If knowledge is meaning that has become available for further meaning, it might seem that everything depends upon the system.
The system provides the distinctions.
The distinctions make instances intelligible.
What, then, is left for the world to do?
Quite a lot.
Because the world does not have to fit the distinctions we have available.
Something happens that our system cannot quite accommodate.
The distinction fails to hold.
The instance refuses its classification.
A relation appears where we expected none.
A consequence occurs that our theory cannot explain.
The world has pushed back.
This does not mean that the world has spoken to us in some mysterious language of its own.
It means something simpler.
Our potential for meaning has encountered a limit.
That limit is not necessarily a failure of the world.
It may be a failure of the distinctions through which we have been trying to make it intelligible.
And this is where the system–instance relation becomes productive.
An instance can exceed the system that makes it recognisable.
It can reveal that what we thought was one kind of thing contains a difference we had not distinguished.
The pressure of the instance can therefore produce a new distinction.
The system changes.
The horizon moves.
And suddenly what was previously unintelligible can become an instance of something new.
This is not the world correcting a mistaken picture of itself.
It is the world participating in the transformation of the potential through which it can be construed.
The world pushes back because it is not exhausted by any particular system of meaning.
That is what keeps knowing open.
Without resistance, a system could simply confirm itself indefinitely.
There would be no reason for its distinctions to change.
No new possibilities would emerge.
Knowledge would become repetition.
But the world continues to offer differences that can matter in ways the existing system did not anticipate.
So perhaps uncertainty is not merely a defect in knowledge.
It is one of the conditions under which knowledge can grow.
The world does not tell us what it is.
It does something more interesting.
It gives us occasions to discover that what we can say about it is not yet enough.
And if knowing is constrained participation in the articulation of a world, then the constraint is not an obstacle to knowledge.
It is what makes further knowledge possible.
Which leaves us with the question that has been waiting underneath the whole inquiry:
If the world and the system continually alter one another, are ontology and epistemology really two different movements at all?
No comments:
Post a Comment