The Nature of the Social Bond: The Modern Alternative

Lyotard says that to understand the nature of knowledge in modern times, one must be able to understand how the society operates. In this case, postmodern society it is either a whole, or split in two. Is it an optimistic model that views society as a cohesive, unified whole, or a model based in dissonance, where the needs of the people and functions of the system are incompatible? Either way, society is a machine, and knowledge is a cog in the system that keeps it running.F

 The Nature of the Social Bond: The Postmodern Perspective

The social bond is itself a language game, each of us nodes on a communication net, intercepting and resending messages throughout the system. These messages affect the nodes in the language game, causing “moves,” “displacements,” and “countermoves,” all which potentially enhance and enrich the system by creating innovation and novelty. This method of communication differs greatly from the modern institutional approach at language games, which limit the kinds of ‘moves’ able to be made by creating rigid boundaries and rules.F

 The Pragmatics of Narrative Knowledge

Science is not the same as knowledge. Whereas science is made up of denotative statements, and must be observable, repeatable, and verifiable by experts, knowledge casts a wider net, being composed of a competence that encompasses concepts of truth, justice, efficiency, and beauty. Knowledge is not limited to a specific class of statements; it is characterized by a fluidity and flexibility that can identify the relationships across subjects in order to make “good” utterances. Narratives then decide the criteria of the competence of knowledge – in traditional knowledge this would be “know-how,” “knowing how to speak,” and “knowing how to hear.” A narrator attains legitimation simply by being the narrator; the information is transmitted to the listener, who then attains the knowledge, and through meter and repetition pass of the criteria of competence and the acceptable rules of a culture.F

 The Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge

Scientific knowledge is characterized by the ability to provide proof supporting a statement, and ability to refute opposing statements. The combination of these two conditions do not prove a statement ‘true,’ but rather as being likely to be true based on our understanding of reality. The competence needed in the formulation of scientific knowledge does not require a social bond; it is one-sided, only requiring a sender’s competence, and is composed only of the language game of the denotative utterance.F

In postmodern society, we have two types of knowledge: narrative and scientific. Neither can be judged as right or true or better in comparison to the other, because their criterion of competence idifference.F