The Paradox of J.W. Goethe
We look at only what we know and understand
Clay tablets, papyrus, parchments, paper, are some supports to contain texts, used by humans being to “freeze” their knowledge and to share it with other people. Texts contains the author’s knowledge, that he describes by means of a natural language and formalizes through the use of its syntax. For example, in the past many scientific knowledge were written in Latin on parchments, today in English on paper.
When the texts were written by hand, if someone needed to have some information, it was necessary to write it all over again on a new support, of course, by hand. This process was too slow to disseminate knowledge and to share it properly. Only in the 15th century, Johann Gutenberg invented the technology to come through this problem: the printing press with movable type. Now the author can disseminate his knowledge towards many people at the same time. We could say that the process of one-to-many communication was born and a new kind of society based on the value of the information began to exist: the Information Society.
Today, thanks to computing, we do not need clay tablets or paper to “freeze” our knowledge. Now we can use word processors and files to write and contain texts. We can share texts through Internet and people can now read e-Books and e-Newspapers on devices like iPad or Kindle. But the way to “freeze” and to transfer knowledge from a man to other men is still the same one used at the times of the ancient sumerian (the inventors of writing). In fact, from that age, nothing has really changed in the learning process of knowledge: the author must write in some natural language that he knows, and whoever would like to add new knowledge to the author’s must read the text, understand the contents and memorize the notions. Computing has only dematerialized supports, nothing else.
However, the Information Technologies offer new functions to retrieve information in a very fast way, thanks to search engines. That was absolute impossible to do before.
But these technologies don’t allow to overcome the problem that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had already stigmatized when he said “man looks at only what he knows and understands!” (Was man weiss, sieht man erst!). In fact, the search engine can’t help us to find things that we don’t know already, because if someone needs to look for something, he must already know something about the topic, otherwise, he can’t put the right keyword in the search box.
In other words, I don’t know which are the proper words used in my language to represent the subject that I don’t know and don’t understand yet. Even more, is impossible for me to know anything about something I don’t know.
by Luca Severini, July 2010, Oxford, UK