Hullistic

I was recently introduced to Nicholas J. Belkin’s “Anomalous States of Knowledge.” Belkin’s position is meant to inform study of human information behavior and design of information retrieval systems.

One is in an Anomalous State of Knowledge when one is aware that they have a gap in knowledge but are uncertain as to how to fill it and also uncertain as to what counts as filled. Said another way, when you know you don’t know and you aren’t sure how to learn what you don’t know and how to tell when you come to know, you are in an anomalous state of knowledge. For Belkin this state is in relation to a goal one wants to achieve or a problem one wants to solve so the anomalous state of knowledge is relative to those particulars.

For example, suppose a child is diagnosed with a disease. The parents of the child naturally desire to get the best care possible for their child but how do they know what counts as the best care? In order to learn, they decide they first must know all they can about the disease, how it’s been treated, what studies have been and are being done and which doctors are experienced in treatments, the success rates of those doctors, which are involved in the research, in clinical trials and so on and so forth. Getting their child the best care is the parent’s first milestone to achieve with the ultimate goal of making their child well. At the moment that that becomes the goal and they recognize the gap in their knowledge along with the uncertainty of how best to fill it, they are in Belkin’s Anomalous State of Knowledge. And they stay in an Anomalous State of Knowledge as they seek out information to fill the gap and as they grapple with the uncertainty of whether the gap is truly filled properly. Now these parents may be in different anomalous states of knowledge along the way, but each cognitive state is still anomalous and so still fits Belkin’s description.

With that example in mind then we can consider where these parents go for information and how they acquire it in order to fill the gaps, achieve the goal and solve the problem. That is, we can reflect on their information behavior.

Belkin supposed that the written word was a message that contained not only the explicit content but also the cognitive state of the sender of the message (the author). Belkin explicitly says that the author’s cognitive state includes his or her purpose, intention, desire and also their beliefs about who the recipient might be and the recipient’s state of knowledge vis-à-vis the subject of the message.

This latter part looks to me a like Belkin is saying that the author is makes assumptions about the recipient and that those assumptions are part of the information of the text or message they are sending. Not wild guesses exactly but nevertheless assumptions based in part on the author’s own beliefs, desires and intentions regarding the potential audience for the message.

Recalling the parents in the example, they are engaging in information behavior because of their own purpose, intention and desire and they select information based on their beliefs about the author and his or her state of knowledge vis-à-vis the subject of the message. Thus the parents, the seekers of information, are making assumptions too. Again, not wild guesses, but nevertheless assumptions based in part on the parent’s own beliefs, desires and intentions regarding the author of the message AND ALSO assumptions about their own states of knowledge.

To me, it is reasonable to describe both the authors and the information seekers in Belkin’s view as operating under hypotheses about the other. And I’ll quote Willard Quine who says “People adopt or entertain a hypothesis because it would explain, if it were true, some things they already believe.”

I suggest that Belkin’s anomalous states of knowledge are states in which information seekers develop, tacitly and rapidly in most cases, hypotheses about themselves, their knowledge gaps, the information they need, the places to get information, and even about the mediums of delivery and the authors of the information they do find. I further suggest that these hypotheses are required as a means to “hook in” what seekers are looking for and finding, to what they already know. If this is right then it means that information retrieval systems must include tools to exploit those hooks while also adding to, or altering, the stock of knowledge already connected to them.

This may not imply anything new to information studies. Then again, maybe considering people as hypothesizing during their information search can be a useful way of describing the situation.