There are many different concepts of what the term "knowledge" means, and picking a definition is fraught with difficulties as concepts of knowledge implicitly underlying disciplines ranging from philosophy and religion to science and business management. As I discuss in more detail in Episode 4 of this hypertext, the two most important, and often conflicting definitions are those deriving from Karl Poppers' (1972) Objective Knowledge, adopted by most scientists and philosophers of science; and other definitions of knowledge deriving from Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (1958, 1967), adopted by behavioral psychologists, many religious philosophers and a majority of the organizational knowledge management practitioners.
As will be made explicitly clear in the following section, this work primarily builds on the Popperian paradigm of knowledge. However, there is much in the Polanyian paradigm that will inform our understanding of knowledge at the organizational level