Skip to main content

Alliances and non-human knowledge

Finishing my lectures in epistemology and the final section on non-human knowledge. After stuff on capture and modulation (cf post below from last weekend on white blindness) in the context of process philosophy, we discussed the idea that knowledge is always an (explicit or implicit alliance) involving the knowers and the known. The known is not therefore a passive element that is merely captured or inspected but rather something that takes part in the process by acting in order to form a society (in Tardean sense) of knowledge that assembles a network. This assembling is what took place between Pasteur and the medicine and the science of his time and with the microbes in Latour's description. To present a theory is to present a network with strong and weak links - vulnerable to different tests of force. Knowledge is an assembling (an alliance) that has proven to be reliable (the J factor, in a rough JTB account of knowledge) that helps bringing about (or sponsoring) something so that it makes something be the case (the T factor). Instead of beliefs, we would have alliances as non-representational items that aggregates knower and known for as much as it resists tests of force. The J factor here would make the account externalist in the sense that it is enough for the actants to build on reliable connections.

Comments

  1. Inspirational Friendship Quotes5 March 2013 at 00:31

    Non human knowledge has always been a topic of interest for me. I'd be curious to attend a few seminars or lectures on the topic in the future. Hopefully I'll get the time to do it!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory Assemblages out!

  Memory Assemblages is out at Bloomsbury This is the book I wrote during most of 22 and 23. It proposes a spectral realism based on the idea that archives are ubiquitous - I call this pan-mnemism. It offers a conception of how memory related deeply with persistent addition of new events, thoughts and circumstances and this addends concoct varying assemblages of what is retained and what brings this archives to the fore. It also rejects the idea that there is an archeology to the archive - or an ontology to hauntology. Even if it boils down merely to postulate traces or forms. I have neglected this blog for a while and I don't expect myself to be very much back to it soon. But I will talk about the book in my youtube channel, in an English language playlist called "On Memory Assemblages" .  
Post a Comment
Read more

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more