Raising public and policy debate is always easier if everyone understands the terminology. Obvious, perhaps, but in the case of ‘knowledge’, the definition may well stand in the way of understanding. There is wide-ranging debate among philosophers about what knowledge means, while among development specialists there seems to be an agreement to disagree and remain silent.

Perhaps Plato started it all with his insistence that at least three criteria must be fulfilled for knowledge to exist – a statement must be justified, true and believed. Anyone working with HIV, for example, will know that many people have what they believe to be knowledge, because they believe that it’s true and justified – but it certainly isn’t true, isn’t justified, and to most of us isn’t knowledge at all. For example some people believe that you can get rid of your own HIV if you pass it on, or that taking ARVs means you are no longer infectious or you can get HIV from shaking hands or that heterosexual Anal sex is safe sex.

Each of these statements is believed precisely because the holder perceives it to be true. So it’s easy to go with Plato if you think that you know what is right!

I know it’s scary to disagree with Plato, but for those of us who work in development with participative methods, Plato’s definition is bound to make us feel uncomfortable. Robert Chambers, a great champion of respecting people’s knowledge and challenging our own (specialists’ or experts’) knowledge, has proved again and again that ‘our’ knowledge may well be wrong and that those farmers, women, children who are closest to an issue have more knowledge than ‘we’ do.

So, knowledge does not have to be true nor necessarily correct, even if, for example, an intellectual holds it. Time can change knowledge too – smoking was once thought to improve health! In IP circles, knowledge can be both a commercial asset and sometimes a global good.

Francis Bacon wrote that “knowledge is power”. Well, as most women will recognise, they have lots of knowledge but little power and certainly those farmers championed by Robert Chambers will agree that holding knowledge does not bring power.

Don’t expect Wiktionary to help, which includes a definition of knowledge as, among other things, “relevant information that one is able to recall from memory” – a tad ironic for an online information resource! My personal favourite is one I heard from James Deane, “Knowledge is the sense people make of the information they have.” This works for me in the standard development context but I am not sure it works in the intellectual property rights (IP) debate nor the debate around knowledge as a global public good or around the role of knowledge in the modern global economy.

So, how can there be informed debate among development specialists about the importance of IP in development, or among policy makers about knowledge as a global good in the face of the challenges of environmental change? Or public debate about the laws and policies needed?