Jay H. Bernstein—Kingsborough Community College The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy and its Antithesis

The now taken-for-granted notion that data lead to information, which leads to knowledge, which in turn leads to wisdom was first specified in detail by R. L. Ackoff in 1988. The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy is based on filtration, reduction, and transformation. Besides being causal and hierarchical, the scheme is pyramidal, in that data are plentiful while wisdom is almost nonexistent. Ackoff’s formula linking these terms together this way permits us to ask what the opposite of knowledge is and whether analogous principles of hierarchy, process, and pyramiding apply to it. The inversion of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy produces a series of opposing terms (including misinformation, error, ignorance, and stupidity) but not exactly a chain or a pyramid. Examining the connections between these phenomena contributes to our understanding of the contours and limits of knowledge. This presentation will revisit the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy linking these concepts together as stages of a single developmental process, with the aim of building a taxonomy for a postulated opposite of knowledge, which I will call ‘nonknowledge’. Concepts of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom are the building blocks o