Choosing an epistemic authority also defines what counts as knowing itself.

Evidence

When we decide what community is worthy of epistemic trust, we are implicitly also deciding what it means to know something. … It is not that Trump suffers the disability of an untrained mind tied to “stratospheric self-confidence,” Will wrote, or that he is intellectually slothful and misinformed or totally ignorant of ordinary matters of history and of the fact that he has no knowledge of that about which he speaks, or that he is indifferent to being bereft of information. It is not that he is cognitively impaired. “The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.” This is dangerous in a president, Will observes, for it “leaves him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.” — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 284

Categorization

• DEFINE: Rosenblum distinguishes trust in a knowledge community from understanding what knowing requires — a difference of epistemic standard, not fact-checking.
• SEED: Angle: what changes when a leader genuinely lacks ‘what it means to know something’ — an epistemic-competence criterion for office rather than a factual one.
• XREF: connects to: Power and knowledge mutually constitute and imply one another — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 75; Submission to external authority can constitute rather than constrain the self; Undifferentiated power conflates truth with decision-making authority

Broader Connections

• Submission to external authority can constitute rather than constrain the self #expands (0.85)
• Power and knowledge mutually constitute and imply one another #expands (0.78) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 75
• Undifferentiated power conflates truth with decision-making authority #qualifies (0.73)