There’s a TS Elliot poem from a play called The Rock. It’s a mediation on the human condition and our use of data… read on.
Choruses from The Rock – T.S. Eliot
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death, no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
TS Elliot gave us a vision of wisdom, fluid and pressing, yet structured and present. Wisdom for Elliot is more than possessing data and information or even its dressed up partner, knowledge. Wisdom is somewhere in the Life we have lost in living. It’s in the application of what we know and what we do in the world with what we know. And, importantly, it’s doing good in the world.
Many argue that this wonderful poem by TS Elliot has helped shape the field of information science, and in particular, an approach to making sense of the relationship between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom — (more here and here).
In a 1974 article on knowledge management and public policy, Nicolas Henry kick started this field. Henry opened the door for a new way to think about the relationships between data and information and then the development of knowledge and ultimately wisdom. Henry’s way of thinking—
By information and knowledge, I mean data that change us. This distinguishes information from data, which are merely raw facts that do not change us. 1
Put differently, data is, in and itself, unfit for much good. Humans interacting with data give data meaning, shaping and forming data into information. This information as data in action is then ready to be shaped again and manipulated again into knowledge. By manipulation, I don’t necessarily mean anything nefarious, but more that information is used as an ingredient to make knowledge. Think of knowledge as a meal, made using a recipe with interesting ingredients (that’s where information comes in) and then all put together to make something that tastes good. Those ingredients in our meal are made up of raw materials (that’s the data in our knowledge making).
Information scientists have come to describe this as a hierarchy representing the relationships among data, information, knowledge and wisdom – the DIKW pyramid.
Data (unformed and most purposeless) is given meaning as it’s shaped into information and similarly information informs knowledge. Then, knowledge in action can be wisdom. It’s the – can be – that deserves our attention.
Knowledge (which is information put to work from data that was likewise put to work) is itself put to work when we do things with our knowledge. When we make or do something complex, solve a problem, or answer an open-ended question, we’re applying knowledge. It happens everyday, all day. In school and work, we structure our experiences around using knowledge to accomplish tasks. While the nature of these tasks matters, I would suggest that the use of information and knowledge to complete these tasks is where we have the most agency and thus the most opportunities to do good or to do harm. That’s where wisdom comes into play.
Wisdom is the use of knowledge to accomplish a task such that the outcome is good.
Outrage, prejudice, abuse, violence, immorality, and other vices in which we trade, undermine our human nature. These are the outcomes of knowledge put to harmful use. Knowledge used badly wrecks our innate human capacity to be humane. Knowledge used to make our human experience better is wise.
In a recent article in Acta Analytica (via Michael Prinzing), Iskra Fileva and Jon Tresan offer a sharp account of wisdom.
Wisdom has a special place among the virtues: other virtues typically allow for misuse and undesirable surpluses. Thus, an intellectually gifted person may use her intelligence to commit fraud, and a witty person may use her wit to ridicule others. One may be kind to a fault, courageous to the point of foolhardiness, too patient, or too generous. But one cannot, it seems, be too wise or put one’s wisdom to bad use. When it comes to wisdom, good use is part of the very notion of wisdom.2
In school, we ask students to use knowledge (from information and data) on a regular basis. But, how often do we stop to consider the ways in which these knowledge-building exercises are for a common good and help them to become wise? With inquiry, we can do just that. With inquiry, we ask students to use their knowledge to say things they believe to be true. In an inquiry, that’s called claim-making and claim-making is the business of making an argument. Thus, if being and acting wisdom should do no harm and a condition of wisdom is to do no harm, then perhaps we should be sure that our claim-making is done with purpose.
