Knowledge as a Complex Phenomenon

Rafal Maciag

Institute of Information Studies, Jagiellonian University, Lojasiewicza 4, 30-348 Krakow, Poland

Keywords: Knowledge, Discourse, Dynamical Space, Discursive Space, Complexity.

Abstract: The paper presents the construction of the discursive space, which is a representation of knowledge. It is a

multidimensional dynamic space crossed by discourses running along their specific trajectories. These

discourses remain in the relationship of supervenience with reality, which is interpreted as a world of facts

(state of affairs). Discourses inherit the complexity of the world, and because they are the articulation/retention

of knowledge, this knowledge also inherits this property. Discursive space is, therefore, a model of knowledge

of a complex nature.

1 INTRODUCTION

This paper addresses the subject of knowledge in the

context of complexity. In particular, it presents a

knowledge representation model based on two main

ideas: discourse and dynamic space. The first idea

comes from the area of social sciences and

philosophy and uses the classical concept of discourse

presented by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1966, 1969,

1971). The second idea comes from the area of

physics, where it is also a classic tool for representing

and describing various types of phenomena (Nolte,

2010, 2015). Thanks to this combination, it is possible

to find a junction between the existing formal

construction and the phenomenon which is very hard

to formalize, although such solutions have been

proposed.

Dynamic space is a tool that can be used to

describe complex systems. However, the key place to

justify the use of the concept of complexity in the

proposed knowledge model is the mutual relation of

discourses and the world, which is based on the

relationship of supervenience (Armstrong, 1997),

which exists between discourses and the world

interpreted as a set of facts (world of affairs).

Armstrong, who develops the ideas of Wittgenstein

and Russell, is based on this interpretation (Russell,

1923; Wittgenstein, 1922). In this situation,

discourses must inherit the uncontroversial immanent

property of the world, which is its complexity.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1812-3538

Complexity, therefore, appears not as an assumption

but as a necessarily arising problem to be solved.

The immediate reason for taking up the described

problems is the phenomenon of knowledge and the

state of interpretation of this phenomenon, in

particular in the context of IT development.

Knowledge is treated in the IT field as an autonomous

resource that must be reconstructed in a computable

way. The effort involved has been going on since at

least the 1960s and is mainly associated with the so-

called artificial intelligence.

However, knowledge is a phenomenon whose

perception has undergone a broader, fundamental

revision in the 20th century. The classical definition

of knowledge puts at the center a man who is its only

subject (Pritchard, 2016, p. 3). It was given in Plato's

dialogue Theaetetus and functions as the basis for

understanding knowledge to the present. Its short

definition is Dóksa alethés metá lógu (Appiah, 2003),

in English translation by Waterfield: “true belief

accompanied by a rational account” (Plato, 1987, p.

115), usually shortened to justified true belief (Dancy

et al., 2010). It is a combination of three elements:

belief, true and justification (the so-called tripartite)

which “is a central philosophical claim [of

knowledge] of the Western tradition since Plato”

(Appiah, 2003, p. 43).

The revision was based on the deprivation of

knowledge of its transcendental nature, in particular,

the abandonment of the condition of truth and a

pragmatic approach in its understanding. This kind of

Maciag, R.

Knowledge as a Complex Phenomenon.

DOI: 10.5220/0009513201130119

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Complexity, Future Information Systems and Risk (COMPLEXIS 2020), pages 113-119

ISBN: 978-989-758-427-5

113

change was due to some fundamental changes in the

understanding of physics and mathematics in the

nineteenth century e.g. (Husserl, 2008; Russell,

1923). This leads to a functional and teleological

understanding of knowledge e.g. “as a generalized

capacity to act and as a model for reality” (Adolf &

Stehr, 2014, p. 22) and also to perceive it as the

separate and autonomous issue i.e. human-

independent phenomenon e.g. (Adolf & Stehr, 2014;

Burgin, 2015; Ibekwe-SanJuan & Dousa, 2014;

Pritchard, 2006; Tolksdorf, 2011).

The implementation of this pragmatic approach

had many variants. These include the emergence of a

modern philosophy of science that is based on

reflection as old as philosophy itself (Losee, 2001;

Machamer & Silberstein, 2002). The philosophy of

science in the twentieth century has become,

however, “the distinct yet central part of philosophy”

(Psillos & Curd, 2008, p. xxi) formulating

fundamental questions about the justification of the

scientific reasoning e.g. (Popper, 1935). One of the

branches of this philosophy even led to the

phenomenon of the so-called “historical turn” in the

understanding of science interpreted by researchers

like Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend as a product of

current historical and social circumstances (Bird,

2008, p. 21).

