Download Globalization of Knowledge (Forschungsperspektiven 2010+)

Globalization of Knowledge
(Forschungsperspektiven 2010+)
Jürgen Renn and Malcolm Hyman†
Definition of topic
Today much knowledge – scientific, technological, and cultural – is shared worldwide.
The extent to which globalized knowledge existed also in the past is an open question
and moreover a question that is important for understanding present processes of
globalization. Considering for instance the rapid spread in pre-history of the wheel
throughout Eurasia, the spreading of Roman law to such diverse areas as the
Byzantine empire and Ethiopia, and the global spread of paradigmatic solutions in
architecture such as the gothic arch, one is led to conclude that a lively exchange
existed between cultures in all periods of human development.
The much discussed globalization process of the present refers, however, mainly to the
economic processes of the globalization of the markets for goods, capital, and labor,
whereas the global diffusion of technical innovations and bodies of knowledge is often
merely considered as either a presupposition or a consequence of economic, political,
and cultural processes. But globalization involves knowledge in more significant ways.
For instance, goods and the technologies to produce them often spread independently
from each other, and they are each associated with systems of knowledge making
them relevant and accessible to a given culture. The transfer of the knowledge
necessary for producing and inventing tools requires, in particular, linguistic
capabilities and frameworks of ideas that can only be built up once globalization
processes of other types have taken place. Knowledge does, therefore, not just
constitute one more aspect of globalization as precondition and consequence but
represents a critical element of its development. It is the globalization of knowledge as
a historical process with its own dynamics that orchestrates the interaction of all the
underlying layers of globalization.
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Our situation today may be understood as the result of historical processes which
already comprise all dimensions characterizing modern globalization processes, each
with its own, peculiar constellation of economic, political, technical, and cultural
means of social cohesion. Investigating the role of knowledge in these historical
processes and referring such an analysis to the present may open up chances for
regaining autonomy with regard to the economic constraints dominating our
perception of current globalization processes. This may explain in which sense the
globalization of knowledge has become a critical dimension of today’s globalization
processes on which their future development depends. From this perspective, they
may turn either in the direction of subjecting the economy of knowledge to the control
by other globalization processes or in the direction of strengthening the autonomy of
knowledge and thus its potential for steering such processes.
Status of the field
Science in the twenty-first century represents globalized knowledge and benefits not
only from the creation and exploitation of new social and technological structures that
allow for the free flow of knowledge and expertise globally, but also from a historical
awareness of the ways in which techniques and technology have in the past spread
throughout the world. The present lack of this awareness hinges on a structural deficit
of research in this field due to disciplinary boundaries. These boundaries can be
overcome not only by innovative research, but also by innovative forms of cooperation
bridging cultural and social history and theoretically guided comparative approaches.
It may be tempting to conceive globalization processes of knowledge as processes in
which local knowledge traditions are either eliminated or absorbed into a
homogeneous body of knowledge with universal validity, a body of knowledge that
happened to have developed in Europe in two major phases, emerging in classical
antiquity and maturing in the Renaissance. On closer inspection, this view is merely a
prejudice that ignores important insights of recent historical studies of science and its
contexts. More appropriately, the globalization of knowledge may be seen as the result
of an interplay between dominance, resources, and knowledge potentials governing the
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interchange and transformation of knowledge traditions with their own intrinsic
dynamics on a global scale. A particular tradition of local knowledge may accordingly
become globalized because of contingent circumstances such as political and economic
dominance but also because of its inherent capacities to assimilate other local
knowledge traditions. The question of what intrinsic features enable specific
knowledge traditions to become globalized in the sense of being capable of assimilating
or transforming other knowledge traditions is still, however, widely open.
The field of the globalization of knowledge represents a proof of concept for integrative
source-based humanities research. It comprises longitudinal and transversal studies
that cover long-term historical and global processes and thus include diverse
disciplines and institutions holding sources. Such transdisciplinary research will have
to make use also of new infrastructures and the opportunities offered by the new
information technologies. In-depth comparative historical research undertaken on a
large scale depends on a vast amount of evidentiary material that requires
computational treatment, in much the same way that the massive datasets used in
astrophysics and computational molecular biology, for example, could not be processed
without computational assistance.
In contrast, scholars in the humanities presently share the problem that access to
their sources is constrained by the traditional separation of research, publication, and
the storage and preservation of relevant sources in libraries, archives, and museums.
