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This book examines the relations and structures which enable and inhibit the sharing of knowledge within and across epistemic communities.
List of contents
1. Introduction: testimony and the transmission of knowledge; 2. The framework presented: testimonial knowledge and the flow of information; 3. Joint agency and the role of trust in testimonial knowledge; 4. Social norms and social sensibilities; 5. A unified account of generation and transmission; 6. The framework extended: common knowledge; 7. Education and the transmission of understanding; 8. Reductionism and big science; 9. Social religious epistemology; Appendix: the garbage problem.
About the author
John Greco holds the McDevitt Chair in Philosophy at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His publications include Putting Skeptics in their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge, 2000), and Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity (Cambridge, 2010). He is co-editor (with Christoph Kelp) of Virtue-Theoretic Epistemology: New Methods and Approaches (Cambridge, forthcoming).
Summary
This book examines the interpersonal relations and social structures which enable and inhibit the sharing of knowledge within and across epistemic communities, drawing on resources from moral theory, the philosophy of language, action theory and the cognitive sciences. It will interest students and scholars of social epistemology.
Additional text
'In this book John Greco significantly advances our understanding of the nature of testimony and of testimonial knowledge. His line of argument develops the idea that testimony is a social act that takes place in norm-governed social settings. The account that results will need to be taken up by anyone interested in the epistemology of testimony and in social epistemology more generally.' Sandy Goldberg, Northwestern University, Illinois
