The Challenges of Collaborative Knowledge

Abstract

Knowledge is not transcendental but rather locally produced and that knowledge is not forever but rather sustained in a community of practitioners (that may be world-wide in its distribution). These communities are ideological structures held together and marked apart by certain core beliefs about the world, about the character of our knowledge of the world, and about the nature of the evidence of that knowledge. Inside one of these communities, truth is often certain and knowledge one. Members face “culture shock” when they cross the town boundaries to discover that there are real people with power who don’t believe as they do.