Education Quote by Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish’s provocation works because it yanks a familiar distinction out from under us: the comforting idea that “knowledge” is clean, objective, and earned, while “belief” is messy, private, and optional. Fish, a writer who made his name arguing that interpretation is never neutral, is aiming straight at the prestige economy of certainty. The line is short enough to sound like common sense, but it’s engineered as a trap: once you grant that knowledge claims always rest on background assumptions, you’re forced to notice how much “knowing” depends on communities, institutions, and agreed-upon methods of validation.

The intent isn’t to collapse everything into relativism so much as to expose the scaffolding we pretend isn’t there. In Fish’s world, “knowledge” is what a culture has successfully stabilized as belief-with-credentials. Peer review, professional jargon, legal precedent, academic canons: these aren’t just neutral pipelines to truth; they’re social technologies that launder belief into authority. That’s the subtext behind his blunt “But they are not.” It’s less a philosophical claim than a rhetorical jab at the people who use “knowledge” to end arguments and “belief” to dismiss opponents.

Context matters: Fish’s career sits in the wake of postwar debates about objectivity, theory, and expertise, when universities became both arbiters of truth and targets of suspicion. The quote lands today as a warning and a challenge: if you don’t understand the belief embedded in your knowledge, you’ll mistake power for proof.