Jean-François Lyotard — The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Yield

90 of 785 paragraphs kept (11.5%). Target for mining: 30%–50% — ⚠️ BELOW target.

Pre-Assessment

Jean-François Lyotard is a well-known French philosopher and a central figure in postmodern theory. The Postmodern Condition (1979, English trans. 1984) is his landmark work that coins and develops the concept of ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ — the precise primary source you’re mining for Jameson’s response. Lyotard’s authority here is established and unquestionable; he is THE originator of this thesis, and the text is the canonical reference point in postmodernism studies.

Given your intermediate-level mining stance in service of understanding Jameson, expect a mostly concept/framework yield: the text’s core payoff is its analytical distinction between scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge, and the claim that legitimation of knowledge now flows through performativity and language games rather than grand legitimating narratives. Some facts (historical context: the report was commissioned for Quebec’s university reform), but the real value is conceptual architecture. The prose is notoriously dense and aphoristic — a genuine difficulty to flag for a mining read. Note that this is a 45-year-old continental philosophy text; its empirical claims about the ‘computerization of society’ are dated, but the conceptual framework is exactly what a Jameson reader needs. One caveat: Lyotard’s French structuralist/poststructuralist idiom can be forbidding; you’ll likely want a secondary gloss handy.

Reading Goal

Prioritizing: Definitional Content (Needs precise concepts (metanarrative, incredulity, postmodern condition)), Factual Claims (Wants accurate account of Jameson’s claims about postmodernism), Contrarian or Surprising Claims (Intermediate theory reader seeks the sharp disagreements between Lyotard and Jameson), Connection Points (Primary goal is linking Lyotard’s concept to what Jameson answers), Causal Relationships (Tracing how Lyotard’s critique drives Jameson’s response) De-prioritizing: Craft and Method (Not reading for prose technique; reading for argument and theory), Inspiration and Speculation (Reading analytically, not for personal creative spark)

Thesis

Narrative knowledge transmits the pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond · ch. 0

