Epistemic Attachment: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 13:28, 11 September 2026
Epistemic Attachment
An Epistemic Attachment is an emotional, professional, and identity-level investment in a particular object of knowledge — a theory, institution, discipline, or worldview — such that the object's continued existence and stability functions as a source of personal and professional legitimation, thereby limiting the knower's capacity to imagine alternatives, up to and including the object's transformation or disappearance.
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The concept of epistemic attachment was articulated by anthropologist Jana Bacevic,[1] who illustrates it with the failure of social scientists to predict the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Both Yugoslav and Western scholars "depended on Yugoslavia as a source of legitimation of their work, though for different reasons." For Yugoslav scholars, the exceptionality of the Yugoslav model grounded their authority as possessors of "local knowledge" in international scientific collaboration, and their personal and professional identities "depended on the continued existence of Yugoslavia as an object; they could imagine different ways in which it could be transformed, but not really that it could be obliterated." For Western scholars, Yugoslavia served as the perfect experiment proving either that market socialism could work (the left) or that market exchange could soften command economies (the right). "If no one foresaw the war, it was because it played no role in either of these epistemic constructs."
The counter-example is Bogdan Denitch, the one scholar who predicted the collapse in detail. His position provided "a sufficient degree of attachment to be able to look deeply into a problem and understand its possible transformations; and a sufficient degree of detachment to be able to see that the object of knowledge may not be there forever."
Epistemic attachment cannot be eliminated, only balanced. "Balancing between attachment and detachment is one of the key challenges in any practice of knowing the social world," and the challenge grows as the objects of study (climate change, artificial intelligence, the future of humanity itself) grow in complexity and centrality. Mark Carrigan[2] adds that avoiding the bias produced by epistemic attachment may also require distancing from comfortable philosophical constructs — e.g., treating "prediction" as a philosophical designator rather than a sociological one — since such constructs can themselves become objects of attachment.
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Footnotes
- ↑ Jana Bacevic, “Between Legitimation and Imagination: Epistemic Attachment, Ontological Bias, and Thinking about the Future,” Jana Bacevic, December 18, 2017, https://janabacevic.net/2017/12/18/between-legitimation-and-imagination-epistemic-attachment-ontological-bias-and-thinking-about-the-future/.
- ↑ Mark Carrigan, “Ontological Bias and Social Knowledge in a Post-Truth Era,” Mark Carrigan, December 28, 2017, https://markcarrigan.net/2017/12/28/ontological-bias-and-social-knowledge-in-a-post-truth-era/