Epistemic Legibility Not Everything Can Be Made Explicit
Being easy to understand, argue with, and verify is a genuine intellectual virtue but mistaking legibility for truth leads to the systematic dismissal of knowledge that resists formalization.
"Epistemic Legibility Being easy to be understood, read, and argued-with is a virtue, separate from being correct." Elizabeth Van Nostrand
Elizabeth Van Nostrand's concept of epistemic legibility names something crucial: the degree to which a claim or system of knowledge can be made transparent to outside inspection. A scientific paper with clear methodology, stated assumptions, and reproducible results is epistemically legible. A grandmother's intuition about which herbs cure a cough is not. The legible claim is easier to evaluate, critique, and build upon. This is a real advantage. But it is not the same as being true.
The modern world has a deep bias toward the epistemically legible. We trust what can be quantified, peer-reviewed, expressed in formal models, and defended in explicit argument. We distrust what is tacit, embodied, traditional, or rooted in accumulated but unarticulated experience. This bias produces real gains science, engineering, medicine but it also produces systematic blind spots. The knowledge embedded in cultural traditions, craft practices, and long-standing institutions is often functionally superior to the "rational" replacements designed to supersede it, precisely because it has been refined by centuries of trial and error that no formal model can fully capture.
This connects directly to Scott's concept of "metis" the practical, local, experiential knowledge that authoritarian high-modernist schemes always override and always need. The forester who knows when to harvest by the smell of the soil possesses knowledge that is real, reliable, and completely illegible to the state surveyor. In Postman's terms, Technopoly elevates the quantifiable and dismisses everything else: in such a culture, "sin and evil disappear because they're not quantifiable. Instead, we have social deviance and harm, because these are statistically measurable concepts." The danger is not that we value legibility, but that we treat it as the only valid form of knowledge.
Takeaway: Legibility is a property of how knowledge is expressed, not of whether it is true and a civilization that only trusts what it can formalize will discard half of what it actually knows.
See also: Legibility Kills What It Tries to Measure | Causal Reductionism Misses the Forest for the Trees | We Amuse Ourselves to Death | The Streetlight Effect Distorts What We Know