ABSTRACT
We have used the term ‘problem’ to refer to the object of knowledge because it is often used in that sense and is the least unsatisfactory term we can think of. Sometimes we use application as a synonym, but it is too referential to knowledge to be generally applicable. We recognise that in the application of knowledge there are possibilities as well as problems and it would have been nice to have an English word that handled this. We stayed with problem because it matches the idea of knowledge as solving something and as with teacher and student the two ideas exist only in relation to each other. We see knowledge and problem as lying at the ends of an interactive axis of people-mediated communication. When people do things to things because of what they know it is a form of communication. To arrest a criminal, to do open heart surgery or to write a computer
program are applications of knowledge to problems that are manifestly acts of communication, though they do not readily fit current models of communication which see people not problems as the ends of communication. However, if we can accept that a communicative interaction takes place when knowledge is applied to a problem then this interaction can be regarded as a syntagm of the knowledge paradigm.
