Chapter 3 develops the information economy framework by invoking two additional resources: the concept of a speech-act from philosophy of language, and the concept of joint agency from action theory. The chapter also vindicates a prominent anti-reductionist theme: that the interpersonal relation of trust plays an essential role in testimonial knowledge. The central idea is that knowledge transmission essentially involves a kind of joint agency, characterized by a special sort of cooperation between speaker and hearer, and that joint agency essentially involves relations of trust between the cooperating agents. In addition, it is argued that the kind of joint agency involved in knowledge transmission essentially involves the speech-act of “telling.” The central idea is that a successful telling requires that the speaker intends to pass on knowledge to the hearer, and that the hearer understands that this is the speaker’s intention. It follows that a successful telling involves the kinds of “shared intention” and “common understanding” that are a characteristic of joint agency.

Chapter 9 argues for a “social turn” in the philosophy of religion, by showing how the information economy framework can be fruitfully applied to several perennial issues in religious epistemology, including the problem of religious disagreement, Hume’s critique of testimonial evidence for miracles, and the problem of divine hiddenness. More generally, the chapter argues, contemporary epistemology of religion assumes an overly individualistic account of knowledge and justification, including reductionist accounts of testimonial knowledge and evidence. By adopting recent advances in the epistemology of testimony and in social epistemology more generally, a social religious epistemology promises to enrich and expand the field.

Chapter 7 considers whether there can be a transmission of understanding, arguing that understanding can indeed be transmitted by the kind of extended testimony that one finds in standard educational settings. To make the case, the chapter defends a neo-Aristotelian account of understanding as systematic knowledge of causes, where “causes” are understood broadly, in terms of various kinds of dependence relations. So understood, it is argued, the transmission of understanding can be conceived as a special case of the transmission of knowledge. The information economy framework enters the argument in two ways. First, the framework helps to explain both the mechanisms by which understanding is transmitted by testimony in educational settings, and the intuition that it cannot be. Second, the framework helps to address an objection to the claim that understanding is a kind of knowledge.

Chapter 1 begins by invoking an intuitive distinction between the generation of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge. Very roughly, generation concerns coming to know “for oneself,” as when one reasons to a conclusion on the basis of good evidence. Transmission concerns coming to know “from someone else,” as when one is told by someone else who knows. Section 1.1 argues that some but not all testimony is at the service of knowledge transmission, with the result that some but not all testimonial knowledge is transmitted knowledge. Section 1.2 redraws some familiar categories in the epistemology of testimony so as to better characterize our target and related phenomena, better frame our questions, and better see the possible answers. Finally, a central thesis of the book is introduced and discussed: that knowledge transmission is irreducible to knowledge generation, and for that reason requires its own theoretical treatment. More specifically, it is argued that an adequate account of transmission must go beyond the usual theoretical resources of traditional epistemology – that is, beyond those resources that the tradition uses to theorize knowledge generation.