Knowledge in Change

Broekman's central claim is that knowledge is never fixed but always shifting, and that every act of knowing connects the individual person to reality. The positioning of cognition is increasingly shaped by conversion. The book gives the cultural setting for this shift a name, the New Plural: a worldview assembled from combinations of analog, digital, artificial intelligence and quantum ways of understanding the world.

Against this backdrop, the book examines the Subject as it appears in new forms of knowledge formation. It revisits how earlier thinkers understood the subject, including Kant's split ego and Voegelin's notion of flow, alongside Husserl's phenomenology of ego-positions. It then traces how the Subject has given way to the Self, whose dynamics reach further than any selfie could capture. Its discussion of the Self in digital culture introduces the term Self-E, which the author considers essential for the semiotic study of current communication patterns and practices.

The decentering of the Subject has altered human cognition. The book proposes a 3-S Triad (Subject, Self, Self-E) to take over the role and functions of the classical Subject. As digital thought formation now leads the way in shaping knowledge, traditional ideas of grasping and understanding knowledge have faded, and every part of life on the planet is fitted into newly conceived, digitally anchored frameworks. The book presents this as one of the most forceful and worldwide challenges facing the human mind.

One concrete test the book poses is whether our knowledge of climate change actually fits the problems it addresses. Its closing pages sketch an epistemological route through such intricate domains of knowledge. Underlying the whole is a broad question: what does change mean when it is asked to clarify what we call climate change?