Epistemology of Folk-Lore

Testimony is a central concept in the epistemological debate on knowledge and learning. It is therefore surprising that testimony plays a minor role in the empirical literature on cultural learning. This raises the question of whether our approach to knowledge in epistemology might be missing out on some things when applied to cultural knowledge and its transmission. By taking the semantic component of knowledge in the compound folk-lore at face value, we aim to explore whether the concept of folklore could potentially help out here. Three persistent puzzles concerning folklore and its study are discussed to this end: (1) What is the ontological status of folkloric objects of study? (2) How shall one safeguard folkloric objects, depending on different possible answers to the ontological question? (3) How could we distinguish fake-lore, i.e. folklore that is merely seemingly representative of epistemic groups, from more generally representative folklore?