Argument

Annotation Roundup

Question

Master-narratives persist unconsciously rather than disappearing outright — Worth chasing: Jameson’s ‘political unconscious’ frames — how exactly does a buried master-narrative act unconsciously on present thinking?
Marxist categories still explain contemporary multinational and media capitalism — Jameson’s affirmative answer on Marxism re capital monopolization is the hinge connecting Lyotard’s postindustrial-info society thesis to Jameson’s own cultural logic of late capitalism piece.
Simple causal accounts of the decline of grand narratives are inadequate — Lyotard dismisses technology and capitalism as sufficient causes for delegitimation, pointing instead to internal seeds — a methodologically revealing move but one he states too briefly.
Godel’s theorem proves arithmetic systems cannot be complete. — Lyotard’s use of Godel is controversial; is it a sound analogy or a misreading? Worth checking against a proper treatment of Godel’s theorem.
Data banks become the Encyclopedia of tomorrow, exceeding any single user’s capacity — Lyotard calls data banks ‘nature for postmodern man’ — what exactly is a ‘nature’ that is socially constructed and computational? Worth chasing how he would square this with social constructivism.
Teamwork boosts performance for a fixed task but not for conceiving new models — What social scientists does Lyotard mean by ‘conditions detailed long ago’? The sourcing is vague; worth identifying the empirical work he gestures at.
Rules governing scientific discourse are prescriptive, not denotative, claims — The status of ‘metaprescriptive utterances’ — how do they get their own legitimacy? Lyotard answers only by ‘generating ideas’; this is the stress point Jameson will probe.
Proust alludes to the unpresentable through time while Joyce does so through writing itself — The distinction between trau de temps and trau de livre is compressed — worth chasing how each author’s medium-specific excess produces allusion.
Class struggle has been neutralized in both liberal and communist societies — If Marxism’s critical force is co-opted everywhere, what standpoints remain genuinely external to the system?
Narrative cultures need no memory because recitation itself is contemporaneous — This claim that narrative memory is actually anti-mnemonic is surprising — worth tracing how it feeds into Jameson’s critique of Lyotard’s historicism. Xref
The two legitimating grand narratives are national and European myths — This is the precise content of the ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ that Jameson interrogates — the two master-narratives Lyotard dismantles.
Lyotard rejects Habermas’s consensus ideal as totalizing and terrorist — The sharp Lyotard-vs-Habermas disagreement on consensus is precisely the contrast Jameson engages.
Lyotard’s anti-totality stance stems from a French post-Marxist reaction — Explains the genealogy of the anti-totality posture that Jameson diagnoses as symptomatic of late capitalism.
Master-narratives persist unconsciously rather than disappearing outright — This is the crux of Jameson’s disagreement with Lyotard — master-narratives survive underground in the political unconscious, which directly feeds what Jameson argues in Postmodernism (1991).
Lyotard holds that bureaucracy and technocracy displace classical social classes — Lyotard’s Socialisme ou Barbarie origins — the analysis of Soviet bureaucracy — are the biographical root Jameson cites to locate his anti-class position.
Narrative and scientific knowledge are incommensurable language games with no common criterion — Directly what Jameson answers/contests: Jameson rejects the ‘loss of meaning’ as mere mourning and treats postmodern fragmentation as structural to late capitalism rather than a neutral diversity of discursive species.
Cultural imperialism is driven by science’s demand for legitimation, not by material conquest — This claim — that imperialism’s special tenor is the demand for legitimation — anticipates what Jameson will characterize as the cultural logic of late capitalism: legitimation becoming the organizing drive.
Legitimation by ‘the people’ requires destroying traditional minority knowledges — The abstraction-vs-destruction tension here is exactly the modernity-as-uniformity point Jameson inherits; also echoes Things Fall Apart’s collision of traditions with colonial modernity.
Modern science grounds truth rules in expert consensus, not transcendental authority — Consensus-based truth rules are the target Jameson critiques as ideology; also connects to the reader’s prior work on Milgrom’s reputation institutions.
The liberty narrative drives primary education politics rather than higher education — The hero-of-liberty narrative’s political assumptions connect to the reader’s earlier reading on how free-press ideology reframed citizenship — education as the site where the people are constituted.
Hegel’s encyclopedia produced the metanarrative whose narrator is neither people nor scientists — This is the exact concept ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ that Jameson’s postmodernism theory answers — the primary reading purpose.
Humboldt’s university ideal was not science for its own sake but national moral formation — This is the Bildung university ideal that Jameson positions as the ‘master narrative’ whose delegitimation Lyotard documents; connects to the reading purpose of tracking how Lyotard’s incredulity drives Jameson’s response.
German idealism located the subject of knowledge in a speculative System, not the State — Contrast between French state-based and German speculative legitimation is a key structural distinction Lyotard carries into his account of delegitimation.
