The big idea: When you picture 'real knowledge', you probably picture experiments, arguments, written textbooks. But people also come to know things in other ways. So this micro asks: whose ways of knowing actually count?
Usually taken seriously
- Experiments
- Arguments
- Written textbooks
Often waved away
- Meditation
- Quiet self-reflection
- Stories passed down by word of mouth for centuries
Western philosophy has often crowned a few methods — logic, experiment, written proof — as the only real routes to knowledge, and quietly sidelined others like introspection and oral tradition.
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Look at three ways of knowing that a narrow view brushes aside, and notice they're not obviously worse — just different.
Ways of knowing often waved away
Meditation
In many traditions, disciplined stillness reveals things about the mind and reality that argument alone can't reach.
Introspection
Looking carefully inward at your own experience — dismissed as 'just subjective', yet it's how we know our own minds.
Oral & indigenous traditions
Knowledge carried in stories, songs and elders' teaching — often ignored because it isn't written or 'peer-reviewed'.
Inward · Reflective · Spoken
Checkpoint — the pattern: In one line: whole ways of knowing get dismissed less for being false than for not matching one narrow model of knowledge. Hold that — there's a name for the harm this does.
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When someone's way of knowing is ignored, they don't just lose an argument — they're wronged as a knower.
Fricker: epistemic injustice: The philosopher Miranda Fricker named this harm epistemic injustice: being dismissed not because you're wrong, but because of WHO you are — your accent, gender, background, or tradition.
What it looks like
- Elders' oral knowledge is ignored.
- A woman's testimony is doubted just for being hers.
- Either way, it's a real injustice done to them as knowers, on top of any loss of the knowledge itself.
Go further — higher-level insight: Fricker splits the harm in two (below). The top-band point: a way of knowing can be silenced BEFORE anyone judges it true or false — because there's no room for it in the first place.
Not being believed
- Not being BELIEVED when you should be
- e.g. a doubted witness
No words for it
- A group lacks the very words to name their own experience
- So it can't even be discussed — the deeper wrong
Checkpoint — the injustice: In one line: dismissing someone's way of knowing because of who they are wrongs them as a knower — that's epistemic injustice.