thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

Knowledge, Knowledge Management, and Knowledge Transfer
2.) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation;
3.) sexual intercourse (archaic).
Number one, two, and three refer to different homonyms. Only the definitions under number
one refer to the concept of knowledge that is relevant to the present context. Interestingly, there
are four different definitions given for this concept, which already demonstrates that it is difficult
to give one all-encompassing definition for knowledge.
The question of what constitutes knowledge has a long tradition and is still being debated
within the field of epistemology, the discipline dedicated to this issue. In the western tradition,
this debate originated with the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle; Plato introduced the
above mentioned definition of knowledge as “true, justified belief”, and took a rather rationalist
perspective by considering knowledge as something that is achieved by rational reasoning. His
student Aristotle, on the other hand, assumed an empiristic perspective, and proclaimed that
knowledge can only be gained through sensory experience. The debate between Rationalism and
Empiricism has been literally going on for centuries, with several attempts of a synthesis, for
example by Kant, Hegel, and Marx in the 18 th and 19 th century. A shared agreement between
these and other streams of epistemology has as yet not been reached, so there is still no one
agreed-upon definition of knowledge. Maybe one of the reasons for the lack of such a universal
definition is that knowledge can have a different meaning in different contexts and
environments. As for the present work, I do not need a philosophical definition of knowledge,
but rather a practical definition of knowledge in organizations. Such definitions, which have
been proposed in the management and business literature, are presented in the following.
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