Generic Epistemology

We ascribe knowledge, as well as rational or justified beliefs not only to individual epistemic agents but also to groups and other social entities. Among theorists of collective intentionality, it is nowadays common to take at least some of those ascriptions to be genuine attributions of epistemic states. This raises the question of how we should think of the relationship between, e.g., the concept of ‘knowledge’ employed in ‘collective knowledge’, and the concept of ‘knowledge’ employed in ‘individual knowledge’. I will propose an understanding of epistemology that treats collective and individual epistemology, as well as further epistemic endeavours having other (non-human) entities at the centre of their study, to be broadly continuous, called Generic Epistemology. While surprisingly unexplored, Generic Epistemology rests on a natural extension of the method of cases, the dominant research paradigm that underlies the conceptual analysis of knowledge, justification, and other epistemic concepts.