How we know things, and can talk about what we know - climbing from concrete to abstract

Back on September 17, 2013 I blogged about The Ladder-of-Abstraction and the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Pyramid. The Ladder of Abstraction shown above describes six levels, but as Patty Mulder described in an article at Toolshero, S. I Hayakawa originally used eight. You can find an eight-page white paper by Richard Freishtat and Adam Leipzig titled INFORMATION ACROBAT: Climbing the Ladder of Abstraction about picking the right levels when organizing a speech.

Another way for going from concrete to abstract is the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom or DIKW Pyramid shown above. Last year, in the Online Journal of Public Health Information, there was an article by Olaf Dammann titled Data, information, evidence and knowledge: a proposal for health informatics and data science.

He suggested another hierarchy as shown above both as a stepstool and via a table (which I have condensed from Table 1 in his article).   

Images of a stepladder and a stool both came from Wikimedia Commons.