Power Influences What Knowledge Is Valued, Suppressed, or Promoted
- Power determines which facts get shared and which methods for determining truth get treated as legitimate.
- The difference is that some communities have institutional power to make their knowledge standards the default for everyone else.
Definition
Epistemic authority
The power to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge. These authorities control who gets taken seriously and who gets dismissed, determining which methods are valid and which sources are trustworthy.
Power shapes knowledge by determining whose validation methods get treated as authoritative in legal systems, educational curricula, research funding, and policy decisions.
Controlling the Knowledge Pipeline
- Power shapes knowledge by controlling what questions get asked in the first place.
- When pharmaceutical companies spend billions researching patentable medicines but almost nothing on whether eating vegetables prevents disease, this doesn't mean the knowledge they produce is false but more so that it's just incomplete by design.
- This creates opportunity cost in knowledge production.
- Every dollar spent researching profitable pills is a dollar not spent researching free interventions.
- Climate change research funding fluctuates based on political control.
- During administrations skeptical of climate science, funding shifts toward adaptation research and economic impact studies rather than emissions reduction and renewable energy development.
- Same scientific methods, but different political priorities create different knowledge emphasis.
- When analyzing knowledge claims always ask: "What research isn't being funded, and why?"
- This shows you understand that knowledge gaps are often engineered, not accidental.
Establishing What Counts as Credible
Credibility systems create their own blindness.
- The better a field gets at filtering out bad ideas, the worse it becomes at recognizing revolutionary ones.
- This happens because the same experts who maintain quality also maintain the status quo.
- When Barbara McClintock discovered jumping genes in the 1940s, the genetics community ignored her work for 30 years, not because it was wrong, but because it was too right too early.
- The field's credibility system was optimized for consistency, not breakthrough insights.
- Recognize that even through power shapes credibility, it doesn't mean all knowledge claims are equally valid.
- It just means you should understand all validation processes have built-in biases.
Controlling How People Think
- The most subtle power operates by controlling not what people think, but how they think.
- This works by establishing frames, underlying assumptions that make some questions seem reasonable and others irrelevant.
- Climate change got framed as a debate between "believers" and "skeptics," which treated scientific consensus as personal faith rather than risk management.
- Academic publishing requires research to be published in English for global recognition.
- This isn't just translation, since different languages encode different ways of thinking about problems.
- When knowledge must fit English academic frameworks to be taken seriously, entire ways of understanding get lost.
- Framing works because humans rely on mental shortcuts.
- When someone else establishes the frame, they control your shortcuts.
- They don't need to control your conclusions if they control your starting assumptions.
