Personal knowledge base

Abstract: Three years ago, I read Michael Polanyi's contribution—as a philosopher—to a symposium entitled Scientific Outlook: Its Sickness and Cure . In a brilliant, penetrating, and delightfully humorous criticism of R. W. Gerard's 1 biological contribution, he unerringly diagnosed the sickness of medicine: The fact that a so learned, ingenious and imaginative survey of living beings should deal so perfunctorily with some of the most important questions concerning them shows a fundamental deficiency of human thinking.... If a rat laps up a solution of saccharine, the rational explanation of this lies in the act that the solution tastes sweet and that the rat likes that. The tasting and liking are facts that physics and chemistry as known today cannot explain. Nothing is relevant to biology, even at the lowest level of life, unless it bears on the achievements of living beings... and distinctions unknown to physics and chemistry... The current idea of

Abstract: Recent research indicates that social trust of those who manage a hazard is strongly correlated to judgments about the hazard's risk and benefits. The present study investigates the more specific question of “For which hazards is this?” It was postulated that when an individual lacks knowledge about a hazard, social trust of authorities managing the hazard determines perceived risks and benefits. On the other hand, when an individual has personal knowledge about a hazard and therefore does not need to rely on managing authorities, social trust is unrelated to judged risks and benefits. Participants (N = 91) assessed risks, benefits, and trust in managing authorities and personal knowledge associated with 25 hazardous technologies and activities. As expected, strong correlations between social trust and judged risks and benefits were observed for hazards about which people did not possess much knowledge. No significant correlations between social trust and judged risks and benefits were found for hazards about which people were knowledgeable. Results suggest that the lay public relies on social trust when making judgments of risks and benefits when personal knowledge about a hazard is lacking. Replicating findings of other studies, the present study also found negative correlations between perceived risks and perceived benefits. When social trust was controlled for, correlations between perceived risks and benefits diminished. Implications of the results for risk management are discussed.

Abstract: The purpose of the phenomenological approach is to illuminate the specific, to identify phenomena through how they are perceived by the actors in a situation. In the human sphere this normally translates into gathering ‘deep’ information and perceptions through inductive, qualitative methods such as interviews, discussions and participant observation, and representing it from the perspective of the research participant(s). Phenomenology is concerned with the study of experience from the perspective of the individual, ‘bracketing’ taken-for-granted assumptions and usual ways of perceiving. Epistemologically, phenomenological approaches are based in a paradigm of personal knowledge and subjectivity, and emphasise the importance of personal perspective and interpretation. As such they are powerful for understanding subjective experience, gaining insights into people’s motivations and actions, and cutting through the clutter of taken-for-granted assumptions and conventional wisdom.