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Statisticians and data scientists have been called upon to increase the impact they have through their collaborative projects. Statistics and data science practitioners and their educators can achieve and enable greater impact by learning how to create shared understanding with their collaborators as well as teaching this concept to their students, colleagues, and mentees. In this paper, we explore and explain the concepts of common knowledge and shared understanding, which is the basis for action to accomplish greater impacts. We also explore related concepts of misunderstanding and doubtful understanding. We describe a process for teaching oneself and others how to create shared understanding. We conclude that incorporating the concept of shared understanding into one’s practice of statistics or data science and following the steps described will result in having more impact on projects and throughout one’s career.

Purpose: To investigate how interprofessional collaboration is developed in a municipal 24-hour rehabilitation unit. Design, material and method: Single case study. The empirical material is conducted using focus group interview. The focus group included a physiotherapist, occupational therapist, auxiliary nurse, doctor and nurse. The analysis is thematic, and Edward's theory of interdisciplinary collaboration constitutes the theoretical framework for the analyses. Findings: The findings are presented as four topics: 1) Rehabilitation potential, clarification of expectations and common goal, 2) Practical collaboration and common knowledge, 3) Next of kin as contributors and partners, demanding decisions and grief work and 4) Professional glasses, rehabilitation glasses and common interdisciplinary knowledge. The findings show how relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency are established as a common interprofessional platform where the sum is larger than the contribution from each of the professionals. The study also shows that patient and next of kin involvement is an important part of the interdisciplinary collaboration. Conclusion: Common knowledge that all professionals share is a central premise in the interdisciplinary collaboration, the knowledge constitutes something more than what the individual profession represents, and the patient and next of kin are involved in the collaboration. Interprofessional collaboration requires that the individual professional is able to contribute to such a common knowledge production.

Indigenous health knowledge refers to the skills and information created by human societies to treat sickness and improve well-being. Typically, this knowledge focuses on disease prevention and treatment via the use of indigenous plant-based therapies. The wealth of medical ethnobotanical data acquired in Limpopo Province, South Africa, necessitated an account of the development of knowledge regarding medicinal plant use. A purposive sampling procedure was used to make up a sample of 240 participants with the age range of between 25 and 90 years. They were traditional health practitioners, ordinary community members and patients consulting with traditional health practitioners. Common knowledge gained from family, friends, and neighbors; information inherited from ancestors; and apprenticeship knowledge are the main ways in which knowledge of medicinal plant use was developed. The knowledge was acquired and handed down verbally over generations, and it remains applicable today. This knowledge was passed down orally throughout centuries, protected as the family's or practitioner's trade sectret, whereas common knowledge is held as part of the community's cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For as long as there have been theories about common knowledge, they have been exposed to a certain amount of skepticism. Recent more sophisticated arguments question whether agents can acquire common attitudes and whether they are needed in social reasoning. I argue that this skepticism arises from assumptions about practical reasoning that, considered in themselves, are at worst implausible and at best controversial. A proper approach to the acquisition of attitudes and their deployment in decision making leaves room for common attitudes. Postulating them is no worse off than similar idealizations that are usefully made in logic and economics.

