Knowledge as a virus: Principles of metaphorical transfer

The problem field of evolutionary epistemology looks as follows: on the one hand, one cannot refuse the evolutionary metaphor that is fundamental for the theory; on the other, two ways of using this metaphor give us with the following dilemma: either an objective study of knowledge in the form of records, or a study of any methods of knowledge transfer without the possibility of dealing with knowledge itself. Thus, we must retain the metaphorical relation to the evolutionary theory while changing the way the relation is founded. It is common knowledge that viruses are subject to all laws of evolution: they change, replicate and undergo natural selection. We speak about virological episte-mology in order to bring into focus its underlying metaphorical shift, namely, knowledge is a virus. It is this affirmation that gives rise to virological epistemology taking it out from the problem field other concepts are in. To legitimate this metaphor, there must exist certain similarities between knowledge and a virus, and it is these similarities that appear as the fundamental principles of virological episte-mology. Four of these principles were determined by two thinkers, Terrence Deacon, a linguist and neurophysiologist, and William Burroughs, a writer and experimentalist. This was done, however, in relation to language rather than knowledge. Burroughs is the author of the famous statement that "the word is a virus". According to him, the similarity between them is that language, like a virus, depends on the carrier (speaker) to be propagated through infection. Deacon draws an analogy between language as a system and a virus as an extracellular parasite to highlight co-evolution between language and the human brain. Therefore, for Deacon, the grounds for transfer is the fact that language "evolves spontaneously", with no control by its speakers, i.e. represents a self-developing system. This system has all the features of a network: no explicit dominant centers, consequently, no hierarchy. Thus and so, Burroughs highlights the distributive properties special to each individual system component, while Deacon focuses on the system properties. Transition from one to the other is realized via propagation: in such a way, a virus invades a plurality of carriers to build an infection network. Therefore, in total, we have five attributes to characterize both language and a virus, namely, dependence on the carrier (speaker), infection, propagation, network nature and self-ogranization.

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