The Theories Of Shared Knowledge

Prescribed Title: With reference to two areas of knowledge discuss the way in which shared knowledge can shape personal knowledge.

To what extent can shared knowledge modify our behaviour and perspective on aspects of life?

Shared knowledge plays a huge role in shaping who we are as people, it helps us to identify ourselves and hence, quite obviously have a great influence over our personal knowledge. Shared knowledge is knowledge that many people take part in producing via collaboration, and can change or evolves over time due to the continuation of other individuals taking part in inquiry and discover more facts about that certain subject. Shared knowledge, to some extent, can be interpreted as our culture or surrounding environment. Whereas …show more content…
Direct experience gives us direct personal familiarity, even though other can share the same experience by being in the same place, they cannot lives it exactly as you do. Following direct experience, humans will undergo reflection of these experiences and hence modify their future behaviour in response to their personal knowledge of the experience. However, the behaviour has to be voluntary or desired and not forced to be a response to the personal knowledge. Behaviours that are dued to expectations from social norms can be disregard as personal knowledge. Social norms are values, belief, attitudes and behaviours that are culturally-specific, they are normal within a society but might not be normal in other societies. An example to distinguish social norms behaviours and personal knowledge behaviours is within the context of the norms of a classroom, individuals are expected to sit down face the front and take notes. These behaviours are not voluntary as teachers at school guides us to these behaviours with rules and disciplines (social norms behaviours). But when asked to do private study in the same social norm context. Some students started to put their earphones in for music, others asked to be left in silence, and some started debating (personal knowledge behaviours). This shows that for each type of …show more content…
Surrealism focuses on expressing imaginations of in our subconscious such as dreams without any logical comprehensibility. Imaginations, as it exists in an individual’s mind, we can say that it is personal knowledge. Also, imagination can come autonomous creativity of an individual and might have been completely independent from that individual’s surrounding environment. For that reason, it can be argued that these artworks expressing the artists’ personal knowledge are not shaped by but instead, shaping the shared knowledge. Another example of personal imagination shaping the shared knowledge could be the case of Charles Steffen, an artist with schizophrenia. His artworks comes from his own imagination and possibly hallucinations therefore can be viewed as a representation of his perspectives and cognitive experiences. This is not only not taken from the shared knowledge, but these artworks also contributed to the shared knowledge as it gives insights to scientific research of the mental illness of schizophrenia. Therefore it is clear that shared knowledge and one’s perspective have a bidirectional effect, shared knowledge can affect one’s perspective in life and one’s perspective in life can impact the shared knowledge. This can then be further argued that sometimes personal and shared knowledge are impossible to be treated separately. A supporting example of this is