Philosophy Now Forum

According to the Anglo-American school (following Professor Austin, not to be confused with the jurist) there is a category of existence mysteriously different, no one tells us just how, from the Greek notion of nomos or Convention of logos (logos meaning speech). This notion has been popularized and affects all fields of the global Europeanized university in the form of such phrases as "efficacious speech" and the rather strange and all-the-more-widely popular "performative act" (as is popular in Butler / Ronnel et al., which is to say, the fashion is as much in the theory and "continental" parts of the opened fan of the Anglo-American university as in the properly "analytic" departments.)

Following this usage, might we be done forever with the question of knowledge by pointing out that whoever is so authorized to do so, if they do so, may through announcing it, declare something or some subject matter knowledge. For example, when an experiment is completed and the data is arrayed, one may say, provided one is not joking, "This is knowledge."