Collective Beliefs

Being my brother's brother, maybe I shouldn't write this; but what the heck, he is younger anyway.

Here in Chilpancingo, high school teachers are trying his ideas, because at our school, colleagues are his students. He is colonizing the hearts and minds of Guerrero teachers.

Are the ideas right?

I dunno, that is why all this socioepistemology comes about.

If he convinces enough people, I guess he is right. According to Searle, and other such thinkers.

Other thinker, that I happened to know personally also, Terry Sejnowski, has reached,  what to me seem equivalent notions, coming from the neural net camp.

Consciousness, say Sejnowski and Quartz, is a social phenomenon.

Nobody listens to me though; my brother is so busy that he has not read Sejnowski's book that I recommended to him.

I guess I have to do the work; damned.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ends this article I have been referring to, this way:

``True, Cartesianism focused exclusively on introspectible mental contents, and this is dramatically different from social epistemology, especially in its institutional-design dimension. But contemporary epistemology no longer hews to Descartes's rigid introspectionism. If we emphasize a different aspect of Descartes's enterprise, we find a feature entirely congenial to social epistemology, namely, the pursuit of truth. Whereas Descartes thought that truth should be pursued only by the proper conduct of "reason," specifically, the doxastic agent's own reason, social epistemology acknowledges what everyone except a radical skeptic will admit, namely, that quests for truth are commonly influenced, for better or for worse, by institutional arrangements that massively affect what doxastic agents hear (or fail to hear) from others. To maximize prospects for successful pursuits of truth, this variable cannot sensibly be neglected.''