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...the greatest achievement our species. Moreover, a central theme in our reflections on democracy is that the advance of our knowledge and the progress of political institutions go hand in hand. As more is known, the possibilities for fruitful discussions of the issues that concern us increase, and we become better able to craft effective policies in response to the problems that confront us. Or so at least we often believe.
Yet it is immediately evident that swift inferences from claims about public knowledge to the attitudes of individuals are unjustified. If we are told that "it is now known that" something or other is the case, we have no license to conclude that everybody now knows the pertinent fact. More than half the population of the United States thinks that the earth is less than 10,000 years old; many Americans continue to believe that Iraq was directly involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center; about a quarter of them think that preparation for the end of the world and the return of a savior requires destabilization of the Near East; and very few have accurate views about the impact of fuel emissions on the likely temperature of our planet during the next decades. That may be an extraordinary record for an affluent democracy, but America does not have a monopoly on ignorance. European schoolchildren assent quite readily to the proposition that genetically modified organisms differ from other organisms because the former, but not the latter, contain genes--indeed, according to the statistics, 64 percent of Swedish students endorse this idea (Jasanoff, 2005).
The flow of misinformation is matched by failures to address certain issues that need to be resolved. We know less than we should, and less than we could, about ways of preventing infectious disease, about consequences of global warming, about the causes of religious militancy, and about the prospects of developing drought-tolerant crops (while ensuring that farmers in the poorest regions of the world are not held hostage to agribusiness). Many of the most urgent political questions of our times are debated without probing the factual matters that might bring rival perspectives closer. Even when the central facts have been resolved, at least according to scientific standards, futile controversies continue.
These dismal, but familiar, facts lead me to conclude that the central epistemological problems for our times are not those about individual knowledge (questions probed in contemporary Anglophone philosophy with an astonishing attention to minutiae and an equally astonishing disregard of what might really matter). (1) They are instead about the character of knowledge as a public good and the systems that generate and sustain that good. In what follows, I want to undertake an initial foray into these central problems.
II
Let me begin by setting on one side a serious form of skepticism that really should matter to our contemporary discussions. Since the writings of Thomas Kuhn (and others), we have recognized the limitations of any simple model of the accumulation of knowledge, and some scholars have offered arguments that question the privileged status of the Western scientific tradition and that sometimes seek to free "local knowledges" from the hegemony of natural science (Kuhn, 1962; Schaffer and Shapin, 1985; Foucault, 1980). Since I have written elsewhere in response to these live forms of skepticism (Kitcher 1993, 2001),(2) I am going to take it for granted here that they can be addressed, and that we can find a position that does justice both to the insights of Kuhn, Foucault, and the historians and sociologists of science who have followed them, and the thesis that our increasing success at manipulating nature testifies to the objectivity of our knowledge and to the thought that we do have more of it than our predecessors did. In response to the familiar rhetoric that knowledge is a public good, my focus is primarily on the "public" and I shall not question the terms in which the "good" is typically understood.
Here is a naive and explicit version of the picture that lies behind the rhetoric. There is something like a depositary that is built up by the combined efforts of investigators over the centuries, from which anyone can withdraw in response to the concerns and interests of the moment. The obvious metaphor is that of a public library, where the knowledge painstakingly achieved is "on the books," a library for which each of us has an indefinite supply of tickets and for which returns and renewals are never required. An important part of education consists in providing access to this library, enabling the latest generation to draw on the insights of its predecessors, to gain the benefits of knowledge without the sweat and the pain. (3)
These benefits are naturally conceived in terms of the acquisition of true beliefs. In one of the few genuinely penetrating epistemological studies of recent years, Edward Craig has proposed that our concept of knowledge is attuned to the enterprise of acquiring information from others (Craig, 1991). We apply the term to mark out places where we might learn from another. Craig's own formulation is tied to a "state of nature," one in which individuals come into contact and cooperate in furnishing one another with new beliefs. We look for people who might tell us the truth about matters where we are in doubt--and, precisely because we are in doubt, we cannot assess their deliverances directly but must evaluate the reliability of what they say within a general topic area. In doing so, the standards for reliability have to be context dependent and pragmatic: the potential consumer of information has to decide on the level of accuracy, on the range of different situations across which the potential informant is to be assessed, and on the probability of correctness (within the latitude allowed). (4)
Given the needs of one information-seeker, a person can count as authority enough on a topic, but, relative to the more demanding concerns of a different information-seeker, the same person would no longer be trustworthy. That is unproblematic insofar as individuals are...
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