2. The Creation of Knowledge Markets
2.2. Materializing the Marketplace of Ideas: Is Possessing Knowledge Like Possessing Money?
2.2.1. Knowledge’s Likeness to Money
(a) Mediation: Both money and knowledge are things you need to have before you can get what you want. Both institutions arise indi- rectly, once diverse people attempting to achieve diverse ends find it in their own interest to go through a common means. Once enough people and ends are implicated, the pursuit of money (banking) and knowledge (science) become prestigious in their own right.
(b) Objectivity: In the long term, as power is indirectly accrued to bankers and scientists, the best functional explanation for the ends that individuals pursue is to maintain financial and epistemic insti-
tutions, which serves to give those institutions a sense of permanence and perhaps even transcendence.
(c) Articulateness: The money-based economy is based on interde- pendence among the widest variety of people possible, none of whom is indispensable in his or her function. In principle, everyone is replaceable at a price, which increases the scope of consumer choice but the uncertainty of producer profit. This is analogous to the dual virtue of theories as explicitly articulated knowledge structures. The explicitness that enables many different theories to stand for a given phenomenon is also responsible for the relative ease with which those theories can be tested and replaced.
(d) Creditworthiness: Prior to the introduction of uniform account- ing procedures in the money-based economy, it was difficult to keep track of a person’s creditworthiness. One would simply decide to trust a person (or not) on sight, which could lead to a false exchange of goods. Likewise, before evidence was taken to be independent of authoritative testimony, one would judge the epistemic merits of a claim on the basis of qualities of the person making them, which led to a greater focus on personal decorum than on data gathering (Hacking 1975, Grafton 1990).
(e) Evaluability: Labor can be evaluated more analytically (i.e., it is easier to determine a laborer’s exact contribution to the manufacture of some product) once a price is put on it, even if the price turns out to be the Ricardian figure of the cost of replacing the laborer. Simi- larly, once the probability calculus was imported to epistemology, knowledge was effectively quantified, and the merits of compe- ting theories could be formally compared (Hacking 1975). Not sur- prisingly, replaceability is an important criterion here as well. For example, the test of a theory’s truth is the likelihood that the explained phenomenon would have appeared, if the theory were not true. If the likelihood is low, then the theory is indispensable (though it might also indirectly show the illusoriness of the phenomenon), whereas if the likelihood is high, then theory is dispensable (but the phenomenon itself is indirectly better grounded precisely because it affords alternative theoretical accounts: cf. Salmon 1967).
(f) Control: Money creates a sense of control over the value of a good by enabling a resolution of the good’s price. Without money, if you brought a cow to market, you could not tell prior to the actual
negotiation how much, or even whether you would get any, food in exchange for the cow. With money, however, the value of the cow can be more or less fixed, and the money you receive in exchange can be used to purchase whatever you want. The knowledge ana- logue here is the introduction of standardized methods that pro- duce data domains that can be used by researchers operating from a variety of theoretical perspectives (Ackermann 1985). Indeed, scien- tists routinely use data generated by a laboratory operating from within an opposing theoretical framework.
(g) Abstractness: Explicitly represented mathematical and verbal knowledge have as their proximal objects of manipulation the actual pieces of paper inscribed with numbers and words. These offer their user little resistance. So, too, money invites speculative, long-term reasoning by enabling calculation without the “distal” objects of cal- culation—the purchasable goods and the referrable things—having to be present to the speculator.
(h) Cool vs Hot: In a McLuhanesque vein, it might be said that money and knowledge are both neutral in themselves (“cool”) but controversial in their pursuit (“hot”). An important reason why the value of all goods can be determined by money and the validity of all beliefs can be determined by knowledge is that neither the money standard nor the knowledge standard is considered a priori biased toward any of the things it judges. It is precisely for that reason that all sides are drawn into competition to look good a posterioriby the standard. As I will suggest at the end of this paper, an important part of studying the proprietary grounds of knowledge is the construction and maintenance of such standards.
(i) Invariance: Simmel supposed that money and codified knowledge are similar in that their own value remains constant in relation to the things that they evaluate. In contrast, neither cows nor personal beliefs would make good evaluative standards because they change as they interact with other things (e.g., cows get sick, people change their minds). However, not only was Simmel clearly abstracting from the long-term effects of changes in the supply of money in circula- tion, but he also underestimated the degree to which codified knowl- edge is subject to unmonitored “semantic drift” as it is reproduced in increasingly diverse settings (cf. Fuller 1988, Part II), so that, say, the diffusion of a technical term such as “energy” in the 19th
century—and arguably “gene” in the 20th century—served to devalue the information conveyed in the term, much as inflation devalues money. What is crucial here is that this shift in the stan- dards of knowledge appearsinvariant either because no mechanisms are in place to check the drift or because mechanisms are in place to compensate after the fact, e.g., by exaggerating the difference between high and low culture appeals to “energy.”