Knowledge & Power
I'm deciding how much of you to believe before you finish.
The question
There's a woman I work with who, for two years, said the building was making her sick. Headaches, the same cough going round her end of the floor. And I'll be honest about what I did, because I didn't do nothing — I did something worse than nothing. I filed her. Quietly, without ever deciding to. She's the anxious one, I thought. She always thinks something's wrong. And I went on trusting the facilities email that said the air was fine, because that's the source you trust, that's the grown-up source. I wasn't being cruel. I was just doing the thing I do a hundred times a day without noticing — sorting people into the ones whose word I take and the ones whose word I discount.
Then they found the mould. Behind her wall, exactly where she'd been pointing the whole time. And the strange thing — the thing I can't put down — wasn't guilt, quite. It was vertigo. Because I sat there and tried to work out how I'd decided she was the unreliable one and the email was the reliable one, and I realised I hadn't decided it at all, not with evidence. It came pre-decided. She came pre-discounted, and the email came pre-believed, before either of them said a word. And then the cold part: if that was running the whole time and I couldn't feel it running — how many people am I doing it to right now? And I genuinely cannot tell. From in here, my discounting feels exactly like being right.
What you practise
Most of us think we hand out trust the way a fair judge hands out marks: this one has been right before, that one has not. Here you swap that for something harder. You take a person whose word you quietly marked down, say out loud what made them less credible, then try to tell a fair low opinion from an unfair one. You find you cannot do it from inside. "Believe the underdog", "distrust the experts" and "do your own research" are not ways out. Nothing here settles it for you. You leave able to say which risk you run when you trust, and what running it costs.
The episodes
Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.
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01
The anxious one
A colleague said for two years that the building was making her ill, and was filed as the anxious one — until the mould was found exactly where she had pointed. The first episode locates the judgment that did the filing, made before any evidence arrived, and sets the series' task — to catch the map of who is credible that no one remembers drawing.
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02
Just follow the evidence
The strongest case for the view most of us already hold — Alvin Goldman's veritism, on which credibility should track exactly one thing, reliability, and a track record built from real mistakes is doing precisely the job a track record is for. The case is built to win and left standing, with Miranda Fricker's own concession noted — not every low mark is an injustice.
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03
When you're not believed
Miranda Fricker's testimonial injustice — the wrong of being disbelieved for who you are rather than for what you said, as when a doctor reads the patient before reading the pain. The veritist rejoinder stays in the room — show that the discounting tracked prejudice and not a real difference in reliability — and in the hard cases no one can easily tell.
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04
When there are no words for it
A year of failure at work with no name for what was happening, until four words — you were managed out — reorganise everything. Fricker's hermeneutical injustice, the experience that lacks a shared concept, alongside Sandra Harding's strong objectivity, W. E. B. Du Bois's double consciousness and Patricia Hill Collins's outsider-within — the claim that where you stand can yield less partial knowledge, not more biased.
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05
Say who you discounted
The listener's own act of discounting, named in the first episode, is brought back into the open, and Fricker's distinction is held against it — justified low credibility, or prejudice? The episode shows that from the inside the two feel identical, because the map that did the discounting is the only instrument available for checking it.
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06
There is no outside. (power/knowledge)
The last exit — check the map against the plain truth of who is reliable — and Michel Foucault closes it, arguing that what counts as reliable is itself produced by a regime of truth. The objection that genealogy saws off its own branch is kept open against him, and Longino and Anderson's reformist answer — objectivity as an improvable social achievement — enters as the standing counter. No one is declared the winner.
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07
How the map got made. (propaganda, echo chambers, networks)
The machinery itself. Jason Stanley on propaganda that borrows your ideals rather than lying, C. Thi Nguyen on the echo chamber that works by telling you whom to distrust, and O'Connor and Weatherall on how false belief spreads through networks regardless of any individual's rationality. The findings sharpen both sides of the argument and settle it for neither.
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08
Ignorance as an achievement
Charles Mills's "White Ignorance" — some not-knowing is produced and maintained, held in place by the rules of what counts as evidence and whose word is heard, so that certain questions never become askable. The deflationary rejoinder is kept standing — ignorance may be mere absence, and a produced ignorance risks being impossible to check.
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09
Which one were you following?
The final episode brings all six positions into one room — veritism, Fricker, the standpoint theorists, Foucault, Mills, and the reformist middle — and crowns none of them. "Do your own research" is examined and found to be no outside at all. The question handed back — when reliability and power point in different directions, which one were you following, and how would you ever know?
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Thinkers
The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:
Related series
Your turn
You volunteer as a support worker at asylum interviews. A man is claiming he was detained and beaten by the police in the country he left. Between two interviews, two details have shifted: the month he was picked up, and how many men were in the room. The caseworker has written "inconsistent" in his file. She has twenty years of these interviews behind her, and she says, not unkindly, that people telling the truth do not usually move the furniture around. You believed her. You are no longer sure why.
- Shifting details are some reason to weigh his word less. Is that what you went on, or did you do to him what was done to the woman behind the wall? What, apart from those two details, could tell the two apart?
- The file feels like evidence. Who wrote it? If you read it through yourself, have you got outside your trust, or only moved it?
- Say what you would lose if you believed every claimant, and what you would miss if you believed every caseworker.
A good answer says what your trust in the caseworker rests on, and which of the two risks you are choosing to run. Reaching for her twenty years, or for his being the one with least power, settles it by rank instead, which is the very thing you sat down to examine.
Sources
Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.