In the 20th century, this social context becomes

the most important circumstance of knowledge and

shows the way to its interpretation (Bloor, 1976;

Fleck, 1935; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Latour & Woolgar,

1979; Mannheim, 1929). This interpretation may

have a more philosophical and speculative character,

as exemplified by the reflection of Foucault and

Lyotard (Foucault, 1966, 1969, 1971; Lyotard, 1979)

or based on a social, economic and political approach.

In the latter area, knowledge can be interpreted in at

least three ways: first, as the basis of management, the

main premise of political organization and a direct

resource, e.g. for business (Bell, 1973; Drucker,

1961; Machlup, 1962; Simon, 1971). Secondly, it can

be subject to instrumental economic management

(Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1991; Wiig, 1993) or thirdly, to

function as a resource that is subject to practical

human activities such as searching, acquiring and

organizing (Hjørland, 2016).

However, probably the most important way of

understanding knowledge in a pragmatic way is

associated with its use in the area of IT. Knowledge

perceived from this perspective is computable, i.e. it

is treated either as purposeful, intentional, explicit

knowledge bases or on the contrary as hidden,

spontaneous and random resources. Especially the

latter have gained in importance recently, leading to

generalized ways of interpreting knowledge e.g.

(Burgin, 2015; Moldoveanu & Baum, 2014; Weller,

2010; Zhuge, 2012).

Computing solutions aimed at formalizing

knowledge for broadly understood IT purposes have

their beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s e.g. (Collins

& Quillian, 1969; Minsky, 1974; Schank & Abelson,

1975; Sowa, 2000) and have developed many

practical solutions e.g. (Brachman & Levesque, 2004;

Van Harmelen et al., 2008). Recent rapid progress in

the field of neural networks has raised the importance

of solutions based on the non-symbolic, distributed

way of knowledge understanding e.g. (Bengio et al.,

2003; Goodfellow et al., 2014; LeCun et al., 1990;

Mikolov et al., 2013; Vaswani et al., 2017). Another

rapidly growing area of knowledge acquisition is

massive data repositories created spontaneously,

whose prototype is the WWW, explored through

several techniques known as mining: data mining or

particularly text mining (Bramer, 2016; Jo, 2019;

Kitchin, 2014).

2 METHODOLOGY

The reasoning presented in this paper has a

conceptual character (Gilson & Goldberg 2015) since

it presents the metalevel type of reflection due to the

general problem of knowledge. Although it refers to

the numerous empirical reflections on particular

issues and solutions. Such reasoning maintains

coherence both on the level of deduction and

coherence of the adopted assumptions, fulfilling, on

the one hand, Popper's postulate (Popper, 1935) and

on the other assumption of the axiomatic approach

(Hilbert, 1899; Peano, 1889).

3 RESULTS

This paper proposes the discursive space construction

as a model of knowledge. The definition of the

discursive space is as follows: “the discursive space

(DS) […] is the method of the description of the

massive and ubiquitous phenomena like the internet

chosen as an example. This method could be also

treated as the model of knowledge about the chosen

phenomenon. This knowledge is understood from the

point of view brought by sociology and philosophy

which present the so-called constructivist attitude

which means that the knowledge is treated by them as

a social, temporary and spatially local creation. […]

Two essential ingredients appears as the base of DS:

COMPLEXIS 2020 - 5th International Conference on Complexity, Future Information Systems and Risk

114

complexity as a generic model and discourse as its

direct substance” (Maciag, 2018). The more formal

definition of it is as follows: discursive space is an n-

dimensional dynamical space in which discourses,

which are autonomous instances of knowledge, run in

time trajectories describing the real state of

knowledge in the subject they concern.

Such a definition brings instantly at least the

following two questions: first, about the nature of

discourses, second, about the conditions of the

building of the dynamical space i.e. its dimensions.

For the complexity the first is crucial. To establish

such a space the idea of discourse was based on the

theory by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1971). Foucault

describes discourse as a retention/articulation of

knowledge, what is classical approach now, widely

presented in the current literature e.g. (Angermüller

et al., 2014, p. 6; Dijk, 2013, p. 592; Hyland &

Paltridge, 2011, p. 39; Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002, p.

2).

Foucault characterizes discourse indirectly, by

formulating the rules of its analysis, which are the

only ways due to its character. This character is

fundamentally linguistic but discourse goes beyond

this level. Foucault proposes four rules that explain

this character. He names the reversal as the first rule

and opts for the rejection of such classical subjects as

the author, the discipline, the will to truth. They are

recognized as “the negative action of a cutting-up and

a rarefaction of discourse” (Foucault, 1981, p. 67).

