Does knowledge have to be theoretical, i.e have some cogent theme or structure to it?

That question is too abstract for me. Can you present a concrete example. please?

Certainly facts and data form part of knowledge. As does experience.

Theory is a question, knowledge is an answer.

It is impossible to have any collection of data or facts without theory. This is because you have to define something that is the fact to be collected as distinct from the rest that is not the fact.

Therefore, you have established a tentative theory that some phonomena are observable, countable, measurable; they can exist as facts. And, there is something else that is not the fact. And, you can separate the two.

Therefore, there cannot be facts without theory.

No number of facts prove a theory, but one fact can disprove a theory.

When facts and theory are used together, you can gain knowledge.

The proof that one has knowledge is the ability to predict. The more accurately you can predict, the better your knowledge.

@PerryDolia Ummmm??? I have two sons. Now you possess knowledge you didn’t have before without any theory necessary.

@PerryDolia Excellent synopsis! GA.

I would like to add that “data” and “facts” might be better thought of as “observations.” This helps us remember that, due to the unstable nature of perceptions, there could easily be measurement bias.

As @PerryDolia said, we say we “know” something when that knowledge allows us to accurately (or more accurately) predict the behavior of whatever it is we are observing.

But theories don’t observe. People observe and people generate theories to explain their observations. We call the things we observe “data.” A fact is an observation that just about everyone you ask agrees is an accurate observation.

However, all knowledge is provisional. We consider it true if it helps us predict behavior better than we could by chance. Truth is never absolute. Instead it is considered as a probability. In hard sciences, the probability of A leading to B can be expressed as so great that the chance that A does not lead to B is practically unmeasurable.

In social sciences, we only need to be 95% or 99% or 99.9% confident in the relationship between A and B to consider that relationship to be true. Unfortunately, that relationship does not always tell us if there is a causal relationship between A and B.

Observations are easily biased, so it can be hard to measure a level of reliability of an observation. Thus, no matter how great our theories are, they can be greatly mistaken if our observations are inaccurate or if we misunderstand the causal relationship. Since this happens often, people are often mistaken in what they believe they know. Therefore it is a good idea to be skeptical of most observations and theoretical relationships until you have verified them yourself.

For example, people say that race explains discrimination. However, it may be that race is a stand-in for other factors, such as class and income and education, and that when you incorporate these things in your model, race drops out of the model, since it no longer offers any significant additional explanatory power. So what we think we know about race may turn out to be a chimera. Irrelevant.

Knowledge is provisional. Usually better data and better theories will come along (not necessarily in that order) that replaces the old “knowledge” with new, better knowledge. People who hold onto old ideas in the face of theories with better explanatory power—well, there’s a question for you. Why do they do that?

@yarnlady You say you have two sons, but I can not say that has added to my knowledge. If I saw you and your sons, or if you provided birth certificates, or sent pictures and a video, I would be closer to saying I know you have two sons. However, this is the internet, and people are notorious for making up “facts” on the internet. Based on my observations of your behavior on fluther, I’d wager that if you say you have two sons, I’ll be able to observe two sons if I were motivated to verify your assertion. But it’s still a wager until I have more data, and I’m not sure that the information you’ve provided us is sufficient for me to say I know you have two sons.

It’s the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

@YARNLADY Your comment about your two sons is a good one. It shows the difference between data and knowledge. The fact that you have two sons is a factoid, but since it does not add to my ability to predict, it contains no knowledge.

I was reading about the unorthadox anthropolgist Tom Harrison, and he made detailed and copious observations on the indigenous population of Borneo and others, british people too, compiled massive volumes of data, about anything he considered noteworthy, some of it seemingly trivial, but ultimately derived no theorem in the manner of Darwin or Levi Straus (not the jeans) but we are still more knowledgeable by reading Harrison’s disparate field notes than we would have, had we read nothing at all.

@PerryDolia Just to ask: maybe with the knowledge that I have two sons (and 5 grandsons) you could predict I don’t know much about raising girls?