New Models of Knowledge Communication is a Norwegian Research Council funded project at the University of Oslo.
Project summary
Communication plays a vital role in our attempts to gain, share, and evaluate our knowledge and beliefs about the world around us. Much of the knowledge we possess is apparently formed on the basis of trust in another person’s say-so. Similarly, when we come to question or revise our beliefs, it is often as a result of disagreements or disputes with other people. Understanding these epistemic activities requires investigating their communicative foundations. What does it mean to successfully communicate with another person? How often does communication succeed? What features of an interlocutor’s context or environment might undermine her communicative attempts? These questions are important because different answers may have significant implications for our understanding of how we gain and evaluate knowledge through our interactions with others. Surprisingly, within epistemology, very little attention has been paid to these foundational issues. Instead, authors typically assume a naïve ‘content preservation’ model of communication according to which the audience in a communicative exchange can easily and often grasp, or decode, precisely what the speaker has said. The central aim of this project is to develop and motivate an alternative
model of communication to serve as the basis for our understanding of how communication facilitates the sharing and evaluation of knowledge. This new model, which is motivated by contemporary work in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics, has sceptical implications: our attempts to share knowledge will often be less successful than is popularly thought, and the appearance of substantive peer disagreements may more often turn out to be at least partially verbal disputes. The project's positive model provides a framework for understanding the role of these non-ideal communicative exchanges in our epistemic ecology.
model of communication to serve as the basis for our understanding of how communication facilitates the sharing and evaluation of knowledge. This new model, which is motivated by contemporary work in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics, has sceptical implications: our attempts to share knowledge will often be less successful than is popularly thought, and the appearance of substantive peer disagreements may more often turn out to be at least partially verbal disputes. The project's positive model provides a framework for understanding the role of these non-ideal communicative exchanges in our epistemic ecology.
Project members
Joey Pollock - Principal Investigator
Hugo Mota - PhD Fellow
Hugo Mota - PhD Fellow
Collaborators
Delia Belleri, University of Lisbon
Robyn Carston, University College London
Ingrid Lossius Falkum, University of Oslo
Sanford Goldberg, Northwestern University
Andrew Peet, University of Leeds
Andreas Stokke, Uppsala University
Robyn Carston, University College London
Ingrid Lossius Falkum, University of Oslo
Sanford Goldberg, Northwestern University
Andrew Peet, University of Leeds
Andreas Stokke, Uppsala University