• Common ground is typically defined as what people know together (common knowledge). • It should also include what they do not know together (common ignorance). • We tested children's ability to use four common knowledge/ignorance states. • 4- to 8-year-olds played a novel coordination game with a partner. • The common ignorance states were more difficult than the common knowledge states. Common ground is the knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions shared between partners in an interaction. Previous research has focused extensively on what partners know they know together, that is, "common knowledge." However, another important aspect of common ground is what partners know they do not know together, that is, "common ignorance." A new coordination game was designed to investigate children's use of common ignorance. Without communicating or seeing each other's decisions, 4- to 8-year-olds needed to make the same decision as their partner about whether to try to retrieve a reward. To retrieve it, at least one of them needed to know a secret code. The knowledge/ignorance of both partners was ostensively manipulated by showing one partner, both partners, or neither partner the secret code in four conditions: common knowledge (both knew the code), common ignorance (neither partner knew the code), common privileged self knowledge (only children knew the code), and common privileged other knowledge (only their partner knew the code). Children's decisions, latency, and uncertainty were coded. Results showed that the common ignorance states were generally more difficult than the common knowledge states. Unexpectedly, children at all ages had difficulty with coordinating when their partner knew the code but they themselves did not (common privileged other knowledge). This study shows that, along with common knowledge, common ignorance and common privileged self knowledge and other knowledge also play important roles in coordinating with others but may develop differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature on nominal tautologies, it is assumed that common knowledge is a crucial ingredient for their interpretation. This paper explores a different approach: we argue that invoking shared knowledge is at the same time too strict and too vague as a condition for the understanding of tautologies in context. More specifically, we claim that, on the one hand, the hearer's previous knowledge about some specific set of properties of the entity referred to in the tautology is not always necessary: lack of previous knowledge can be repaired by accommodating new assumptions or compensated by providing additional explicit content in discourse. On the other hand, the hearer's previous knowledge about some specific set of properties of the entity referred to in the tautology is not always sufficient: only permanent, classificatory properties can be evoked by a tautology; transitory states, by contrast, are systematically rejected, even if they constitute shared knowledge and are supported by the context. We provide evidence for our claims both from the corpus study, analysing examples of tautologies with proper names from COCA and web-based sources, and experimental study designed as a verification task, additionally measuring reaction times for replying to a given question. • The paper explores the role of common knowledge in the understanding of tautologies. • We argue that common knowledge is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition. • It is not necessary because tautologies can be accompanied by contextual cues. • It is not sufficient because only permanent, essential properties can be evoked. • Our proposal is supported by corpus and experimental data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals a serious flaw in the consequentialist solution to the inefficacy problem in moral philosophy. The consequentialist solution is based on expected utility theory. In current philosophical literature, the debate focuses on the empirical plausibility of the solution. Most philosophers consider the cases of collective actions as of the same type as a horse-racing game, where expected utility theory is adequate to solve the choice problem. However, these cases should be considered as of the same type as a coordination game, where the assumption of common knowledge is also required. However, the assumption is implausible—it is impossible to obtain common knowledge of rationality in cases such as voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand lying, we naturally focus on small scale lies involving one speaker, one listener, one assertion. This methodology confers artificial plausibility upon the requirement that liars intend to deceive. For it excludes principal-agent conflicts that emerge from linguistic division of labor. When an employee lies for her boss, she need not inherit his motive to deceive. She displays loyalty even if her lie does not deceive. Focus on a single lie in isolation also blinds us to tactical deceptions such as telling a lie which is intended to be caught to advance another lie. Many of these complexities arise from situations that approximate common knowledge without quite crystallizing into this uniform transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impossibility of agreeing to disagree in the non-probabilistic setup means that agents cannot commonly know their decisions unless they are all the same. We study the relation of this property to the sure thing principle when it is expressed in epistemic terms. We show that it can be presented in two equivalent ways: one is in terms of knowledge operators, which we call the principle of follow the knowledgeable , the other is in terms of kens —bodies of agents' knowledge—which we call independence of irrelevant knowledge. The latter can be easily extended to a property which is equivalent to the impossibility of agreeing to disagree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work suggests that an important cognitive mechanism promoting coordination is common knowledge—a heuristic for representing recursive mental states. Yet, we know little about how common knowledge promotes coordination. We propose that common knowledge increases coordination by reducing uncertainty about others' cooperative behavior. We examine how common knowledge increases cooperation in the context of a threshold public goods game, a public good game in which a minimum level of contribution—a threshold—is required. Across three preregistered studies (N = 