IB Philosophy 3.3.1 Knowledge and Power Notes

The Relationship Between Knowledge and Power

1. The previous topics in this unit examined what knowledge is (3.1.1), what makes beliefs true (3.1.2), and how we justify claims to know (3.2.3). This topic shifts from the nature of knowledge to its social and political dimensions, asking not just what knowledge is, but who controls it and why that control matters.
2. Knowledge and power have been intertwined throughout the history of philosophy. The ability to define what counts as legitimate knowledge, to determine how knowledge is transmitted, and to restrict who has access to information amounts to a form of political and social authority that shapes entire civilizations.
3. The connection between knowledge and power operates in multiple directions. Those who possess knowledge can use it to exercise authority over others, as when a ruling class maintains its position by monopolizing education.
4. Conversely, those who already hold power can shape what counts as knowledge, privileging certain perspectives while marginalizing others.
5. Foucault’s concept of discourse illustrates how knowledge is not neutral. A discourse is a set of rules determining what can be said, thought, or recognized as true within a particular domain.

Foucault and the Power/Knowledge Nexus

1. Michel Foucault developed one of the most influential analyses of this relationship, arguing that power and knowledge are inseparable.
2. For Foucault, institutions such as schools, hospitals, and prisons do not merely apply existing knowledge. They actively produce knowledge that serves to classify, discipline, and control populations.
3. Medical discourse, for instance, defines what counts as illness and health, and those who control that discourse exercise significant power over individuals’ lives. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).
4. When this classification was removed, the “condition” did not change. What changed was the institutional discourse that defined it.
5. For Foucault, this illustrates how power operates through knowledge: medical institutions do not merely discover illness but actively construct what counts as illness, shaping the lives of millions through classification.
6. Francis Bacon famously declared that "knowledge is power," capturing the idea that understanding the natural world gives human beings practical control over their environment.
7. Bacon's programme of empiricism, building knowledge through systematic observation and experiment rather than pure reasoning, proposed that science could improve human life.
   1. Yet this same capacity for control raises questions about who benefits from such knowledge.

Mannheim, Objectivity, and Critical Awareness

1. For example, the concept of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century presented the economic dominance of industrial capitalists as a natural law of survival of the fittest. Mannheim would argue that this "knowledge" was not a neutral scientific finding but an ideology that served the interests of the ruling class, dressing up what were actually changeable human arrangements as if they were fixed laws of nature.
2. The field of the sociology of knowledge, the study of how society shapes what we believe, complicates this picture by suggesting that all knowledge is influenced by social conditions.
3. Karl Mannheim argued that knowledge cannot be separated from the social position of the knower. What a society accepts as true reflects the interests and perspectives of its dominant groups rather than any purely objective standard.
4. This raises a critical question for epistemology: if knowledge is always entangled with power, can we achieve genuinely objective knowledge?
5. Some philosophers argue that recognizing this relationship does not require abandoning the pursuit of truth, but rather demands greater critical awareness of how social structures influence our beliefs and our standards of evidence.
6. As discussed in the analysis of scepticism (3.2.1), we must scrutinize the foundations of our beliefs.
   1. The link between knowledge and power adds a social dimension to that scrutiny: it is not enough to ask whether a belief is justified.
   2. We must also ask who benefits from its acceptance and whose perspectives are excluded from the conversation.
7. If knowledge development is shaped by those in power, then the advancement of knowledge may serve narrow interests rather than humanity as a whole.
   1. Recognizing this is the first step toward a fairer approach to knowledge, one that does not simply serve the interests of those already in power.