- Miranda Fricker — Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007) Fricker names two wrongs: being disbelieved because of who you are, not how reliable you are, and lacking a shared word for what is happening to you. The series keeps her warning: marking someone down is sometimes simply accurate. A publisher record, not the book. checked against source
- Alvin I. Goldman — Knowledge in a Social World (1999) Goldman's case that there is one standard for judging whom to believe, and it is truth. Episode 2 builds the series' opening position from it. The link goes to the publisher's catalogue page. supports in part
- Alvin I. Goldman — What Is Justified Belief? (1979) Goldman's earlier essay arguing a belief is justified when the process behind it tends to get things right. Episode 2 applies that test to the people we take our information from. The link goes to the publisher's page for the chapter.
- John Hardwig — Epistemic Dependence (1985) Hardwig argued that nearly everything you know, you know on someone else's word — and that's not a failing, it's how knowledge works. Episode 2 names him; later episodes use the idea to close off "just check it yourself." The link goes to the JSTOR record. supports in part
- Sandra G. Harding — Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (1991) Harding's argument that starting from the lives of people pushed to the margins can make an inquiry more objective. She also argues that a standpoint has to be worked for; being born into a group does not supply one. The link goes to the publisher's catalogue page. checked against source
- Sandra Harding — Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is 'Strong Objectivity'? (1993) Harding argues that starting an inquiry from the view of people left out can make it more objective, because it forces the inquiry to examine its own position too. Episode 4 uses this against the charge that no view beats another. The link goes to the whole book. checked against source
- W. E. B. Du Bois — The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Du Bois's 1903 book. Its opening chapter names 'double-consciousness': seeing yourself as you are, and through a world that looks down on you. The series reads that as a claim about who knows what, and says so on air. Free at the link. supports in part
- Patricia Hill Collins — Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) Collins's book on the knowledge that comes from being inside a household without belonging to it, as Black women domestic workers were. Episode 4 uses it as a second case of a position that lets you see more. The link goes to the publisher's record of the second edition. checked against source
- Michel Foucault — Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) Foucault's history of the modern prison. It is one of the main places he argues that power and knowledge grow together, so that the rules for what counts as knowing have a history of their own. The link is a library copy on the Internet Archive that you can borrow with a free account. checked against source
- Michel Foucault — Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (1980) The collection of interviews and lectures in which Foucault speaks of each society's 'régime of truth': its rules for who may speak with authority and what counts as evidence. The link is a library copy on the Internet Archive that you can borrow with a free account. supports in part
- Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala — Michel Foucault (2003) A summary of Foucault's argument that power shapes what counts as knowledge, including the standard objection that this claim contradicts itself if true. Episodes 6 and 9 put that objection to the idea. This is a summary about Foucault, not his own writing.
- René Descartes — Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) Descartes's six meditations, in which a thinker sets out to doubt everything he was taught and rebuild knowledge alone. Episode 6 uses it as the classic picture of standing on neutral ground. The link is a free, lightly modernised English version, not a word-for-word translation.
- Immanuel Kant — An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784) Kant's short essay whose motto, 'Sapere aude' ('dare to know'), sums up the ideal of thinking for yourself without leaning on authority. Episode 6 traces 'do your own research' back to it. The full text is free at the link, in an older English translation. supports in part
- Helen E. Longino — Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (1990) Longino argues that objectivity is not one mind seeing clearly, but something a community builds — people who see things differently, made to answer each other's criticism, so dissent can actually be heard. The link goes to the publisher's catalogue page, not the book itself. supports in part
- Elizabeth Anderson — The Epistemology of Democracy (2006) Anderson argues democratic institutions — courts, a free press, open inquiry — can pool what different people know and let dissent catch mistakes, producing better knowledge without one neutral view. The episodes treat it as a bet, not settled. Links to a record, not the full paper.
- Elizabeth Anderson — Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions (2012) Anderson argues that fixing whose word gets believed is a job for building better institutions, not for individuals trying harder. Two episodes put this forward as a real answer, while showing what it has to assume unproven. The link is a journal abstract page.
- Jason Stanley — How Propaganda Works (2015) Stanley's argument that the most effective propaganda usually tells no lie, but turns the audience's own ideals, such as fairness or open-mindedness, against them. Episode 7 applies this to whom we believe. The link goes to the publisher's catalogue page. supports in part
- C. Thi Nguyen — Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles (2020) Nguyen's paper separates a "bubble" — where you've simply missed the other side — from an "echo chamber," which trains you in advance to distrust it. Episode 7 uses this to show how someone else can set who you trust. Links to the paper's abstract. supports in part
- Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall — The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (2019) O'Connor and Weatherall show, with simple models, how a group of careful and honest reasoners can still end up believing something false. They also show how an industry can manufacture doubt without telling a single lie. The link goes to the publisher's catalogue page.
- Charles W. Mills — White Ignorance (2007) Mills's essay argues some not-knowing is produced and kept in place, because rules about whose word counts decide what gets recorded. Episode 8 builds on it, then tests it against a strong objection. The link goes to the publisher's page for the essay collection. supports in part
- Charles W. Mills — The Racial Contract (1997) Mills's larger argument that a society can work like a contract some people sign and others are only bound by. Episode 8 names it as the wider claim behind "White Ignorance," then sets it aside for another episode. The link goes to the publisher's record.
Where to start
- W. E. B. Du Bois — The Souls of Black Folk (1903) It is short, beautifully written and free, and its first chapter is the passage Episode 4 quotes. Read it to meet, in the author's own words, the idea that the people least believed may see what everyone else misses.
- Katherine Hawley — Trust: A Very Short Introduction (2012) A short, plain book written for readers with no background, by a philosopher who worked on exactly this question. It lays out what it means to trust what others tell you, including experts and sources online, so you can see the ground the series was digging under.
- C. Thi Nguyen — Escape the echo chamber (2018) A free, lively long essay by the philosopher Episode 7 relies on, making the same argument in plain words for general readers. It shows how whom you trust can be shaped in advance, and why simply hearing the other side does not get you out.