5580), we explored how varying (1) the information participants had regarding what their group members knew about the threshold and (2) the threshold level affected contributions. We found that participants were more likely to contribute to the public good when there was common knowledge of the threshold than private knowledge. Participants' predictions about the number of group members contributing to the public good and their certainty ratings of those predictions mediated the effect of information condition on contributions. Our results suggest that common knowledge of the threshold increases public good contributions by reducing uncertainty around other people's cooperative behavior. These findings point to the influential role of common knowledge in helping to solve large-scale cooperation problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I articulate the question of the value of common knowledge, or the question of why common knowledge is preferred to mere widespread knowledge. I argue that common knowledge often enjoys instrumental value lacked by widespread knowledge, and present a case that suggests that common knowledge sometimes enjoys non-instrumental value lacked by widespread knowledge. But I articulate some doubts about whether we should draw that conclusion from the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biological approach to culture focuses almost exclusively on processes of social learning, to the neglect of processes of cultural coordination including joint action and shared intentionality. In this paper, we argue that the distinctive features of human culture derive from humans' unique skills and motivations for coordinating with one another around different types of action and information. As different levels of these skills of 'shared intentionality' emerged over the last several hundred thousand years, human culture became characterized first by such things as collaborative activities and pedagogy based on cooperative communication, and then by such things as collaborative innovations and normatively structured pedagogy. As a kind of capstone of this trajectory, humans began to coordinate not just on joint actions and shared beliefs, but on the reasons for what we believe or how we act. Coordinating on reasons powered the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution especially characteristic of the human species in the last several tens of thousands of years. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statisticians and data scientists have been called upon to increase the impact they have through their collaborative projects. Statistics and data science practitioners and their educators can achieve and enable greater impact by learning how to create shared understanding with their collaborators as well as teaching this concept to their students, colleagues, and mentees. In this article, we explore and explain the concepts of commonknowledge and shared understanding, which is the basis for action to accomplish greater impacts. We also explore related concepts of misunderstanding and doubtful understanding. We describe a process for teaching oneself and others how to create shared understanding. We conclude that incorporating the concept of shared understanding into one's practice of statistics or data science and following the steps described will result in having more impact on projects and throughout one's career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution examines whether there is agreement within the global community of linguists on what should constitute common knowledge about language among the general public. We report the results of a large-scale survey study where we asked established linguists around the world (n = 552) to rate 15 language-related questions with respect to how important it is that the public knows the answer to them. We analyze the ratings in relation to the demographic data that we collected from the respondents. Using ordinal logistic regression models, we show that the opinions regarding what is important for everyone to know vary between linguists from different parts of the world as well as between linguists working in different subfields of linguistics. The study provides an empirical starting point for a broader reflection on the field of linguistics and the variation therein with respect to views about science communication and public outreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a Bayesian dialogue two individuals report their Bayesian updated belief about a certain event back and forth, at each step taking into account the additional information contained in the updated belief announced by the other at the previous step. Such a process, which operates through a reduction of the set of possible states of the world, converges to a commonly known posterior belief, which can be interpreted as a dynamic foundation for Aumann's agreement result. Certainly, if two individuals have diverging interests, truthfully reporting one's Bayesian updated belief at every step might not be optimal. This observation could lead to the intuition that always truthfully reporting one's Bayesian updated belief were the best that two individuals could do if they had perfectly coinciding interests and these were in line with coming to know the truth. This article provides an example which shows this intuition to be wrong. In this example, at some step of the process, one individual has an incentive to deviate from truthfully reporting his Bayesian updated belief. However, not in order to hide the truth, but to help it come out at the end: to prevent the process from settling into a commonly known belief—the "Aumann conditions"—on a certain subset of the set of possible states of the world (in which the process then would be blocked), and this way make it converge to a subset of the set of possible states of the world on which it will be commonly known whether the event in question has occurred or not. The strategic movement described in this example is similar to a conversational implicature: the correct interpretation of the deviation from truthfully reporting the Bayesian updated belief thrives on it being common knowledge that the announced probability cannot possibly be the speaker's Bayesian updated belief at this step. Finally, the argument is embedded in a game-theoretic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Salience reasoning, many have argued, can help solve coordination problems, but only if such reasoning is supplemented by higher-order