Analyzing Knowledge Management Systems: A Veritistic Approach

Knowledge management systems (KMS) are increasingly becoming popular and important in managing organizational knowledge. This motivates a closer inspection of the degree of usability of various types of KMS. This paper is an analysis of KMS from a philosophical angle: with the help of veritistic social epistemology we analyze which KMS are likely to be used more in comparison to others. Veritistic social epistemology is oriented towards truth determination; it seeks to evaluate actual and prospective multi-person practices in terms of their tendency to produce true beliefs (versus false beliefs or no belief) in their users. We distinguish between KMS that manage structured knowledge and those that manage unstructured knowledge. It is argued that structured knowledge is more credible to the users than unstructured knowledge and that, because of this, KMS that manage structured knowledge bring more veritistic gains than those that manage unstructured knowledge.