Abstract
Distinguishing knowledge from information is not too difficult. We can define what high-order knowledge means. Nevertheless, defining higher-order knowledge is indeed a challenge. What is this thing called knowledge of higher order than or beyond the high? Knowledge of high order is shared and repeated, but knowledge of higher order is not easily taught, for its communication is a big challenge.
We vainly expect that higher knowledge is rendered plausible in the classroom through lectures and interactions. Most students gather only pieces of information even from the most effective and technology-aided lectures, which they remember and recollect. Higher-order knowledge is abstract and deeply theoretical, irrespective of the domain it represents. It is neither the empirically given nor the intuitively attained. Perhaps it could be a combination of both through the process of transcendental deduction as Immanuel Kant thought. It could be fortuitous. Be it Kantian synthesis (Hoffe, 1994) or Jacques Monodian chance and necessity, higher-order knowledge emerges from creative minds as an irresistible impulse working in a certain way (Monod, 1972). Needless to say that it needs to be communicated. What is it that impedes communication of higher-order knowledge?
For Overcoming Barriers
Language is our first and informal agency to convey ideas. However, this agency is too inadequate to satisfy the functional responsibility reposed on it. All linguists agree upon the truth that language seldom succeeds in conveying ideas exactly as construed by their original source. An early Sanskrit theorist Bharthruhari of circa sixth century
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) realized that utterances were not confined to words, but gestures, sighs, yawns, exclamations and laughter—all such forms of wordless utterance—were rich in communicative power. Likewise, we mix informal languages with semiotics in everyday communication. Semiotics is not entirely a non-verbal language (Ogden & Richards, 1994). All this fails in communicating higher-order knowledge.
Semantic vagueness of words had seriously bothered the philosophers of language and logic in Renaissance Europe. They found it hard to communicate their ideas and theories successfully due to the limitations of the informal language. Most of them felt the formal language of algebra was suitable. William of Ockham (1285–1347
In effect, formal languages also misrepresented or failed to convey higher-order knowledge. Charts, diagrams and algebraic modelling in conventional pedagogy either fall flat or convey knowledge wrongly. Only the exceptionally sharp-minded would identify the Euclidian line drawn on the blackboard, a rectangle. Most students fail to get the thought process of scientists through algebraic equations and their algorithms. Even many of the teachers themselves are no exception to this failure. That is the problem with higher-order knowledge communication (K.P. Mohanan, 2017). It can be illustrated by the famous dialogue between Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atom bomb. Bohr said: ‘Everything we see real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.’ Some of his colleagues around him could not understand it. Oppenheimer sitting beside smiled at him. Bohr said: ‘The important thing is not, can you read music. It is, can you hear it. Robert, can you hear the music of physics?’ Oppenheimer said: ‘Yes I can.’ One colleague expressed his inability and asked Bohr whether he would teach him. Bohr smiled at him. Like those musicians, who just read the notations of music, many theoretical physicists read the algebraic equations and miss the music therein.
Of modern European attempts at transcending the linguistic barrier, the Esperanto movement led by L. L. Zamenhof (1859–1917), a Warsaw-based ophthalmologist way back in 1887, who constituted an international auxiliary language, deserves mention. With a view to providing an unambiguous language for science communication, he combined the features of European languages and their common words in science and technology. Despite the existence of other constructed languages, Esperanto remains the most widely spoken the world over.
Terminology
Terminology emerged as an effective alternative proposing terms denoting precise meaning, unlike words with synonyms connoting multiple meanings. Terminology owes its origins as a specialized field of linguistics to Eugen Wüster (1898–1977), a German electrical engineer and an activist of Esperanto. Wüster’s principles, prepared by H. Felber based on lecture notes, came out posthumously in European languages as Introduction to the General Theory of Terminology in 1979 (Felber, 1983). Coming up spontaneously and forming part of knowledge creators’ communicative action Terms constituted a new language within the language. It gained currency among academics.
Wüster devoted his whole life to standardize and theorize Terminology as an efficient tool with the distinct objective of eliminating ambiguity from communicating science and technology. A staunch advocate of a single language for international scientific communication, he wished scientists and technologists the world over to be mutually communicative through Terminology, so that linguistic differences would not impede intellectual transmission. Terms containing phonological and morphological information are based on syntactic rules in delineating concepts by means of definition. Syntactic structures of thought describing the formation of concepts are similar to those in a language.
Linguists of terminology define the relation of Terms to language as a semiotic, unchanging, synchronic, paradigmatic, trans-linguistic and multilingual universal instrument of communication of concept (Castelvi, 2003). Drawing insights from Ferdinand Saussure, they conceive the language system as langue (the sphere of concepts and concept systems) → parole (the sphere of speech or the referential world the sphere of the referent of the concept and the extra-linguistic reality (Saussure, 1986). Terminology distinguishes itself from the relation of words to language, which is semantic, evolving, diachronic, syntagmatic, regional and unilingual communication of meaning.
Despite all this, terms and words became interchangeable, making their semantic function imprecise. Indiscriminate rendering of terms of conceptual and theoretical signification made cross-disciplinary scientific communication ambiguous. Terms of one science became words of metaphorical or analogical function in another science upsetting scientific communication. Higher-order knowledge, in spite of its being universal, independent of cultural differences, began to be different in tune with the diversity of languages.
In short, communicating higher knowledge is a larger question too hard to be resolved easily. Nevertheless, how to enhance the number of students with higher-order cognition is a challenge fruitfully encountered. It is too stale to repeat that rigid modes of education account for the fewer number of the creative ones among students. A flexible system that recognizes higher education as a curiosity-driven personal pursuit and promotes critical thinking can certainly increase the number. Letting the brilliant ones only to repeat the entrenched knowledge rather than requiring to seek ways of rejecting it, the system blocks their creative potential. Educational strategies capable of nurturing curiosity and facilitating self-learning can certainly develop the faculty of higher-order cognition in more students.