The new knowledge arises under changed conditions of creation and in changed structures of organization. It becomes disputable knowledge which has to lay itself open to criticism, and is capable of improvement through criticism. What is important is no longer how and at what point it can be incorporated in the existing ordered structure of total knowledge. It does not become true through true safe-keeping, but when it can be exposed to open argument and increasingly to the experimentally empirical test procedure by means of measurement and pieces of equipment, and can hold its own there. In accordance with its epistemological condition, it is a knowledge on call, and it bears within it the willingness to give up the position it has achieved at any time in favour of later, but better knowledge. It is a knowledge committed to scientific progress. The beginnings of the changed conditions for generating it lie in the eighteenth century, that period in which the decisive preconditions are created for the subsequent, dramatically increasing growth of scientific knowledge in particular, due to the systematic opening up of new sources of cognition and their methodical utilization. It is also a century, however, which is pervaded with a vast destruction of knowledge. Knowledge previously preserved only with great effort and protected by the aura of tradition increasingly comesunder the pressure of experimental test conditions which it cannot withstand. In the eighteenth century, it first becomes apparent how the novelty of cognition begins to transform the standpoints of preservation and of previously valid classification. The newly tapped sources of cognition, the journeys and expeditions undertaken in the course of progressive colonialization, create curiosity about the new and lead almost inevitably to a change in the processing capacity of science. The old schemes of classification, based on generalization and classificatory abstraction, are no longer sufficient to absorb the partly exotic knowledge dragged in from all over the world, without bursting the conventional categories of classification. It is the century in which not just the 'birth of the clinic'takes place, but also that of the laboratory, that organizational invention for the purpose of generating knowledge, which gradually, confirmed by its successes, turns all science into laboratory science.
Cronos's Fear of the New Age
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