This paper aims to explain and discuss the complex nature and value of knowledge as an exploitable resource for business. Design/methodology/approachThe authors propose a conceptual explanation of knowledge based on three pillars: the plurality of its nature, understood to be conservative, multipliable and generative, its contextual value and the duality of carrier incorporating business knowledge, objects or processes. After conceptualizing the nature of knowledge, the authors offer a metaphor based on the classic transformation from "potential" to "kinetic" energy in an inclined plane assuming that the conservative nature of knowledge makes it act as energy. FindingsThe metaphor uses the concept of potential and kinetic energy: if energy is only potential, it has a potential value not yet effective, whereas if the potential energy (knowledge) becomes kinetic energy (products and/or services), it generates business value. In addition, business value is a function of the speed acquired and caused by the angle of inclined plan, namely, the company's business model. Knowledge is the source of the value and can be maintained and regenerated only through continuous investments. Several years later the value extraction reaches a null value of the company (potential energy) which will cease to act (kinetic energy) for triggering both the value generated and the value extracted. Originality/valueThe paper proposes an initial attempt to explain the meaning of the transformation of knowledge using a metaphor derived from physics. The metaphor of the energy of knowledge clearly depicts the managerial dilemma of balancing a company's resources for both the generating and extracting value. Similarly, future study should try to associate other knowledge peculiarities to physical phenomena.
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Plausibly perceptual knowledge satisfies the following: (1) It is knowledge about things from the way they appear. (2) It can embrace more than the way things appear. (3) It is phenomenologically immediate and thus, in one sense, non-inferential. (2) and (3) place a significant constraint on adequate elucidations of (1). Knowledge about an object, from the way it looks, which embraces more than the way it looks, should not turn out to be inferential in the relevant sense. The paper shows how this constraint can be met, drawing upon a conception of a discriminative capacity. The discussion touches on literature dealing with observation in science, knowledge of other minds, and the possibility of moral knowledge.
This book shows that ascriptions of beliefs and intentions are normative in that they have normative implications. Since there is no more to believing something and intending something than meeting the conditions for falling under, respectively, the concepts of so believing and of so intending, it follows that there is a normative dimension to the states of believing and intending. The idea is extended to all propositional attitudes via the assumption that attitudes with conceptual content have a normative dimension. The resulting picture is applied to issues about understanding people in terms of rationalizing explanations of what they think or do. An important concern is to explain how the fact that agents’ attitudes rationalize the performance of actions or the formation of beliefs on their part can be relevant to the explanation of what they do or believe. Along the way, there are discussions of normative commitments, differences between reasons for action and reasons for belief, practices conceived as essentially rule-governed activities, simulation theory, and the limits of mentalistic explanation.
This chapter presents a conception of recognitional abilities and perceptual-discriminative abilities to make sense of how perceptual experiences make it possible to have cognitive contact with objects and facts. It is argued that accepting the emerging view does not commit one to the claim that perceptual experiences are essentially relational, as they are conceived to be in disjunctivist theories. The discussion explores some implications for the theory of knowledge in general. In particular, it considers how we can shed light on the nature of knowledge if we do not aim to provide a conceptual analysis of knowledge in terms of true belief plus something else. Consideration is also given to how best to make sense of the practical value that knowledge has.
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