Epistemology and Knowledge Management

INTRODUCTION This article surveys and explores the relationship between epistemology and knowledge management (KM). Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge (Klein, 1998b). Knowledge management is clearly deeply indebted to many ideas derived from epistemology. Much of the seminal work in KM discusses epistemology in a fair amount of detail, and explicitly appeals to insights from epistemology in developing a theoretical account of KM. make explicit appeal to the philosophical insights in epistemology, which has provided the groundwork for much of their pioneering work in knowledge management. One would thus expect there to be a fairly intimate connection between epistemology and knowledge management. The relationship between these two fields, however, is far from straightforward. This article argues that traditional philosophical discussions about epistemology are generally quite limited in their application to KM. This is because they focus mainly on the production of individual or personal knowledge, rather than sharing and use of knowledge in a collaborative context. Thus many of the insights from traditional epistemology are largely irrelevant for the enterprise of KM. There are, however, recent developments in epistemology which seem more promising for KM. This article ends with a brief overview of some of these developments, looking at recent work in both the philosophy of science and social epistemology. These approaches seem extremely promising for developing a sounder philosophical and methodological basis for KM.