Information and Knowledge in Decision-Choice Rationality

Abstract

In Chapter One of this monograph, we presented the distinguishing and uniting features of explanatory and prescriptive sciences. This was done through an abstraction of what constitutes the structural parameters and the basic characteristics of explanatory and prescriptive theories. The abstraction proceeded from a process of developing the path to understand how the universal knowledge bag and the intellectual heritage of humanity are constructed through decision-choice process. The objective of information-knowledge process is to create knowledge in support of decision-choice activities that in turn go to support the control and management of social and natural systems, it is argued. The foundational principle behind the analysis and synthesis is that knowledge production, just like any human activity, is a decision-choice process. Such a decision-choice process has input and output. The input is cost and the output is benefit, both of which are reversible depending on situations and circumstances. We shall project an analytical system such that information is seen as input and knowledge is seen as output. The movements from information to knowledge are substitution-transformation processes that involve the behavior of dynamics of actual-potential duality. The basic raw material for this knowledge development is information whose cognitive manipulations give rise to fuzziness and randomness in the development and management of human and non-human affairs. In order to discuss uncertainties and their effects on rationality in the presence of simultaneous existence of fuzziness and randomness we need to examine the definition and analytical roles that information and knowledge play in decision-choice process in the social knowledge acceptance.