Collective Epistemology

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This seminar will investigate the emerging field of “collective epistemology,” or the epistemology of phenomena involving collective intentionality on a large scale. So understood, collective epistemology is a subfield of social epistemology. It includes the epistemology of “proper groups,” with requisite structure and identity conditions, but also the epistemology of less structured collections and forms of social organization. As such, collective epistemology investigates epistemological issues around distributed cognition, extended mind, cultural and institutional mechanisms of knowledge generation and knowledge transmission, and other epistemic phenomena involving large-scale varieties of collective intentionality.