justify knowledge claims)? But perhaps the most interesting inquiry would be into what prevents the physics market from losing its knowledge-like qualities and becoming more like the car market.
To illustrate this last inquiry, consider now what it would be like for the physics market to become more like the car market. Engineers would start to take an interest—much as the social constructivists in science studies have—in examining their actual reliance on physics in the workplace. Which bits of physics turn out to be most useful to engineers? Which bits turn out to be useless and maybe even mislead- ing? Are there certain aspects of engineering that get along perfectly well without any knowledge of physics? Are there aspects that would benefit from branches of physics that are normally opaque or unknown to engineers? If social constructivist findings are any indi- cation, there are bound to be some surprising answers to these ques- tions. For example, it may turn out that physics is most useful when engineers write up their research for the archives, which would reveal the status of physics as a lingua franca, but as not much more (Knorr- Cetina 1981). Once so revealed, the physics market may become destabilized, as engineers are encouraged to distinguish their own interests from those who invest in the future of physics (“physics futures,” as the economist would say). At first, this may involve the emergence of new curricular suppliers aimed more specifically at engi- neering needs. However, if the possibility for alternative curricular suppliers that are radically different from physics seems far-fetched, that is only a reflection of the extent to which engineering demand has been molded by what physicists have been willing to supply. But in the long term, physics investors may come to realize that the authority of physics depends, in large measure, on engineers consuming their goods, and consequently they may alter their investment patterns so as to promote a physics that is more “engineering-friendly.”
4. Interlude: Is the Knowledge Market
increase his or her own wealth. Thus, the idea that a market could have too many goods—a “glut”—would seem to be a conceptual impossibility. For this reason, economists have been intuitively attracted to Say’s Law, as discussed in the previous section. Never- theless, the fact remains that capitalism undergoes periodic depres- sions, the most obvious explanation for which is that too many goods are chasing too few buyers. Whereas defenders of Say’s Law (e.g., David Ricardo and Karl Marx) have been forced to reinterpret the market contractions that appear to characterize depressed economies, opponents (e.g., Thomas Malthus and John Maynard Keynes) have taken the prima facie occurrence of depressions as refuting Say’s Law.
Yet, in either case, something needs to be done to repair the economy.
What does the history of Say’s Law have to do with knowledge management?
We ordinarily do not entertain the possibility that we already know too much. Of course, many have argued that not only the average citizen, but even the average member of the scientific community, increasingly faces an unmanageable glut of information (cf. Boehme and Stehr 1986). However, this state of affairs is not without its skep- tics, and even those who concede the point typically treat it as symp- tomatic of a lackof knowledge—specifically, at the meta-level of how one’s limited cognitive resources may be used most effectively as a selection mechanism; hence the need for “knowledge management.”
Generally speaking, we presume that something like Say’s Law oper- ates in terms of knowledge production. In other words, no knowl- edge is useless or unassimilable, though determining its use may require the generation of still more knowledge. However, by exam- ining the historical detractors of Say’s Law, we may come to see an alternative economic vision that provides a model for imagining a world with “too much” knowledge.
In one of the original defenses of Say’s Law, David Ricardo argued that what economists call “depressions” are really depressed pro- duction levels, that is, the presence of too few goods. In Ricardo’s diagnosis, large segments of the population are not producing the amount or kind of goods that can be exchanged in fair trade with goods currently on the market. Ricardo’s answer, then, was to increase the production levels of the poor, which immediately led critics to charge that his thinking was more that of a “chrematist”
(i.e., someone concerned only with increasing wealth, regardless of its other consequences) than of a proper economist. The critics, most
notably Thomas Malthus, argued that given the periodic nature of depressions, Ricardo was only setting up the economy for a still bigger fall in the future. Instead, efforts should be taken to stabilize markets by containing their size. Malthus accepted the commonsen- sical view of depressions as resulting from an oversupply of goods, which suggested to him that the surplus ought to be sold off at reduced prices and production subsequently scaled down to reflect a more “human” level of consumer demand. Sowell (1972) notes the rival interests behind these two views in early 19th century Britain.
Ricardo drew support from expansionist factory owners and pro- ponents of Adam Smith’s new “abstract” (i.e., universal) science of economics, whereas Malthus found support in aristocrats con- cerned with the depletion of agricultural resources and defenders of the traditional Aristotelian conception of economics as household management.
How do these policy recommendations bear on the possibility of an analogous “knowledge glut”? The epistemic analogue to an economic depression is incommensurability, whereby a plethora of specialized discourses is met with a paucity of channels for communicating across them (Fuller 1988, Chapters 5, 6). Conse- quently, bodies of knowledge accumulate in a form that is, for the most part, unbeknownst and unavailable to potential consumers. The Ricardian knowledge manager traces incommensurability to a lack of higher-order languages into which these jargons may be translated for the mutual benefit of all concerned. Thus, she recommends the positivist solution of employing philosophers (who, bereft of subject matter, would otherwise contribute nothing to the knowledge system) to produce schemes for effecting such translations.
By contrast, according to the Malthusian knowledge manager, this strategy is exactly the wrong one, since it fails to come to grips with the fact that incommensurability results from the unmonitored pro- liferation of discourses, which can only be alleviated by lowering the epistemic advantage gained by engaging in such self-driven language games. In turn, will follow the collapse of inconsequential distinc- tions and the reformulation of esoteric discourses in plainer terms.
And so, just as the Malthusian economist takes it at face value that a depression results from the presence of too many unmarketable goods, her epistemological counterpart diagnoses incommensurabil- ity as proceeding from too much unusable knowledge. Rather than employ philosophers to generate still more knowledge of this sort,
the Malthusian knowledge manager would focus several currently incommensurable discourses on articulating a common problem space of general public concern, which would thereby inhibit the further production of esoteric knowledge.