Studies in the history of the globalization of knowledge constitute an example for
transdisciplinary research that achieves a greater integration of these three activities.
For instance, traditionally, workshops and conferences have featured presentations of
research results by scholars, while the source materials that led to the results remain
locked in archives and libraries, inaccessible to the other participants. By
concentrating on the digitization of source materials and their accessibility via
innovative, content-based access systems, scholars will be able to bring their sources
to meetings and share them with all participants. Such new formats will allow for a
close integration of the results of specialists and the accumulation of transdisciplinary
knowledge.
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Key scientific questions and opportunities
The social processes constituting globalization in modern times are such processes of
intercultural transmission that involve the spread or exchange of material goods, of
social, political, and cultural institutions, as well as of belief systems, and result in the
strengthening of worldwide interdependence. While some of these processes of
intercultural transmission are as old as human history, their systemic interaction has
yielded a number of outstanding historical phases that may be considered as
antecedents of modern globalization and led to their ever-growing interdependence in
modern times.
Some basic claims about the relation between the set of social processes constituting
globalization, on the one hand, and knowledge development and diffusion, on the other
hand need to be addressed and historically validated. In terms of a short
characterization, these basic claims are:
●
The globalization of knowledge does not merely represent one more social
process underlying globalization as precondition or consequence but rather
constitutes a relatively autonomous developmental process that mediates
between all the other processes involved, shaping their collective outcome.
●
The globalization of knowledge is based on two complementary processes. The
first is the transformations of extrinsic (i.e. societal) contexts into conditions for
the intrinsic (i.e. cognitive) development of knowledge systems (e.g. the role of
democracy for the prospering of science). The second is the transformation of
the intrinsic evolution of knowledge systems (e.g. that of cosmography in early
modern Europe) into extrinsic factors of knowledge globalization (e.g.
colonization).
●
The crucial role of knowledge in globalization processes is closely related to its
function as a self-referential medium involving an interaction between internal
cognitive and external material representations of knowledge. For instance,
scholars once assumed that the earliest writing must represent language,
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because they falsely assumed that writing is a context-free, universal external
representation of language. They failed to recognize that this modern
characteristic of writing was only the result of an interaction between internal
and external representations of knowledge, in this case of a reflection upon the
operations made possible by the earliest writing, which was a specific
technology associated with particular administrative processes, and which was
used only by a small number of scribes.
All knowledge traditions are local traditions in the sense of depending, at least at their
origin, on specific contexts, specific groups, specific ranges of knowledge, as well as on
a specific history determining its architecture in an ultimately contingent way.
Globalization of local knowledge traditions involves intrinsic as well as extrinsic
developments, potentially enhancing their social dominance, their range of
application, and their degree of reflexivity or, alternatively, destroying their autonomy
and reducing their complexity. The globalization of local knowledge has thus to be
conceptualized as a cross-over phenomenon, resulting from the integration of local
knowledge traditions whose initial encounter may depend on a specific constellation of
dominance, resources, and knowledge potentials, that is, on an extrinsic, societal
dynamics, while their subsequent co-development is also shaped by an intrinsic,
cognitive dynamics.
The globalization of local knowledge is typically accompanied by a localization of
globalized knowledge in the sense of the recontextualization of an alleged universal
system of knowledge that may trigger its restructuration. Thus, the implementation of
globalized scientific knowledge in new contexts has, as a rule, not just taken the form
of an application and specification, leaving its intrinsic structures unaffected but has
yielded instead a hybridization of globalized and local knowledge, changing the overall
history of knowledge even with regard to the initial constellation of dominance,
resources, and knowledge potentials.
It will only be possible to draw such a larger picture of the role of knowledge in
globalization processes and to validate the claims that emerge once this introductory
sketch is made concrete and once the issue of knowledge is specifically taken up by
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individual research endeavors, revisiting their findings from the perspective developed
within an overarching conceptual framework. They will have to systematically answer,
in particular, the following questions about the role of knowledge in the exchange
processes underlying globalization:
●
What was, from their own perspective, the knowledge that exchange-partners in
a globalization process believed to possess of each other and of the exchange?
●
What was, from our perspective, the knowledge that exchange partners in a
globalization process actually had about each other and about the exchange?
