Social Epistemology: The Niches for Knowledge and Ignorance

Human beings change the world in order to know it more easily and reliably. That is, we construct social and material environments, or 'epistemic niches', and develop cognitive tools to better acquire, transmit, or store information. A queue, for example, is an environment where information about the order of arrival is conveyed by a spatial configuration. Queues are niches that transform an arduous memory task into a simpler perceptual one.

In this important book, Alessandra Tanesini argue...