This paper aims to present a new way of understanding and elaborating the current state of reality which has a substantial dependency on technology. An example of such a relatively mature technology is the Internet. The discursive space (DS) is a proposed new cognitive tool, which can be used for this purpose. DS is constructed based on the idea of the discourse and the idea of the configuration space, state space, phase space, and space-time, etc. Discourse is understood as the representation/creation of reality, which means that it can also be understood as a carrier of knowledge. The configuration space, etc., is a tool elaborated in the field of physics for describing complex phenomena. DS is a tool for acquiring knowledge analogous to formal information processes, but is based on another interpretation of the existence of knowledge. This interpretation sees knowledge as a social construction and not as an independent entity, which can be described by rigorous formal procedure. The necessity of such tools comes inter alia from management, particularly from humanistic management, where it can describe the Internet as a dynamic and complex environment for organizations that understand it as a basic unit of the social space of reality.

The paper develops the idea of discursive space by describing the manner of existence of this space and the world of facts. The ontology of discursive space is based on the idea of discourse by Foucault. Discourse, being a language phenomenon, is a form of existence of knowledge. The discursive space is a representation of knowledge and can be interpreted as the system of acquiring this knowledge. This space is connected with the world of facts by a relationship of supervenience, which can be interpreted as a flow of knowledge. At the same time, the existence of the world of facts (world of affairs) assumes that it covers all phenomena and processes, and therefore, necessarily, also the discursive space. Hence, this space is not a separate system but a system that emerges from the world in order to allow the gathering of specific knowledge about it. Treating the discursive space as one of the possible cognitive systems, one can imagine other systems of knowledge that emerge from the world (the whole), as parts subordinated to particular goals (the use of knowledge), which can have a multilevel character. The flow of knowledge on the border of such a system and the whole of it can be interpreted as information. This paper tries to justify this possibility, which could lead to a general model of the flow of the knowledge.

This paper discusses the theory of knowledge based on the idea of dynamical space. The goal of this effort is to comprehend the knowledge that remains beyond the human domain, e.g., of the artificial cognitive systems. This theory occurs in two versions, weak and strong. The weak version is limited to knowledge in which retention and articulation are performed through the discourse. The strong version is general and is not limited in any way. In the weak version, knowledge is represented by the trajectories of discourses in time, in a dynamical space called the discursive space, which has an arbitrary number of dimensions. Given space is used to represent a given part of knowledge. A manifold is introduced to represent knowledge with a wider scope (all knowledge). The strong version is an extrapolation of the weak version to cover all forms of knowledge, not necessarily human or manifesting in language. The use of dynamical space construction allows one to formalize knowledge as such. Such an effort requires us to initially consider knowledge as mainly a social and linguistic phenomenon, which also could be presented as a result of the evolution of the understanding of knowledge that took place in the 20th century.

Advanced NLP Procedures as Premises for the Reconstruction of the Idea of Knowledge The article presents the current state of development of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, in particular the GPT-3 language model, and presents its consequences for understanding the phenomenon of knowledge. The NLP technology has been experiencing remarkable development recently. The GPT-3 language model presents a level of advancement that allows it to generate texts as answers to general questions, as summaries of the presented text, etc., which reach the level surpassing the analogous level of human texts. These algorithmic operations lead to the determination of the probability distribution of its components. Texts generated by such a model should be considered as autonomous texts, using immanent, implicit knowledge embedded in language. This conclusion raises questions about the status of such knowledge. Help in the analysis is provided also by the theory of discourse, as well as the theory of discursive space based on it, that proposes the interpretation of knowledge as a trajectory of discourses in a dynamical space. Recognizing that knowledge may also be autonomous, and in particular not be at the exclusive disposal of humans, leads to the question of the status of artificial cognitive agents, such as the GPT-3 language model.

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