●
What was the awareness that exchange partners in a globalization process had
about the limitations of their knowledge of each other and of the exchange?
The interest of individual research endeavors in participating in an overarching
research collaboration dedicated to the globalization of knowledge is rooted in
questions that have emerged from their own investigations but can hardly be
addressed within the scope of their current activities, nor within the available
conceptual frameworks. Their collaboration is thus intrinsically motivated by the need
to contextualize – in terms of knowledge integration and differentiation processes –
some of their most significant findings concerning the origin of knowledge, its
transmission, and its transformation in cultural exchange processes. It is the primary
aim of such a collaboration to develop an empirically validated conceptual framework
for integrating the specific findings of individual research collaboration concerning the
origin, transmission, and transformation of knowledge.
Research opportunities, needs and challenges
The globalization of knowledge can only be analyzed by integrating diverse studies of
the conditions, pathways, and consequences of historical processes of the production,
the transmission and the transformation of knowledge, and relating them to present
processes of globalization. A new conceptual framework is required that will develop a
comparative history of knowledge on a large scale, in which present processes of
globalization are conceived as the outcome of historical developments and their
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interactions.
A systematic account of the globalization of knowledge has so far not arisen for two
reasons: first, the manifest diversity of data needed, and second, the less obvious lack
of a common theoretical language for describing types, media, and transfer processes
of knowledge. In order to overcome the first of these problems, it is necessary to
establish a global research network. The second problem requires the development of a
new theoretical language that is both expressively rich and structurally simple. This
should draw on established insights from cognitive science, philosophical
epistemology, anthropology, archeology, historical disciplines including the history of
science, art, law, as well as the social sciences; it must moreover encompass the full
range of developmental processes implicated in the global spread of knowledge
throughout history. No existing academic discipline provides all the tools required.
The theoretical framework demands a core set of concepts which will necessarily be
extended and revised in the course of ongoing research. The basic concepts required
include a typology of knowledge forms, knowledge representation structures, and
knowledge transfer processes.
Expected outcome and benefit
Science in the twenty first century depends not only on the creation and exploitation of
new social and technological structures, which permit a free flow of knowledge and
expertise globally, but also on a historical awareness of the ways in which techniques
and technology have in the past spread throughout the world. It is here that studies
on the history of the globalization of knowledge could make a much-needed
contribution. In the following, we can only provide a first, coarse-grained overview of
the globalization of knowledge.
Long-distance, indeed inter-continental connections with an attendant spread of
knowledge are at least as old as Homo sapiens itself. Knowledge spread also with the
later expansion of agricultural technologies relating to the domestication of cereals
and animals. In the fourth millennium we see the beginning of large-scale settlements
in Babylonia. At this time we see, not coincidentally, also the development of writing,
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which will lead in time to dramatic increase in the durability and transportability of
knowledge.
The globalization of science in the sense of an exchange of systems of theoretical
knowledge across the wider Mediterranean world, on the one side, and East Asia, on
the other side, goes at least back to classical antiquity. Due to economic and political
circumstances that exchange remained, however, limited and episodic without the
combination of accumulation and autonomous diffusion of scientific knowledge
characteristic of more mature phases of globalization.
While, in the polycentric world of Europe, the Near East, and India, exchange did take
place among cultures as different as ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and India, a
continuous accumulation of scientific knowledge beyond local networks, such as
Hellenistic society, was prevented by a scattered urban landscape with only few hubs
for economic and epistemic trading, as well as by the scarceness and fragility of
institutions dedicated to the production and transmission of such knowledge.
In contrast, such an accumulation of theoretical knowledge did take place in the
relatively monocentric world of China beginning with the Qin dynasty, resulting in a
system of knowledge deeply embedded within and limited by the practice and the
ritual contexts of state administration and, in this form, diffused also to Japan, the
Korean peninsula, and South-East Asia.
The strong dependence in antiquity of the dynamics of the development of knowledge
upon local economic, political, and ideological factors was, both in the East and the
West, due to the fact that the networks supporting knowledge generation and
exchange were centralized in the sense of being dependent on all-important centers
that constituted potential critical points of failure. While even the exchange of
knowledge between the two extremes of Eurasia, which were connected by trade
routes, may not be excluded it can only have played a marginal role, because of the
very weak linkage of epistemic networks in antiquity.
