Abstract

The generation of knowledge has been influenced, in the twentieth century, by the emergence of quantum physics, verbal language as a vital force in itself, and by the global accumulation of knowledge. The latter I have designated as a knowledge environment. ;Before these events had significantly changed the mental landscape, knowledge was, for the most part, generated within a discipline. Of all the disciplines, the natural sciences were the most successful: they not only coloured and dominated the mental landscape of most people in the western hemisphere, but also influenced the generation of knowledge in other disciplines, particularly in the social sciences, the humanities, and medicine; they adopted scientific forms and languages in the generation of knowledge. ;The scientific generation of knowledge, in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, , was marked by notions of the linearity of time, verbal language as a representative vehicle for knowledge, objectivity, and an underlying belief that knowledge, ultimately, could be unified. ;One of the marks of knowledge generated at the end of the twentieth century is the use of a double form: generating knowledge within some already existing knowledge; that is to say, already existing knowledge becomes structurally part of the fresh knowledge generated. ;To clarify the notion of generating knowledge within some already existing knowledge, I have chosen to describe and analyse a number of art works which depend, for their realisation, on the idea of some already existing knowledge. ;As part of the equipment for analysis, I use the notion of a generic double. The term refers to the phenomenon of one knowledge being articulated consciously, with some already existing knowledge or in terms of the knowledge apparatus of the mind itself . A certain 'slipperiness' in the form is overcome by a sense of good fit. ;Concomitant with the emergence of this form of knowledge generation is the notion of a person as a participant in the act of generating knowledge