Ikujiro Nonaka is one of the world's premier modern epistemologists. Although his theories are framed by a keen understanding of organizational structure and business, Nonaka can easily be classified as a philosopher and to not do so would significantly undermine the scholar's work. In fact, Nonaka sits on the forefront of a global paradigm shift: his theories reflect overarching global trends. For example, knowledge creation in the modern world cannot be distinguished from capitalist enterprise. Therefore, knowledge creation and knowledge management are necessarily functions of group dynamics and organizational politics to an extent they never have been in the past. Furthermore, Nonaka's epistemology has a solid practical application and foundation, the likes of which did not exist for philosophers like Kant or Plato, who also concerned themselves with knowledge creation and learning.
In his and co-author Hirotaka Takeuchi's groundbreaking work The Knowl
Nonaka's theories can be understood as extensions of earlier pragmatic epistemologies that arose from revolutions in science and corresponding understandings of the physical universe. Though Nonaka does not delve into the absolute origins of knowledge and does not refer to specific forms or archetypes of knowledge in the Platonic sense, the Berkeley theorist nevertheless proposes a thorough enough formula of knowledge creation to warrant inclusion in philosophy textbooks.
Ikujiro Nonaka is also widely recognized as an epistemologist, even if his theories are criticized by other theorists (Paavola, Lipponen & Hakkarainen nd). The very fact that Nonaka has been criticized within the framework of epistemology illustrates the impact of his theories and shows that he deserves to be read as a philosopher.
In some ways, Nonaka's epistemology resembles memetics because of the philosopher's emphasis on knowledge transmission and his under-representation of the
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