Discursive Space and Its Consequences for Understanding Knowledge and Information

Abstract

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.

Ontological Basis of Knowledge in the Theory of Discursive Space and Its Consequences

“…Due to the unlimited number of such observers the discursive space could be understood as a multiplicity of areas of articulation/retention of knowledge in the discourse existing for various observers or just a plurality of such discursive spaces. This is a significant modification that leads to further, serious conclusions related to the need to reformulate other phenomena (e.g., information) [3]. One of the most important such conclusions is that actually one deals globally with the manifold, which realizes locally as discursive spaces.…”

“…It is an approach based principally on a different epistemic paradigm, based on the idea of complexity. This last idea and its application in the theory of discursive space have been extensively discussed in earlier papers [3][4][5].…”

“…The idea presented here boils down to intentional separation of the deep semantic content identified with knowledge from the level of its linguistic representation. It is based on a descriptive construction of the discursive space [3][4][5], but it considerably extends its original application, going beyond the source area of the social context introduced by the classical concept of discourse. This concept was based on the theory presented by M. Foucault in an orderly form in his lecture in 1970 [6] and developed extensively in other works (1969, [7]), (1966, [8]).…”

Ontological Basis of Knowledge in the Theory of Discursive Space and Its Consequences

“…It is based on the concept of an ontology of the world proposed by Wittgenstein [1] and Armstrong [2]. Thanks to that concept, the ontological unification is possible, which gives the basis for reinterpreting the idea of discourse, which as an autonomous phenomenon of retention and articulation of knowledge can be at the same time a part of this world and representation of its selected fragment [3,4].…”

Holonic Management Tree Technique for Performance Improvement Over Self-Similar System Structures

“…Actually, the complex systems of the reality in which we are acting feature many nested levels of emerging behaviours, each of which involves different emergent domains and associated languages (Albertazzi, 2010;Poli & Obrst, 2010). The knowledge of the emergent levels seems to go even beyond the universe of discourse of human beings (Maciag, 2018) and therefore needs embodiment of some level of autonomous intelligence at many levels of granularity, as it apparently happens for fish schools or swarms in nature.…”