Category Archives: Knowledge

What will prove as ‘distinctively human’ and will survive the cognitive automation? I think it is the personal, the individual, the subjective, and this convinced me of Downes’s ‘personal learning’.
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Does a neural network need domain knowledge? I think artificial ones do, but human ones do not because they use recognition from the beginning.
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The map is great metaphor when thinking about what can be looked up and what needs to be in the brain. I think the difference is between searching something on a knowledge map, and browsing the map.
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In a great summary of much of his work, “My Viva”, Stephen Downes addresses some august ideas about knowledge construction — and topples them off their pedestal. Abstract ideas such as: representations that “stand for” concepts, and propositions “encoding” knowledge, were unchallenged presuppositions. But “recognizing” is the crucial thing.
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Gradually, Stephen Downes’ explanation of Knowledge as Recognition becomes more and more lucid. Myself, I most intensively recognized this idea in McGilchrist’s description of two different ways of “knowing”.
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OK, concepts are no longer transported into the student’s brain, but only constructed there. But how does the “construction set” get into the brain? Continue reading →

I have often tried to explain my biggest problem with connectivism. Maybe a picture works better. There is the neuronal layer, and then there is the society layer. But how are these related? The metaphor of conceptual connections could be closing the gap.
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I am still wondering if conceptual connections would fulfill one of Stephen Downes’ criteria: “A connection exists between two entities when a change of state in one entity can cause or result in a change of state in the second entity.” Words can change each other’s subtle nuances; “Language is use”,
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When I try to understand what “recognition” means, what makes “recognizing” different from just seeing the single parts, I cannot visualize this at the neural level. Rather, I need some imagination from an accessible level — from the conceptual level.
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Downes explains that representational theories only work if we assume a little “homunculus” inside ourselves. Therefore he emphasises the role of recognition. McGilchrist calls the representational mode an “emissary” who needs to return to his master, the presentational mode, for reintegration.
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