Exploring the Nature and Characteristics of Knowledge

Every field you study is in motion. The textbook you read this semester will be revised, the statistics you memorise will shift, and theories once treated as settled will be questioned by the next generation of researchers. This is not a flaw in how we learn. It reflects something fundamental about knowledge itself. Knowledge is not a fixed object that sits quietly on a shelf. It grows, it is shaped by the people who create it, and it eventually fades when newer understanding takes its place. For students of information, communication, and society, grasping these three characteristics is essential, because they explain why libraries reorganise collections, why curricula change, and why no piece of recorded knowledge can claim to be the final word.

The infinite nature of knowledge 🔗

One of the most striking features of knowledge is that it has no clear endpoint. Unlike a physical resource that gets used up, knowledge expands the more it is used. Every answer tends to open new questions, and every discovery creates fresh areas to investigate. This is why we describe knowledge as dynamic and, for practical purposes, infinite. There is always more to know, and the boundary of what is known keeps moving outward.

How fast knowledge actually grows 🔗

This expansion is not just a comfortable assumption. It has been measured. The historian of science Derek de Solla Price, often called the father of scientometrics, noticed in the mid-twentieth century that the volume of scientific literature was rising in a regular exponential pattern. While placing bound journal volumes in chronological order, he observed that their yearly height increased exponentially with time. From this he argued that scientific output doubles over a fixed period rather than growing in a slow, steady line.

Later studies confirmed the basic trend while refining the numbers. A large analysis of publication databases found that modern science grows at roughly four percent each year, doubling about every seventeen years. One consequence of this pace is that the bulk of available knowledge always sits close to the cutting edge, because so much of it has been produced recently. For a student, this explains a familiar frustration: by the time a survey of a field is published, new work has already appeared.

Growth across every discipline 🔗

This is not limited to laboratory sciences. Medicine produces new treatment guidelines constantly, the social sciences refine their theories with each wave of data, and technology reinvents itself within a single career span. Even the humanities accumulate new interpretations, translations, and critical readings. The rate differs from field to field, but the direction is the same. This is why information professionals talk about the knowledge explosion, the rapid multiplication of recorded material that libraries and databases must somehow organise and make findable.

Knowledge as a social product 🔗

It is tempting to imagine knowledge as something produced by lone geniuses working in isolation. The reality is closer to the opposite. Knowledge is created, tested, and validated within communities, and it carries the marks of the social context in which it was made. This idea sits at the heart of a field called the sociology of knowledge, which studies the relationship between human thought and the social setting in which it arises.

The social construction of knowledge 🔗

The most influential statement of this view came from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their 1966 book, which argued that the everyday reality people treat as obvious is in fact built up through social interaction. Over time, repeated interactions become habitual and are embedded into society as shared cultural knowledge. What a community accepts as common sense, professional best practice, or established fact is the outcome of a social process, not a simple reading of nature.

This perspective reshaped how scholars think about even scientific facts. Researchers in social epistemology have argued that the standards a community uses to accept a theory depend partly on how that knowledge will be used. Knowledge is therefore not just discovered and recorded. It is negotiated, debated, and agreed upon by people who share methods, language, and values.

Why validation needs a community 🔗

An individual can have an idea, but turning that idea into accepted knowledge requires others. The peer review system is a clear example. A researcher’s claim only becomes part of the scholarly record after editors and reviewers examine it, challenge it, and decide it meets the community’s standards. From a sociology-of-knowledge perspective, this means knowledge claims are socially constituted rather than the product of pure, isolated truth. The process of generating an idea is not the same as the process of validating it, and validation is inherently collective.

Social context shapes creation and use 🔗

The social character of knowledge appears in two directions. In its creation, the questions researchers choose to ask are influenced by funding priorities, cultural concerns, and institutional pressures. In its application, the same piece of knowledge can mean different things in different settings. A statistic about literacy, for instance, carries one meaning for a policymaker designing a national scheme and another for a community worker on the ground. Recognising this helps information professionals stay alert to bias and to the gaps in what gets recorded and preserved. Knowledge that no community values tends not to be documented at all.

Obsolescence of knowledge 🔗

If knowledge grows endlessly and is built socially, it also has a third, less comfortable property. It ages. Information that was once central can lose its validity and usefulness as newer findings replace it. This decline is called obsolescence, and it is one of the most carefully studied characteristics of recorded knowledge.

The half-life of knowledge 🔗

Library and information scientists borrowed a vivid term to describe this aging. Burton and Kebler introduced the idea of a half-life for literature in 1960, defining it as the time during which one half of the currently active literature was published. In practice this is measured through citation analysis. By tracking how the age of cited references is distributed, researchers can see how quickly older work stops being used. The pattern is consistent: citations to a body of work usually rise to a peak and then fall away exponentially.

The same idea applies to facts themselves. The economist Fritz Machlup popularised the notion that within any discipline, a measurable share of accepted facts will be overturned or revised within a given span of time. What counts as correct today may need replacing tomorrow, and the speed of that replacement is itself a feature of the field.

Why some fields age faster 🔗

Obsolescence does not move at the same pace everywhere. In fast-moving areas such as computer science, medicine, and engineering, the decline can be sharp, because new methods quickly make older results outdated. In the basic sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, the decline tends to be slower, reflecting a more gradual diffusion of ideas. A foundational work in philosophy may stay relevant for decades, while a paper on a specific software technique may be superseded within a couple of years. This is why a library weeds a technology collection far more aggressively than it does a collection of literary criticism.

The role of ongoing research in renewal 🔗

Obsolescence sounds purely negative, but it is the natural counterpart to growth. The same research activity that pushes knowledge outward is what renders older knowledge obsolete, and it is also what renews the stock of what we know. New studies do not simply add to a pile. They correct earlier errors, refine partial truths, and integrate scattered findings into stronger frameworks. For students and professionals, the practical lesson is that learning cannot stop at graduation. Because the validity of knowledge decays, staying current requires continuous engagement with new research, a habit often described as lifelong learning. Libraries and databases support this by constantly acquiring, updating, and reorganising their collections so that users reach the most current and reliable material.

Bringing the three characteristics together 🔗

These three features are not separate facts to memorise. They reinforce one another. Knowledge grows because communities keep producing and validating it, and that same productive activity is what makes older knowledge obsolete. The infinite, social, and perishable nature of knowledge together explain why managing information is a continuous task rather than a one-time effort. For anyone working with recorded knowledge, understanding these properties is the difference between treating a collection as a static archive and treating it as a living, changing resource that mirrors the society producing it.

What do you think? If knowledge in your own field is constantly growing and ageing, how would you decide which sources are still worth trusting today? And if all knowledge is shaped by its social context, can we ever call any piece of knowledge truly neutral?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00903-w
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Reality
4. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/social-epistemology/v-1/sections/the-social-construction-of-knowledge
5. https://faculty.lsu.edu/bedeian/files/peer-review-and-the-social-construction-of-knowledge.pdf
6. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-022-04359-w