Thinking in Promises

Chapter 8. Knowledge and Information

There is a saying that if you have one clock you know what time it is, but if you have two you are not sure. The joke is about a fundamental issue with autonomous agencies. When everyone lives in a private world, how would they come to agree about anything—in fact, would they ever need to? Whom should we trust? Who has the right answer? Do facts have any meaning? What can we say, at all, about who knows what about whom, and where?

Relativity leads to all manner of trouble and intrigue in the world of agents, human or otherwise. This is certainly one of the issues that Promise Theory attempts to get to the bottom of by decomposing the world into autonomous pieces, and then documenting their probable behaviours, even in the face of incomplete information.

How Information Becomes Knowledge

As we’ve already discussed, knowledge is a body of information that’s familiar (i.e., that you know like a friend). We sample information from the world through observation, hopefully adding the context in which the observations were made, until we’ve rehearsed that relationship. Our level of confidence about what we see only grows through this repetition. That’s why experimentalists repeat experiments many times, and why data samples need to be repeated. It is about whether we promise to accept information as fact or reject it as conjecture. This status emerges over time as we repeatedly revisit the same measurements and ask the same questions.

Knowledge: ...