Nature - autonomous learning

strange natures 13knowledge has a point (or points) of origin, a referent (or referents)and an addressee (or addressees). The first describes the institutions,groups or individuals who promulgate a particular bodyof knowledge or specific knowledge-claims. The referent/s of knowledgeare those particular things referred to in any knowledge-claimor body of knowledge. Referents can be either material things orother bodies of knowledge. The addressees of knowledge arethe intended audience for a particular representation or set ofrepresentations of the world; in effect, they are the ‘consumers’ ofknowledge. The trio of origin/s, referent/s and addressee/s help usdistinguish one body of knowledge from another. In the secondplace, we can distinguish tacit (or taken-for-granted) knowledgefrom formal (or codified) knowledge. The former is all that knowledgethat’s so deeply internalised that it’s simply ‘common sense’.Though this knowledge is capable of being articulated formally itis rarely necessary to spell it out. The latter is all that knowledgethat’s explicitly articulated, either because of its complexity, itsnovelty or its specialised character. The distinction between tacitand formal knowledge is closely linked to that between lay (orvernacular) knowledge and expert (or technical) knowledge. Theformer is ‘ordinary’ knowledge that we all deploy in everyday life.The latter is higher-level knowledge used for specific purposes andintended for specific audiences. Technical knowledges are oftencharacterised by their exclusivity in terms of who produces themand who consumes them.I mention all this for two reasons. First, it is important to appreciatethat the understandings of nature produced by geographers and otheracademics must, in one sense, compete among themselves and in relation tothose nature-knowledges by myriad non-academic organisations (Figure1.2). This may strike student readers as a peculiar claim at first sight.After all, you might think that academic knowledge of nature is relativelyobjective whereas that produced by other organisations is often less so.Indeed, some of this non-academic knowledge is patently fictional – think,for instance, of the supernatural world depicted in the movie Jurassic Park.