Talents and Skills and Knowledge

I've been thinking about skills and talents and knowledge. We have been moving along (for some time now) with the view that knowledge is a thing - something we can pass between one another, exchange, sell etc. New discussions highlight the idea of knowledge as process and particularly as a quality which enable somebody or some people to do something. We could call this the utility function of knowledge. What is valued now is knowledge that enables a person to do something. In education settings, the emphasis is now upon acquiring knowledge which enables a person to do things which will enable them to find employment and generally be useful to an organisation.

All this raises many questions - such as, is the explanatory power of knowledge now subservient to the overall goal of being able to do something? That is, explanations that simply tell us something about a phenomena but offer us little by way of suggesting what we might do about it, are these explanations now devalued? Perhaps they have always been seen as of lesser value to those knowledges which enable us to do something.

To do something in the world is certainly important. However, the three great questions of life - what is this world I am living in, who am I and what am I to do? - contain two which we might say are explanatory in emphasis and the last is enabling to action. However, that would take the first two a little simply in the sense that insights about existence and our identity in turn can be greatly contributory to finding meaningful action.

I guess the question here is, given this emphasis on being able to do things, to what extent can we say that knowledge is in fact separate from skills and talents, that is, from our ability to do things. Let us pretend that there is no such thing as codified knowledge (writing on paper, for example), we can see that what is left is our internal worlds of knowing. How different therefore is this from our skill and talents, those things within us that both motivate and enable to do things?

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