Examples Of Shared Knowledge And Personal Knowledge

“I know” refers to the possession of knowledge by an individual - personal knowledge. “We know” refers to a knowledge that belongs to a group – shared knowledge .

Shared knowledge is the product of more than one individual, where individuals may or may not contribute to this knowledge, however, this does not depend only in the contributions of one individual in particular, others may verify or correct the individual contributions and add knowledge the already existing (group knowledge). For example, in psychology for a beginner its really easy to come up with conclusions of an experiment or accept the conclusion provided by the investigator as correct and “the absolute truth”, but as the person gains more knowledge about several other factors that could have influenced the outcome of the experiment this individual will eventually start questioning the investigation and provide knowledge that will influence some people that belong in the group of shared knowledge.

Shared knowledge changes and evolves though

An example of this could be Charles Darwin, who has postulated crucial theories regarding human evolution and other scientific and philosophic theories. He had personal knowledge that allowed him to see things differently and was able to use all of these knowledge to move forward with his exploration of the tough questions surrounding the origins of the human species or more specifically the human evolution. Darwin’s theories had to match the criteria of the accepted methods of discovery that were scientifically permitted in those times. His ideas had to be coherent and had to adjust themselves to previous known experimental or scientific discoveries, they also had to be revised by peers. Only after meeting these requirements Darwin’s visions were able to be accepted by the scientific community. This example shows personal knowledge leading to developments in shared