University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Re-Visiting the Revised Knowledge Pyramid

Haas, Aric

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/133130

Description

Title
Re-Visiting the Revised Knowledge Pyramid
Author(s)
Haas, Aric
Issue Date
2024-08
Keyword(s)
knowledge hierarchy, knowledge pyramid, DIKW, data, the given
Date of Ingest
2026-04-23T13:19:19-05:00
Abstract
Knowledge hierarchy models often take a bottom-up or top-down structure. Data are either empirical beliefs that form a solid foundation or observations that presuppose the knowledge required to record them in structured databases. In an attempt to connect these definitions and construct a bidirectional knowledge hierarchy, one may fall back to foundationalist epistemology, where data are immediately known through sensory experience. In this article, Wilfrid Sellars’s account of the myth of the given is presented to highlight the incompatibility between these two accounts of data. Further, Sellars’s positive account of observation is introduced to propose a method for defining data as both presupposing knowledge and a starting point for a bidirectional knowledge hierarchy.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Series/Report Name or Number
Volume 73, Issue 1-2, August & November 2024
Type of Resource
text
Genre of Resource
article
Language
eng
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2025 University of Illinois Board of Trustees

Owning Collections

Library Trends 73 (1-2) August & November 2024: Design and the Philosophy of Information [Restricted] PRIMARY
This 2024 special issue of Library Trends was inspired by the contributions of Marcia Bates to our field and discipline. We are very fortunate to have her selected works gathered into three volumes (Bates 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). Thus, the vision for this issue was to treat Bates’s research “protoparadigm” as derived from Thomas Kuhn as a design sounding board, and I invited authors to freely explore these parameters. Additionally, I called for scholarship deriving from the emergence of Chinese information philosophy as another metatheory for LIS. I intentionally left the term “design” as open as possible, with some influence of Floridi’s (2019) definition of philosophy as conceptual design as a directive. Also, Bates (2002) has long called for good design for elements making up retrieval system interfaces and criticized models that do not actually improve information sources for users.