The background: Deeply social epistemology3
Despite some small steps in the direction of a recognition of the extent to which cognition is divided and distributed, virtue epistemology remains heavily individualistic.4 For the mainstream, virtues are dispositions of agents, supervening on their internal states; knowledge is the possession of individual agents, and so on.
Most importantly, whether an agent knows a proposition depends on facts about her alone: is it the upshot of her virtuous activity? This approach seriously underplays the extent to which knowledge is dependent on other agents and the environment for its generation, acquisition, and for its maintenance. For a large range of significant propositions, agents have true beliefs because of the way they are embedded in networks of other agents, and because of the way the environment they come to inhabit is structured.Consider the knowledge (as I think it deserves to be called) that allows indigenous people across the world to flourish in very harsh environments. Much of that knowledge is the product of cumulative culture: innovations acquired and gradually built on for generations (Richerson and Boyd 2005; Laland 2017). Cumulative culture has for centuries provided us with tools for the acquisition of knowledge that no individual could discover for themselves (at least before the advent of modern science), because the relevant data is too noisy for distinguishing signal from noise. Cumulative culture allows us to detect environmental changes that are generations long, for example (Shea 2009). It also allows for the accumulation of innovations that build on one another; again something that no individual can do for herself, because life is simply too short.
There are some well-known and spectacular examples of how well-equipped and prepared individuals were unable to acquire the knowledge they needed to survive in environments in which indigenous people were flourishing.
In 1846, two ships commanded by Sir John Franklin, on an expedition to chart the Northwest passage, became stuck in sea ice in the Canadian Arctic. The entire crew perished. But the area was regarded by the local Inuit people as being rich in resources. Despite their training and the resources of the wealthiest empire the world had ever seen, which had ensured the expedition was well-provisioned, they were unable to acquire the skills they needed to survive. A few decades later, Roald Amundsen spent two winters in the same region. He relied on the help of the Netsilik Inuit for his survival (Boyd, Richerson and Henrich 2011). The fate of the Burke and Wills expedition to cross the Australian continent also illustrates the wisdom of relying on indigenous knowledge and the folly of rejecting it (Burcham 2008). Running low on food, members of the expedition accepted the gift of cakes made from the Nardoo plant for sustenance. However, apparently as a consequence of unease with being reliant on people they saw as inferior, they spurned further assistance and attempted to make the cakes themselves. They ground the seeds into a powder, mixed it with water and baked it. Unbeknownst to them, the local people roasted the seeds prior to grinding.This step is required to remove toxins from the plant. Because they missed it, the explorers did not receive the nutrients they needed from the Nardoo cakes. There was only one survivor: he accepted further aid from the Yandruwandha people.The Netsilik Inuit and the Yandruwandha were reliant on cumulative culture for the knowledge of how to survive in harsh environments. But reliance on cumulative knowledge is common, not a strategy for harsh environments alone (Henrich 2017). Edible plants frequently evolve toxins that must be removed prior to consumption, and across the world indigenous people have gradually developed techniques for their removal.These techniques are often counterintuitive and complex, and the very need for them may not be obvious (because it may take years for ill-health to develop as a result of eating the foods).
Individuals do not hit upon these techniques by themselves; they emerge from (literally) centuries of tinkering and innovation.It is worth stressing one other way in which this knowledge cannot be understood as an individual possession. Not only does it owe its existence to previous generations, but it is often ill-understood by those who deploy it. Consider, for example, the practice of several indigenous groups in the Americas of mixing ash with cornmeal prior to cooking. This is adaptive in regions which rely on corn as a staple, because ash is alkaline and releases the niacin that is otherwise chemically bound in corn. Failing to introduce a base (whether derived from wood ash or seashells, as with some coastal groups) leads to pellagra, which is a serious and sometimes fatal illness.When corn was exported to the old world and became a staple in the United States, pellagra became a serious problem, the causes of which weren't understood by the scientific community until well into the 20th century. Indigenous peoples overcame the problems arising from a diet reliant on corn centuries before Western science was able to solve the problem. But individual members of these indigenous cultures possessed the knowledge that Western science sought only in an attenuated sense.
Asked why it is necessary to mix wood ash with cornmeal, indigenous people may have no more to say than “it is our custom” (Henrich 2017).They may not know that it is adaptive, let alone why it is adaptive.They may even have false beliefs about their adaptive practices. Food taboos, for instance, are typically justified on supernaturalistic grounds, though they are maintained in the group because they are (naturalistically, of course) adaptive (Henrich and Henrich 2010).Those people who adopt these practices do not know central facts about why they do the things they do. In this respect, it is worth noting, they may not be as different from Western scientists as we'd like to think.
Science produces knowledge, including knowledge of the causes of pellagra. But when knowledge is deeply social, much of it is not the property of any one individual. Contemporary scientific research routinely involves multiple individuals, with different disciplinary backgrounds and expertise working together (for example, work in neuroimaging may involve neurologists, physicists and statisticians, as well as neuroscientists — and ‘neuroscientist' may fragment again, such that different individuals have different ranges of skills). Some of the authors of a paper may have little interest in, or capacity to assess, its main claims. Cuttingedge medical research may take this very much further, involving (literally) thousands of people in research, at multiple locations around the world (from primary physicians to epidemiologists to bench scientists). None of them may be in a position to understand, let alone assess, every claim made in the resulting paper (Kukla 2012). Afortiori, they — like the indigenous people who rely on corn as a staple — are not in a position “to take... reflective responsibility for their true beliefs” (Pritchard 2005); for many the sine qua non of the possession of intellectual virtue. Socially distributed knowledge production may produce irreducibly social knowledge: knowledge that is the possession of the group and not of any of the individuals who compose it.Equally, blind imitation remains an important part of science. As Shea (2009) notes, when scientists perform a well-established protocol, whether to replicate it or to build on it, they may have little idea of the causal contribution (if any) of every step of the protocol. Why that amount of a solvent, rather than 5ml more, or 5ml less? Why that amount of time in the centrifuge? Especially if the experiment is expensive to run (in terms of resources required or time commitment), scientists have little incentive to attempt the kind of trial-and-error experimentation that would be required to discover whether certain steps might be dropped or shortened. Unless they have a particular interest in some step, they are likely to simply stick to the protocol. As Shea puts it,“all sorts of techniques and steps are copied without any appreciation of whether or why they are necessary to achieve the goal — following an experimental protocol can feel rather like following a magic spell” (2434).
40.2