The Organization of He Concept of Knowledge (2001)

Abstract The purpose of this pilot study is to find out how first-year university students who are majoring in communication studies organize their own concept of knowledge. A card sort procedure was used in gathering data. Each of the 113 participants was asked to sort out a set of 45 words related to the defining concept of knowledge. The findings are interpreted as evidence that these participants think of as a tri-polar concept, with extremes of open and expressive (`Socratic') knowledge, empirically structured ('Cartesian') knowledge, and socially structured (`authoritative') organized around a central concept of informally structured individual knowing. Introduction According to Giddens (1986), communication can be defined as a process where individuals simultaneously shape their own understanding of reality and norms to reflect their social environment and alter the environment to suit their own experience and understanding. Of particular concerns here are concepts such as 'knowledge' and 'math' because of their reflexive nature (Nencel & Pels, 1991; Woolger, 1988). Individuals use such concepts to think and communicate. They simplify their environment in this abstracting enterprise (Trenholm & Jensen, 1992; Tubbs & Moss, 1994; Weaver, 1993). Concepts as Repositories of Social Experience Although there is evidence that the ability to form concepts is shaped by the biological structure of the brain (Gardner, 1993; Steinberg, 1985), specific concepts are abstracted from each individual's accumulated experience. Since humans are an active social species, a large part of the relevant experience is communicative or rhetorical (Hawes, 1977; Shalin, 1986; Shotter, 1993). Thus, individual members of every communicating group appear to understand concepts in ways that closely resemble the understanding of other members. The important point is that because concepts such as knowledge, math, and theory lack any `objective' or `quantifiable' signifier, they are therefore anchored exclusively in people's social experience. Such concepts, then, are susceptible to the influence of proximate social groups. Concepts such as are learned in relation to each other through communication about the torture of both verbal and non-verbal exchanges (Infante, 1980; Leathers, 1986; Tubbs & Moss, 1994). Part of what we generally mean by `socialization' is learning how to interpret and comprehend such abstract concepts, how to connect them to other concepts, and how to apply them to communicate about the group's social and organizational processes (Beebe & Masterson, 1990; Miller & Jablin, 1990). In socializing members into groups primarily concerned with specialized realities (e.g., academic, religious, and scientific communities), the process of teaching new members how to understand central terms such as knowledge is formal and deliberate. On the other hand, in socializing members into social roles of a more general nature (e.g., sex-role socialization and power relations), the interpretation of meta-communicative terms s usually learned through a more subtle and indirect approach. Some meta-communicative abstractions may be taken over entirely by a group. For instance, 'theory' and 'science' are taken over by each scientific community and given a meaning that expresses the values and practices of that particular community (Nelson, Megill, & McCloskey, 1987; Polkinghorne, 1983). New members are discouraged from using these terms in any other way, even in informal conversation. Terms such as `knowledge' and 'fact,' however, are too broadly used in society; they are important in too many contexts to be wholly 'owned' by any one group. Consequently, however communication scholars, for example, understand and use the concept of 'knowledge,' they will also apply the concept in ways that are conditioned by their specific communities, sex-role identities, and power distribution in society (Farrell, 1976; Nelson & Megill, 1986; Stehr, 1994). …