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For over twenty years a handful of knowledge management researchers have focused on the notion of pragmatics. How pragmatics and the internal maps that guide knowledge workers gained their attention is discussed next. This discussion serves as a helpful introduction to pragmatics as well as serving as the introduction for the literature review, and these introductory statements begin with a discussion of a study of distance medicine.
Teleconferencing technologies enable medical specialists to confer with distant physicians and patients to conduct medical diagnoses. To study how teleconferencing impacted medical diagnostic practices, a four-stage model of the medical diagnostic process was developed by Randles and Thachenkary (2002). Discovery of Covington’s pragmatic rules – rules which control what is said when – focused the attention of the aforementioned researchers on pragmatics, and a study of the semiotic process contributed to their understanding of this topic.
Semiotics describes several levels of transformation: morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. Stimuli at the morphological level are merely a collection of unconnected symbols. By relating these symbols to each other, the stimuli are elevated to the syntactic level to produce data. At the semantic level, meaning is attributed to the data to generate information (Ramaprasad and Rai, 1996). Finally, at the pragmatic level, the meaning of information is interpreted in a particular context, and is related to events and action (Stamper, 1973; and Penzias, 1989). A study of distance medicine and the medical diagnostic process revealed the following. Decision making entails a rapid ascent to the pragmatic level of the semiotic process. The physician readily attributes meaning to the medical data. Within minutes the physician has placed the patient’s situation in a particular context, reducing the number of potential illnesses from hundreds to five or six.