IB Philosophy 3.3.2 Access to Knowledge Notes

1. Topic 3.3.1 examined the relationship between knowledge and power, showing how those who control knowledge exercise authority over others. This topic builds on that analysis by asking a more specific question: who has access to knowledge, and why are certain ways of knowing valued while others are dismissed or marginalized?
2. The IB syllabus poses a pointed question: "Why are certain ways of knowing, such as knowing through meditation or introspection, often dismissed by Western philosophical traditions?"
   1. This question asks students to examine the assumptions built into the theories of knowledge studied in earlier topics (3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.2.3), and to ask whether those theories are truly universal or just culturally specific to the Western tradition.
3. Since the Enlightenment (roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when European thinkers championed reason and science over tradition), Western philosophy has tended to favour forms of knowledge that can be tested through observation or proved through logical argument.
4. As discussed in 3.1.3, the main sources of knowledge in the Western tradition are perception, reason, and testimony, with systematic observation and step-by-step argument treated as the gold standard for justified beliefs.
5. This emphasis on empiricism (learning through observation and experiment) and rationalism (learning through pure reason) has produced extraordinary advances in science and technology.
6. But it has also pushed aside knowledge traditions that do not fit those categories.
   1. Ways of knowing rooted in contemplative practice (disciplined practices like meditation aimed at cultivating insight), oral tradition, spiritual experience, or bodily learning have often been dismissed as pre-scientific, subjective, or merely cultural, rather than counting as genuine knowledge at all.
7. The concept of epistemic injustice, introduced by Miranda Fricker (discussed in 3.3.1), helps explain this marginalization. Hermeneutical injustice (hermeneutical means "to do with interpretation") occurs when a dominant culture lacks the words or concepts to recognize or articulate the experiences of marginalized groups.
8. When Western philosophy defines knowledge solely in terms of justified true belief and empirical evidence, it effectively treats the knowledge produced through meditation, ritual, and communal practice, treating those as if they don't count.

Spivak, Smith, and Subaltern Knowledge

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raised a related concern in her influential essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988).
2. Spivak argued that the knowledge systems of colonized peoples are systematically excluded from dominant discourse, not because those systems lack value, but because the structures of colonial and post-colonial power determine whose voices can be heard and whose knowledge counts as legitimate.
3. Consider the fate of Aboriginal Australian ecological knowledge under British colonial land management.
   1. Aboriginal peoples had developed sophisticated fire-management practices over tens of thousands of years, using controlled burns to prevent catastrophic wildfires and promote biodiversity.
   2. Colonial authorities dismissed these practices as primitive and imposed European land-management techniques.
   3. When catastrophic bushfires devastated large areas, the suppressed knowledge was proven right, but only after decades of epistemic exclusion (being shut out of the conversation about what counts as knowledge).
4. For Spivak, such cases show how colonial power structures do not merely ignore subaltern knowledge (the knowledge of marginalized or colonized peoples), they actively make it unspeakable within the dominant framework of what counts as legitimate knowledge.
5. Linda Tuhiwai Smith extended this analysis in Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), arguing that Western research traditions have historically treated Indigenous peoples as objects of study rather than as knowledge producers in their own right.
   1. Smith contends that decolonizing knowledge requires not just including Indigenous perspectives within existing frameworks, but fundamentally rethinking the criteria by which legitimate knowledge is defined.
6. A documented example comes from the history of biomedical research involving Maori communities in New Zealand. Western researchers collected genetic samples from Maori populations for studies that the communities had not consented to and that served research agendas determined entirely by Western institutions.
7. Smith argues that such extraction is not merely an ethical violation but an epistemic one, because it treats Indigenous communities as sources of raw data rather than as knowledge-producing cultures with their own research questions, methods, and standards of evidence.

Sociology of Knowledge and Epistemic Standards

1. The sociology of knowledge (introduced in 3.3.1 through Karl Mannheim) reinforces this point: what counts as knowledge is shaped by the social position of those who produce and validate it. If universities, journals, and funding bodies are dominated by scholars trained in Western traditions, then the standards for deciding what is "real" knowledge will inevitably reflect those traditions' assumptions and biases.
2. This does not mean that all knowledge claims are equally valid or that critical evaluation should be abandoned. Rather, it suggests that the standards of evaluation themselves must be examined for cultural bias.
3. The question is not whether meditation produces knowledge in the same way that laboratory experiments do, but whether what meditation produces, insight, self-understanding, perceptual clarity, counts as genuine knowledge that deserves philosophical attention.
4. The overarching Unit 3 question, "Is knowledge culturally dependent?", is directly relevant here. If the answer is yes, even in part, then any theory of knowledge that claims to be universal while systematically excluding non-Western traditions is incomplete.