La "société de la connaissance": Généalogie d'une double réduction

Abstract

The term "knowledge society" has replaced the older term of "communication society" which was coined just after the second World War. However its initial meaning has not changed. The first hypothesis on which this paper is based is that the content of this notion took root within the cybernetic informational paradigm which developed in the 1940s. The second hypothesis is that the confusion between science and knowledge which became established at the Renaissance has since developed within a context of reduction of science to information and of depreciation of politics, namely of opinion as the legitimate mode of knowledge. The notion of knowledge society is thus the result of a double shift - on the one hand knowledge is assimilated to science, more precisely to technoscience, on the other hand scientific knowledge is reduced to information taken in the operational perspective of new technologies.