Knowledge

Knowledge is usually conceived as an evaluative concept, connoting a normative judgement about the truth or correctness of what is ascribed to it. In connecting a domain's knowledge with its practices, a further distinction must be made. Knowledge has a physical embodiment, and it is this materiality that makes it effective – that, quite literally, enables it to have effects. An emphasis on the materiality of knowledge has methodological consequences. One consequence of an emphasis on the materiality of knowledge is to treat knowledge as unfolding in the realm of events. The most important constituent elements of knowledge are concepts, which are its central organising features. As core elements of bodies of domain-local knowledge, concepts come in families. Like practices and concepts, ontologies are relative to a domain or to a body of knowledge. Knowledge is inextricably bound up with reasoning, which is its modus operandi and its dynamic element.