Necessary Fictions: Epistemic Privilege and the Politics of Knowing

Epistemic privilege is having special, authoritative access to the truth. How is this access used and abused in the stories we tell and the realities we create? What happens when what it authorizes becomes a fiction that organizes belief regardless of its truth? Does its authority to persist depend on someone actually knowing the truth it manages, or just on it continuing to work?

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. -Oscar Wilde