The Knowledge Producing Enterprise: New Official Intro

The phrase "knowledge explosion" usually refers to "what is known" in some abstract sense, as if there was an official (World) Storehouse of Knowledge (WSoK). The question of whether I know, or you know, or how many people know a thing hardly registers.

Many attempts to explain the "knowledge revolution" involve exponentially rising graphs, perhaps of academic journal pages, or or everything published to date, or in recent days, the total number of words on all the pages on the web, glossing over the fact that much content on the web isn't static, but potentially unlimited combinations of content from a back-end database. But surely not everything that is published, or written on a web page, is "knowledge". To my mind only a tiny fraction could possibly deserve to be called knowledge.

Partly to answer such questions, there is a philosophical discipline called epistemology, or "The study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief." Another question an epistemologiest might ask is "If one person in some discipline has arrived at some correct conclusions, such that a decade from now everybody will know he was right, while the other hundred people in their discipline think the opposite can we say 'it is known', or it belongs in the WSoK?"

Science in a Nutshell: From Projectiles to Invisible Elephants to Plate Tectonics

January 12, 2017 By Hal Morris

For our pre-technical ancestors, the clockwork at the bottom of the material world was so clothed in messiness that hardly a trace of it appeared on the surface.  But you could say that three exposed bits collectively formed a Rosetta stone to the mathematical language of nature:  a thrown rock, a pendulum, and the solar system, revealed by the night sky.  The last had to be viewed from such a difficult angle that reams of tables, centuries worth of exact observations, and a huge advance in mathematics were required to see it, but it was there to be seen.

Clockwork Model of the Solar System, source: Wikimedia, Creative Commons 20