ABSTRACT
Thinking about knowledge from an economic and legal standpoint — as product and property — helps to reintegrate these two branches of philosophy into a properly normative social epistemology. This chapter analyzes how issues of epistemic validity and economic value are affected by interpreting goods as more or less "knowledge-like." It shows how this materialist conception of knowledge can be used to raise a pressing epistemological question of the Knowledge Society, namely, whether we know too little or too much for our own good. The epistemological strategy for making knowledge less power-like is to introduce what may called a criterion of substitutability. Epistemologists portray knowledge as unbiased by nature, with no interest of its own, and hence potentially in the service of any interest. The chapter reflects on the recent "dematerialization" of knowledge that marks the incursion of knowledge management into science policy.
