engleski

Social dynamics of common knowledge

Individual reflective knowledge about one’s own knowledge and social reflective knowledge about knowledge of others constitute common knowledge understood as a semantic information state. The social reflexive equilibrium of common knowledge is an essential part of collective intentionality. The conditions of possibility of creation of common knowledge through communication are encoded in the two norms of trust. The strong norm of trust requires that the receiver adopts the intentional state equal in type and content to the intentional state expressed in a successful locution of the sender. The weak norm of trust requires that the receiver believes that the sender’s locution is sincere. The modeling in the public announcement logic (van Benthem et al.) rests on the presupposed observance of the two norms. If a disagreement between communicating actors becomes revealed in communicative incoherence, then the constitution of common knowledge fails. There are two ways to restore communicative coherence: by relying on relations of epistemic authority and by shifting to non-authoritative social form of communication devoid of any epistemic authority relations. Accordingly the strong norm of trust is either relativized to the relation of epistemic authority or completely abandoned. Not every configuration of epistemic authority distribution will enable disagreement resolution. Therefore, if common knowledge is to be restored, it may be necessary to adopt the non-authoritative social form of communication, which is not subordinated to the strong norm of trust. The interaction that takes place in that social form is called argumentation and its rules (as defined by van Eemeren and Grootendorst) presuppose abandonment of the strong norm of trust. Consequently, the validity of the famous thesis of D. Lewis, that the convention whereby a population uses a language is a convention that includes trust, is restricted to specific social forms of communication since the revision of common knowledge may require the shift to a non-authoritative communicative form.

argumentation; collective intentionality; dynamic logic; communication norms

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