With the rise of Buddhism in India and of Christianity and Islam to the West (as well
as Judaism after the destruction of the temple), we see religion becoming to a
previously unparalleled degree decoupled from the state, emerging as a source of
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authority separate, and potentially in conflict with, from that of the state, and
developing a potential for global spread (“world religions”). This new development set
the stage for the possibility of the accumulation and transmission of knowledge that,
while nonetheless always extrinsically motivated, would neither be confined to local
networks nor inseparable from immediate contexts of application, and thus free to be
repurposed or translated to new contexts. The extent to which this possibility was
realized remained largely contingent on the emergence of a social network supporting
the production and dissemination of knowledge. Hubs in this network were typically
flourishing trade or religious centers or capital cities of large empires.
In the ancient world we have seen several incipient beginnings of science. But only
with the rise of science in the early modern period are there the economic and social
conditions that allow for a robust and scale-free network sustaining a knowledge
economy. In the densely connected urban landscape of early modern Europe a selfreinforcing mechanism connecting the production of specifically scientific knowledge
with socio-economic growth arose, driving combined globalization processes of science
and economy. This combination of epistemic and economic globalization by a feedback
loop with an inbuilt tendency to scale-up is the hallmark of the globalization of
modern science.
Modern science represents the third in a series of monumental revolutions, at the
same time social and epistemic, that have affected human kind since the sedentary
revolution of the Neolithic. The first was the rise of the centralized state, as for
instance in Mesopotamia, where technologies allowed for reflection on practical
knowledge that made possible completely new means for the organization of labor. The
second was the birth of the world religions, which challenged the authority of the state
and ultimately transcended the limits of the state. Modern science, in turn, came into
conflict with the authority of religion. This conflict was not one of complete opposition
but one of differing intrinsic dynamics. Religion comprised and continued to
accumulate a vast amount of knowledge, integrating it into an overarching worldview
that closely connected knowledge of the natural and the social worlds; at the same
time religion exerted powerful control over the totality of knowledge. Modern science,
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while open to expropriating much of the knowledge previously controlled by religious
authorities, contested both key elements of this knowledge and the authority of
religion to control knowledge. From the dialectics of this conflict science gave birth to
new worldviews, rivaling that of religion, and eventually to a new social order. The
commonality of the three revolutions lies in the increasingly autonomous status that
they achieve for the production and dissemination of knowledge, on the one hand, and
the increasing potential for application of this knowledge to the control of society.
This series of three revolutions ultimately results from a cascade of nested
evolutionary processes building upon the ground layer of biological evolution. Sociocultural evolution began somewhat before the emergence of modern humans. The
precondition for socio-cultural evolution was the evolution of a rich social intelligence
primarily aimed at cooperation. The central dynamics of socio-cultural evolution are
the transmission of material and social culture. This mechanism facilitates the
transmission of knowledge between individuals, allowing humans to shape their
environment and to acquire new capabilities at a rate that is many times faster than
the pace of biological evolution. Acquired knowledge is thus easily transmitted across
generations.
Socio-cultural evolution inherently involves knowledge that is efficacious either with
respect to the physical world or with respect to the social world. Ignoring the role of
knowledge in the development of human societies necessarily leads to inadequate
descriptions; thus, for instance, the study of long-range transfer in prehistoric
archeology has been hindered by a lack of focus on knowledge. Once external
representations of knowledge that are intended to represent knowledge are
exchanged, there can be said to be a knowledge economy. At first this knowledge
economy is almost completely tied to the underlying economy of labor. For example,
literacy is closely correlated with socio-economic status, and in Babylon astronomical
knowledge was pursued for agricultural ends, so that the pursuit of astronomical
knowledge was ultimately motivated by economic concerns.
