Rants as the Basis of Knowledge

I was editing my thesis this morning and relatively pessimistically thought of the whole lot as a giant rant. Sure, it's systematic and contains published research (may even be called scientific), although referring to the the mass of typed pages as a rant feels strangely accurate. I do not mean the term in the emotional sense, the work is objective, rather I mean it in the sense that the mass of pages represents my biased investigation and resulting biased perspective on the particular research question. Books and all (let's say written for now) communication are rant's, just really well structured and written by people who know more than the average (usually) about a given domain.

Extrapolation of this perspective suggests that the basis of human knowledge is the summation of biased perspectives. Two obvious clarifications are, firstly the biased context for communicating knowledge, and second the biased context for interpreting communicated knowledge. Pushing the perspective too far suggests at the ability of supporting arbitrary 'facts' with a seemingly reasonable argument of hand-picked (bias with intent) evidence. This does occur (mass media), although is generally averaged out, where knowledge is defined as commonly accepted (easily associated into the framework) facts. This is likely the basis of the perspective that large jumps (difficult to associate or integrate facts into the framework, like 'a perpetual motion engine') are treated skeptically, even in the presence of 'evidence'. Also suggests at work that is refered to as 'before its time', a the suitable context or framework had not been devised.

Ultimately, higher education (for example some history or philosophy of science) teaches you about the fluid nature of facts and knowledge, although the subtleties and implications (in my case) seep-in over a longer period of time. Particularly the structures for integrating, and frameworks for assessing facts (self correcting frameworks are cool). The observation this morning reminded me of a discussion with a friend a number of months ago. She was reading Bryson's: A Short History of Nearly Everything, (highly recommended!) and said she 'felt cheated' by her education (she's a practicing vet). The core of the problem was that Bryson's treatment of the history of science highlighted pointedly the fluidity of the 'facts' that define our conceptual frameworks defined and used in K-12 and beyond. The disgruntled perspective comes from the point that the (potential) instability of 'foundational knowledge' was only recently revealed to her, and serendipitously through reading the seemingly innocuous book.

Thinking about it deeper, it is clear that the perspectives that define the presented 'foundation knowledge' are those arrived at by consensus, basically perspectives that are the most amenable to a broader sample of humans (easy to associate or integrate) using popular methods. I was talking this over with D in the context of what we agree on as seminal dissertations and reference texts in our field, and it is clear for a rant to rise to the stature of 'seminal' there are a set of objectives to maximise, not limited to readability and precedence, as well as the simplicity (elegance!) and distinctness of the presented perspective of the material. Now, if only I could crack that nut...