Oops I Did It Again
On Epistemic Trespass
The academese version of “stay in your lane” is “don’t commit epistemic trespass.” “Epistemic trespass” is when you assert expertise in areas in which you are not qualified to do so.
For Maimonides, any talk of God’s essence is epistemic trespass. For Kant, any talk of ultimate reality is epistemic trespass. Some scientists will claim that the opinions of non-scientists represent epistemic trespass. But the accusation also gets thrown around between experts. A chemist weighing in on particle physics is an epistemic trespasser.
The concept of epistemic trespass is at once consistent with and in conflict with democratic cultural norms.
On the one hand, the language of trespass evokes private property, the Lockeian ideal. Just as I can’t walk onto someone’s land uninvited, I can’t just rock up onto someone’s domain expertise and expect warm hospitality.
Yet when it comes to issues that are a matter of the public domain and the common good, the Lockeian view doesn’t apply. Everyone is allowed an opinion on matters of politics and policy, for to deny this is authoritarian and aristocratic.
In Weberian terms, facts are for experts to debate, but values do not belong to experts--they are the property of all citizens.
One difficulty this presents, however, is the secondary problem of classifying which things are facts and which values, which private and which public? Are these questions themselves ones that the public should decide? And what do we do with the postmodern suspicion that fact and value are inseparable? That there are no naked facts?
The anarchist, Proudhon, was famous for saying that property is theft, thereby deligitimating all claims to private ownership. If we extend this teaching all the way to the cognitive realm, then intellectual property is also theft. Experts have no more right to their facts than home owners do to their homes.
Most people fall somewhere in between the ethos of making everything common and everything private. But what’s baffling is that we are not always consistent in the way we treat knowledge as compared to housing.
What is Called Thinking? is a practice of asking a daily question on the belief that self-reflection brings awe, joy, and enrichment to one’s life. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this project and access subscriber-only content.
You can read my weekly Torah commentary here.