THE ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE NOW, OR THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

What role should history play in the advancement of knowledge? Because it was so “hard,” so “unbelievably difficult … to get people to believe” in his Great Renewal, Francis Bacon thought a history of knowledge could provide evidence of advancement—a reason to “believe” and participate in his experiment. By indexing advancement, historians of knowledge could foster it. If Bacon were with us today, he would be happy to hear that the history of knowledge is a thriving enterprise. But upon reading our version, he would be dismayed to discover that advancement is nowhere to be found. It's the elephant in the room. That shouldn't surprise him or us—the great difficulty of The Great Renewal is that it always needs to be renewed—but this is a new kind of precarity. I call it friendly fire, because it's damage done not by those who wish to contain or undermine knowledge but by those whose purpose it is to produce and valorize it. Why, I ask in this article, is a volume that offers so much of value—Information: A Historical Companion—so unattuned to issues of advancement? Although occasioned by the current ubiquity of “information,” its focus is not on change—asking such questions as “why information?” and “why now?”—but on asserting the “belief” that “every age is an information age.” In a history built on that belief, change is relegated to subordinate clauses (“while recognizing changes over time”) and advancement isn't even on the table. I put it back on not by rejecting this companion but by providing a companion for it, one in which identifying and classifying change is the central task. I take two preparatory steps. First, I clarify how the concept of “culture” configures the agenda and the findings of Companion 1 while fencing out advancement. Second, I set the agenda for Companion 2 by specifying that the knowledge at stake in advancement is “explanatory knowledge.” I both address concerns about the notion of “progress” and provide a vocabulary for explanation highlighted by the concepts of “fit” and “reach.” Companion 2 then approaches the elephant from a number of angles, from a shift in information over four centuries from a matrix of currency to a matrix of possibility to the pacing of that change by a feature of the history of knowledge that I call the “sequence of surprise.” Since Bacon's highest hope for his history of knowledge was to make us better at advancing it, I conclude with a speculative turn to information's future, from Alan Turing's first use of the word “information” in its modern sense to a rethinking—through the history of knowledge—of the “hallucination” issue in our new forms of generative AI.