Posted by Reilly Atkinson on August 20, 1999 at 00:33:04:

In Reply to: Re: Wrong, untrue, incorrect or out of context posted by Daan de Koning on August 18, 1999 at 18:26:41:

Sir

A small point: the notion of an absolute truth, a theorem that is absolutely true is no longer held by most mathematicians. About a hundred years ago, mathematicians led by David Hilbert, thought otherwise, and were convinced they could develop a truth machine -- a series of procedures by which the correctness of any mathematical construct could be ascertained. Indeed, Godel put a stop to this effort. In layman's terms, Godel proved that there are always statements like, "How high is up? " Statments that make no sense, but are grammatically and syntactically proper exsist in any language structure. So, even mathematical truth is relative, relative to mathematical protocals of proof. Similarly, the laws of nature are true relative to the protocols of physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. But, not to worry, you can bank the laws of nature as usually expressed, and mathematics as well. There's never been any signs of real funny business -- the sun always shows up in the morning, to the best of our knowledge.

More generally, there's a simple difficulty with absulute -- hence perpetual -- truth. There's no general way to establish what the future will be, hence any proof of universal and/or perpetual truths is impossible. Even faith cannot do the trick, as the statments of these universal truths must be made in a language. And once again, Godel rains on the universal parade. When all else fails, informed common sense is usually the best way to get at the truth of most anything. That's how most scientists operate.

Knowledge can certainly be wrong. Creationists and Evolutionists will swear the the other's knowledge of the origins of humanity is wrong. There are many folks who are convinced that the knowledge physicists have of relativity is wrong. If truth is relative, then "wrong" is relative too. And, of course, knowledge about managment, customer relations, operations and so forth can sometimes be badly wrong. Thus it would seem that a key element of KM is vetting what is kept and what is discarded. This relative stuff makes a lot of things difficult -- think about doing KM for a political party.

Regards
Reilly Atkinson

As the poet Louis MacNeice put it, "There ain't no universals in this man's town".

---

Follow Ups:

• the truth, the only truth and nothing but KM Daan de Koning 05:20:16 8/20/99 (9)
  • Re: the truth, the only truth and nothing but KM Reilly Atkinson 22:08:42 8/23/99 (8)
    • Re: the truth, the only truth and nothing but KM Daan de Koning 04:50:14 8/24/99 (7)
      • Re: there are exceptions (small fish eating the bigger fish) Kees de Vos 17:53:26 8/25/99 (0)
      • Less is More Martyn R Jones 12:16:12 8/24/99 (5)
        • Re: Less is More Reilly Atkinson 19:55:59 8/26/99 (4)
          • Re: Less is More Richard 07:29:03 8/29/99 (3)
            • Re: Less is More Reilly Atkinson 20:25:28 8/29/99 (2)
              • Re: Less is More Richard 15:00:08 8/31/99 (1)
                • Re: Less is More Reilly Atkinson 16:05:02 9/01/99 (0)

---

Click Here to Post Follow Up in New Forums

    Knowledge Management Think Tank (New)

  

 Subject: 

Message: