Knowledge means the whole universe. In other words, know+ledge means to know about something. Man being a human being has three specific characteristics:
- a) Intellect;
- b) Wisdom;
- c) Mind.
Man thinks with no check and conserves it in his mind. Mind is a reservoir in which intellect work rests with liberty. Knowledge should not be checked or move abrupt. It should flow freely from one mind to the other. All these three characteristics are the creation of man. When the man apply intellect with wisdom and preserve and retrieve through mind, it is called idea or thinking. Thinking is a continuous process of development based on experience and observation. It has resulted into knowledge explosion.
Dr. Sr. Ranganathan has suggested three ways of knowledge explosion.:
- Idea plane,
- Verbal plane,
- National plane.
Idea plane denotes thinking and keeping in mind what is not verbal or notational. Every man thinks, creates ideas in his mind. This is called idea plane.
Verbal plane denotes the ideas which are spoken verbally. Man has many ideas in his mind based on his experience and observation and stores them in his mind. But when he expresses the ideas in language or through other expression media, it is called verbal plane.
Notational plane leads to notations. When ideas come in mind and converted into language and take verbal shape and the verbal language is converted into artificial; language is coding in any form of notations, i.e. alphabets, Arabic numeric, signs and symbols and/or Greek letters, such coding is known as notational plane.
Attributes of Knowledge:
a) Spiral of development of new subjects: Relay research leading to a spiral movement for short period in the development of new subjects:
- Fundamental research: Research in pure science.
- Applied research: Specific field of utility.
- Pilot project: Establishment of production of commodity. The spiral continues and thus emerge new subjects.
b) Continuum: Universe of knowledge is continuum. Subject grows and leads in decreasing degree of interaction-Extension and intention between it and other subjects. It leads to mutual enrichment of the subjects and it is a development of new specialisation.
c) Infinite: Universe of subjects are continuously grows with the increase in facilities. Infinite means impossible to measure or without limit. With the continuous knowledge explosion, subjects grow without limit which is impossible to measure.
d) Multidimensional/manifold multidimensional: Knowledge grows in manifold dimensions, witnessing exponential rate among the classes of knowledge, e.g. arrays of classes, collateral arrays, chain of classes, etc.
Similarly tree of knowledge grows in three dimensions.
e) Turbulently Dynamic: It is an important attribute. There are two types of ideas- seminal and near seminal ideas. These are increasing through centuries.
Turbulent means circles of universe of knowledge. Relay-research is producing micro-subjects continuously.
Example:
- 225 lacks periodicals -every year.
- 70,000 new titles -every year.
- 15 million pieces of information – every year.
There is no end to it. More scientific papers are poured like rain over the scientific world used in a year.
Man has mind, mind has ideas and ideas are subjects. Man gains knowledge in three phases:
- Man and Nature- Natural Science.
- Man and Self-Humanities.
- Man and Society- Social Science.
In fact the classification of work started the day the men started naming the things.
In Rome, the word class is used for the “class and persons of the society” and the word classification is supposed to be originated from classic.
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