No metadiscourse can unify or totalize language games — Jameson’s totalizing aesthetic/cultural logic directly contradicts this claim — the key point of disagreement between them.
Godel’s theorem proves arithmetic systems cannot be complete. — Godel’s incompleteness as the mathematical warrant for delegitimation parallels Jameson’s claims about the loss of cognitive mapping.
Technical notation systems proliferated explosively in the mid-twentieth century. — This list of new notation systems instances the language-dissemination thesis that Jameson interprets as postmodern fragmentation.
Research funding subordinates truth to the goal of performativity — This is Lyotard’s direct claim about why metanarratives fail—the profit motive replaces truth-narratives. Jameson answers by insisting these are still late-capitalist ideology, not genuine emancipation.
Scientific knowledge operates as a pragmatic game governed by contract — The ‘new move vs. new rules’ distinction maps cleanly onto the Kuhn normal-science vs. paradigm-shift distinction—worth connecting explicitly.
Terror operates outside language games and destroys the social bond — Terror as outside-language-games connects to the reader’s trust literature: Shapiro on impersonal trust relies on language-games-like mutual constraint; terror is the antithesis of trust.
All formal systems face internal limitations that cannot be escaped — Directly answers Jameson’s critique—Jameson accused Lyotard of embracing ahistoricism; this passage shows Lyotard grounding his claim in formal logic (Gödel-style).
Reason shifts from universal metalanguage to a plurality of axiomatic systems — This is the technical core of what Jameson reads as Lyotard’s ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’—the de-universalization of reason itself.
Scientific legitimation rests on consensus among experts about language rules — The Bourbaki example connects to the reader’s Milgrom/law-merchant work: both show knowledge/trade depending on rules that are the object of consensus among practitioners rather than self-demonstrating.
Profit motivated technology’s growth before science did — Challenges the common narrative that science drove technology; Lyotard reverses it—commerce drove the technology-science union—relevant to Jameson’s account of postmodernism as consumption-driven.
Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. — Central to the emancipation narrative (metanarrative) concept the reader wants to map onto Jameson — universities abandoning the enlightenment project.
Technical performativity now shapes what counts as scientific truth. — Directly connects to Jameson’s critique of Lyotard in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism — Jameson reads Lyotard’s performativity as commodification of knowledge.
Power legitimates itself through a closed cycle of efficiency and verification. — This self-legitimating loop is exactly what Jameson critiques as the logic of late capitalism; useful for the reader’s Lyotard-to-Jameson mapping.
University autonomy is hollow because faculty lack control over budgets. — Prescient for today’s university corporatization debates (adjunctification, donor-driven budgets).
Mercantilization replaces truth-testing with saleability and efficiency as the criteria for knowledge — This is the precise claim Jameson critiques obliquely as the logic of late-capitalist knowledge; the reader’s stated goal is connecting Lyotard to Jameson.
Interdisciplinarity arises in the age of delegitimation that lacks any metanarrative — The ‘no metanarrative, only brainstorming’ formulation is exactly the target Jameson’s ‘totalizing’ reading of postmodernism answers, a key connection point for this reader.
Data banks become the Encyclopedia of tomorrow, exceeding any single user’s capacity — Directly parallels the move from Diderot’s Encyclopedia to database as epistemic infrastructure — relevant to the reader’s ADDENDUM on trees-as-infrastructure? Not directly; better: connects to discussions of AI/data as background ‘nature.’
Teamwork boosts performance for a fixed task but not for conceiving new models — Anticipates the familiar creativity-research finding that brainstorming groups underperform in idea generation — a cross-domain empirical parallel.
Postmodern science legitimates itself through difference, not maximized performance — Directly answers to the reader’s purpose: this is the precise concept of paralogy that Jameson reads against.
Simultaneous conflicting control variables make behavior abruptly unpredictable — The dog attack/flight catastrophe model is a vivid illustration of the Double Bind I connect to the Palo Alto schizophrenia research Lyotard cites next.
Systems theory cannot legitimately describe either science or society — Lyotard’s blunt rejection of systems theory is the sharpest point of disagreement with Luhmann and prefigures Jameson’s contrasting defense of systemic totalization.
Terror is the performativity system’s enforcement by threatening exclusion from the language game — Pairs with Jameson’s political unconscious — both see coercion embedded in normative/linguistic structures rather than overt force.
Science’s paralogy is the antimodel to the totalizing performativity system — Directly the metanarrative-incredulity that Jameson answers — Lyotard’s refusal of a metalanguage is precisely the abandonment of the grand narrative Jameson mourns/analyzes.
A performativity-driven system defines needs by their value to performance, not by suffering — This is the exact ‘system’ logic that Jameson answers — the erasure of the subject’s independent needs under capital. Direct echo of Lyotard’s ‘vanguard machine’ vs. Jameson’s late-capitalist totality.
The goal of dialogue is dissent or paralogy, not consensus — Directly overturns the Habermasian discourse-ethics consensus ideal; Jameson’s reading of Lyotard hinges on exactly this dissent-versus-consensus split.
