On Knowledge, Science, And Epistemological Postmodernity (Essay‪)‬

We are coursing through the vicissitudes of a new millennium where epistemological certainty is no longer taken for granted, and yet, we must still have some empirical and conceptual foundations upon which to build knowledge after the paradigm of the postmodern condition. (1) These knowledge structures of science as "moments of learning" are the minimal parameters of what we know that legitimize knowledge. Not only because the reality of a temporal disjunction engenders liminal perspectives on knowedge, but because the nature of episteme becomes redefined in accordance with the "problems of translation" (PC 3) between repositories of knowledge and their technologies of archiving. Epistemological postmodernity is a turning point for understanding virtual spaces of learning because it is a philosophical meditation that looks toward a future yet-to-come and settles around the problem of what it means to know in relation to the field of educational research, the crisis of legitimation after modernism, and the rule of language games. A question we must always ask in education and research is: Can truth be reduced to an archive? Is it possible? Yes. Knowledge is nothing if it is not grounded upon the possibility of a permanent record of physical data that can then be used to establish "laws of science" as the demonstrable evidence of the self-certainty of the truth of research. Culture depends upon the feasibility of referring to relatively archives of meaning to endow expressions of understanding with the evidence of empirical value and predictive power. The failings of conscious memory require the continuing, demonstrable proof of a past and a future to secure the possibility of a genealogical rendering of human experience.