The second is the discontinuity which qualifies

discourse as “discontinuous practices, which cross

each other” (ibidem). The third rule: specifity, maybe

the most difficult, which underlines the influence of

discourse on things, discourse through the violence

becomes operational. The fourth rule is the

exteriority, which refers to the conditions of the

existence of discourse which are always external.

Discourse presents then the autonomous entity of

the uncertain identity. This uncertainty defines it. The

only way to recognize discourse is to observe its

impact on things what means that this identity is

invisible by itself by the usual modes of cognition.

Foucault calls it “practices” (pratiques) what heading

towards certain human actions and also towards their

dynamic form of existence. The rule of exteriority

excludes the existence of kernel, the overriding

principle of the discourses which “cross each other,

are sometimes juxtaposed with one another, but can

just as well exclude or be unaware of each other”

(Foucault, 1981, p. 67). Such a set of properties lets

understand discourse as potentially complex.

However, the main premise for the claim of the

complex nature of discourse comes from the

assumption about the ontological establishment of the

discourse. This establishment assumes the relation of

supervenience between the space of discourses and

the world. Armstrong defines the supervenience

which is as follows: “We shall say that entity Q

supervenes upon entity P if and only if it is impossible

that P should exist and Q not exist, where P is

possible” (Armstrong, 1997, p. 11). The general

character of this definition neither doesn’t exclude the

particular kinds of relations nor determines the

direction of them what allows the presence of circular

relations instead of the simple casual ones. At the

same time, Armstrong doesn’t exclude the factor of

time which means that supervenience relation can

develop over time i.e. is a dynamic process.

The second side of the relation (besides the

discourses): the reality is interpreted by Armstrong

who names it in terms of a state of affairs. He defines

it as follows: “The general structure of states of affairs

will be argued to be this. A state of affairs exists if

and only if a particular (at a later point to be dubbed

a thin particular) has a property or, instead, a relation

holds between two or more particulars. Each state of

affairs, and each constituent of each state of affairs,

meaning by their constituents the particulars,

properties, relations and, in the case of higher-order

states of affairs, lower-order states of affairs, is a

contingent existent. The properties and the relations

are universals, not particulars. The relations are all

external relations” (Armstrong, 1997, p. 1).

Armstrong relies on the idea proposed earlier by

Wittgenstein and Russell (Russell, 1923;

Wittgenstein, 1922).

Russell describes the idea of the structure of the

world in a text from 1911: „I believe there are simple

beings in the universe, and that these beings have

relations in virtue of which complex beings are

composed.” (Russell, 2003, p. 94). For this text is the

indication of the relational character of the world is

most important. Russell composed his structure of the

world of the two elements representing on one side

the simplest parts of it and the relations between them

on the other (Russell, 2003, p. 95). He calls them “the

stuff” and “the structure” (Russell, 2003, p. 276) and

names them “particulars” and “universals”.

Wittgenstein published Tractatus in 1921, but the

first draft entitled Notes on Logic he presented to

Russell in 1913 whose student he became in 1912.

Wittgenstein created the visionary idea of the world

structure based on the idea of the facts: “1.1 The

world is the totality of facts, not of things. […] 2.

What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of

affairs. 2.1 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a

combination of objects (things)” (Wittgenstein, 2002,

Knowledge as a Complex Phenomenon

115

p. 5). Such a world is the base of the language. There

is a clear connection between them that uses well-

defined intermediaries: facts, a logical picture,

thoughts, and propositions. There is no place here to

develop a detailed justification, so let us remain with

the statement that this is the clear manifestation of the

complex nature of the world understood in terms of

the network (Wittgenstein, 2002, p. 59).

The last component of reasoning is the mode of

the representation of the whole concept which is

based on the idea of the dynamical space. Nolte refers

the fundamental nature of this construction as

follows: “A unifying viewpoint of physics has

emerged, over the past century, that studying the

geometric properties of special points and curves

within dynamical spaces makes it possible to gain a

global view of the dynamical behavior, rather than

focusing on individual trajectories. Dynamical spaces

can have many different dimensions and many

different symmetries” (Nolte, 2015, p. 2).

Discursive space is built of the unlimited set of

dimensions which have primordially the qualitative

character. They are the result of the qualitative

(semantical) analysis of the discourses regarding the

issue under consideration. Infinitely many discourses

can run usually trajectories in such a space since there

are many interpretations i.e. the manifestations of

knowledge concerning every subject. Due to the

constructivist nature of such knowledge the category

of truth is irrelevant. In the example of the discursive

space, the subject of the study was the Internet, which

was presented as the value of 19 variables of various

types observed in time (Maciag, 2017, 2018). The

status of these values has been visualized as a chart

on the coordinate system parallel (Inselberg &

Shneiderman, 2009). The idea of space can be

extended by the introduction of the idea of manifold

invented by Riemann, who didn’t understand

manifold as formally as modern topology (Torretti,

1978). Manifold has been understood in a more

general way also by the Husserl (Smith, 2002).

