TEHNE's principles work best when the people who generate the knowledge are the same people who store it, explain it to others, and coach them as they try to implement it.

The significance of the Greek tehne

The ancient Greek word tehne (or techne) can be translated to refer to art, craft or skill. It encompasses the kind of informal and hard-to-pin-down competencies or crafts often captured in the term "know-how". Plato viewed tehne and systematic or scientific knowledge as being closely related. Aristotle went a step further by asserting that tehne was the systematic use of knowledge for intelligent human action.

The Scale of Knowledge

(Aristotle - Metaphysics)

Particular Levels:

1. Sensation - not defined explicitly; includes sensing (the act), the senses (faculties) and sense-perceptions (the products of our use of the senses). The senses are the most "authoritative" means of recognizing particular things, but this knowledge is "easy" to attain.

2. Memory - not defined explicitly; results from sense perception and denotes a natural ability to collect, store and recollect previous sensations. Basically it is a spontaneously produced "image", which is regarded as a copy of that which it is an image of (Aristotle designates acquired, rationally controlled mnemonics with another expression - anamnesis).

3. Experience - results from memory, "for many memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience"; so it is a "general knowledge" derived from many memories of the same thing (one particular instance remembered on many occasions).

4. Art - (the Greek techne includes both craft and art); it is the capability to make universal judgments that cover all cases of a certain type; thus, it is a "universal knowledge" that includes also the reason why something is so.

5. Science - defined in the Nicomachean Ethics (VI 3); the demonstrative and teachable knowledge deduced from the starting principles.

6. Wisdom - the knowledge of "the first causes and the principles of things"; in fact, it is a combination of an intuitive insight into these principles as well as the demonstrative (scientific, universal) knowledge derived from these principles (Nicomachean Ethics, VI 7).

Principle of Gradation: "more knowledge"/"more wisdom"; every next stage provides more information and deeper insights than the previous one that serves as its starting point. The first three levels answer the question whether something is so or not, whereas the second three give reasons why it is so. The question "Why it is so?" aims at an explanation.