COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE AND THE LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
Aleksandr Anatolyevich Shevchenko
Institute of Philosophy and Law, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia
Keywords: agent of cognition, public good, rationality, intentionality, scientific egoism, social interaction
Abstract
In modern epistemology, the production of knowledge is understood as a collective enterprise, which implies not only the coordination of the efforts of individual researchers, but also the presence of collective agents of cognition. The behavior of such a collective agent is presumably determined by its inherent collective rationality and intentionality. “Bracketing out” the individual agent allows, in particular, to eliminate the gap between individual and collective rationality, which is a significant problem in the production of knowledge understood as a public good, since it can lead to freeriding and scientific egoism. At the same time, the construction of collective agents of cognition does not always seem to be a justified tool in methodological and metaphysical terms. An alternative may be a mixed theoretical scheme, namely the representation of scientific cognition as collective action, but without collective intentionality.
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