Knowledge? Which knowledge?

I’ve just come across a paper written by Marcus Foth, Nancy Odendaal and Greg Hearn, titled “The View from Everywhere: Towards an Epistemology for Urbanites.” I found it a fascinating read because it echoes so many of my own thoughts concerning popular definitions of “knowledge”. My own thoughts on the topic are, in a very general sense, that the traditional notion of knowledge as objective truths has become increasingly dubious as global interaction increases. In fact, what that increasing interaction does show us is that being exposed to foreign “knowledge cultures” is a powerful means of revealing underlying assumptions, often unfounded, on which we tend to base our “knowledge” (that’s why global ICTs and internationalisation of education are such a great idea). Many of my past posts (usually the lengthier ones) include some aspects of my thoughts on this.
In their abstract, Foth, Oldendaal and Hearn say, “We argue for the development of an epistemological model which takes into account and values transitory, informal, soft, implicit, contextual and tacit forms of knowledge, and its sources and utility outside the hard sciences.” On the one hand I would say that, at least in philosophical epistemology, this view of knowledge is increasingly accepted. I think that this is quite clear from the abundant literature that the authors were able to draw on for this paper. What’s more, I don’t think that there are many philosophers today that would have a problem with this (except maybe some of the fine details, but that’s just how philosophers are, right?). The big question for me, that this paper does not answer (and perhaps was not meant to answer), is how this notion of knowledge gets transferred into educational practice (education here is meant to refer to any activity that facilitates learning whether that is an anticipated result or not) or any other useful activities?
There is one thing that bothers me about the paper. In their conclusions the authors ask, “How can this ‘other’ knowledge be trusted? How is tacit or informal knowledge justified, or what kind of justification will distinguish it from opinion, convention, religion, tradition or politics? ” It seems to me that they sort of missed the point here. I think the relevant question, that follows from the authors’ proposed definition of knowledge, does not concern the justification of “this ‘other’ knowledge”, rather, what knowledge is embedded in the ‘other’ knowledge and how was it formed and what function does it serve? I’m sure some will say that this is merely a loquacious description of “justification”. But my reason for putting it this way is that I believe that the authors’ proposed definition of knowledge suggests that knowledge is not necessarily justified (in the traditional epistemological sense), rather it is reinforced. Hence the role of context. It would be more difficult to make a case for “contextual justification” than for “contextual reinforcement”.