Jennifer Nagel on Epistemic Mapping

Jennifer Nagel suggests that we say that people know stuff, because we care about the stuff they know; while we say that people believe stuff mostly when we care about them and what they think, not so much about the stuff about which they believe. [Compare this with a more traditional account of the relation between knowledge and belief, like Geurts' according to which “Attributing mental states to others and ourselves permits us to discern, predict, explain, and manipulate behavioural patterns.” (Geurts 2021)] So if I care about X and you are my source of information about X I must care about you and your mental state vis a vis X, but those, for me, would still be not important in themselves, but only of instrumental value.

What she calls epistemic mapping is the fact that ‘caring about what others think” means both evaluating what they already know and making sure that they acquire valuable new knowledge. 

There is ample evidence, like gaze following, that epistemic mapping is very common in the animal kingdom. We are very good at detecting where are others looking at because this information is very valuable for coordinating our knowledge with theirs.

“Being able to read the reactions of another person is like being able to use a rearview or sideview mirror”

We usually occupy each other’s visual space in such a way that we can see that others see that we see that they see etc.

Kobayashi & Kohshima 2001: our eyes are built to be easy to follow

Tomasello 2018 : joint attention comes from cooperation

Lizskowski, brown et al. “a conversation-like structure in prelinguistic gestural communication”

Ryan McElhaney: “I wonder if it relevant to consider cases of competition in which I want to reveal my mental states to those I am competing with, and cases of cooperation where I want to keep my mental state hidden from my partners in a project (perhaps because my knowledge is irrelevant and thus distracting for their task); these possibilities seem to problematize (at least somewhat) the line Tomasello is running”

Báselas, Gerwing & Healing (2017) Oral conversations naturally feature an active three-step calibration process: say, acknowledge/confirm, 2nd order acknowledge/confirm: 

- The talk is in room 418.

- In 418?

- Yeah.

“In two major corpora of English, the British National Corpus (BNC, Burnard & Aston, 1998) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, Davies, 2010), three mental-state verbs and two perception verbs rank among the 25 most frequent verbs of English, with “know”, “think” and “see” even being in the top 15: 

BNC: see (11), know (12), think (15), look (18), want (23) 

COCA: know (10), think (12), see (14), want (17), look (18) ” but not “believe” or “belief”

Who are the opponents? People like Stitch or Geurts who think that there is not a substantial difference between attributing knowledge and attributing belief, or others like Michael Hannon who think that we attribute knowledge to track reliability, to know who else is a good cooperator, and thus who to share information with in future encounters. But Nagel thinks that the evidence is against it, since we usually do not care who told us what. Also, another sort of opponent are people like García-Ramírez who think that everyday conversations have little to do with knwoeldge, at least not in the strict sense.

De Muhammad Ali Khalidi: “If I understood correctly, you mentioned that success signals after other-initiated repair may not be the point if our concern is knowledge — as long as we don’t embrace the KK principle.  But maybe success signals don’t just provide evidence that we know that we know, but also other incidental information about the overall epistemic situation — e.g. it tells the other party that the way they originally explained something was clear (as opposed to unclear), or they provided the right amount of detail, etc.  So might success signals provide other types knowledge?”

Di Bradley: Aren’t we just being polite?

It is indeed polite to pretend you understand when you actually do not, but only using practice expressions, like “Oh” that is usually used when you just learnt something from other person, in order to aflame it. In other words, even in polite uses, these uses of phatics is derivative of their epistemic-cooperative ones!