mental space

Rather than understanding knowledge as a simple ‘thing’, as a product, the history of ideas grasps knowledge as a process of co-creation, of concoction, and also co-action. In this process a common space,(1) an orography, can be traced, conveyed, in a shared language, by means of language games, despite imperfect, partial, replications. To share a noetic space, it does not suffice to attain a certain semantic competence; it also requires to be embedded in a soil of interactions forged by relations of meaning. Men produce their conditions of existence by translating, by incorporating, their conventions, by the deposition of uncertainty in discourse.

In this sense, knowledge can be seen as a mental space shared and lived together by the members of a given community, founded on the sedimentation and hstorical dispersion of language. The sense of community shapes the very content of this space, not only limited to the speaker of that community, but also by those whose space, due to its imported/exported similarity, are able to integrate, at least partially, those nuances. What matters is not the term but the general noetic space.

(1) Cf. G. Fauconnier, Mental Spaces, New York, 1994.