Sloman, Steven & Fernbach, Philip. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
Sloman and Fernbach are cognitive scientists whose book explores the communal nature of knowledge. This extremely readable book provides an interesting perspective for educators by challenging the narrow conception of individual intelligence. Humans, they contend, have a limited capacity to retain a large quantity of detailed information. The human brain evolved so that we retain information that helps us to connect actions with cause and effect. As they explain: Just as people don’t think only associatively (as Pavlov thought we do), people do not reason via logical deduction. We reason by causal analysis. People make inferences by reasoning about the way the world works. We think about how causes produce effects, what kinds of things disable or prevent effects, and what factors must be in place for causes to have their influence. Rather than thinking in terms of propositional logic, the logic that tells us whether a statement is true or false, people think in terms of causal logic, the logic of causation that incorporates knowledge about how events actually come about in order to reach conclusions. [p, 56] In the animal world, only humans have the capacity to look back from an effect and speculate about its causes. The capacity to discern patterns between cause and effect allows us to understand what is happening when we encounter new events. Coupled with this a powerful conceptual ability is the ability to exchange knowledge with others in order to accomplish our purposes. We do not need in-depth knowledge regarding every aspect of an effort. We need the capacity to work within knowledge communities where various members can contribute their specialized expertise. As Sloman and Ferbach observe; Intelligence resides in the community and not in any individual. So decision-making procedures that elicit the wisdom of the community are likely to produce better outcomes than procedures that depend on the relative ignorance of lone individuals A strong leader is one who know how to inspire a community and take advantage of the knowledge within it, and who can delegate responsibility to those with most expertise. [p. 259] This view of communal intelligence has implications for how we teach students within classrooms, how we organize schools as learning communities, and how we pursue our own professional development.