Epistemocracy

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The term epistemocracy has many conflicting uses, generally designating someone of rank having some epistemic property or other. Nassim Nicholas Taleb used it in 2007 to designate a utopian type of society where the leadership possesses epistemic humility. He claims the French writer Michel de Montaigne was a modern epistemocrat. He points out, however, that it is difficult to assert authority on the basis of one's uncertainty; leaders who are assertive, even if they are incorrect, still gather people together.^[1]

However the term had already been used long before this, and as of 2010^[update] Taleb's usage has not caught on. Most uses of the word are unrelated or even opposite to this. For instance in reference to communism: "Maoism, like the Marxist- Leninist system upon which it modeled itself, was an `epistemocracy,' rule by those possessed of that infallible wisdom embodied in the `universal truth of Marxism'"^[2] Or theocracy: "The model for this concentration of knowledge in the hands of a single group is the epistemocracy of the Old Testament priests..."^[3]

Another use seems to be in relation to modern science or western technocracy: "...the social promotion and political em-powerment of a new class of experimental scientists ... what sociologists of science like Blumenberg call an epistemocracy."^[4] Again this is more or less opposite to Taleb's use. However it would be unfair to say that any of these have exactly caught on either. It remains a word used in an ad hoc manner.

• Skepticism
• Empiricism
• Steven Connor: A scholar being critical to Epistemocracy

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