Lyotard: The legitimation of knowledge

All sorts of interesting articles of information on the blog of the patternhunter - "tracking the spread of ideas, technologies and social change".

On a different note, I am (still) busy reading Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. It's taking time to digest, but it's fascinating. For instance, Kurt Godel proved that some propositions (axiomatic consistency in particular) in an axiomatic mathematical system cannot be proved. This undermines one of the requirements for properties of a formal system. Expand this to be the case for formal systems in general, and you have a situation where legitimation (of a formal system and denotative statements derived from it) is not legitimised by the axiomatics of the system, but by a tacit agreement among experts.

Lyotard argues that this is true of scientific knowledge as well. He mentions Nietzsche as the thinker who noticed, in the 19th century, that European nihilism arose as a result of the truth requirement of science turning on itself. This happened in part because the legitimation of science as a whole was found to be on less solid ground than previously supposed. Science's only recourse to legitimation was through narrative knowledge, and science does not acknowledge narrative knowledge as a legitimate form of knowledge. Problem!

Lyotard's report is all about the problem of the legitimation of knowledge in current thought (well, circa 1979 anyway), and he uses the idea of language games to describe the localisation of truth. I'm simplifying of course, but that gives some idea of it.