Social language games are heteromorphous with no common metaprescriptions — This is the core of Lyotard’s ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ that Jameson responds to — the reader’s stated purpose of linking Libyrinth to Jameson’s postmodernism essay.
The temporary contract is supplanting permanent institutions across social life — Foreshadows the flexible-precarity thesis that Jameson and later theorists (incl. the fluid-precarity literature) develop from Lyotard.
Realism is defined by avoiding the question of reality and serves ruling power — This political-academicism account maps onto both Soviet socialist realism and Nazi aesthetics — a useful concrete anchor for the Lyotard-Jameson contrast.
Eclecticism of contemporary culture signals a general slackening of taste — This is the passage Jameson cites as the eclecticism-pastiche claim he both develops and critiques — central to the reader’s comparative project.
Photography and cinema continued rather than challenged the realist program of painting — Directly reverses the Benjaminian/commonsense narrative Jameson inherits; good material for a Lyotard-vs-Jameson comparison on the role of commodification.
The modern aesthetic question shifted from beauty to the definition of art — This question of defining art parallels Jameson’s focus on the waning of affect and the aesthetic as category.
Postmodernism precedes and enables modernism rather than following it. — Directly answers the reader’s core question: this is the conceptual target Jameson’s ‘postmodernism is late capitalist culture’ thesis contradicts. Jameson sees postmodernism as a periodizing break; Lyotard sees it as the perpetual nascent state of modernism.
Totalizing philosophical reconciliation has historically demanded terror as its price — Lyotard’s claim that Hegelian totality buys unity at the price of terror is the direct line Jameson interrogates.
Modern aesthetics nostalgically presents the sublime; postmodern aesthetics presents it directly — The pleasure-pain structure of the sublime is Kantian, connecting to Jameson’s reading of the postmodern sublime.
Joyce’s writing makes the unpresentable perceptible in the signifier itself — The Joyce example is the contrast case Jameson later re-reads differently in his own postmodernism.
Lyotard’s ethic of schizophrenic desire is survival within capitalism, not revolution — Jameson aligns Lyotard with Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus — a vital line of connection for placing Lyotard within French poststructuralism.
Consensus does violence; invention arises from dissension. — The direct claim against Habermasian consensus — essential for the intermediate theory reader mapping Lyotard against both Habermas and Jameson.
Postmodern society is a pragmatics of heterogeneous language games, not a Newtonian system. — Lyotard’s ‘language games’ derive from Wittgenstein; this is the point where he departs from structuralist ‘Newtonian’ totalizing — a key disagreement Jameson critiques.
Nation-states will fight over information as they once fought over territory. — Pre-echoes modern information-warfare discourse and data-sovereignty debates; a notable 1979 foresight.
Knowledge under computerization would circulate like money, split into payment and investment categories — Directly sets up the commodification-of-knowledge claim that Jameson takes up in ‘Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’.
Science and ethics both stem from the same Western choice about truth and justice — Foreshadows the metanarrative thesis — both science and justice are grounded in the same Western grand narrative — which Jameson critiques.
Speech is fundamentally agonistic play, not mere communication — Direct antecedent of Jameson’s postmodernism as agonistic play; also echoes Deleuze’s rhizome-breaking language.
System theory’s true goal is performativity, optimizing input-output ratios — Performativity is the exact term Jameson’s critique addresses as postmodern efficiency-worship.
Utterance types function as rule-governed language games — This is the primary conceptual ancestor Jameson’s postmodernism critique must confront.
Totalizing truth-seeking theory gets co-opted by the system’s optimization — This danger-of-co-option dynamic is central to Jameson’s suspicion of postmodern totalizing narratives.
Class struggle has been neutralized in both liberal and communist societies — Strong resonance with the fate of critique Jameson tries to recover amid postmodernism.
Performative utterances create reality rather than admit truth-valuation — Directly parallels Austin’s speech act theory and later underpins the critique Jameson’s postmodernism will answer.
Class struggle offers a viewpoint immune to systemic self-regulation’s allure — This is the critical-dualism pole Jameson inherits in his Marxist analysis of postmodernism.
Knowledge in general exceeds science and even learning — Directly grounds the concept Jameson critiques; this definitional hierarchy is what Jameson engages through the lens of late capitalist culture.
Customary knowledge is legitimated by communal consensus the Greeks called opinion — This consensus-based legitimation is precisely what Lyotard later contrasts with the performativity criterion — and what Jameson reads as the effacement of local consensus by multinational capital.
Narrator authority in traditional cultures derives from having been narrated by others — Connects to Jameson’s reading of Lyotard — this is the ‘premodern’ non-legitimated knowledge Jameson contrasts with the postmodern condition.
Narrative knowledge transmits the pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond — This ‘social bond constituted by pragmatic rules’ is the direct antecedent to the modern legitimation-by-performativity Jameson critiques.
