David Adam in Nature:
How do we know when others know what we know? Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, delves into how ‘common knowledge’ can cement or explode social relations. Common knowledge — awareness of mutual understanding — can explain the emergence of social-media shaming mobs, academic cancel culture and revolutions that seem to erupt from nowhere. It drives how people coordinate with others and can explain everything from awkward first-date conversations to financial bubbles and stock-market crashes. Pinker tells Nature why it helps to better understand the ways we get into each other’s heads — and what happens when we know that we have.
What is common knowledge?
It is the state in which I know something, you know it, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know that you know it, and so on, ad infinitum. It differs from private knowledge, in which someone knows something without knowing whether anyone knows they know it.
More here.
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