Social Justice Fallacies, by Thomas Sowell, Chp 4 — Knowledge Fallacies

A review of all four fallacies, one by one

Knowledge Fallacies

“For many social issues, the most important decision is who makes the decision.”

Because different people have such different ideas about what constitutes knowledge, the person or persons making the decisions may come to vastly different conclusions about how to proceed when faced with issues to resolve.

Dr. Sowell’s first example differentiates the knowledge of a carpenter and a physicist. The carpenter may know how to build a fence and the physicist may understand E=MC2, and neither may know what the other knows. But the importance of each of their knowledge is very much context driven, even though we tend to see the physicist as being “more knowledgeable”. Although the physicist’s knowledge may be nearly useless when building a fence regardless of how important that fence may be to the benefit of any individual people.