Epistemocracy
The term epistemocracy has many conflicting uses, generally designating someone of rank having some epistemic property or other. Nassim Nicholas Taleb used it in 2007 to designate a utopian type of society where the leadership possesses epistemic humility. He claims the French writer Michel de Montaigne was a modern epistemocrat. He points out, however, that it is difficult to assert authority on the basis of one's uncertainty; leaders who are assertive, even if they are incorrect, still gather people together.[1]
A. James Gregor used the term in reference to communism: "Maoism, like the Marxist-Leninist system upon which it modeled itself, was an `epistemocracy,' rule by those possessed of that infallible wisdom embodied in the `universal truth of Marxism'"[2] J.R Simpson used it in terms of theocracy: "The model for this concentration of knowledge in the hands of a single group is the epistemocracy of the Old Testament priests..."[3]
Another use is in relation to modern science or western technocracy: "...the social promotion and political em-powerment of a new class of experimental scientists ... what sociologists of science like Blumenberg call an epistemocracy."[4]
See also
- Skepticism
- Empiricism
- Steven Connor: A scholar critical of Epistemocracy
References
- ↑ Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2007). "Epistemocracy, a Dream". The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House. pp. 190–192. ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2.
- ↑ Marxism, China, and Development: Reflections on Theory and Reality by A. Gregor, 1999
- ↑ J. R. Simpson. Animal body, literary corpus: the old French "Roman de Renart". Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam
- ↑ José María Rodrígez García. "Scientia Potestas Est – Knowledge is Power: Francis Bacon to Michel Foucault"[link removed] Neohelicon Volume 28, Number 1 / January, 2001. Akadémiai Kiadó.