Individual Representation in a Community of Knowledge

Abstract

An individual's knowledge is collective in at least two senses: it often comes from other people's testimony, and its deployment in reasoning and action requires accuracy underwritten by other people's knowledge. What must one know to participate in a collective knowledge system? Here, we marshal evidence that individuals retain detailed causal information for a few domains and coarse causal models embedding markers indicating that these details are available elsewhere (others' heads or the physical world) for most domains. This framework yields further questions about metacognition, source credibility, and individual computation that are theoretically and practically important. Belief polarization depends on the web of epistemic dependence and is greatest for those who know the least, plausibly due to extreme conflation of others' knowledge with one's own.

Keywords: collective cognition; knowledge representation.