Group Knowledge: Towards a Real-World Approach Søren Harnow Klausen University of Southern Denmark

The reality of group knowledge Knowledge is regularly attributed to groups and organizations a) “By then, the Russians knew how to build the bomb” b) “The CIA did not know the identity of the drone attack victims” c) “The CIA did not know of the attack in advance” d) “The government did not know what they [sic] wanted from the website” e) “They knew immediately that their lunar landing would have to be aborted” f) “Ensure that the crew knows how to handle the boat should the captain not be on board” g) “What cell biologists already knew is that the EGF receptor–ubiquitin complex binds to a protein called Hrs” h) “He saw his theory as following logically from what biologists already knew about natural selection” 2

The relevance of group knowledge  Collaborative modes of knowledge-seeking carries both promises and risks (groups can be smarter, but also dumber than the individuals that make them up)  Ethical implications: Epistemic obligations; collective responsibility for knowledge claims (e.g. scientific dishonesty or fraud; politics (”Who knew?” ”Who should have known?”))  Special relevance for information resources and library science: Crucial role in building and facilitating ”knowledge communities”. Reliance on digital resources boosts the collective aspect of knowledge-seeking (greater division of ”epistemic labor”) 3

Existing accounts of group knowledge  The psychology requirement: Only things with minds (or mental states) can know something  Accounts based on joint intentionality. Groups can form beliefs if their members jointly commit themselves to viewing and presenting a certain proposition as something they jointly believe.  Getting to group knowledge by adding requirements of joint appreciation of evidence or joint commitment to rational methods of belief formation (and assuming the truth of the proposition in question) (Schmitt, Tuomela et. al.; Mathiesen (?)) 4

Basic assumptions of the existing accounts a)Joint attention: Each and every member of the group has considered the target proposition (and/or the evidence or method of belief formation) b)Reflexivity: Each and every member of the group views herself as a member of the group (”jointly intending to form a group agent”) Holds for homogeneous groups; groups with a common focus; high degree of explicitness; even distribution of tasks and resources Paradigm cases: Juries, boards, committees 5

Real-world collective knowledge  Genuinely distributed cognition: Individuals working on different subtasks; the target proposition is only considered by few members of the group (or no single member!?) Cf. Hutchins: Cognition in the Wild (1995). The navy vessel crew knows how to navigate, but by making different contributions to this task.  No reflexivity (?). Individuals contribute to collective knowledge-production unknowingly. They do not always view themselves as members of the collective in question, and they do not always know the task to which they are contributing. 6

Real-world knowledge collectives Research groups, scientific communities, organizations (cf. ”The CIA did not know”), project teams, working crews 7

The positive account A more liberal view: From epistemic agency to epistemic behavior -Groups individuated by tasks (as in organization theory) An epistemic collective is a set of individuals jointly contributing to an epistemic task T (knowing p, knowing how to Φ, justifying p, testing p etc.) - Only epistemic contributions count - Groups consist of epistemic assistants and epistemic executives (a difference in degree, rather than kind) 8

Requirements for group knowledge  Reliability of the collaborative process  Sufficient integration of individual contributions (cf. ”The CIA did not know”)  Sufficient accessibility of evidence etc.  Sufficient disposition to solve the epistemic task at hand These requirements can be fulfilled in multifarious ways (salience and flow of information vs. perceptiveness of group members; receptivity to input vs. internal interpretation and evaluation etc.) General ”cognitive ecology” (environment; infrastructure). The epistemic collective must be assessed in it’s”ecological niche”). Some epistemic collectives may distinguish themselves by their relative indifference to a specific environment, i.e. their flexibility) J9

Not that crazy!? Compare with individual knowledge attributions: The elements of knowledge are distinct and distributed (e.g. evidence and belief) Knowledge is dispositional (I know things I have never actually thought of (?)) No need to know that, or what, one knows Only fairly ready accessibility of evidence is required (e.g. memory, knowledge by inference etc.) 10

A related paradigm: Extended cognition Clark & Chalmers: ”The extended mind” (1998) Otto, an Alzheimer’s patient, use a notebook, which he carries with him everywhere he goes, to compensate for his impaired memory. He can still know e.g. that the museum is on 53 rd street. Compare a physician and her assistant: The assistant presents results, i.e. “acts as evidence/a source of belief formation”. As long as they maintain their roles (: stay in their niche), they can be said to know. 11

Knowledge without an epistemic executive? The UN Population Commission, which is comprised of forty-seven individual members, issues a report entitled Charting the Progress of Populations. Each member of the group was responsible for collecting information about a different segment of the population represented in the document, and their respective work was done entirely independently from one another. The information contained in the report is, then, widely distributed across the members of the group. Sam, who is not a member of the UN Population Commission, was hired to interpret and compile all of the data contributed by the members of this group into the published report and to serve as the group’s spokesperson. One of the statements in this report is, “the birth rate of Latinos in the US is on the rise,” of which not a single member of the UN Population Commission is aware. (From Lackey 2012) 12

Group knowledge and the internet  Huge amounts of knowledge (and evidence)  are fairly readily available  Very quick formation of (transient) knowledge collectives  ”Outsorcing” of epistemic labor need not make us any less knowledgeable (though we perhaps become more dependent on our – large but rather special – ecological niche)  Lessons from cooperation and organization theory applied to the internet (?) Balancing trust and mistrust (Being ”nice, forgiving and retaliatory” (Axelrod (1984)) 13

References Axelrod, R The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books Bratman, M. E “Shared Intention”, Ethics 104, Clark, A. & Chalmers, D.: ”The Extended Mind”, Analysis 58, Gilbert, M. (1989). On Social Facts. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press Hutchins, Edward Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press Lackey, Jennifer “Group Knowledge Attributions“, in Jessica Brown and Mikkel Gerken (eds.), New Essays on Knowledge Ascriptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press Schmitt, F. F “The Justification of Group Beliefs”, in Schmitt, F. F. (ed.): Socializing Epistemology. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, Mathiesen, K “The Epistemic Features of Group Beliefs”, Episteme, 2, Tuomela, R ”Group Knowledge Analyzed”, Episteme 1, 2, Tuomela, R The Philosophy of Sociality. Oxford: Oxford University Press 14