The Nature of Knowledge

It would be wrong to say that Information is Knowledge.
It is also wrong to say that Knowledge is Intelligence.

So the question that plagues the more psychologically-focused philosophers remains: How do we know anything? What is "knowing"?

Consider: When Literacy was introduced, people did not say "the book says..." They said "The Truth of the Book is..."

This fits in with the legend of King Thamus, as told in Plato's Phaedrus, which states:

..this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

This runs counter to what many of us think of when we think of literacy--we believe that the information contained in writing can be "reassembled" into knowledge, which can be properly used with intelligence. To the ancients, this would seem like idiocy: If we don't know facts, ourselves, how can we be said to know anything.

This is the old "New Media are Evil" reaction--epitomized by the distrust of television, rock 'n' Roll, and the Internet. (Perhaps "Reductio ad New Media?")

But we can't say that there is no such thing as knowledge or intelligence, anymore, or that we are less intelligent and knowledgeable than our forebears. Instead, I would argue that we're more distributed. Knowledge isn't composed of "facts" anymore, but of the processes necessary for acquiring the desired facts.

A knowledgeable individual might have access to a larger number of individual facts than the average person. Nowadays, though, "knowledgeable" is getting closer to "intelligent": better able to correlate facts and discover new ones, able to allow the sum of what they know be greater than the individual facts that they hold in their memory.

(Note to self: Cease trying to be clever when using the words "New Media.")