4 - Public knowledge

Summary

The idea of public knowledge

How, then, does the concept of knowledge feature in our lives? What uses do we put it to? One thing that may strike us immediately, when we ask such questions, is that knowledge, as we often conceive of it, has a public aspect, an aspect that is liable to be missed entirely when we focus on the task of delivering an analysis of the conditions for some individual's knowing that P. Consider the uses of the noun knowledge. We often use it to refer to what we seem to think of as a kind of public commodity, something that may be available to anyone; we have already noticed how encyclopaedias, for example, aim to collect items of human knowledge together in a readily accessible format so that anyone may access them. The same idea is enshrined in those PhD rubrics that require that a dissertation should make a significant contribution to knowledge. Again, it occurs when London cab drivers apply themselves to the task of learning what they call “The Knowledge”, or when we speak of matters of common knowledge. And, as we saw in Chapter 1, this way of thinking is manifest in the use Greeks had for a plural of their word for knowledge; for them, not only is there such a thing as human knowledge considered generally, but there are also separate “knowledges” (branches of knowledge), like cooking and astronomy, all capable of being taught by a master to his pupils.