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.

Why?

Well, my first thought is that what defines and differentiates humans from the rest of the animal world is our ability for higher thinking. So it can be easy to assume that a more complicated concept or the ability to hold a more complicated, abstract concept in one’s mind is akin to a higher level of humanity. I sympathize with that view, however most decisions in our lives don’t necessarily require extremely complicated abstract abilities. Handing over daily, mundane and practical but consequential decisions to people with high levels of abstract thinking abilities may not be the best way to go.

CONSEQUENTIAL KNOWLEDGE

What we should be looking in assessing knowledge is not what is the most complicated, abstract idea, but what is the most pertinent — consequential — knowledge necessary for making the specific decision and who has it. Consequential meaning something that…