Social Knowledge

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Social Knowledge = "a result of the connections between the individual members of society, resident in no single one of them, but rather a property of the society working as a whole"

Explanation

By Stephen Downes at

"Social knowledge is to a society what personal knowledge is to a person. It is a result of the connections between the individual members of society, resident in no single one of them, but rather a property of the society working as a whole. Numerous instances of such connections occur; where certain of those connections become salient, and are frequently activated through use, they are recognized as forming a distinct entity, producing a distinct type of knowledge.

As an example, consider the knowledge of 'how to fly a person from England to Canada in a 747'. No single person possesses this knowledge, because it is the result of combining numerous instances of personal knowledge - from how to make tires to how to navigate a 747 to how to execute a landing while keeping the airplane intact. What makes these individual bits of knowledge combine to form an instance of social knowledge is that they are connected; knowing how to land an aircraft depends on, and makes sense, only in the context of knowing how to fly an aircraft, or to build an aircraft.

Though many instances of social knowledge go unobserved and unremarked, numerous examples may be adduced. For example, the knowledge of 'the value of wheat' at a given time is a type of social knowledge; it is the knowledge that results through the connections of millions of wheat buyers and wheat sellers in a marketplace. No individual has a grasp of 'the value of wheat' - they each make decisions to buy or to sell based on their own individual knowledge and needs. It is true that there is a 'market value' of wheat - but again, this is an interpretation of that social knowledge - not all instances of wheat-trading are taken into account, only those expressed in financial terms, and not all wheat-traders are considered (the child receiving wheat from her mother, for example).

Smith's 'invisible hand of the marketplace' is but one way of looking at particular types of social knowledge, specifically, those that may be expressed quantitatively, and on the basis of quantitative reasoning. Wheat may be valued non-quantitatively - by its taste, for example. Consider how society values chocolate, in comparison. The 'value of wheat', looked at from a connective perspective, is a consideration of the interaction between all statements concerning 'value' and all statements concerning 'wheat', and an interpretation of those statements. That we today express the value of wheat in economic terms says as much about the salience of financial value in today's society as it says about wheat.

Social knowledge has recently attained recognition (and value) under the heading of Surowiecki's 'wisdom of crowds'. But it is worth noting that many of Surowiecki's examples are cases where individual guesses "aggregated and then averaged." While Surowiecki stresses (correctly) the autonomy of those guesses, he does not so stress the equally important fact that those guesses are not independent events - they are connected, in some key way, to each other (for example, the people guessing the temperature of a room have also the property of being in the same room; those estimating the weight of objects all see the same objects, and in trhe same way).

Social knowledge is not merely the aggregation and averaging of individual knowledge (as if there could be such a thing - consider how in guessing weights we use a medium, which in electing leaders we use a mode). That is why such aggregation is not necessarily reliable - an aggregation that is considered independently of the connections between entities is like a count that is considered independently of the membership of a set. Consider, for example, counting sheep without worrying about whether what is being counted is a sheep. It can work sometimes - in sheep-filled rooms, for example. But more often, it will mislead." (a result of the connections between the individual members of society, resident in no single one of them, but rather a property of the society working as a whole)