When someone initiates a conversation with “It’s a little known fact that …”, what he typically means is that there’s something he knows, but his interlocutor probably does not. But I want to bring our attention to another use of the phrase. Ever since Plato’s Theaetatus, it’s been widely accepted that by knowledge is meant justified true belief. But suppose something is true, and believing it would be justified, but, as it happens, it’s not actually believed. By this I don’t mean it’s believed to be false. I just mean that one hasn’t yet thought about it. But if he did think about it, he would believe it, and he’d see that that belief is justified. What I have in mind is when I say, for example, that “It’s a little known fact that we’re all the product of rape.” The moment I say it, you realise it’s true. In fact it’s impossible to deny. And hence justified. But that we’re all the product of rape was, as I’ve claimed, “little known”, because prior to my saying it, it’s something most people hadn’t thought about.
Now it seems to me that it’s precisely these kinds of “little known facts” that make up much of philosophy, if not the lion’s share of it. Here’s just a representative sampling. A “right” is nothing more than a report on some relatively stable equilibrium in social expectations. What it is to “own” something is for others to have acquiesced to one’s exclusive control of its use. What it is to be a “this” rather than a “that” – a woman as distinct from a man, for example – is indexed to the uses for which the world is divided into thises and thats – e.g. who gets to use which bathroom. And so on.
These, and hundreds like them, are the “little known facts” I’ve spent a career trying to render a little less little known and a tad more widely known. For this I have been widely reviled. And what this tells me is that people prefer that these little known facts remain little known. Why? Because – and I’ve argued this too – the value of knowledge is indexed to its instrumentality. And so some knowledge – for example that what’s a right is indexed to an equilibrium in social expectations – facilitates certain social advocacies and undermines others. In short, the very doing of philosophy – or at least the choice of what to philosophise about – is partisan. Or at least insofar as these choices are often seen to be clustered, if not perfectly then at least generally, along partisan political lines. Why do I deconstruct indigenous rhetoric? Because I must be a racist. Why do I deconstruct trans rhetoric? Because I must be transphobic. And so on.
But what’s the alternative to letting the chips fall as they may? As it happens I’m not a racist. Nor am I transphobic. But if, before picking what I will and will not look at, I attend first to the possible partisan outcomes, it seems to me I’m not doing what the widow’s mite is paying me for.
Oh? And what, pray tell, asks my critic, do I think she’s paying me that mite for? She’s paying me to know the difference between little known facts that are to be left as such and those which are to be made a little less little known. In fact isn’t that what the Serenity Prayer calls wisdom? And doesn’t philosophy just mean the love of wisdom?
Well, if so then I suppose Socrates wasn’t much of a philosopher, now was he?
Categories: Angst, Critical Thinking, pure philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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