Abstract
During the last few decades, there has been an increased emphasis on the fundamentally public nature of knowledge, understood as both the science of the experts, the personal experience of the individual, and the generally accepted wisdom of the community. The interesting question becomes then, not ‘how does reliable knowledge come to be generated, justified and disseminated among epistemic elites’, but how does everything that people talk about as ‘knowledge’ circulate, and what are its effects? In this paper, I will discuss the distribution of knowledge in light of Enlightenment ideals of human improvement through the public exchange of ideas, with an eye toward rethinking higher education today as a democratic enterprise engaged in the perpetual redistribution of the means of concept formation and modification.
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Notes
- 1.
The HE-landscape differs between countries, which means that a national university may or may not be considered public, depending upon the system in question.
- 2.
Fuller (2018b) reminds us that concept of ‘expert’ is a late nineteenth-century juridical innovation that extended the idea of first-hand experience to include people with a specific training which puts them in a position to generalize over a variety of cases based on prior knowledge. In this respect, experts came to be licensed to speak as authorities, a caste of politically sanctioned and economically underpinned secular clerics, the edicts of whom cannot be questioned by the laity.
- 3.
Wittgenstein never makes such a claim. In what follows, I will attempt to say something about why he does not, and why that fact is relevant for understanding what he does say.
- 4.
See also Wittgenstein (1969: §38): ‘Knowledge in mathematics. [One has to ask]: “Why should it be important? What does it matter to me?” What is interesting is how we use mathematical propositions.’
- 5.
A useful way of understanding the distinction between the canon and the activity is Vincent Decombes’ (2014) distinction between ‘objectified mind’ and ‘objective mind,’ respectively (see especially the discussion on pages 292–295).
- 6.
I refer here to MIT physicist Max Tegmark’s (2014) popular Our Mathematical Universe. My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, which makes this argument. In his review of the book for the New York Times, UC Berkeley mathematician Edward Frenkel (2014) applauds Tegmark’s capacity to make recent developments in astrophysics and quantum theory accessible to nonspecialists, but is critical of the metaphysical claims he makes in the name of science. Responding to Tegmark’s speculations of the multiplicity of selves in his theory of the mathematical multiverse—‘When the number of yous increases, you perceive subjective randomness. When the number of yous decreases, you perceive subjective immortality.’—Frenkel responds, ‘The real question, however, might be, What is the number of yous who can understand what this means?’
- 7.
A weather derivative is a financial instrument used by companies or individuals to hedge against the risk of weather-related losses. The seller of a weather derivative agrees to bear the risk of disasters in return for a premium. If no damages occur before the expiration of the contract, the seller will make a profit.
- 8.
Illustrated London News, April 19, 1924 (Chesterton 1924).
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Rider, S. (2020). Going Public: Higher Education and the Democratization of Knowledge. In: Peters, M.A., Besley, T., Jandrić, P., Zhu, X. (eds) Knowledge Socialism. East-West Dialogues in Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8126-3_10
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