An Introduction to Connective KnowledgeStephen DownesThis paper provides an overview of connective knowledge. It is intended to be an introduction,expressed as non-technically as possible. It is intended to respond to writers like Chris Anderson who,like many other writers, describe connective forms of knowledge as probabilistic.
These forms of knowledge, created by means of interactions among connected entities, are outlined inpublications such as James Suroweicki's
The Wisdom of Crowds.
They should not be thought of asprobabilistic, but rather, as a distinct and new form of knowledge. The purpose of this paper is tointroduce the reader to this new, connective, form of knowledge.It should go without saying that these are my own thoughts, and this discussion should not therefore beconsidered an authoritative reference on the subject. Moreover, this is intended to be a brief overview,and not an academic treatise on the subject.
a. Types of Knowledge
You probably grew up learning that there are two major types of knowledge: qualitative andquantitative. These two types of knowledge have their origin in major schools of history andphilosophy, the former in the works of the ancient Greeks, and the latter in Arabic and then laterRenaissance philosophy.Connective knowledge adds a third major category to this domain, knowledge that could be describedas distributed, because it is spread across more than one entity. A property of one entity must lead to orbecome a property of another entity in order for them to be considered connected; the knowledge thatresults from such connections is connective knowledge.This is more than just the existence of a relation between one entity and another; it implies interaction.A relation - such as 'taller than' or 'next to' - is a type of quality. It describes a property of the object inquestion, with reference to a second object. But the fact that I am, say, 'taller than' Fred tells us nothingabout how Fred and I interact. That is something different.This is why it is incorrect to represent distributed knowledge merely as a type of probabilisticknowledge. The logic of probability implies no connection between correlated events; it merelyobserves a distribution. A connected system may exhibit probabilistic characteristics, but it is not itself probabilistic.Probabilistic knowledge is a type of quantitative knowledge. It is based on the counting of things (orevents, or whatever) and of comparisons between one count and another (one needs only to readCarnap
to see this clearly). A poll, for example, gives us probabilistic information; it tells us how manypeople would vote today, and by inference, would vote tomorrow. But the fact that Janet would vote oneway, and I would vote one way, tells us nothing about how Janet and I interact.
Connective knowledge requires an interaction. More to the point, connective knowledge is knowledge
of
the interaction. If Janet votes a certain way because I told her to, an interaction has taken place and aconnection has been established. The knowledge thus observed consists not in how Janet and I willvote, nor in how many of us will vote, but rather, in the observation that there is this type of connectionbetween myself and Janet. This knowledge may have nothing to do with voting at all. Rather, we mayrecognize it as part of a larger pattern of interaction between the two of us.
b. Interpretation
What we 'know' about the world is irreducibly interpretive. That is to say, we do not through our sensesand cognition obtain any sort of
direct
knowledge about the world, but rather, interpret the sensationswe receive. This is true not only of connective knowledge, but of all three types of knowledge.Consider qualities, for example. We take it as basic or atomic (see people like Ayer
for example) that astatement like 'this apple is red' represents a pure and unadjusted fact. However, looking at this moreclosely tells us how much we have added to our original sensation in order to arrive at this fact:
First
of all, the apple itself has no inherent colour. Colour is a property (specifically, the wavelength) of light reflecting off the apple. In different coloured light, the apple will appear to us differently - itappears white in red light, for example, or gray in diminished light. Yet we say the apple is 'red' -standardizing our colour descriptions to adapt to the natural light that surrounds us day to day.
Second
, our perception of the apple as 'red' depends on our organizing light patterns in a certain way.When I was a child, the spectrum had six colours - red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. As anadult, I find that a seventh - indigo - has been added. It's not that a new colour came into existencewhen I was twenty, it's that our nomenclature changed. In a similar way, we can divide the colours of the spectrum in numerous ways: 'red', for example, can include shades as varied as 'crimson' and'cherry'. Or '#ff0000'.
And third
, when we say that 'the apple is red' we are drawing on our prior linguistic ability to use thewords 'apple' and 'red' correctly and apply them to appropriate circumstances. Indeed, our priorknowledge often shapes our perceptions themselves: were you shown an apple in diminished light, sothat all you could see was gray, and asked what colour it was, you would still respond 'red' because of your prior expectations about apples and redness.Less intuitively so, but equally clearly, interpretation applies to quantitative knowledge as well. It iseasy to say that a sentence like 'there are twenty schoolchildren in the yard' is a basic fact, but this alldepends on how you classify schoolchildren. Suppose, unknown to us all, one of the children had justbeen expelled; is our statement now false? Not obviously so. Perhaps one of them is over sixteen - isthis person still a child (and hence, a schoolchild)? It depends on your point of view.Quantification is essentially the enumeration of members of a category or set. Consequently, it dependscrucially on how that set is defined. But membership in a set, in turn, is (typically) based on theproperties or qualities of the entities in question. So such membership is based on interpretation, andhence, so is counting.
One might be tempted to say that even though applied instances of counting are based on interpretation,mathematics itself is not. But in my view, this too would be mistaken. For one thing, as people such asMill and Kitcher argue
, the rules of mathematics depend on empirical verification for their importance:we say that one plus one is two, not out of some innate sense of goodness, but because when we put onesheep together with another, we observe that there are two. Nothing but our observations prevents usfrom saying that one plus one is three, and in some contexts such a statement makes perfect sense.
c. Emergence
Emergence
is a hard concept, but at this point I can gloss it with a simple characterization: emergence isinterpretation applied to connections.There are two (equally valid) ways of thinking about this:
First
, we may perceive an actual set of connections linking a group of entities as a distinct whole. Forexample, when one domino topples another, and so on, in turn, and we observe this from a distance, wemay observe what appears to be a wave moving through the dominoes. The wave that we observe canbe said to be an 'emergent phenomenon' - it is not a property of the dominoes themselves, or even of thefalling of the dominoes, but of the connectedness of the falling - because one domino causes the next tofall, we see a wave.
Second
, we may perceive something as a distinct whole and interpret this as a set of connections. Forexample, when we look at the image of Richard Nixon on the television, we do not perceive theindividual pixels, but rather, the image of a person. But our inference goes beyond merely theobservation of the person; if asked, we would say that the appearances of the pixels are connected toeach other, through the mechanism of having a common origin (Richard Nixon himself) and themechanism of video broadcasting.Emergence is fundamentally the result of interpretation. As mystics (and Spinoza) are fond of arguing,everything is connected. At a certain point, as the old saying goes, when a butterfly flaps its wings inChina, the result is a thunderstorm in Halifax. But broadcasters in Halifax do not watch butterflies inChina in order to predict the weather, because this connection will be of no use to them. Typically, theywill look at more intermediate events, themselves emergent properties, such as waves of air movingthrough the atmosphere (known locally as 'cold fronts').In the same way, the observation of sets of connections between entities depends a great deal on whatwe already believe. That is why we see swans in clouds or faces on Mars when, manifestly, there arenone. We have brought our prior knowledge of connected entities to bear on our interpretations of thesephenomena. As Hume would say, our 'perception' of a causal relationship between two events is more amatter of 'custom and habit' than it is of observation
d. Physicality
We generally think of knowledge as being about facts, and about facts in turn as being grounded in anindependent reality, a physical reality. Consequently, it is natural for us to say, for example, that whenwe see that something is red, that there is a physical basis for that statement, that even if we bring some
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connective knowledge
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