The Knowing World: II. What Matters

Not every difference matters.

A difference may occur and disappear without consequence. But another may alter what happens next.

That is where we should begin.

To say that something matters need not mean that anyone cares about it. Mattering begins more simply.

A difference matters to the extent that it enters into the conditions of further difference.

One physical event alters another. A biological change affects whether an organism continues. A social action changes what others can do. A distinction in a meaning-making system can organise further meanings.

At each point, something has become consequential.

This suggests that mattering has a history.

The world need not wait for consciousness before differences can have consequences. Nor need meaning appear as something imposed upon an otherwise indifferent universe.

Meaning-making develops within a world in which differences were already making differences.

But a further transformation is still required.

For a difference merely to have consequences is not yet for it to become meaning. Meaning requires that its mattering can be organised: related, distinguished and made available for further meaning.

That development will concern us later.

For now, one point is enough.

Before anything can be known, something must matter.

And before we ask what a knower knows, we may need to ask:

What has to happen for a difference to become consequential at all?

Perhaps knowing begins not when the world is represented.

Perhaps it begins in the much older history of what can make a difference to what comes next.

The Knowing World: I. Before Knowledge

What was there before knowledge?

The question sounds as though we should be able to make a list.

Objects, perhaps. Events. Matter. Space. Time. A world waiting to be discovered.

But there is a difficulty.

To call something an object is already to have distinguished it from its surroundings. To call something an event is already to have distinguished change from continuity. To speak of matter, space or time is already to have organised experience according to particular distinctions.

So perhaps we should begin further back.

Not with objects, but with difference.

The world changes. Things affect one another. Some differences persist; others disappear. Some relations matter to what happens next; others do not.

None of this requires a knower.

But neither does it yet give us a world composed of the kinds of things that a knower might subsequently discover.

There is simply an unfolding of differences and relations.

Something happens.

Something is affected.

Something persists.

Something changes.

And already, perhaps, we have the beginnings of what will later become knowledge: not information, but mattering.

A difference matters when it makes a difference to what can happen next.

For an organism, a change in its surroundings may affect its survival. For a social system, a distinction may alter what its participants can do. For a meaning-making system, a difference may become available for further articulation.

At no point need we imagine a mind standing outside the process and inspecting it.

Knowledge may emerge from something much more modest:

a world in which differences can make differences.

If so, then knowledge does not begin when a subject first represents an object.

It begins somewhere in the longer history by which the world becomes capable of mattering to something.

And that suggests a strange possibility.

Perhaps before asking how anything can know the world, we should ask:

How does a world become capable of making a difference?

The Knowing World: Prologue — The Question We Thought We Knew

We have a familiar way of separating two questions.

Ontology asks what exists.

Epistemology asks how we know what exists.

The distinction seems obvious. First there is a world, already furnished with things; then there are knowers, trying to discover what those things are.

But perhaps the distinction has been doing more work than we noticed.

For the moment we say that ontology comes first, we have already imagined a particular kind of world: a world of things that are what they are independently of how they become available to be known. Knowledge then becomes a problem of access. How does something inside the world come to represent something else inside the world?

But what if this gets the order wrong?

Before there is an object for knowledge, there must be some way in which a difference can become significant. Before something can be known as something, there must be a way of distinguishing it from what it is not. Before a world can be described, there must be some organisation through which what happens can become experience.

Knowing, then, may not be an operation performed upon an already articulated world.

It may be part of how a world becomes articulate at all.

This does not mean that we invent the world. The world pushes back. Our distinctions succeed or fail in relation to something that is not simply of our making.

Nor does it mean that ontology and epistemology are the same question. They are not.

But perhaps they are not as independent as we have imagined.

Perhaps the question is not simply:

How can we know what exists?

but also:

What kind of existence becomes possible to articulate through knowing?

That is a different question.

And it may take us somewhere unexpected.

Because if knowing is not merely the discovery of a world, then we may have to ask what makes knowing itself possible.

The question we thought we knew may turn out to be the beginning of the inquiry.