Abstract
Human beings are promiscuously social creatures, and contemporary epistemologists are increasingly becoming aware that this shapes the ways in which humans process information. This awareness has tended to restrict itself, however, to testimony amongst isolated dyads. As scientific practice ably illustrates, information-processing can be spread over a vast social network. In this essay, a credit theory of knowledge is adapted to account for the normative features of strongly distributed cognition. A typical credit theory analyzes knowledge as an instance of obtaining success because of or through the ability of the individual knower. The extended credit theory developed here broadens this framework so as to accommodate team-like epistemic achievements. The extended credit theory is then contrasted with some similar proposals given from within a process reliabilist framework. Once one isolates pairs of cases of distributed cognition in which there is a difference between sheer reliability and reliability grounded in ability, one can see that the extended credit theory maps the normative terrain better than the alternatives.
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Notes
One might date the shift in attention to Coady (1992) and the responses it elicited.
I do not mean to invoke the technical modal notion of sensitivity here. Rather, I mean something more colloquial such as that changes in the subfield often result in matching changes in the agent.
These expressions are realist, but I take it that one could adapt the language so as to make similar points within the framework of anti-realism in the philosophy of science.
One does not have to endorse the existence of collective minds or the extended mind to accept that there is such distributed cognition. It is enough to think that social networks, whatever they are, exist and that individuals interface with them. One can think of the relationship as being one of mind to cognitive niche. Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to the need to clarify this.
I will focus primarily on interacting with Greco’s position. This is useful because Greco’s view can be contrasted sharply with the view I want to develop, though I take it that Greco’s thinking on this aspect of his theory is continuing to evolve. Sosa, by contrast, is a bit less clear when it comes to what role other people do or do not play in cases like that of testimony. He claims that it is enough if an agent receives partial credit for a testimonial belief and that credit can be distributed through a group (Sosa 2007, pp. 92–97). He is not very clear, however, on what the theoretical substance of this move is. As contrasted with Sosa, one could think of this project as trying to draw out and make explicit what Sosa’s suggestion would commit one to if it were doing substantive theoretical work.
See also Greco (2007).
I thank an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this objection.
I thank an anonymous referee for bringing this objection to my attention.
Green (2012).
In conversation, Greco relates that he will be dropping the discrimination requirement in a forthcoming paper. It is not clear to me how the new version of his theory would handle the Morris case, but I believe it will be more sympathetic to the view I am developing here than his older view.
I thank an anonymous referee for prompting this addition to the paper.
In a sequel paper, I develop the relationship between the group and the individual in team-like achievements at greater length and, in doing so, I also go to greater length in discussing this sort of objection.
He does pay attention to a very interesting case involving knowing through not having heard something that falls within a domain over which one’s epistemic community has coverage. For instance, one can know that the president was not assassinated yesterday because one would have heard about it if that had happened. I set this kind of case aside, however, since Goldberg is explicit that an individual forming a belief due to coverage is not doing so through some kind of extended process but rather through an intra-mental inference (Goldberg 2010, pp. 154–155).
Shieber also thinks that it is demonstrable from empirical literature that human beings do not have any competence that could satisfy the personalist requirement (Shieber 2012). This is an important part of Shieber’s overall project. I cannot do it justice in this paper, but I take it up in Green forthcoming.
In Green (2012), I interact with Goldberg’s view at length, and I develop a separate objection to his view there that would complement the line I’m urging here.
Cf. Goldman (1993), especially p. 282. It is interesting that Goldman’s response to strange and fleeting processes in this essay is combined with some explicit flirting with virtue epistemology.
The page number is from the reprinted version. Goldberg cites this same passage on Goldberg (2010, p. 43.)
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Green, A. Evaluating distributed cognition. Synthese 191, 79–95 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0305-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0305-1