Knowledge refers to an awareness of facts, a familiarity with individuals and situations, or a practical skill.
Knowledge of facts, is characterized as true belief that is distinct from opinion or guesswork.
The main source of empirical knowledge is perception, involving the usage of the senses to learn about the external world.
Introspection one to learn about their internal mental states and processes.
Other sources of knowledge include memory, rational intuition, inference, and testimony.
The main discipline investigating knowledge is epistemology.
Epistemology studies what people know, how they come to know it, and what it means to know something, discusses the value of knowledge and the thesis of philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge.
Various religions hold that humans should seek knowledge and that God or the divine is the source of knowledge.
Knowledge is a form of familiarity, awareness, understanding, or acquaintance, and often involves the possession of information learned through experience and can be understood as a cognitive success or an epistemic contact with reality, like making a discovery.
Definitions focus on propositional knowledge in the form of believing certain facts, and other forms of knowledge include knowledge in the form of practical competence, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity with the known object based on previous direct experience.
Knowledge is often understood as a state of an individual person, but it can refer to a characteristic of a group of people as group knowledge, social knowledge, or collective knowledge, similar to culture.
Knowledge may further denote information stored in documents like in the library or the knowledge base of an expert system.
Knowledge is closely related to intelligence, but intelligence is more about the ability to acquire, process, and apply information, while knowledge concerns information and skills that a person already possesses.
The main discipline studying knowledge is called epistemology or the theory of knowledge, examining the nature of knowledge and justification, how knowledge arises, and what value it has.
The definition often characterizes knowledge as justified true belief: three essential features: it is (1) a belief that is (2) true and (3) justified.
Truth is a widely accepted feature that knowledge implies that, while it may be possible to believe something false, one cannot know something false.
Knowledge is a form of belief implies that one cannot know something if one does not believe it.
Some true beliefs are not forms of knowledge, such as beliefs based on superstition, lucky guesses, or erroneous reasoning.
True belief that does not amount to knowledge.
Knowledge by acquaintance is familiarity with something that results from direct experiential contact.
The object of knowledge can be a person, a thing, or a place.
The person forms non-inferential knowledge based on first-hand experience without necessarily acquiring factual information about the object.
In contrast, it is also possible to indirectly learn knowledge about subjects by reading books without having the direct experiential contact required for knowledge by acquaintance.
To know something a posteriori means to know it based on experience.
A priori knowledge is possible without any experience to justify or support the known proposition: Mathematical knowledge, such as that 2 + 2 = 4, is traditionally taken to be a priori knowledge since no empirical investigation is necessary to confirm this fact.
A posteriori knowledge is empirical knowledge while a priori knowledge is non-empirical knowledge.
Self-knowledge refers to a person’s knowledge of their own sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and other mental states.
Common knowledge is knowledge that is publicly known and shared by most individuals within a community.
It establishes a common ground for communication, understanding, social cohesion, and cooperation.
General knowledge encompasses common knowledge but also includes knowledge that many people have been exposed to but may not be able to immediately recall.
Common knowledge contrasts with domain knowledge or specialized knowledge, which is only possessed by experts.
Situated knowledge is knowledge specific to a particular situation.
It is closely related to practical or tacit knowledge, which is learned and applied in specific circumstances.
Tacit knowledge, which is not easily articulated or explained to others, like the ability to recognize someone’s face and the practical expertise of a master craftsman.
Tacit knowledge is often learned through first-hand experience or direct practice.
Biologically primary knowledge is knowledge that humans have as part of their evolutionary heritage, such as knowing how to recognize faces and speech and many general problem-solving capacities.
Biologically secondary knowledge is knowledge acquired because of specific social and cultural circumstances, such as knowing how to read and write.
Occurrent knowledge refers to knowledge that is actively involved in cognitive processes.
Dispositional knowledge, by contrast, lies dormant in the back of a person’s mind and is given by the ability to access relevant information.
Many forms of spirituality and religion distinguish between higher and lower knowledge.
Lower knowledge is based on the senses, the intellect,and encompasses both mundane or conventional truths as well as discoveries of the empirical sciences.
