such as local-distributed, representational-situated, mapping construction and so on) will be discussed, together with their relevance to the field of knowledge management. Investigation of the object of knowledge reveals that technological and information processing approaches to knowledge management and to our everyday knowledge cover only a small fraction of what knowledge actually comprises.