Western theories of knowledge tend to fix on statements and beliefs—symbolic, linguistic, propositional entities—and have developed highly technical concepts of evidence, warrant, and justification, all to explain a preposterously small fragment of knowledge—the part that is true, “the truth.” This contemplative, logocentric approach, much favored in antiquity and never really shaken from later tradition, is counterproductive for understanding the contribution knowledge makes to the technical accomplishment of our civilization. The ingenuity of the inventions, the range and density of technical mediation, the multiplicity of artifactual interfaces in a global technoscientific economy attest to the reach and depth of contemporary knowledge. But this knowledge resists logical analysis into simpler concepts, seldom climaxes in demonstrable truth, and does not stand to pure theory as mere application or derivative “how- to” knowledge. Thus does the best knowledge of our civilization become unaccountable in the epistemologies of the epistemologists.

Barry Allen in Vanishing into Things