Scientific truth rests on a dialectical proof rule and a metaphysical non-deception rule — The ‘God is not deceptive’ premise is a metanarrative in miniature — the exact thing Jameson reads Lyotard as declaring incredulous toward.
Verification and falsification both presuppose that truth must draw consensus — The consensus-horizon premise here is what Lyotard will later dismantle — and Jameson reads as the essential modern legitimation claim.
Mastering matter is now less pressing than building information networks — Connects to Jameson’s reading of postmodernism as a shift from industrial production toward information and late-capitalist networks. Seed
Research funding subordinates truth to the goal of performativity — Essay angle: how grant-funding and university performativity metrics literally operationalize Lyotard’s claim—‘scientists are purchased to augment power’ as a description of citation-index culture.
Mercantilization replaces truth-testing with saleability and efficiency as the criteria for knowledge — Angle: the ‘Is it saleable?’ test as a lens on today’s university metrics, rankings, and skills-based credentialing.
Postmodernism precedes and enables modernism rather than following it. — A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern’ — an essay angle on how period labels disguised as chronology are really logical priorities.
Speech is fundamentally agonistic play, not mere communication — The ‘speech as combat’ frame against the ‘accepted language’ could ground a piece on why innovation always attacks established connotation. Fiction
In science, reality itself is called to testify as a witness — The metaphor of reality being ‘called to the stand’ in a courtroom-style debate is a vivid image that could seed a story about a literal trial where reality/testimony is contested. Define
The two legitimating grand narratives are national and European myths — Names the two specific metanarratives — emancipation of humanity (French) and speculative unity of knowledge (German/Hegelian) — that define the concept.
Legitimation becomes an object of study only when questioned — The key presupposition — legitimation is only visible in crisis — that frames Lyotard’s whole inquiry.
Master-narratives persist unconsciously rather than disappearing outright — Distinguishes Lyotard’s claim (metanarratives die) from Jameson’s revision (they go unconscious): a definitional pivot in the debate.
Narrative and scientific knowledge are incommensurable language games with no common criterion — Gives Lyotard’s core claim that narrative and scientific knowledge cannot judge one another — the incommensurability of language games that grounds the ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ idea.
Modern science grounds truth rules in expert consensus, not transcendental authority — States the modern immanence of truth conditions — key to what the postmodern condition overturns.
The people’s consensus and scientific consensus are the same legitimation model — Shows how Lyotard fuses political and epistemic legitimation into a single paradigm — central to the modern metanarrative.
Hegel’s encyclopedia produced the metanarrative whose narrator is neither people nor scientists — Directly defines ‘metanarrative’ — the term at the core of Lyotard’s famous definition of the postmodern condition.
Humboldt’s university ideal was not science for its own sake but national moral formation — Clarifies the German idealist principle of legitimation that Jameson’s account of the postmodern condition is responding against.
German idealism legitimated knowledge by unifying truth and justice in a single subject — Precisely defines the speculative metanarrative that Lyotard says the postmodern condition renders incredible.
German idealism located the subject of knowledge in a speculative System, not the State — Defines ‘speculation’ as the legitimation discourse for science — central terminology for Lyotard’s argument.
No metadiscourse can unify or totalize language games — Articulates the anti-metadiscourse core of Lyotard’s position — the impossibility of totalizing language games is the logical heart of incredulity toward metanarratives.
Scientific knowledge operates as a pragmatic game governed by contract — Lays out the two kinds of knowledge-progress: new moves within rules versus invention of new rules (paralogy vs. innovation).
Terror operates outside language games and destroys the social bond — Key distinction: force in the technical game (legitimate efficiency) versus terror (threat to eliminate the player), which destroys the social bond.
All formal systems face internal limitations that cannot be escaped — Defines the metalanguage problem: the description of any formal system happens in natural language, which is universal but inconsistent.
Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. — Concretely defines delegitimation as the shift from ideals-producing to skills-producing education.
Technical performativity now shapes what counts as scientific truth. — Introduces the performativity criterion (technical efficiency) as replacing the truth criterion in science — a key Lyotardian concept for the reader heading into Jameson.
Mercantilization replaces truth-testing with saleability and efficiency as the criteria for knowledge — Introduces performativity as the replacement criterion for knowledge in a mercantilized learning context.
Interdisciplinarity arises in the age of delegitimation that lacks any metanarrative — Characterizes interdisciplinarity as a product of delegitimation, and ‘brainstorming’ as its stand-in for a missing meta-goal.
Postmodern science legitimates itself through difference, not maximized performance — This is Lyotard’s core definitional move — postmodern science opposes performance-based legitimation with legitimation by paralogy.