Socio-cultural evolution led eventually to the emergence of the state, the first of the
three revolutions. With this revolution we see, on the one hand, the creation of means
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for the external representation of knowledge such as writing that not only increase the
durability of knowledge but also permit reflection upon the knowledge represented,
which results in new second-order knowledge. On the other hand, the new possibilities
for the organization of labor that practices of administration, dependent upon media
for the external representation of knowledge, offer, create radical material changes in
the lives of individuals that facilitate further socio-cultural evolution. It is especially
important that new distributions of labor free certain individuals from work
immediately concerned with their survival, thus allowing them to engage in more
abstract activities of knowledge production. The emergence of the state dramatically
accelerates socio-cultural evolution by allowing for an increase in the production of
knowledge and offering technologies, such as writing, for the transmission of that
knowledge across space and time. Qualitatively new sorts of knowledge can develop in
this context, as for example Babylonian science or Greek philosophy. Now knowledge
can spread faster, whereas, before, the spread of knowledge was essentially limited to
the speed of demic spread. But while items of knowledge can and indeed do travel,
entire systems of knowledge hardly travel at this phase, owing to their essentially
local character. Moreover, the weak links between hubs of knowledge production
severely impeded the travel of knowledge. Nonetheless, with this revolution we see the
first major advance in the globalization of knowledge.
The next major advance came with the second revolution, that of the emergence of
world religions, which provided just the kind of efficient networks for the spreading of
knowledge missing in the earlier phase. They embodied, on the one hand, much of the
structures of authority and of the mechanisms for knowledge production and
dissemination of the state, but whereas knowledge in the state was limited by its
geographic boundaries, the packages of knowledge associated with the world religions
travelled freely across state boundaries. The world religions in effect constituted
superstructures built upon existing social orders. They challenged the authority of the
state, and in a number of cases states responded to this challenge; witness for instance
Roman persecutions of Christians. In any case, religion offered a new social order
greater than that of the state, but modeled on the state; thus for instance the concept
of the Umma in Islam and the City of God in Christianity. At the same time, the world
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religions could adapt; for those who adopted them there was – and is – an
equilibration of traditional beliefs and the beliefs constituting the new religion. While
authority was merely asserted by the state (and grounded in physical force), the world
religions needed to justify their authority. Thus they developed sophisticated schemes
of justification and produced extensive bodies of knowledge through complex processes
of dialectic. Some of these schemes and processes had their origins in earlier systems
of thought that had arisen under specific local conditions, such as Hellenistic
philosophy. But whereas such schemes and processes had been local, the world
religions embedded them in institutions of global extent. It is against the background
of these complex schemes of argument, processes of justification, and elaborate bodies
of knowledge – and in dialogue with them – that modern science was born.
Modern science, the third revolution, constituted an entirely new form of evolution.
Just as socio-cultural evolution was grounded in biological evolution, so this new form
of evolution – epistemic evolution – was grounded in socio-cultural evolution. With
each new evolutionary process in this cascade, the preceding ones eventually become
dependent on the subsequent layers. Thus, the continued existence of our species in a
biological sense becomes dependent on socio-cultural evolution once the latter has
reached a global extent, and, with the globalization of science, our survival becomes
dependent on epistemic evolution. Epistemic evolution is a process even more rapid
than socio-cultural evolution. It is as a result of this process that our environment has
changed more in the past one hundred years than in the entire period that hominids
have existed. Science is a global system of knowledge that creates conditions for
accelerated social evolution, including economic conditions, which favor the further
development of science. Thus science actually creates the conditions for its own
spread. In epistemic evolution continuity is provided by the transmission of the means
of science and the material culture of which they are part. Epistemic evolution is an
evolutionary process in its own right which begins when knowledge production and
dissemination have attained autonomy, having become ends in themselves. Science is
a self-organizing network that inherently scales globally.
Epistemic evolution exhibits all the dynamics characteristic of an evolutionary
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process. The (sometimes ludic) exploration of the inherent potential of the means for
gaining knowledge gives rise to a variety of alternatives within a knowledge system,
corresponding to mutation in biological evolution. In an advanced state of its
development these variations lead to internal tensions and contradictions, resulting in
the transformation or the split-off of a new system; this is speciation. Differing
material and cognitive contexts create ecological niches for epistemic evolution.
Various forces of selection apply. Since epistemic evolution is ultimately grounded in
biology, the greatest selective force is human survival. But this ultimate selective force
is, of course, mediated through many layers of culture and society that impose diverse
proximate forces of selection such as prestige, compatibility with non-scientific
ideologies, fashions, etc. which may differ in their effective exploitation of social
intelligence or of resources within a given ecological niche of a scientific system.
It is the hope that such an overarching perspective, which could only be sketched here,
will make it possible to identify the intellectual challenges posed by globalization
processes of knowledge and to guide future basic research that will be adequate to
solve problems of current and future processes of the globalization of knowledge.
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