It begins with Carl Linnaeus (1707-78), the father of modern natural history, who first ordered knowledge of the natural world.
In the case of the epistemic paradoxes, a similar stratification could be obtained by making an explicit distinction between first-order knowledge (knowledge about the external world), second-order knowledge (knowledge about first-order knowledge), third-order knowledge (knowledge about second-order knowledge), and so on.
Without actively promoting rational order, knowledge alone does not lead to happiness.
For example, in some situations, first-order knowledge of other agents' personal thresholds is not sufficient to motivate an agent to take action, whereas higher-order knowledge or, in the limit, common knowledge is.
In multi-pass decoding, an LM trained with higher order knowledge sources is used to re-score the lattice generated by an LM trained with simpler or lower order knowledge sources from the preceding pass.
The next example reveals that in some cases not even first-order knowledge is sufficient to trigger action, and higher levels of knowledge are necessary.
Little systematically ordered knowledge is available for the analysis of a layout, taking hygienic factors into account.
Hence the waiter's announcement establishes the fourth-order knowledge claim: The guest knows that the waiter knows that she knows that he knows he is at fault.
These questions have triggered interest in the existence of "rich" models containing most, if not all, possible configurations of (higher-order) knowledge and beliefs.
In his work, modern philosophy is seen as fundamentally self-reflexive in nature, as belonging to the age of self-critical reason; that is, it is linked up with the quest not only for first-order knowledge of nature and human being, but also for second-order knowledge of what human knowledge involves in the first place.
