ABSTRACT
The problem of knowledge does not go away. It was raised some 2500 years ago by Plato’s Socrates and again by Descartes at the beginning of the modern era. It persisted throughout the philosophical development of the modern period and it entrenched itself in the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline. Indeed, it was through trying to respond to this question that all major psychological systems found an identity and a path of development. It is a question that continues to haunt us today as we try to make sense of the legacy we inherited and confront the new challenges presented by the proliferation of knowledge concerns in the contemporary world. Knowledge societies, knowledge economies, local knowledge, global knowledge, the management of knowledge, the knowledge of the other, self-knowledge; it may well be-as our postmodern colleagues once declared that the knowledge question does not exist, but it certainly insists. From Plato to Descartes, to the very contemporary discussions about who holds and what is knowledge, the question of what makes knowledge knowledge has never really abandoned us.
