epistemic becoming

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Epistemic becoming is the historically revisable formation of knowledge through embodied inquiry, critical selection and sustained resistance from a world the inquiry does not author. RB1 treats changing questions, objects, instruments and standards as part of this process. Its realism therefore does not require an unchanging viewpoint, and its historical character does not make truth merely a matter of communal survival or arbitrary perspective.

Explanation

The direct section brings Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Hull into one comparison while preserving their different emphases. Functional information is useful where functions can be rigorously specified, not the privileged ontological foundation of knowledge. The entry therefore names a process of knowing rather than a newly demonstrated universal metric.

Stengers’s qualification is central: objectivity requires arrangements through which the addressed reality can put the inquiry itself at risk. A productive program that immunizes its founding categories may narrow its objectivity. Correction can therefore alter what counts as the problem, the relevant variable or an acceptable response, not merely rank answers within an untouched frame.

RB2 describes public methods, testing and coordinated perspectives as achievements of embodied agents, while PB calls knowing a phase of becoming. RB3 separately distinguishes changes in human formalizations from speculative evolution of fundamental laws. The proposal keeps epistemic revision real without pretending that a revised theory itself changes the physical law it describes.

Scope and attribution

Preserve the world’s capacity to challenge the question and the separation of epistemic and ontological claims.

AB — The Actual Book

Objectivity’s resistance condition has native Stengers attribution.

Occurrence locators: Thinker register: 232; Notes: 234.

PB — The Possible Book

Epistemic reflexivity situates knowing within the process it describes.

Occurrence locators: 81, 119, 120, 127.

RB1 — The Real Book, Volume I: The Possible Is Real

World-constrained revision includes questions, methods and categories as well as propositions.

Occurrence locators: 3, 56, 243, 244, 246, 247, 250, 251, 285; Notes: 56.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Objectivity is built through disciplined embodied and public practices.

Occurrence locators: 148, 175, 274.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

Theory change is distinct from speculation about changing fundamental laws.

Occurrence locators: 2, 89, 93, 98, 135, 136.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.