§ 12 The humanity of knowledge, an ontology of use

Knowledge is information we know what to do with.¹

Information is all about us; it is held in books, it is given in lectures, it is held in everything you perceive.

What one person holds as knowledge, because they know what to do with the information they have, the other person receives as information. Knowledge is transferable, but only through learning.

Information has to be processed by each person for themselves in order to make it count as knowledge for that person.

That is not to say that knowledge cannot be shared by communities of knowers. It can, and is. But that fact does not diminish the truth of knowledge’s personal nature and its intense humanity. What do I mean by that?

Knowledge has two faces.

Both involve power and control.

The first face of knowledge subjects objects to our power and control. For instance, I know what to do with a chair.

Knowing what to do with things is helped by having an accurate model of the world that yields well-objectified and accurate truths in our propositions, useful to us for some purpose. This is the kind of knowledge we need to repair a bicycle, build a cathedral, write a book, or send a rocket to Mars.

Teaching a person to acquire this kind of knowledge makes them into autonomous creatures.

The second face of knowledge is darker, it is used to subject other subjects to our power and control, making them objects of use: servants to our will.

There is something quirky about this kind of knowledge. The point is that it needs to be no less well-objectified and accurate to work. But the objectification of that knowledge needs to be accurate and truthful with regard to the subject’s beliefs and not necessarily with regard to the way the world actually works or indeed our own beliefs.

The point of this kind of knowledge is to manipulate the other, and what better way to do that than to play on their beliefs effectively?

To convince someone to do something for me, I need truly convincing arguments that will persuade them to do my bidding, but these need not be true in any sense beyond being consistent with their beliefs. In fact, it can help me if I manage to convince them to hold certain beliefs so I can manipulate them with those beliefs.

If a person happens to believe that I am the official representative of the spaghetti monster upon this earth and therefore believes that I have the power to reduce any person not obeying my orders to Bolognese sauce, I can wield real power and real control.

I abuse their autonomy, not by removing it (which I can’t) but by fooling them into doing things I want them to do.

The objectivity of my knowledge, which allows me to wield control over them, consists in having an accurate model of that person’s beliefs and using that knowledge as I would any other.

If I know that a person is sensitive to violence, I can threaten to use violence against them to do my bidding, as long as I am happy at being thought of as a violent and dangerous person and prepared to face the consequences of such a reputation.

Knowledge sustains the economy of value and deals in truths. But its truths can be either universally or personally objectified.

The latter is what we conventionally call subjective knowledge. But I do not want to use that notion here as it removes the nuance I am trying to argue for. All knowledge is subjective in that it is personally held as knowledge.

Some knowledge is consistent with a person’s frame of reference and empirically accurate. In contrast, other knowledge (more properly called personal belief) is merely consistent with that frame of reference and therefore sensitive to manipulation in the way I just described.

The accuracy of a person’s beliefs is not my primary concern as a manipulator; I am only interested in using that person to do my bidding. Therefore, I am interested in whether that person considers something true, not in whether that truth is accurate with respect to the reality it purports to describe.

Unfortunately, design, and indeed all intentional behaviour, is severely tested by this kind of power play where all forms of fallacy rule.

In interpersonal relations of power, objective truth needs to reach no further than a fit with the beliefs or sensitivities of the person I want to wield power over.

As such, we do not have two different kinds of knowledge, subjective and objective; all knowledge is objectively asserted and subjectively held and used.

With properly objectified statements, we can universalise happily, saying things like ‘all atoms have protons’, or ‘all bachelors are unmarried’ and do with that what we will.

Where things become less certain, we use probabilities such as ‘most children like ice-cream’ and ‘some people believe in the spaghetti monster’, ‘that person is easily frightened’ and so on.

Where things are unknowable, or mysterious, we confabulate gods and angels, ghosts and goblins, fates and forces. This is where we open ourselves up to abuse. Either by those who want us to share their beliefs or by those who use our beliefs to hold power over us.

The full configuration of my beliefs, arranged as my frame of reference, which can be objectively analysed in its workings and subjectively critiqued for its values, makes me uniquely me.

What I do with knowledge is accommodate myself and mine in my environment.

I use knowledge as reasons to act intentionally and to adapt to situations and events.

We learn to accommodate ourselves intelligently, intelligibly, securely, comfortably and joyfully.

The intelligence of our accommodating practices is perhaps the most important, as it involces seeking out the best knowledge and the best reasons to do this or that, adapting fortuitously to new situations and conditions. Intelligence is as such of great use value.

The full mantra includes the notions of intelligibility, comfort, security and joy.

Intelligibility comes into the equation in that values need to be expressed to be communicated and learnt by others

The value of intelligibility is that all expression invites interpretation and evaluation. Intelligibility of design works towards a shared frame of reference in which good communication and effective learning are possible.

Consciousness seeks affordance in behaviour to evaluate it and hold it as a value.

Because we are a community of consciousnesses, learning from each other, it is useful to express and communicate our ideas as intelligibly as possible, even just to ourselves, as this makes learning possible.

Because we are sensitive, sentient creatures with understandable concerns for our safety, we seek comfort and security.

Because we are capable of joy and sadness, we seek joy, even in sadness as such human being seeks to flourish.

This means that, because we are sensitive, growing, developing, learning, mobile creatures, we need to learn to regulate and control the relationships between ourselves and our environment, to capitalise on the present by acting on what we have learnt from our past, to benefit the future.

I can think of no more profound reason.

All value is a reflection of use, and all knowledge seeks to convert that value into use, as well as to constantly re-appraise the value of all knowledge and each form of use.

Use lies implicit in all possible relations between any human being and their environment.

Those relations become explicit when they are held and expressed in signs, indices, or symbols, as affordances, as dispositives, or indeed as atmospheres that we can express in image, word and number and so communicate about.

That expression becomes an indication of value, as description more often than not focuses on use or on the way something works, thus preparing it for use.

Value is necessarily an expression of use because values are applied to things through their conceptualisation or to draw the implications of their behaviour within the sphere of that which can be understood and so be brought under the umbrella of intentional response.

Use values are expressed in terms of their virtue relative to some use or purpose.

© jacob voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

1. A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, Tu/e (2024)  ↩︎