4 DISCUSSION

The application of the idea of complexity to the social

and humanistic field which is the case of the idea of

the discursive space is not new. Preiser and Cilliers

writes that attempts to combine social sciences and

humanities with complexity science emerged in the

1990s and point to publications by Byrne and by

Luhman as examples (Preiser & Cilliers, 2010, p. 95).

In 2005, John Urry called the application of this idea

in social research "the complexity turn" and

compared it to other, similar alterations of the

paradigmatic research approaches and mentions

„Marxism in the 1970s, the linguistic turn and

postmodernism in the 1980s, the body, performative

and global culture turns in the 1990s” (Urry, 2005, p.

1).

Castellani and Hafferty very widely justify the

need to apply the idea of complexity in sociology

(Castellani & Hafferty, 2010). Social, humanistic and

philosophical aspects of complexity are also the

subject of numerous literature e.g. (D. Byrne, 1998,

1998; D. S. Byrne & Callaghan, 2014; Cilliers &

Bruce, 1998; Jörg, 2011; Preiser & Cilliers, 2010;

Youngman & Hadzikadic, 2014). Complexity was

also applied extensively in the field of science of

organizations e.g. (Anderson, 1999; Burnes, 2005;

Griffin & Stacey, 2005). Routledge even devoted two

publishing series to this issue: Complexity and

Emergence in Organizations in 2002 and Complexity

as the Experience of Organizing in 2005. There are

also many textbooks introducing the problematics of

the complexity e.g. (Beautement & Broenner, 2011;

Downey, 2012; Holland, 2014; Johnson, 2007;

Mitchell, 2011).

The way in which complexity appears here is the

closest to Byrne and Callaghan's conception (D. S.

Byrne & Callaghan, 2014). They perceive the theory

of complexity as „an ontologically founded

framework of understanding” (D. S. Byrne &

Callaghan, 2014, p. 8). They devote a special analysis

to the phase space and the state space which are the

realizations of the dynamical space construction in

the context of the complex adaptive systems they

choose as a model (D. S. Byrne & Callaghan, 2014,

p. 27). They write that the dimensions of this space

are not necessarily mathematical. In the justification,

they refer to the difference that separates the so-called

metric space and topological space, described by

DeLanda (Delanda, 2002, p. 23). In that way, they

dismiss the methodological problem of research in

social sciences that results from the conflict between

the qualitative and quantitative approaches (D. S.

Byrne & Callaghan, 2014, p. 38).

The idea of the multidimensional space despite its

quantitative nature was also used by Gärdenfors in his

idea of the conceptual spaces (Gärdenfors, 2000,

2004; Zenker & Gärdenfors, 2015). The notion of the

dynamical system has its strict physical interpretation

proposed by Poincaré and developed in a classical

work by Birkhoff, who is considered an inventor of

this notion (Abraham et al., 1980; Birkhoff, 1966

(1927); Nolte, 2015). Nevertheless, a concept of that

system was proposed by Poincaré as a combination of

COMPLEXIS 2020 - 5th International Conference on Complexity, Future Information Systems and Risk

116

the qualitative and quantitative approaches in a

geometric concept (Abraham et al., 1980, p. xviii).

5 CONCLUSIONS

An approach based on the construction of dynamic

space allows the creation of a knowledge model that

is represented by discourse trajectories. Discourses

are considered articulations/retention of knowledge

as interpreted by Michel Foucault, which is one of the

foundations of reasoning. These discourses remain in

the relationship of supervenience with reality, which

is interpreted as a world of facts (state of affairs). The

key property of such a world is its relational

character, which is an analog of a dynamic network

structure.

This structure reflects the complex nature of the

world, which is otherwise its non-controversial

property. This structure plays the role of a conceptual

interpretation of this complexity. Thanks to the

relationship of supervenience, discourses as

articulations/retention of knowledge about this world

inherit its complexity. Dynamic space allows

modeling the state of discourses over time and thus

modeling the dynamic state of knowledge.

Knowledge presented in this way also acquires the

character of a complex phenomenon.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The paper was created as a result of the realization of

the research project financed from the grant number

2018/29/B/HS1/01882 awarded by the National

Science Centre, Poland.

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