It's all about authority, for them: there's nothing more arbitrary and
unfair in their view than one person using their authority -
irrespective of what it is based on - to rule out of consideration the
knowledge and experience of another. So, if you sincerely believe that
wearing special crystals healed your cancer, and you can produce a
discourse about that healing process and what it meant to you, then
nobody has any right to tell you that you are mistaken about what
really happened, that what you think you know about your experiences
is false.

Jodi Dean did this with alien "abductees": she wrote about what they
said, how they understood their experiences, as if it did not matter
(and could not matter) whether they had really been abducted by aliens
or not. Her concern ("as a feminist", no less) was to treat as
subjectively valid their discourse, their search for meaning - to
refuse to judge that discourse on the basis of any supposed objective
reality.

This is all very seductive - it invites the researcher to abrogate a
certain sort of "bad" epistemic authority (although *as an academic*
the sociologist obviously continues to wield other kinds, not least of
which are those involved in policing and enforcing that whole
"non-judgmental" ethic) and to be part of a noble project of giving
marginalised voices and perspectives a fair crack of the whip. You
also get to demonise the likes of CSICOP as strait-laced epistemic
authoritarians who get their jollies out of sneering at the dumb hicks
who have the temerity to hold "unscientific" beliefs about their
world.

But see where it ends up - if you surrender the epistemic authority of
science, you don't get Feyerabend's discursive democracy, an anarchy
of overlapping voices each constructing its own partial vision of the
world. You get whatever the pressure groups of the religious right
decide, in their very far from non-judgmental view, is the *absolute*
truth, and you are left with nothing you can use to contest their
genuinely and nakedly arbitrary assertions of authority.

I would say that epistemic authority can be otherwise than arbitrary -
it can be based on proven expertise, and mastery of a field of
knowledge - and that to treat the exercise of such authority, in
making informed judgements about the validity of statements and
standpoints, as if it *were* purely arbitrary is to demonstrate a
total contempt for such expertise, and ultimately for serious learning
of any kind.

Dominic