A textbook case revisited – Knowledge as a mode of existence

a chapter for the STS Handbook “Would it not be possible to manage entirely without something fixed? Both thinking and facts are changeable, if only because changes in thinking manifest themselves in changed facts” Ludwick Fleck (1981 [1935]: 50) "Knowledge and science, as a work of art, like any other work of art, confers upon things traits and potentialities which did not previously belong to them. Objections from the side of alleged realism to this statement springs from a confusion of tenses. Knowledge is not a distortion or a perversion which confers upon its subject-matter traits which do not belong to it, but is an act which confers upon non-cognitive materials traits which did not belong to it.” John Dewey (Experience and Nature p. 381-382) Costello —“I do not know how much longer I can support my present mode of existence. ” Paul — “What mode of existence are you referring to? ” Costello — “Life in public”. JM. Coetzee (Slow Man, 2005) ha l-