The boundaries of scholarly knowledge — Cesar A. Hidalgo

What differentiates scholarly knowledge from other forms of insight?<br>In light of recent events, it is worth revisiting some classical definitions. Probably the most famous is Karl Popper’s idea that scientific knowledge has to be falsifiable. This is the notion that theories compete by facing rejection in the light of evidence, so theories must make predictions that are concrete enough to qualify as “rejectable.”<br>But since that is a well-known story, I want to focus on another definition. This is the idea that scholarly knowledge is socially decontextualized (an idea I am borrowing from Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies & Merton’s universalism). This means that scholarly knowledge must be detachable from the identity of the person who produced it. For example, Newton’s theory of gravity would be true whether it had been advanced by Martínez, Zhu, Nguyen, or anyone else.<br>Of course, social context matters. Lived experience shapes the ideas we pursue. But an idea’s acceptance into the scholarly canon shouldn’t depend on such lived experience. It has to be valid no matter who produced it. This is natural in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and in many fields among the social sciences and the humanities, where scholars produce mathematical models, historical accounts, and empirical results whose validity does not require sharing the author’s experience. But when we move beyond these domains, we can encounter forms of knowledge that, while valuable, lie outside this boundary.<br>Consider personal testimony. A person’s testimony can contain important knowledge, but there is a reason why judges need to triangulate among many testimonies when working on a court case. Triangulation is a way to look for the socially decontextualized account.<br>The epistemic value of socially contextualized narratives is different. If you replace the author with another person and the claim is no longer true, you’ve pushed too far.** This does not make such knowledge false or unimportant. It just gives it a different epistemic status.<br>But why is socially decontextualized knowledge important? Because this makes it portable and cumulative. And we owe a lot to these two properties.<br>Cumulative knowledge has transformed the world. It has fueled economic growth, extended human life, and enabled societies to support billions of people. That comes from the portability of ideas like Faraday’s law of induction, which is used to generate electricity in the UK and China, or well known surgical procedures that are used routinely to save lives around the planet.<br>None of this diminishes the importance of other forms of understanding. But boundaries can help us understand their different epistemic functions. Scholarly knowledge cannot be just any insight. It is knowledge that aspires to be publicly examinable, independent of the identity of its author, corrigible through evidence and argument, and capable of being accumulated by others. Other forms of knowledge can continue to flourish alongside it, and can provide inspiration and even add evidence to scholarship (eg a verifiable eye witness account of a key historical event). But we should be clear about where they lie with respect to this boundary. Preserving that distinction is essential if scholarship is to remain a cumulative enterprise rather than a collection of individual experiences.<br>Notes<br>**when the claim is contingent on the author e.g. I saw the bridge collapse, replacing the author involves swapping the subject. A different author would say he or she saw the bridge collapse, with he or she being the original referent.

Cesar Hidalgo