Epistemic cooperation

Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto, St. George, University of Toronto at Mississauga)

Many animals engage in cooperative interaction, and many animals communicate. For human beings, communication is itself a form of cooperative interaction: we are uniquely sensitive to how others are receiving our signals. Humans are the only animals who actively signal when we have missed something (e.g. “huh?”), when we want the speaker to continue (“uh-huh”), and when we have gained or re-gained knowledge (“oh”). Ideally, interactive communication leads to more efficient pooling of knowledge across individuals; this talk examines the positive value of the intuitive epistemic monitoring underpinning ordinary conversation, as well as some problematic situations in which this monitoring fails. By looking at the social function of ordinary intuitive knowledge attribution, we gain a fresh perspective on knowledge itself.