This article will go deeper in the relationship between philosophy and knowledge management. In the articel “How to Build Knowledge Systems”, we said that it is a dual with 5 steps.
{Dual: (Record/Outline -> Extraction/Distillation -> Conceptualization/MFUs)} -> Reconfiguration -> Creative Application

Now, I wanna take it a step further. Firstly, I will introduce Ontology.
Substance and Attribute
Matter and Form
Potentiality and Actuality
In Aristotle’s idea, form is closer to the ‘substance’ than matter. Substance = matter & form.

However, in Kant’s idea, the reality is dual - phenomena and noumena. We can only know ‘things-as-they-appear’ and we can not know ‘things-in-themselves’.
The metaphysics should focus on “what we could know” instead of “what the being is”. This paradigm shift is from Ontology (本体论) to Epistemology (认识论). It is a kind of ‘Transcendental Philosophy’ (先验哲学).

The third shift - from “Metaphysics” to “Philosophy of Language”, Wittgenstein.
The study of philosohpy should be back to the ‘daily life’.
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world. - Wittgenstein, 1922”
We should not care about “being”, and instead, we should focus on “what we can express”. All questions could be divided into analytical proposition (分析命题) and synthetic proposition (综合命题). It also could be called ‘Logical Positvism’ (逻辑实证主义).

The fourth shift, Quine, “Ontological Commitment (本体论承诺)”. A kind of ‘pragmatism’ (实用主义), it assumes that even if we could not observe things or beings, like electron, however, we commit that electron exists, which could help the description of knowledge or research. It is kind of like “hypothesis” or “presumption” in the research.

Based on the discussion of metaphysics, I wanna point out that building a knowledge system is kind of like ‘Reductionism’ (还原论). Aiming at unstructured, empirical knowledge, we want to transform it to a kind of theory, which can guide us to handle problems. So, I wanna provide some rules when we build knowledge systems:

  1. Abstraction (or conceptualization) is significant, but we cannot divorce from reality, which will makes us fall into the antinomy (自相矛盾/二律背反).
  2. While we distinguish the phenomena and noumena, we have lots of perspectives, such as hierarchy of needs theory, class contradiction, etc. Building knowledge systems is a process while we construct our own perspectives.
  3. We tend to assume some hypotheses by default, while we appraoch problems. We should be wary of it!
  4. We should pay attention to ‘Holism’ (整体论), although building knowledge systems is a process of ‘Reductionism’. Relationship is significant.