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Introduction: Indications of the Knowledge Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Eduardo Portella
Eduardo Portella*
Affiliation:
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
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Abstract

Is ‘knowledge society’ yet another empty slogan? More than ever, ‘knowledge is power’. But we can hardly affirm that the society we live in is based on the vigour of knowledge. The market price placed on knowledge fails to provide it with the needed qualitative impetus. Inequities remain the blind spot of technological systems. To be sure, we are living in an information society at higher scales of exchange, with ‘a great deal of information, but little knowledge’. We may indeed be restoring a sort of enlightened despotism of a technologically neo-positivistic type, a realm of experts whose ‘know-how’ is but another term for ‘doing without knowing’. In a truly democratic sense, the knowledge society is a basic human right. Knowledge is nourished in society. Conversely, societies find in knowledge a compass for their peaceful co-existence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2003 , pp. 5 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2003

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References

Notes

1. Society, Knowledge and Know-How was the theme suggested by Eduardo Portella, Coordinator of the transdiciplinary network ‘Pathways into the Third Millennium’, for an international symposium which was held under UNESCO auspices at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples (Italy) on 6 and 7 December 2001.

Issue 197 of Diogenes assembles some of the texts presented at this symposium. The texts of Homi K. Bhabha and Sergio Paulo Rouanet, however, were not prepared within this framework.

We wish to thank Frances Albernaz, of UNESCO’s Philosophy and Human Sciences Section, for the energy, talent and passion devoted to the Naples meeting as well as to the editorial work.

This text was subsequently published in Portuguese in the quarterly Tempo Brasileiro with the title ‘Society With and Without Knowledge’.