The Substitutability of Knowledge and Power (BW)

There is a striking difference in attitudes toward knowledge between the classical political economists and neo-classical economists. In this respect, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper stand with the classical political economists in holding that an epistemologically robust sense of knowledge is an institution that emerges as an unintended consequence of multiple agents agreeing to common means to pursue disparate ends. Instead of each set of parties to a transaction having to expend effort confirming the fairness of each exchange for themselves, they agree to standards that can be used across many transactions — indeed, to such an extent that it becomes an object in its own right pursued for its own sake. In that respect, epistemic institutions resemble financial ones, even in characterizing their most self-involved activities as "speculation."

However, neo-classical economics radically relativizes, even subjectivizes, knowledge as a pure utility. Bracketing the niceties of epistemology, it defines knowledge (normally equated with "Information") as whatever determines the market strategy of an agent, understood as either producer or consumer. This definition brushes aside several issues: Must the agent be able to articulate the knowledge in question as a theory? Indeed, is it even necessary that the agent embody the knowledge in her proper person, as opposed to, say, in some other agent or some machine at the agent's disposal? After all, economists have no trouble including computer forecasts of the market among the agent's epistemic resources. But most distressing to the epistemologist is that "epistemic quality control" is always relative to the task at hand. To an economist, the epistemologist's overriding concern with the quality of available knowledge makes as much sense as endlessly refining a tool with no clear application in sight.

Ultimately "knowledge" for the economist — and henceforth I mean "neo-classical economist" — is whatever enabled the presumptively efficient agent to choose between various ways of investing her efforts. Thus, the thoroughness of the agent's search and the reliability of her findings are hardly ever raised — and when they are, the economist's intuitions tend to go against those of the epistemologist's. Whereas the epistemologist would advise the agent to delay any decision until "all the evidence is in," the economist would steer the agent away from regarding the search process as an end in itself, recalling that the agent is motivated to search for knowledge only in order to eliminate undesirable options for action. After all, the search itself involves consumption of the same resources that the agent will subsequently deploy in production. Once the agent learns enough to eliminate all but one option, the economist declares the search complete. Thus, its epistemological crudities notwithstanding, the economist's definition of knowledge highlights an intimate relation between knowledge and power: knowledge is what enables you to get what you want at a price.

Nevertheless, economists have been just as reluctant as epistemologists to embrace the knowledge-power equation. Here we need to recall the typical definitions of power proposed by political theorists, according to which power is, as they say, divisible. Imagine a pie: even if it is divided into pieces of equal size, the piece I get is withheld from you. On the present point, I exert power over you only if I can get you to do something that you would not have done in my absence. In other words, when I have power over you, it is not your resistance — but only my self-restraint — that prevents you from doing what I want. This runs counter to the definition of knowledge at least nominally shared by economists and epistemologists, both of whom regard knowledge as indivisible: Neither officially regards knowledge as a scarce resource that remains asymmetrically allocated among relevant parties, unless a theory of distributive justice is drawn up. Rather, any knowledge that I have must be accessible to you, if it is to count as knowledge.

The most striking consequence of this commitment to knowledge's indivisibility is that epistemologists have ignored knowledge's diverse material containers, such as books, brains, databanks, and communication network, despite the different costs involved in getting access to the knowledge they contain. In fact, rather than making this point a matter for empirical disputation, epistemologists usually presume that only that which can be conserved as it is conveyed through diverse containers — that is, "content" — can have genuine epistemic import. But what if one were to relativize the distinction between the container and the contained (or content) of knowledge?

Although I shall presume that a neat distinction can be drawn between the indivisible, symmetrically available qualities of knowledge and the divisible, asymmetrically available qualities of power, recent work in personal identity theory, spearheaded by the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, suggests that the difference between the indivisible and the divisible, and hence between knowledge and power, are more apparent than real.

To appreciate this radical claim, let us start with a truism: A change in my state of knowledge enables me to exert power over my present self by narrowing down the range of possible future selves that it can become. Now consider these two claims, one pertaining to a change in my state of knowledge (especially as an economist or an information scientist would see it) and the other to a change in my state of power (especially as a political theorist would see it):

K: I can do what I want because I have reduced my options to one.

P: He can do what I want because I have reduced his options to one.

Assuming the epistemic superiority of the present over the past in determinmg the future, the self-control "I" exert in K is an exact analogue of the asymmetrical power relation "I" exert over "him" in P. Little more than a narrative convention leads us to treat K as involving one person and P as involving two. Perhaps the most intuitive way of getting at the "mere" conventionality of my being the same person across time in K is by considering regret, which is based m the fact that my frame of mind at the time a decision takes effect will be diff erent from my frame of mind at the time I originally made the decision: what seemed good then may, even if brought about as planned, seem not so good later. Parfit argues that there is no principled difference between my regret here and the regret I would feel if I did something on someone else's behalf that I turned out to be against their best interest.

This conventionalizing of the difference between "self" and "other" carries implications for the moral dimension of power, as evidenced in ascriptions freedom and responsibility. When I eliminate uncertainty from my course of action, I become empowered, but when I eliminate it from someone else's of action, she becomes constrained. The most otiose and trenchant positions in philosophy — egoism, skepticism, and solipsism — arise by drawing a hard boundary between ourselves and the external world, as in the hard distinction between knowledge and power above.

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Given the above, it should come as no surprise that a common strategy for casting aspersions on the epistemic status of a claim is to argue that the claim's validity is tied to a particular embodiment, one that empowers some agents at the expense of others. The epistemologist's animus toward relativism is easily understood in this light, as relativism privileges local expression over universal translatability. Traditionally, rhetoric has been the chief source of power in this epistemically objectionable sense. The power of a rhetorically effective speech is said to lie in the speaker's projection of ethos that enables her to move her audience in a way that it would not be moved, had someone eise made most of the same points in a somewhat different manner. But the classical character of this observation does not warrant the conclusion that the opposition of knowledge and power is a thing of the past. For, legal theorists are increasingly faced. with the problem of whether a certain class of theorems is patentable, namely, ones that are computable only by certain machines — but not by humans or readily available computers. The tendency here, too, has been to use the supposed indivisibility of knowledge as a backhanded argument for classifying those theorems, not as pieces of knowledge, but as the sort of technical inventions for which patents are routinely sought and given.

Steve Fuller: Knowledge as Product and Property (BW)

<root><h level="3" i="1">=== Kontext ===</h>

Besser Wissen (Vorlesung Hrachovec, 2006/07)</root>