Negative Knowledge


Book Description

The advent of Modernity was accompanied by a radical criticism of traditional metaphysics. In particular since the 20th century, rationality is predominantly conceived of as positivistic and scientistic, reducing reality to what is positively knowable. The price to pay is the cutting out of any kind of phenomenon of negativity. The present volume explicitly explores the philosophical and epistemological potential of negativity. The contributions brought together in this book tackle the question of negativity from historical as well as from systematical perspectives. From different angles, they defend the claim that philosophical approaches recurring to negativity can build a non-reductive conceptualization of rationality, and thus offer a valuable contribution to the orientation of humankind in the 20th and 21st century. This volume contains contributions in English, French, and German.




Human Fallibility


Book Description

A curious ambiguity surrounds errors in professional working contexts: they must be avoided in case they lead to adverse (and potentially disastrous) results, yet they also hold the key to improving our knowledge and procedures. In a further irony, it seems that a prerequisite for circumventing errors is our remaining open to their potential occurrence and learning from them when they do happen. This volume, the first to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives on learning from errors at work, presents theoretical concepts and empirical evidence in an attempt to establish under what conditions professionals deal with errors at work productively—in other words, learn the lessons they contain. By drawing upon and combining cognitive and action-oriented approaches to human error with theories of adult, professional, and workplace learning this book provides valuable insights which can be applied by workers and professionals. It includes systematic theoretical frameworks for explaining learning from errors in daily working life, methodologies and research instruments that facilitate the measurement of that learning, and empirical studies that investigate relevant determinants of learning from errors in different professions. Written by an international group of distinguished researchers from various disciplines, the chapters paint a comprehensive picture of the current state of the art in research on human fallibility and (learning from) errors at work.




Threatened Knowledge


Book Description

Threatened Knowledge discusses the practices of knowing, not-knowing, and not wanting to know from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. In times of "fake news", processes of forgetting and practices of non-knowledge have sparked the interest of historical and sociological research. The common ground between all the contributions in this volume is the assumption that knowledge does not simply increase over time and thus supplant phases of not-knowing. Moreover, the contributions show that knowing and not-knowing function in very similar ways, which means they can be analysed along similar methodological lines. Given the implied juxtaposition between emotions and rational thinking, the role of emotions in the process of knowledge production has often been trivialized in more traditional approaches to the subject. Through a broad geographical and chronological approach, spanning from prognostic texts in the Carolingian period to stock market speculation in early-twentieth-century United States, this volume demonstrates the important role of emotions in the history of science. By bringing together cultural historians of knowledge, emotions, finance, and global intellectual history, Threatened Knowledge is a useful tool for all students and scholars of the history of knowledge and science on a global scale.




Learning from Errors at School and at Work


Book Description

Learning by erring Is it possible to learn from your mistakes? While there is evidence to the positive, there is also evidence suggesting that whether mistakes may teach you anything depends on genetic disposition as well as supervisors handling those mistakes. Apparently, it is of utter importance to see how things cannot work, what things are not like, and what you do not know. Through this negative knowledge, learning through errors may be achieved. In this book, the authors look at errors and their potentials for the learning process, as well as the sort of environment that does make a positive difference concerning these concepts.




Knowledge, Truth, and Duty


Book Description

This text examines epistemic duty, doxastic voluntarism, the normativity of justification, internalism versus externalism, truth as the epistemic goal, and scepticism and the search for justification.




The Wild Card of Reading


Book Description

One of the most knowledgeable and provocative explicators of Paul de Man's writings, Rodolphe Gasché, a philosopher by training, demonstrates for the first time the systematic coherence of the critic's work, insisting that de Man continues to merit close attention despite his notoriously difficult and obscure style. Gasché shows that de Man's "reading" centers on a dimension of the texts that is irreducible to any possible meaning, a dimension characterized by the "absolutely singular." Given that de Man and Derrida are both termed deconstructionists, Gasché differentiates between the two by emphasizing Derrida's primary interest in "writing," and postulates that the best way to come to terms with de Man's works is to "read" them athwart the writings of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. He shows his respect for the "immanent logic" of de Man's thought--which he lays out in great detail--while revealing his uneasiness at the oddness of that thought and its consequences.




Capture and Reuse of Project Knowledge in Construction


Book Description

An organisation’s competitive advantage lies in the knowledgeof its employees and the organisation’s ability to harnessthat knowledge to meet business objectives. Knowledge management isrecognised in the construction industry as a potential tool forproviding organisational benefits, but for a number of reasons– particularly the project based nature of construction,where teams are transient, multidisciplinary and often fromdifferent organisations – implementation has been onlymarginally successful. Capture and Reuse of Project Knowledge in Construction describesa methodology for the 'live' capture of reusable project knowledgethat reflects both the organisational and human dimensions ofknowledge capture and reuse, as well as exploiting the benefits oftechnology. This methodology was developed in response to theshortcomings of current practices in managing project knowledge,the benefits offered by capturing and sharing knowledge immediatelyafter it is generated, and the organisational benefit of reusingknowledge within a project based environment.




Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery


Book Description

Covering research at the frontier of this field, Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery: Novel Applications and New Techniques presents state-of-the-art privacy-preserving data mining techniques for application domains, such as medicine and social networks, that face the increasing heterogeneity and complexity of new forms of data. Renowned authorities




Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, PKDD 2001, held in Freiburg, Germany, in September 2001. The 40 revised full papers presented together with four invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from close to 100 submissions. Among the topics addressed are hidden Markov models, text summarization, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, demographic data analysis, phenotype data mining, spatio-temporal clustering, Web-usage analysis, association rules, clustering algorithms, time series analysis, rule discovery, text categorization, self-organizing maps, filtering, reinforcemant learning, support vector machines, visual data mining, and machine learning.




The Second Age of Computer Science


Book Description

Between the genesis of computer science in the 1960s and the advent of the World Wide Web around 1990, computer science evolved in significant ways. The author has termed this period the "second age of computer science." This book describes its evolution in the form of several interconnected parallel histories.