The Becoming of Possibility: 3 Knowledge as Stabilised Possibility

If language differentiates possibility, knowledge is what happens when some of those differentiated possibilities become reliably repeatable.

Knowledge is usually treated as something people have: facts stored in minds, beliefs justified by evidence, representations that correspond to reality. From a relational ontology perspective, this picture is backwards.

Knowledge is not what we possess. It is what continues to work.

From Possibility to Stability

Possibility is open-ended. Not every possibility deserves equal confidence. Some collapse immediately; others persist.

Knowledge names the subset of possibilities that have become stabilised through repeated coordination. A way of acting, describing, or intervening counts as knowledge when it:

• can be taken up by others

• holds across contexts

• resists disruption

• supports reliable action

Nothing needs to be stored internally for this to occur. Stability is achieved in practice, not in memory.

Knowing Without Knowing-That

The dominance of propositional knowledge (“knowing that”) has obscured the relational character of knowing.

Most knowledge is practical:

• knowing how to conduct an experiment

• knowing how to diagnose a problem

• knowing how to navigate a situation

• knowing how to respond appropriately

These are not representations. They are competences sustained by coordinated systems — training regimes, tools, norms, and feedback.

Propositional knowledge is a special case: a way of semiotically stabilising practical knowledge for transmission and scrutiny.

Scientific Knowledge Revisited

Science is often taken as the paradigm case of knowledge-as-representation. But scientific practice tells a different story.

Scientific knowledge stabilises when:

• measurements can be repeated

• results can be reproduced

• models can be integrated

• predictions hold under variation

None of this requires correspondence to a mind-independent reality in the representational sense. What it requires is robust coordination under constraint.

Reality pushes back — but it does so through resistance in practice, not through silent comparison.

Error as De-stabilisation

If knowledge is stabilised possibility, error is not false representation. It is failed coordination.

A claim ceases to count as knowledge when:

• it stops working

• it fails under challenge

• it cannot be integrated

• it produces unreliable expectations

This is why knowledge is corrigible without being arbitrary, and why disagreement does not automatically imply relativism.

Knowledge lives in its capacity to endure scrutiny.

Expertise and the Weight of Knowledge

Expertise is not the accumulation of more internal content. It is a deep attunement to the structure of possibility in a domain.

Experts perceive:

• finer distinctions

• relevant constraints

• likely failure modes

• productive next steps

This attunement is not private. It is cultivated through participation in a community of practice that stabilises certain possibilities as reliable and others as fragile.

Knowledge Without Interiors

No one “has” knowledge in their head.

Libraries, instruments, protocols, diagrams, machines, and institutions all participate in knowledge. Human participants are crucial — but they are not the containers.

Knowledge persists because it is distributed across relations, not because it is stored in individuals.

This is why knowledge can survive its knowers.

The Temporal Structure of Knowing

Knowledge is not static. It is always provisional — not in the sense of uncertain, but in the sense of historically situated.

What counts as knowledge today is what has stabilised so far. New possibilities can emerge that destabilise old ones, not by contradiction alone, but by reconfiguring the field.

Knowledge grows not by accumulation, but by reorganisation.

The Cut Ahead

If knowledge stabilises possibility, then value must explain why some stabilisations matter more than others.

Why do certain possibilities attract investment, protection, and transmission? Why are some failures tolerated and others not?

To answer that, we must turn to value — carefully, and without collapsing it into meaning.

The next step is therefore:

Value Systems and the Weighting of Possibility.