Paralogy as a move differs from innovation as system improvement — Sharpens the crucial distinction between innovation (system-serving) and paralogy (disruptive move) — a key concept for the Jameson comparison.
Simultaneous conflicting control variables make behavior abruptly unpredictable — The concrete worked example of catastrophe theory — continuous causes producing discontinuous jumps — grounding Lyotard’s claim that instability is the rule.
Fractals occupy fractional dimensions between whole numbers — Precise definition of fractal dimensionality (log 4/log 3 for Koch’s curve) — the mathematical basis for Lyotard’s charge that continuous function is losing preeminence.
Terror is the performativity system’s enforcement by threatening exclusion from the language game — Lyotard’s distinctive definition of ‘terror’ — not physical violence but the coercion of silencing by threat, grounded in language-game theory.
Science’s paralogy is the antimodel to the totalizing performativity system — The core of Lyotard’s positive thesis: science as open system producing new moves, and its refusal of a general metalanguage is what shields it from the system.
A performativity-driven system defines needs by their value to performance, not by suffering — Defines the performativity principle’s deepest consequence: needs are endogenous to the system, not independent variables.
Rules governing scientific discourse are prescriptive, not denotative, claims — Introduces the technical term ‘metaprescriptive’ — the prescriptive rules that govern admissible moves in a language game.
The goal of dialogue is dissent or paralogy, not consensus — Defines ‘paralogy’ as the true end of dialogue, directly contrasting consensus — a key concept for the novice theory reader.
Social language games are heteromorphous with no common metaprescriptions — Defines ‘heteromorphous language games’ and ties the decline of legitimation narratives to the abandonment of a belief in common metaprescriptions.
Realism is defined by avoiding the question of reality and serves ruling power — Lyotard’s essential redefinition: realism is not mimesis but evasion of the reality-question inherent to art.
Realism’s function is to preserve consciousness from doubt, not to copy reality — Lyotard’s functional definition of realism — its task is ideological reassurance, which mass media perform far better than painters or novelists.
The modern aesthetic question shifted from beauty to the definition of art — A compact statement of the post-Kantian aesthetic shift that defines modernism; key concept for a theory reader.
Postmodernism precedes and enables modernism rather than following it. — Lyotard’s counterintuitive definition: postmodern is not a sequel to modern but its precondition and constant state.
Science must produce a legitimating philosophical discourse about its own rules — Explains why science produces philosophy: to legitimate its own rules, which motivates the whole metanarrative structure.
Consensus does violence; invention arises from dissension. — Introduces ‘paralogy’ as the principle of postmodern legitimation, opposed to the expert’s homology.
Postmodern society is a pragmatics of heterogeneous language games, not a Newtonian system. — Establishes the language-games / local determinism framework as postmodern sociality’s organizing principle.
Knowledge under computerization would circulate like money, split into payment and investment categories — Introduces the payment knowledge / investment knowledge distinction — a key conceptual split in Lyotard’s argument.
System theory’s true goal is performativity, optimizing input-output ratios — Introduces ‘performativity’ as the system’s optimizing goal — a concept essential to the postmodern condition.
Utterance types function as rule-governed language games — Core definition of ‘language game’ as rules defining utterance properties, likened to chess.
Performative utterances create reality rather than admit truth-valuation — Lyotard introduces the performative utterance by distinguishing its effect on the referent from constative claims about truth.
Class struggle offers a viewpoint immune to systemic self-regulation’s allure — Positioning of class struggle as an external standpoint that exposes systemic ‘paranoia’.
The choice between functional and critical knowledge is not easily settled. — Frames the two rival conceptions of knowledge’s social role — functional/positivist vs. critical/reflexive — that Lyotard will reject.
Knowledge in general exceeds science and even learning — Core definition distinguishing savoir from connaissance and science — essential to Lyotard’s whole argument about narrative knowledge.
Knowledge is competence spanning truth, efficiency, justice, and beauty — Lyotard’s broad definition of knowledge as multiple competences — the load-bearing conceptual basis for his later critique of scientific legitimation.
Customary knowledge is legitimated by communal consensus the Greeks called opinion — Grounds the concept of opinion as a mode of legitimation distinct from scientific proof.
Narrator authority in traditional cultures derives from having been narrated by others — Defines how the sender post is legitimated in narrative pragmatics — the double grounding of authority.
Narrative knowledge transmits the pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond — Defines the threefold competence (know-how, knowing-how-to-speak, knowing-how-to-hear) that narrative knowledge transmits.
Scientific truth rests on a dialectical proof rule and a metaphysical non-deception rule — Defines the two rules (dialectical and metaphysical) that resolve the science knowledge legitimation difficulty.

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Jean-François Lyotard — The Postmodern Condition A Report on Knowledge