3. Knowledge Is Skilled Performance

See Chap. 2 for a summary of Johannessen’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s philosophy on rule and rule-following. It can simply be understood as: a rule is abstracted from the situation, whilst rule-following is how one behaves in the situation.

This may be general knowledge e.g. of a specific culture, or specific experience e.g. work based, gained from interaction with work colleagues, group culture.

This is based on the idea of generic structures in memory, which summarise similar events, cf. Barsalou (1988) i.e. refer to memory descriptions which refer to repeated actions over extended periods of time, e.g. ‘we also went to the movies while we were there; everyday we would leave our house’ cf. Table 8.1, p. 200.

This is as in episodic memory, cf. Tulving (1972). Episodic memory refers ‘to situations in which a person remembers an experienced event which contains spatio-temporal knowledge (i.e. details of time and place)’ cf Conway (1990) p. 3.

The term ‘stable’ refers to a person’s relation with their knowledge and is used in a colloquial sense, as opposed to a scientific sense, i.e. it does not mean that knowledge is in a state of stable equilibrium. It denotes an individual’s ability to have acquired the knowledge such that they can use it in a sustainable manner; a kind of psychological state whereby someone can maintain their performance of the knowledge over time. This may be behavioural, involving automaticity. In this case one is not necessarily consciously aware of one’s knowledge. Stability of knowledge may also exist where someone has confidence in using their acquired knowledge. It requires the person to be true to themselves.

See Chap. 2 for details.

Rosenbrock (1988) Engineering as an Art. AI & Society Journal, Vol. 2 No. 4.

Conway and Bekerian (1987) conducted three experiments to investigate timed autobiographical memory retrieval to cue words and phrases. In the first experiment, subjects retrieved memories to cues that named semantic category members and were primed with the superordinate category name or with a neutral word. No prime effects were observed. In the second experiment, subjects retrieved memories to primed and unprimed semantic category cues and to personal primes and personal history cues. Personal primes named lifetime periods (e.g., “school days”) and personal history cues named general events occurring in those lifetime periods for each subject (e.g., “holiday in Italy”). Only personal primes were found to significantly facilitate memory retrieval. A third experiment replicated this finding and also failed to find any prime effects to primes and cues naming activities not directly related to an individual’s personal history. In this experiment, characteristics of recalled events (e.g., personal importance, frequency of rehearsal, pleasantness, and specificity of the memory) were found to be strongly associated with memories retrieved to personal cues and only mildly associated with memories retrieved to other types of cues. These findings suggest that one way in which autobiographical memories may be organized is in terms of a hierarchically structured abstracted personal history.

See Chap. 2.