CONCEPT
Context-Dependent Knowledge
Knowledge whose content is inseparable from the particular situation in which it was developed and applied — the form of knowing that constitutes phronesis and that AI systems, optimized for context-independent generalization, structurally cannot produce.
Context-dependent knowledge is the form of knowing whose content cannot be abstracted from the particular situation in which it operates without catastrophic loss of meaning. Where episteme aspires to regularities that hold across contexts, context-dependent knowledge specifies what works in this situation, with these stakes, for these people, under these constraints. Flyvbjerg's career-long argument is that the most consequential forms of human knowledge — practical wisdom, expert judgment, institutional understanding — are constitutively context-dependent, and that the dominant intellectual traditions of modernity have systematically undervalued this form of knowing in favor of the context-independent aspiration inherited from the natural sciences.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The philosophical pedigree runs through Aristotle's distinction between phronesis and episteme, through Wittgenstein's analysis of rule-following, through Michael Polanyi's tacit knowledge, through Hubert Dreyfus's critique of rule-based AI. The common thread is the recognition that the knowledge that guides skilled action cannot be fully specified in propositions and therefore cannot be transmitted