Knowledge as Transformation: The Limits of Propositional Truth

In the aftermath of war, a child carries the weight of unthinkable suffering into a new homeland. There, an apathetic mental health worker delivers a verdict: You will never recover. You will never be normal. This perfunctory statement is not neutral, it is a pronouncement, a foreclosure of possibility. It operates within the register of connaissance—knowledge as information, as propositional abstraction. In this framework, truth is something inert, something stated, rather than something undergone. The consequences of such knowledge are not considered, only its correctness according to a given paradigm. The child is left not with understanding but with a sentence, a truth that does not open but encloses.

At school, the child’s suffering takes on another form—one that is social, enacted. His PTSD, an unseen inheritance of war, marks him as different. Other children, unable to make sense of his way of being or the fact that he hardly spoke, respond with cruelty, kicking him in the head at breaktime. Knowledge, in this setting, is not propositional but embodied: pain, rejection, exclusion. He is known not as a person but as an object, a disturbance in the social field.

Then, at the behest of teachers, he stands before an assembly and reads aloud a description of what happened to him in the war. He stutters and stammers and names what had remained unspoken. And when he lifts his gaze, he sees a transformation: the same children who had tormented him are now crying.

What changed? The reality of his suffering had not altered, but its mode of being known had. The children’s tears were not the result of acquiring new facts but of undergoing an encounter. In that moment, knowledge was not something they simply possessed but something that possessed them. The child’s testimony moved those who received it. This is knowledge as askēsis, as something that reshapes the knower and the known.

Foucault traced a historical shift in the concept of truth, a “Cartesian moment” in which askēsis—the disciplined transformation of the self—was replaced by the acquisition of knowledge divorced from any demand for change. The mental health worker’s statement exemplifies this shift: truth, on this model, is a static thing, indifferent to its effects. But the child’s act of speaking reopens an older mode of knowing, one in which truth is lived, and in being lived, alters the world around it.

The contrast here is not simply theoretical; it is ethical. If knowledge is not merely a proposition but something that acts, then those who dispense it bear responsibility for what it does. The mental health worker, in delivering his knowledge as verdict, did harm. The child, in revealing his truth, created the conditions for recognition. If the former’s knowledge was cold and unyielding, the latter’s radiated possibility—the possibility that knowing might still be a form of transformation.

Perhaps an epistemic rupture, or even an event of truth. When he stands before his classmates and recounts his story, knowledge is no longer the property of a credentialed elite, nor is it merely a set of abstract statements about the world. His testimony does not conform to the propositional structure of an exclusive epistemic social club; rather, it belongs to a form of knowing that transforms those who encounter it.

What emerges in this view is not an exclusive social club but a field of response. This is a form of knowing that is relational, that forces recognition, that alters both knower and known. If the exclusive club treats knowledge as something to be possessed, this second form treats it as something that happens between us, something that is enacted and lived, one that unsettles, disrupts, and forces a different relation to the world.

The war, the concentration camp, the torture—these are realities that might have cast him permanently into a space of silence, illegibility. Instead, he moves from being spoken about (as a refugee, a victim, an object of war) to speaking.

Knowledge as Situated

The mental health worker's pronouncement reflects an abstract, universalizing epistemology that assumes it can state a neutral fact about the boy’s future without being implicated in the act of stating it. This is knowledge imagined as coming from nowhere, untethered from context, unaccountable to the realities it enters.

Haraway argues that all knowledge is situated—it arises from a position, from a body, from a web of relationships. There is no “view from nowhere,” only partial perspectives that must recognize their embeddedness in the world they describe. The worker fails to acknowledge that his words do not hover in some neutral space but land within the child’s world, where they do something, where they act. His statement does not just describe a future; it helps construct it.

By contrast, the boy’s testimony is radically situated. He does not speak from nowhere—he speaks from his own history, his own body, and in doing so, transforms the knowledge situation itself. He forces others into a position of response, not as passive recipients of information but as implicated witnesses. The tears of his classmates do not stem from acquiring a fact but from being located within a relation—one that had previously been disavowed, ignored, or misrecognized. In that moment, the knowledge situation shifts: what was once invisible becomes undeniable.

The ethical stakes of situated knowledge are clear. The mental health worker’s claim, presented as objective, was in fact deeply unsituated—detached from the child’s reality, from the effects of speech, from the responsibility that comes with speaking into another’s life. The boy’s act of narration, by contrast, was profoundly situated—it did not just assert a truth but forced a reckoning with it.

Haraway’s insistence that knowledge is always an act of positioning speaks directly to the contrast between these two forms of knowing. The child forces others to recognize where they stand in relation to him. In this way, his testimony is not only a statement but a demand—a demand that knowledge be accountable to the world it enters.

Diagnosis can be profoundly clarifying, even a kind of epistemic homecoming. For many, it takes the shapeless and disorienting and renders it knowable; it can transform suffering from an amorphous affliction into something with contours, a name, a history. It can function as a form of recognition—of one’s struggle, one’s difference, even one’s legitimacy in the face of a world that might otherwise gaslight or deny.

But there is a tension here: diagnosis can serve as an entry into an epistemic domain, a granting of membership to a domain of authorized suffering. It can also close down other forms of knowing. It can function as a legitimation, but also as a foreclosure: this is what you have, this is what you are, and this is what it means. It can be a relief precisely because it offers coherence, but coherence can come at the cost of complexity, or even at the cost of a person’s ongoing negotiation with their own being.

This is why situatedness matters. The power of diagnosis depends on how it enters a life. If it comes from a doctor or therapist who sees the person only as a case, an object of knowledge, then it can be indifferent to the life it lands in. If it is offered in a way that acknowledges the person's lived experience—if it meets them where they are, rather than subsuming them into a category—then it can be a form of recognition without reduction.

The key distinction, then, is whether diagnosis serves as an opening or a closing, a clarification or a reduction, a way of granting language to experience or a way of seizing exclusive and exclusionary control over it. The danger is when it becomes an unassailable epistemic verdict, a knowledge that acts on the person rather than with them.

GPT