The Knowing World: VIII. Knowledge Is Meaning

We often imagine knowledge as something that exists before language.

First we know something.

Then we put what we know into words.

But perhaps this reverses the relationship.

If a theory is a structured potential for making instances intelligible, then knowledge cannot simply be information stored somewhere behind meaning.

Knowledge is what happens when an instance has become meaningful within a system of distinctions.

To know something is not merely to have encountered it.

It is to have transformed it into something that can be distinguished, related, recognised and carried forward into further meaning.

This is why the relation between instance and system matters so much.

An occurrence becomes knowable when it can be construed as an instance of something.

The particular enters a system of potential.

It becomes part of an organised field of meaning.

And once it does, it can be used to construe something else.

Knowledge therefore has a peculiar direction.

It does not simply point backwards, from meaning to an experience that existed independently of it.

It also points forwards.

What has become meaningful becomes available for further meaning.

A distinction can be reused.

A relation can be extended.

An instance can become evidence for another construal.

A theory can be revised.

In this sense, knowledge is not a storehouse.

It is a potential for further articulation.

This also explains why knowledge can change without the world simply changing underneath it.

The world may remain what it is while our system of distinctions changes what can be made intelligible within it.

And sometimes the reverse happens.

Something in the world resists the distinctions available to us, forcing the system to change.

Knowledge lives in this movement between the two.

So perhaps the question is not:

How does meaning represent what we know?

Perhaps it is:

How does what has become meaningful become capable of being known again?

Knowledge may be neither a picture of the world nor something hidden inside a knower.

It may simply be meaning that has become available for further meaning.

And if that is so, then we are approaching the point where the world itself enters the argument.

Because a system can organise only the differences it can accommodate.

And sometimes the world refuses to cooperate.

What happens when the world pushes back?