The Knower's Lens
Culture
The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.
How the knower shapes knowledge. These concepts ask what the knower contributes to what is known, and why two careful people looking at the same thing can arrive somewhere different.
IA prompts this concept is central to
The wording is the guide’s, exactly. Quote it as it stands.
- IA prompt 14Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?The prompt asks whether some knowledge is constituted by the practices of a community rather than merely held by it.
- IA prompt 21What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?The prompt is a direct interrogation of the concept, and the difficulty is that the influence of culture is least visible to those inside it.
- IA prompt 26Does our knowledge depend on our interactions with other knowers?The prompt puts the social character of knowing in question, against the picture of a knower reasoning alone.
- IA prompt 33How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?Disciplines inherit their questions, and the prompt asks how much of current knowledge is an artefact of the route taken to it.
Prompts where it is a useful second angle
Culture under the knowledge framework
Only the elements where this concept has something substantive to say. An empty pairing is left dimmed rather than padded.
A discipline is itself a culture, with inherited vocabulary, exemplars and a sense of which problems are respectable. Its historical development is the record of that culture changing, which is why this element includes the past.
Documenting, translating or formalising the knowledge of another community changes it and raises questions of consent, credit and control that the receiving discipline is often poorly equipped to notice.