How Do You Know? : The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge.
Title:
How Do You Know? : The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge.
Author:
Hardin, Russell.
ISBN:
9781400830664
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (251 pages)
Contents:
Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Ordinary Knowledge -- An Economic Theory of Knowledge -- The Social Generation of Knowledge -- Knowledge from Authority -- The Division of Labor and Individual Knowledge -- The Internalization of Norms -- Standard Philosophical Theories of Knowledge -- Concluding Remarks -- Popular Knowledge of Science -- Medical Knowledge -- Estrangement from Science -- The Science Wars -- Religion versus Science -- A New Science? -- Concluding Remarks -- Democratic Participation -- The Logic of Collective Action -- The Economic Theory of Democracy -- Voting and Ordinary Knowledge -- Knowledge of How to Vote -- Median Knowledge -- Understanding Whether to Vote -- Multidimensional Issues -- Concluding Remarks -- Liberalism -- Austrian Social Theory -- Legibility and Democracy -- Seeing like Hayek -- Distributed Knowledge and Policy -- Civil Liberties -- Liberty and Welfare -- Concluding Remarks -- Moral Knowledge -- Individual Moral Knowledge -- Testing Moral Theories against Common Sense -- The Strategy of Knowing -- The Economics of Moral Motivation -- Social Evolution of Collective Moral Knowledge -- Authority and Moral Knowledge -- Concluding Remarks -- Institutional Knowledge -- Strategic Interaction and Institutions -- Institutions and Moral Knowledge -- Institutions as Meliorative -- Apparent Mutual Advantage -- Interpersonal Comparisons of Welfare -- Concluding Remarks -- Religious Belief and Practice -- Religious Knowledge by Authority -- Incentive to Believe, or Count as True -- Adaptive Knowledge Revision -- Communal Sources of Belief -- Communal Enforcement of Belief -- Sincerity of Belief and Knowledge -- Fundamentalist, Infallible Belief -- Concluding Remarks -- Culture -- Group-Specific Implications of Individual Knowledge -- Knowledge and Culture -- A Functional Account of Culture -- The Goodness of a Culture.
Collective Identity -- Concluding Remarks -- Extremism -- Knowledge by Authority, Again -- Normal Politics -- The Belief System of Extremism -- Nationalism -- Fanatical Action without Fanatical Belief -- Interests and Knowledge -- Knowledge, Fanaticism, and Nationalism -- Coerced Ignorance -- Concluding Remarks -- References -- Index.
Abstract:
How do ordinary people come to know or believe what they do? We need an account of this process to help explain why people act as they do. You might think I am acting irrationally--against my interest or my purpose--until you realize that what you know and what I know differ significantly. My actions, given my knowledge, might make eminently good sense. Of course, this pushes our problem back one stage to assess why someone knows or believes what they do. That is the focus of this book. Russell Hardin supposes that people are not usually going to act knowingly against their interests or other purposes. To try to understand how they have come to their knowledge or beliefs is therefore to be charitable in assessing their rationality. Hardin insists on such a charitable stance in the effort to understand others and their sometimes objectively perverse actions. Hardin presents an essentially economic account of what an individual can come to know and then applies this account to many areas of ordinary life: political participation, religious beliefs, popular knowledge of science, liberalism, culture, extremism, moral beliefs, and institutional knowledge. All of these can be enlightened by the supposition that people are attempting reasonable actions under the severe constraints of acquiring better knowledge when they face demands that far outstretch their possibilities.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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