Higher knowledge is understood as knowledge of God, the absolute, the true self, or the ultimate reality.
It belongs neither to the external world of physical objects nor to the internal world of the experience of emotions and concepts.
Perception relies on the senses to acquire knowledge.
Sources of knowledge are ways in which people come to know things.
Knowledge can be understood as cognitive capacities that allows one to acquire new knowledge.
Various sources of knowledge include perception, introspection, memory, inference, and testimony.
Perception or observation, i.e. using one of the senses, is identified as the most important source of empirical knowledge.
Perception modalities, including vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste, which correspond to different physical stimuli.
Perception is an active process in which sensory signals are selected, organized, and interpreted to form a representation of the environment.
Introspection as a source of knowledge, not of external physical objects, but of internal mental states.
A traditionally common view is that introspection has a special epistemic status by being infallible.
Memory differs from perception and introspection in that it is not as independent or basic since it depends on previous experiences.
Memory retains knowledge acquired in the past and makes it accessible in the present.
Memory is generally seen as a reliable source of knowledge.
Memory, can be deceptive at times either because the original experience was unreliable or because the memory degraded and does not accurately represent the original experience anymore.
Knowledge based on perception, introspection, and memory may give rise to inferential knowledge.
Testimony is an additional source of knowledge that, unlike the other sources, is not tied to one specific cognitive faculty.
Testimony is based on the idea that one person can come to know a fact because another person talks about this fact: regular speech, a letter, a newspaper, or a blog.
Testimony depends on the reliability of the person pronouncing the testimony: only testimony from reliable sources can lead to knowledge.
Some people may lack the cognitive ability to understand highly abstract truths and some facts cannot be known by any human because they are too complex for the human mind to conceive.
Some ideas that will never occur to anyone.
There are many disputes about what can or cannot be known in certain fields.
Religious skepticism is the view that beliefs about God or other religious doctrines do not amount to knowledge.
A common view is that a person has to have good reasons for holding a belief if this belief is to amount to knowledge.
When the belief is challenged, the person may justify it by referring to their reason for holding it.
Three traditional theories are foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism.
Knowledge has instrumental value.
Not all forms of knowledge are useful and many beliefs about trivial matters have no instrumental value.
In a few cases, knowledge may even have a negative value.
Besides having instrumental value, knowledge may also have intrinsic value, meaning that some forms of knowledge are good in themselves even if they do not provide any practical benefits.
Progress of scientific knowledge is traditionally seen as a gradual and continuous process.
This is often combined with the assumption that these doctrines are true but cannot be fully understood by reason or verified through rational inquiry.
The anthropology of knowledge is a multi-disciplinary field of inquiry studies how knowledge is acquired, stored, retrieved, and communicated.
Anthropologists of knowledge understand knowledge has been reproduced within a society or geographic region over several generations.
Within a society, a same social group usually understand things and organize knowledge in similar ways to one another.
Social identities play a significant role: people who associate themselves with similar identities, like age-influenced, professional, religious, and ethnic identities, tend to embody similar forms of knowledge.
Such social identities concern both how a person sees themselves in terms of the ideals they pursue, as well as how other people see them, such as the expectations they have toward the person.
The sociology of knowledge is the subfield of sociology that studies how thought and society are related to each other.
Sociological knowledge understands it as a wide sense that encompasses philosophical and political ideas, religious and ideological doctrines, folklore, law, and technology.
Knowledge management is refers to the process of creating, gathering, storing, and sharing knowledge.
Processes in the field of knowledge management are knowledge creation, knowledge storage, knowledge sharing, and knowledge application.
Knowledge creation is the initial step involves the production of new information.
Knowledge storage can occur through media like books, audio recordings, film, and digital databases.
For the knowledge to be beneficial, it has to be put into practice, meaning that its insights should be used to either improve existing practices or implement new ones.
Knowledge representation is the process of storing organized information, using various forms of media and also includes information stored in the brain..
Knowledge plays a key role in the artificial intelligence, where the term is used for the field of inquiry that studies how computer systems can efficiently represent information.