Explaining the Ontological Structure of Knowledge

When we hear the term “knowledge”, we might think of all that we learned at school. But there are more sides to this term. These sides might not have had the chance to reveal themselves to us as individuals in our personal lives or employees, managers and executives in organizations. What is knowing? Our discussions seek to address this question through Paul Tillich’s works on the polarity of cognitive reason. We discuss the elements of union and detachment involved in every act of knowledge in humans. Moreover, we illustrate two types of knowledge: controlling knowledge and receiving knowledge. While controlling knowledge values the role of detachment in acts of knowledge, in receiving knowledge union has the dominant role. This essay attempts to make effective use of Watson, a software technology which can build a knowledge base for answering questions. We believe Watson can make our discussions more tangible and understandable. We do not intend, however, to discuss any technical details in the realm of artificial intelligence in this essay.

Keywords:

Receiving knowledge , Cognitive union , Detachment , Controlling knowledge , Paul Tillich