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Knowledge as a collective status

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journal contribution
submitted on 2023-03-15, 08:05 and posted on 2023-03-15, 09:18 authored by Jeremy Randel Koons

While social epistemology is a diverse field, much of it still understands knowledge as an individual status—albeit an individual status that crucially depends on various social factors (such as testimony). Further, the literature on group knowledge until now has primarily focused on limited, specialized groups that may be said to know this or that as a group. I wish to argue, to the contrary, that all knowledge attributions ascribe a collective status; and that this follows more or less directly from an essential function of entitlement-ascriptions: Ascriptions of knowledge and entitlement serve a primarily social function in that they facilitate coordination by maintaining consensus around true beliefs, true theories, and truth-producing methodologies. This conclusion will shed light on ways in which traditional theories of knowledge (such as foundationalism and coherentism) fail to capture a central function of our epistemic practice.

Other Information

Published in: Analytic Philosophy
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/phib.12224

Funding

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

History

Language

  • English

Publisher

Wiley

Publication Year

  • 2021

License statement

This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Institution affiliated with

  • Georgetown University in Qatar