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Incommensurable paradigms in KM and KM holy wars

William P. Hall

14 July 2004

Observation

In reviewing some slides for a new KM presentation I came across and updated an old snippet on the fundamental issues differing paradigms create for discourse in KM forums.

Google is actually a very powerful tool for exploring questions the spread of ideas. The search strings I used are also in brackets - quotes in the brackets restrict hits to references to their primary book titles.

The numbers speak for themselves:

Search dates: 11/02/2002, (15/08/2002), [14/07/2004], {20/10/2004}. Click the links to see current hits.

• [Michael Polanyi "Personal Knowledge"] - Google hits = 1,760 (1,450) [4,040] {4270}
• [Karl Popper "Objective Knowledge"] - Google hits = 1,850 (1,570) [3,730] {4310}
• Both of the above together - Google hits = 64 (55) [88] {106} (7 of the 106 are to my own contributions)
• Only between 1 and 1.3% of authors citing either book cited both!

Similar results are found doing similar searches of the journal literature using ISI's Web of Knowledge

Conclusion

Writers concerned with one author's thinking were not interested in or could not cope with discussing the other author's thinking in the same document - even to the extent of listing them in a single bibliography.

If I list Logic of Scientific Discovery as Popper's primary book, this gets [5890] {7200} hits on its own, but only raises the number of hits referencing both books to [100] {110}.

Is it any wonder that censorship and holy wars are a problem on KM forums.

Bill Hall URL: http://www.hotkey.net.au/~bill.hall