The idea of Knower and Knowing has been developed by me elsewhere, but can be found examined by others. Usually they reflect public ideas such as psychology but these twin perceptions can be utilised for other accepted thinking.
While the Knower implies authoritarian traits linked to medical ideas, amongst other disciplines, Knowing more supplies the process. Becoming a Knower: Fabricating Knowledge Through Coaction, Fester-Seeger, 2024. Fester Seeger looks more at the processes of training, a strong part of doctor and social worker attainment of knowledge, but equally can be used to understand other 'public' ideas.
To call an institution legitimate is to ascribe it a standing that defines its relationship to various other individuals and groups in such a way as to protect its ability to exist and to function.
To call an institution illegitimate is to deny that it has such a standing and so to deny it such protection.
According to Max Weber, the three types of legitimate authority are traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic. Charismatic authority is relatively unstable because the authority held by a charismatic leader may not easily extend to anyone else after the leader dies.
Legitimacy is commonly defined in political science and sociology as the belief that a rule, institution, or leader has the right to govern.
It is a judgment by an individual about the rightfulness of a hierarchy between rule or ruler and its subject and about the subordinate's obligations toward the rule or ruler.
In this sense, dear Stanley Wilkin , an institution is legitimate if and only if it is worthy of our moral reason-based support.
While I agree, Stephen, the legitimacy concerns the construction of knowledge although acceptance to being ruled is a kind of knowledge.
The Knower champions or rules through, and that rule is not complete, knowledge or ideology. that knowledge is structured on the privileges of power. Fester Seeger sees both knowledge and group as constructed through study and training, and the latter epitomises the psychological and sociological knowledge bases.
Am aware of her (MT Fester-Seeger) work Stanley Wilkin , with respect to social epistemology. The legitimacy of the knower, knowledge and knowing is definitely bound to a social power structure and its interactive hierarchy, in terms of knowledge production and distribution. In this sense, my approach is closer to K. Mannheim: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2804433
Stephen, of course this is alligned to Psychiatry and the medical profession and my attempt to understand how a form of knowledge resembles one but is not. The structuring of knowledge is interesting and this premise can be affixed to nearly all forms of knowledge. Peter C. Gøtzsche (2015) is good on here. But this has been a concern of mine for decades, how knowledge or the proprietary construction of knowledge holds sway, even in History and what we know of our past. I unearthed a philosopher called ROOME who wrote on psychiatric diagnosis and faced the same problem on the nature of knowledge, real or manufactured. He turned to using deceit to explain the strange dichotomies of assertions without genuine evidence.
Of course then we come onto the nature of evidence. I'll give an example but keep to medicine for the moment.
In one of my recent works I cover drug trials. Now psychotherapy takes the longest as we all all, and lacks genuine evidence for working, while drugs are considered the best as they work quickest although their working is assumed not proved. Rather than working quickest there is the quickest activity and reaction. It is the observer, the doctor, who determines the processes noted are therapeutic, not the patient.
Having engaged in long term questioning and discussing with client, the proficiency of drugs is in the mind of the doctor where activity in the patient is noted ans assumed to be beneficial but which I claim isn't. Roome and Gotzsche note what I have noted. The justification for treatments is within the judgement of doctors who do not experience the effects and transformations of say drugs. But this can be seen in most other disciplines.
While the Knower is the authoritative figure or group who gains from this knowledge, the knowledge itself from this unstable premise is further constructed by others.
Added to the above. The DSM was constructed by a very small group of academic psychiatrists in an American University who were alligned to drug companies. But the DSM is strange. It is esoteric in nature founded on certain premises. This stage is the knowing which is passed down from generation to generation but represents a specific not general understanding.
Am in full support of your approach Stanley Wilkin (as you state: my attempt to understand how a form of knowledge resembles one but is not) !
Imo, the production and distribution of ´faké´ knowledge and power structure is a key issue of applied social science, i.e. social science in praxis.