Epistemic Anti-Individualism

What‘s the relationship between knowledge and the environment in which an individual has the knowledge? Both commonsense and epistemology widely presuppose Individualism of Knowledge: Knowledge is just in the head of the individual and whether one knows a proposition is wholly determined by his intrinsic or bodily constrained factors,such as deliberate reasoning,the functioning of perceptual system,bodily behavior,the intellectual virtue and so on.If two subjects have exactly the same intrinsic properties,then they also know or not know the same things.Environment is only the background and partial resources of knowledge which functions as a cause.Once the individual has obtained a knowledge,this knowledge will be separated from the background and stored in the head,so the knowledge per se can be investigated and analyzed independent of the environment.However,Individualism of Knowledge can‘t solve the Gettier Problem.Knowledge is true belief,but true belief is not identical to knowledge,thus knowledge contains constitutive factors beyond true belief.Individualism constrains the constitutive factors within the individual,therefore it is always unable to fill the ?gap? between knowledge and merely true belief.This thesis argues for Anti-Individualism of Knowledge: Knowledge is not just in the head! Whether an individual knows a proposition is not only determined by his inner cognitive abilities and achievements,but also dependent on the suitable natural environment and social environment.Environment is not only the background but also a constitutive part of knowledge.A true belief can be a knowledge only if it is formed in a normal environment.Knowledge is a special kind of states dependent on both the individual and the natural and social environment,and is a kind of relationships constructed by the individual,the social group and the world together.This thesis first introduces the origin of Epistemic Anti-Individualism—Anti-Individualism of Mental States.Epistemic Anti-Individualism is a specific kind of Mental State Anti-Individualism,but it is different from the Anti-Individualism of Mental Contents which has raised lots of concerns.Then,I respectively investigate three kinds of specific knowledge—self-knowledge,perceptual knowledge and testimonial knowledge.I introduce and extend the previous research of Anti-Individualism of these kinds of knowledge,and point out that all these knowledge is constitutively partly dependent on the environment of the individual.Following discussion expands the topic area to all knowledge.After investigating and analyzing some important contemporary knowledge theories which include fallibilism,internalism and externalism,process reliablism,proper function theory,virtue epistemology and social epistemology,I explicit a big trend towards Epistemic Anti-Individualism.Some theories has implied environment as a necessary condition of knowledge,some theories face problems which can be solved by assimilating environment as a constitutive part of knowledge.From this trend I bring forward a global argument for Epistemic Anti-Individualism.At last,I try to solve some epistemic problems—the epistemic luck problem,the Gettier Problem and the skeptical problem—from the standpoint of Epistemic Anti-Individualism.