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 ...