quantknight said:
I will explain the scenario clearly, consider a physician who is a damn expert in cardiology, but has very meager knowledge about other things(society,politics,social awareness etc.), whereas a simple worker like plumber, who has sound knowledge and awareness about his surroundings and society, who will be considered as a knowledgeable person? As from general society's perspective, the cardiologist will be admired as a genius because he is much more useful to society than plumber?
As I see it, this is an example that it somewhat touches again the extreme. I see no reason for a physician to not be sociable or politically and socially aware while being an expert in cardiology. He / She put hard efforts to get this knowledge / expertise but again
not in a vacuum. On the other hand, I see no reason for the plumber to be extremely sociable and/or socially and/or politically aware etc. But let's just stick to the example as it is.
In order to answer the question "who will be considered as a knowledgeable person" we must first define what do we mean by the word
knowledge. Although this definition is more or less common sense, it is a term that encompasses things at various levels so I'll take the definition from
Oxford Dictionary - as I regard it as a credible source, in order to have a common base of understanding. According to the definitions, both physician and plumber have knowledge
but of different kind. Now, I think that it is crystal clear that the answer to the question depends only on one factor:
who considers it and consequently what are his / her standards / qualities regarding knowledge
. And this has a lot of subjective factors that vary from person to person and most importantly pertain to the knowledge that each person has. But there is the objective factor of
usefulness - regarding society, of different kinds of knowledge and clearly the physician is in the lead. He / She can save lives with the kind of knowledge he / she possesses - adding here the factor of expertise as well, while plumber cannot,
at least in an apparent, direct way regarding social and/or political expertise etc.. But the gist here is that in order to acquire special knowledge that can be crucially useful, you have to put hard efforts but most importantly
like strongly what you do. To be more specific, I don't think that there is a single successful cardiologist out there that put such hard efforts, just to be considered as knowledgeable.
For the second question
quantknight said:
As from general society's perspective, the cardiologist will be admired as a genius because he is much more useful to society than plumber?
my opinion lies partly in what I wrote above but I'll add that considering someone as genius or not, is once again a strongly person-oriented matter. There are objectively genius persons according to specific qualities but even this is not free from subjectivity in many cases. But in the general case the term genius may mean many things to many people. So, my answer is again that the physician will be more
admirable, more
useful and rightly so, given the hard efforts he / she put. But again, for me, more
useful is what matters most.