Common Knowledge

[adupont]

I wouldn’t be a member of the blogosphere (ugh) if I didn’t link to this year’s Edge Annual Question: What is your dangerous idea? Like any good blog meme, this is a good way to waste three hours. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out this gem from Daniel C. Dennett:

The human population is still growing, but at nowhere near the rate that the

Comments

Me and my insectoid friends.

[anonymous]

Dennett makes it sound like this is all a rather new development, but I don't see it as new at all. For one thing, we have long been caught up in the process of specialization, which has entailed giving more and more of ourselves over to becoming savants at very particular tasks or in very particular fields of knowledge. There is no need to be at all versed in law; you can simply hire a lawyer. There is no need to study about the maintenance of one's mind; you can just go to your psychiatrist. What I'm saying is that one can increasingly become immersed in one's own bailiwick and go to professionals for whatever requisite information is beyond it. The demise of shared knowledge is a natural ramification, as is the inability to understand information beyond one's bailiwick. Specialization demands this. This is not precisely the sort of thing Dennett is talking about, I suppose, but it is analogous