This manifesto calls neither for a return to knowledge without abstraction, nor for distrust of mathematics. It asserts that the power of a representation increases when it retains the memory of its conditions, its losses and its limits.
1. The real precedes its representation
No empirical formula produces the phenomenon it applies to. It extracts relations from it, stabilises them and makes them transmissible. The world is under no obligation to fit entirely into the categories that allow us to act upon it.
2. Every unit must declare its boundary
Counting requires stating what counts as an occurrence, at what scale and under which rule of identity. A value stripped of its object and its operation is not an explanation.
3. No trace is total
Every trace both retains and loses. Rigour does not consist in denying this selection, but in documenting what was kept, what was set aside and what could not be recorded at all.
4. Abstraction is necessary
We reject the false choice between an inaccessible raw real and sovereign models. Abstraction makes knowledge cumulative. It becomes dangerous only when it conceals its domain and turns its convenience into primacy.
5. A measurement is an interface
A result depends on a phenomenon, an instrument, a protocol, a unit, a model and an uncertainty. Objectivity does not abolish these mediations. It makes them traceable, comparable and correctable.
6. A resemblance is not a proof
Every analogy must declare what it compares. Every filiation must be documented. Every convergence must identify the shared constraints. The beauty of a form never exempts us from reconstructing its mechanism.
7. An anomaly is not a waste product
A persistent discrepancy may reveal an error, a limit of domain, a forgotten variable or a new phenomenon. Healthy knowledge preserves the provenance of anomalies instead of erasing them to protect the elegance of a system.
8. An archive that cannot be reactivated is merely a deposit
Scientific memory requires access, provenance, interpretation and the capacity to inflect a future decision. Accumulating data is not enough to learn.
9. Infrastructures produce both the visible and the invisible
Databases, instruments, funding, platforms and careers select which problems will be able to become knowledge. They must therefore belong to the field of scientific criticism.
10. Reflexivity must be able to transform its own conditions
An institution that can describe its biases but cannot modify its rules remains a prisoner of its own lucidity. Criticism becomes effective when it opens procedures of revision and distributes a real capacity to intervene.
11. Knowledge alone does not produce responsibility
Foreseeing is not enough to oblige. But foreseeing makes complete innocence impossible. When our acts close off trajectories for other beings or other generations, we become accountable for the share of the possible that our power directs.
12. To re-anchor is to keep the loop open
We do not need a foundation declared final. We need powerful representations, accessible traces, preserved anomalies, contestable rules and modifiable infrastructures. Knowledge stays alive when it can return toward what resists it.
Knowledge proceeds from the real. Its maturity begins when it remembers the path travelled and leaves open the possibility of returning.
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