*This is an in-person event held at Bush House (South East Wing) Room 1.05 at King’s College London, from 5-7pm. Please register here.
This is a research workshop organised by the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society, with the following synopsis:
Traditional discussion about knowledge and information in markets have focused on the cognitive abilities and limitations of individuals. I will argue that these discussions have overlooked the social and interactive dimensions of knowledge. In this talk I will treat markets as knowledge commons, understood as shared epistemic infrastructure. These epistemic infrastructures function as an extended mind for individual decision-making. I will distinguish between three different elements of this epistemic infrastructure: (1) market boundaries and product categories such as genres, (2) instruments of interpretation, and (3) prices. All three elements have important emergent properties, which means that they come about during the market process and would therefore not be available as knowledge, absent the process. Using the framework of the knowledge commons I suggest that this epistemic infrastructure enables as well as constrains economic action. It enables rational decision-making in the sense that it provides relevant distinctions and quantitative inputs for the individual and is constitutive of the action-arena. It constrains in the sense that it shapes the set of viable actions. It is furthermore costly to challenge existing categories and instruments. The ability to contribute to and contest these categories is typically asymmetrically distributed and a source of power to shape markets.
About the Speaker:
Erwin Dekker (1984) is Assistant Professor of cultural economics at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication. He worked as post-doctoral research at the Erasmus School of Economics where he wrote the intellectual biography of Jan Tinbergen entitled: “Jan Tinbergen (1903-1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise” (CUP). Previously he has been post-doctoral fellow at the Economics Department of George Mason University, where he published ‘The Viennese students of Civilization’ (2016) with Cambridge University Press. His research focuses on the intersection of art and culture with economics. He has published in the fields of cultural economics, economic methodology and intellectual history, and he is currently working on the moral frameworks which sustain markets.
