The JoHari Window provides a useful context to control speculation or accusation or assumption posing as knowledge:
Here, we see a personal focus. This can readily be extended to institutions, movements, interest groups and the public. We can even see, through faction dynamics, how a minority may see while the community at large is innocently or even willfully blind, stuck in an ill advised business as usual.
For example:
Therefore, we are well advised to heed an adjusted form of Dallas Willard’s observation on knowledge and how it confers legitimate authority:
To have knowledge in the dispositional sense—where you know things you are not necessarily thinking about at the time—is to be able to represent something as it is on an adequate basis of thought or experience, not to exclude communications from qualified sources (“authority”). This is the “knowledge” of ordinary life, and it is what you expect of your electrician, auto mechanic, math teacher, and physician. Knowledge is not rare, and it is not esoteric . . . no satisfactory general description of “an adequate basis of thought or experience” has ever been achieved. We are nevertheless able to determine in many specific types of cases that such a basis is or is not present [p.19] . . . .
Knowledge, but not mere belief or feeling, generally confers the right to act and to direct action, or even to form and supervise policy. [p. 20] . . . .
[K]nowledge authorizes one to act, to direct action, to develop and supervise policy, and to teach. It does so because, as everyone assumes, it enables us to deal more successfully with reality: with what we can count on, have to deal with, or are apt to have bruising encounters with. Knowledge involves [ADJ: warranted, credibly true (so reliable) belief] [p. 4, Dallas Willard & Literary Heirs, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, Routledge|Taylor& Francis Group, 2018.] . . .
Knowledge, then, confers legitimate authority rooted in wisdom. So, there is a tendency to over-claim one’s knowledge and to dismiss what those one differs with may know. This underscores the crucial importance of objective warrant.
Including, when what is warranted is negative knowledge, knowing that one or one’s institution or movement does not know. Likewise, knowing that others, too may not know.
However, this is no excuse for failing/refusing to learn and warrant, or for selectively hyperskeptical dismissal of reasonable warrant. Extraordinary claims only require reasonable, adequate warrant.
Again, it is clear that knowledge (as it embeds hard questions) is not simple. END