The term epistemocracy has many conflicting uses, generally designating someone of rank having some epistemic property or other. Nassim Nicholas Taleb used it in 2007 to designate a utopian type of society where the leadership possesses epistemic humility. He claims the French writer Michel de Montaigne was a modern epistemocrat. He points out, however, that it is difficult to assert authority on the basis of one's uncertainty; leaders who are assertive, even if they are incorrect, still gather people together.
A. James Gregor used the term in reference to communism: "Maoism, like the Marxist-Leninist system upon which it modeled itself, was an `epistemocracy,' rule by those possessed of that infallible wisdom embodied in the `universal truth of Marxism'"Marxism, China, and Development: Reflections on Theory and Reality by A. Gregor, 1999 J.R Simpson used it in terms of theocracy: "The model for this concentration of knowledge in the hands of a single group is the epistemocracy of the Old Testament priests..."J. R. Simpson. Animal body, literary corpus: the old French "Roman de Renart". Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam
Another use is in relation to modern science or western technocracy: "...the social promotion and political em-powerment of a new class of experimental scientists ... what sociologists of science like Blumenberg call an epistemocracy."José María Rodrígez García. "Scientia Potestas Est – Knowledge is Power: Francis Bacon to Michel Foucault" Neohelicon Volume 28, Number 1 / January, 2001. Akadémiai Kiadó.
See also Skepticism Empiricism Steven Connor: A scholar critical of Epistemocracy
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