How Many Scientists Does It Take to Have Knowledge?

Abstract

Contemporary scientific research, especially in most of the STEM disciplines and the social sciences, is massively collaborative. This chapter focuses on a characterization of knowledge that is widely endorsed in epistemology. According to it, knowledge is warranted true belief, where warrant is a general epistemically good-making property that makes the difference between a belief’s being merely true and its constituting knowledge. It describes knowledge as warranted true belief. Because scientific knowledge is high-grade knowledge, scientific warrant must consist of explicit evidence and reasons. Traditionally, knowledge has been conceived as involving individual mental states and this is why many philosophers reject the idea that there can be genuinely collective knowledge. The philosopher of science Philip Kitcher refers to ‘the traditional conception of knowledge as something that is located in an individual subject’. Knowledge plays various functional roles in intellectual and practical lives.