The work is a compact philosophical report on the status of knowledge in the most highly developed industrial societies, especially as they undergo computerization. Its central hypothesis is that the status of knowledge changes when societies enter the postindustrial age and cultures enter the postmodern age. Knowledge is no longer treated simply as a matter of truth, education, or intellectual cultivation; it becomes an informational resource, a commodity, and a stake in power.
The report rejects a unitary model of knowledge. Drawing on Wittgenstein, it treats knowledge as a plurality of language games with different rules, aims, and pragmatics. Scientific knowledge is one such game; narrative knowledge is another. Scientific knowledge is not the whole of knowledge, nor has it ever been. It has always existed alongside narrative forms, and its claim to truth depends on argument, proof, and institutional authority, yet it cannot fully legitimate itself by itself. The book examines how modern science was legitimated by grand narratives: the speculative narrative of the unity of knowledge and the emancipation narrative of humanity’s liberation through reason and progress. In the most developed contemporary societies, these metanarratives lose credibility, producing a crisis of legitimation.
With grand narratives weakened, legitimation increasingly shifts toward performativity. Knowledge is judged by efficiency, optimization, and system performance. Research, training, and education are oriented toward productivity and market relevance; universities are drawn into the production of useful skills and the transmission of information rather than the pursuit of speculative unity or emancipation. Computerization intensifies this shift: data storage, access, and transmission transform knowledge into a commodity and make it a major force of production. The question of who decides what counts as knowledge becomes inseparable from the question of power.
The book does not simply lament this situation. It explores the possibility of a postmodern science that is not governed by a single method or a unifying metadiscourse. Science develops through disagreement, instability, undecidables, and the invention of new rules. Instead of treating consensus as the goal of legitimation, the text proposes paralogy—the continual production of difference and the toleration of heterogeneity—as a model for legitimation. The social bond is not a single organic whole but a fabric of multiple language games; politics and justice must respect their plurality. The report thus links the problem of knowledge to a politics of judgement and to the question of justice in a plural, postindustrial society.
The report develops this account through a pragmatics of language games. It asks what makes an utterance authoritative, who is entitled to speak, what competence is required, and how institutions certify competence. Scientific knowledge is analyzed not as a pure method but as an agonistic practice: researchers seek to refute, persuade, and invent new moves, and the rules of the game are themselves at stake. Narrative knowledge, by contrast, is shown to carry its legitimacy in the act of narration and in the social roles it transmits; it is a form of competence, not a primitive residue. Scientific knowledge delegitimates narrative while relying on narrative to justify its own rules, and this contradiction is one source of the legitimation crisis.
The report also traces how the criterion of performativity reshapes the relation between knowledge, state, and capital. Research and education are evaluated by their contribution to system efficiency and competitiveness; data banks and information technologies make knowledge available, transferable, and appropriable, raising questions about access, ownership, and control. The book presents this as ambivalent: the decline of grand narratives frees language games from totalizing unity, but also exposes them to market and administrative power. It therefore warns against scientism and against terror—the attempt by one language game to subsume all others—while refusing nostalgia for a lost unity.
Its constructive proposal is a legitimation immanent to plural language games. Paralogy names a practice of inventing new rules and preserving dissensus rather than seeking consensus as the end of inquiry. Science can be postmodern when it embraces instability and undecidability without turning them into a new master narrative. The political stake is justice: judging without a universal metadiscourse, protecting the heterogeneity of language games, and resisting the reduction of knowledge to information or performance. The report’s significance lies in linking the authority of science to institutional, economic, and political conditions, and in treating postmodernity as a condition of knowledge rather than a period style.
