Counterknowledge

An important and compelling book on the viral dissemination of misinformation in today's world. We are being swamped with dangerous nonsense. From 9/11 conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to alternative medicine, we are all experiencing an epidemic of demonstrably untrue descriptions of the world. For Damian Thompson, the misinformation industry is wreaking havoc on the once-lauded virtues of science and reason. Unproven theories and spurious claims are forms of "counterknowledge," and, helped by the Internet, they are creating a global generation of misguided adherents who repeat these untruths and lend them credence. Thompson explores our readiness to accept falsehoods and the viral role of technology in spreading quack remedies, pseudo-history, and creationist fanaticism. Following in the footsteps of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, Sam Harris's The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great, Counterknowledge is a brilliant defense of scientific proof in an age of fabrication.

Counterknowledge is misinformation packaged to look like fact. From 9/11 conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial, we are all experiencing an epidemic of demonstrably untrue descriptions of the world—dangerous nonsense. The circulation of false information is creating a global generation of misguided adherents who repeat these untruths and lend them credence. In Counterknowledge, Damian Thompson explores these unproven theories and demonstrates that unless the defenders of enlightenment values fight back soon, the counterknowledge industry has the potential to create new political, social, and economic disasters.

Foreword: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson One: 7 January 1976 What is a lecture? -- Subjugated knowledges. -- Historical knowledge of struggles, genealogies, and scientific discourse. -- Power, or what is at stake in genealogies. -- Juridical and economic conceptions of power. -- Power as repression and power as war. -- Clausewitz's aphorism inverted. Two: 14 January 1976 War and power. -- Philosophy and the limits of power. -- Law and royal power. -- Law, domination, and subjugation. -- Analytics of power: questions of method. -- Theory of sovereignty. -- Disciplinary power. -- Rule and norm. Three: 21 January 1976 Theory of sovereignty and operators of domination. -- War as analyzer of power relations. -- The binary structure of society. -- Historico-political discourse, the discourse of perpetual war. -- The dialectic and its codifications. -- The discourse of race struggle and its transcriptions. Four: 28 January 1976 Historical discourse and its supporters. -- The counterhistory of race struggle. -- Roman history and biblical history. -- Revolutionary discourse. -- Birth and transformation of racism. -- Race purity and State racism: the Nazi transformation and the Soviet transformation. Five: 4 February 1976 Answer to a question on anti-Semitism. -- Hobbes on war and sovereignty. -- The discourse on the Conquest in England: royalists, parliamentarians, and Levellers. -- The binary schema and political historicism. -- What Hobbes wanted to eliminate. Six: 11 February 1976 Stories about origins. -- The Trojan myth. -- France's heredity. -- "Franco-Gallia."--Invasion, history, and public right. -- National dualism. -- The knowledge of the prince. -- Boulainvillier's "Etat de la France."--The clerk, the intendant, and the knowledge of the aristocracy. -- A new subject of history. -- History and constitution. Seven: 18 February 1976 Nation and nations. -- The Roman conquest. -- Grandeur and decadence of the Romans. -- Boulainvilliers on the freedom of the Germans. -- The Soissons vase. -- Origins of feudalism. -- Church, right, and the language of State. -- Boulainvilliers: three generalizations about war: law of history and law of nature, the institutions of war, the calculation of forces. -- Remarks on war. Eight: 25 February 1976: Boulainvilliers and the constitution of a historico-political continuum. -- Historicism. -- Tragedy and public right. -- The central administration of history. -- The problematic of the Enlightenment and the genealogy of knowledges. -- The four operations of disciplinary knowledge and their effects. -- Philosophy and science. -- Disciplining knowledges. Nine: 3 March 1976 Tactical generalization of historical knowledge. -- Constitution, Revolution, and cyclical history. -- The savage and the barbarian. -- Three ways of filtering barbarism: tactics of historical discourse. -- Questions of method: the epistemological field and the antihistoricism of the bourgeoisie. -- Reactivation of historical discourse during the Revolution. -- Feudalism and the gothic novel. Ten: 10 March 1976 The political reworking of the idea of the nation during the Revolution: Sieyes. -- Theoretical implications and effects on historical discourse. -- The new history's grids of intelligibility: domination and totalization. -- Montlosier and Augustin Thierry. -- Birth of the dialectic. Eleven: 17 March 1976 From the power of sovereignty to power over life. -- Make live and let die. -- From man as body to man as species: the birth of biopower. -- Biopower's fields of application. -- Population. -- Of death, and of the death of Franco in particular. -- Articulations of discipline and regulation: workers' housing, sexuality, and the norm. -- Biopower and racism. -- Racism: functions and domains. -- Nazism. -- Socialism. Course Summary Situating the Lectures: Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani Index.

The life cycle of companies and enterprises, at present, is short-lived due to rapid social and technological changes. Despite the growing awareness on the importance of knowledge management (KM) among academic researchers, it is still not widely practiced in industry. Why is this?

"This book captures an in-depth knowledge base on the most current and useful concepts, applications, and processes relevant to the successful management of knowledge assets"--Provided by publisher.

Conspiracy theorists claim impossible knowledge, such as knowledge of the doings of a secret world government. Yet they accept this impossible knowledge as truth. In effect, conspiracy theories detach truth from knowledge. Knowledge without power is powerless. And the impossible knowledge claimed by conspiracy theorists is rigorously excluded from the regimes of truth and power – that is not even wrong. Yet conspiratorial knowledge is potent enough to be studied by researchers and recognized as a risk by experts and authorities. Therefore, in order to understand conspiracy theories, we need to think of truth beyond knowledge and power. That is impossible for any scientific discipline because it takes for granted that truth comes from knowledge and that truth is powerful enough to destroy the legitimacy of any authority that would dare to conceal or manipulate it. Since science is unable to make sense of conspiracy theories, it treats conspiracy theorists as individuals who fail to make sense, and it explains their persistent nonsense by some cognitive, behavioral, or social dysfunction. Fortunately, critical theory has developed tools able to conceive of truth beyond knowledge and power, and hence to make sense of conspiracy theories. This book organizes them into a toolbox which will enable students and researchers to analyze conspiracy theories as practices of the self geared at self-empowerment, a sort of political self-help.

This book develops a novel account of assertion in terms of its function of sharing knowledge.

Many democratic societies currently struggle with issues around knowledge: fake news, distrust of experts, a fear of technocratic tendencies. In Citizen Knowledge, Lisa Herzog discusses how knowledge, understood in a broad sense, should be dealt with in societies that combine a democratic political system with a capitalist economic system. How do citizens learn about politics? How do new scientific insights make their way into politics? What role can markets play in processing decentralized knowledge? Herzog takes on the perspective of "democratic institutionalism," which focuses on the institutions that enable an inclusive and stable democratic life. She argues that the fraught relation between democracy and capitalism gets out of balance if too much knowledge is treated according to the logic of markets rather than democracy. Complex societies need different mechanisms for dealing with knowledge, among which markets, democratic deliberation, and expert communities are central. Citizen Knowledge emphasizes the responsibility of bearers of knowledge and the need to support institutions that promote active and informed citizenship. Through this lens, Herzog develops the vision of an egalitarian society that considers the use of knowledge in society not a matter of markets, but of shared democratic responsibility, supported by epistemic infrastructures. As such, Herzog's argument contributes to political epistemology, a new subdiscipline of philosophy, with a specific focus on the interrelation between economic and political processes. Citizen Knowledge draws from both the history of ideas and systematic arguments about the nature of knowledge to propose reforms for a more unified and flourishing democratic system. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.