predictions, e.g. beliefs about what others believe yet others will choose. In this paper, I will argue that this line of reasoning is self-undermining. Higher-order behavioral predictions defeat salience-based behavioral predictions. To anchor my argument in the philosophical literature, I will develop it in response and opposition to the popular Lewisian model of salience reasoning in coordination games. This model imports the problematic higher-order beliefs by way of a 'symmetric reasoning' constraint. In the second part of this paper, I will argue that a player may employ salience reasoning only if she suspends judgment about what others believe yet others will do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood shyness and associated psychosocial difficulties can place pupils at risk of underperforming cognitively. Yet shyness is not regarded as a special need demanding a response from education professionals. In this article, drawing on data from a national study of how teachers support shy children, we trace how teachers negotiate this support from the networks of teachers and carers that are available to them. Data comprised post-observation recall interviews, individual interviews and focus groups with teachers, all of whom had successful experiences with shy students. Qualitative responses from a national teacher survey were also analyzed. Analyses were guided by three cultural-historical concepts which explain professional relationships. Four networks were identified: teacher teams; school resource teams; school leadership teams and families. With peers the negotiation was horizontal, drawing on shared concerns with children as learners; with resource teams teachers negotiated upwards by recognizing and addressing the priorities of the resource teams; with leadership teams the school Principals worked relationally and pedagogically with teachers to enable their agentic responses to challenges; while with families teachers worked sensitively to elicit the what mattered for the families and encourage relational collaborations with school professionals. The implications for professional learning and school leadership are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lacan's contribution in applying and promoting game theory in the early 1950s is mostly ignored in the history of game theory. Yet his early analyses of logical reasoning made him one of the first social scientists to consider the importance of the hypothesis of common knowledge. By retracing Lacan's path in his discovery of game theory, we show how much he has been a precursor in applying it. While accommodating a narrative approach, he demonstrated rigour and originality. Soliciting mathematicians open to interdisciplinarity, he introduced as early as 1945 modes of reasoning which corresponds to reasoning based on common knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint attention customarily refers to the coordinated focus of attention between two or more individuals on a common object or event, where it is mutually "open" to all attenders that they are so engaged. We identify two broad approaches to analyse joint attention, one in terms of cognitive notions like common knowledge and common awareness, and one according to which joint attention is fundamentally a primitive phenomenon of sensory experience. John Campbell's relational theory is a prominent representative of the latter approach, and the main focus of this paper. We argue that Campbell's theory is problematic for a variety of reasons, through which runs a common thread: most of the problems that the theory is faced with arise from the relational view of perception that he endorses, and, more generally, they suggest that perceptual experience is not sufficient for an analysis of joint attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé: Comment mieux intégrer la science dans l'action publique pour la santé ? Comment la recherche en santé environnementale peut-elle mieux servir la prévention, son domaine d'application sanitaire et sociale ? Toutes deux ont la même exigence de transversalité et d'intersectorialité. Cet article défend la thèse de l'intérêt, dans le but de faciliter cette intégration, de la capacitation citoyenne à la fois dans la recherche (recherche participative et recherche-action) et dans l'action publique de prévention (protection et promotion de la santé). Dans ces deux domaines, la pratique de la co-construction avec les experts se fonde sur la valorisation des savoirs usuels du citoyen comme patient-habitant-usager-consommateur et leur hybridation possible avec les savoirs académiques. Un panorama des réalisations existantes en France dans les deux domaines est esquissé et un message d'espoir est délivré pour la progression vers l'objectif de santé pour tous de l'Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS), formulé déjà en 1979. How can science be better integrated into public health action? How can environmental health research better serve prevention, the domain of its health and social applications? Both have the same requirement of transversality and intersectorality. This article defends the value of citizen empowerment in both research (participatory research and research-action) and public prevention actions (health protection and health promotion) to facilitate this integration. In these two areas, the practice of co-construction with experts makes use of the citizen's common knowledge as a patient – inhabitant – user – consumer and its possible hybridization with academic knowledge. We present an overview of existing achievements in France in both fields and deliver a message of hope about progress towards the WHO's "Health for All" goal, formulated in 1979. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Searle (Speech Acts, 1969) introduced his famous distinction between constitutive and regulative rules that together define felicity conditions of speech acts. Regulative rules are normative rules, whereas constitutive rules define what counts as a performance of a speech act. In this paper we demonstrate with the example of assertions and referential uses of definite description that simple regulative rules can be given to speech acts that hold only on a core of well-behaved utterance situations. From this core, extended uses can be derived based on epistemic paths that are defined by the epistemic perspectives of speaker and hearer. As the use of speech acts get extended to a wider class of utterance situations, conflicts with the constitutive rules can emerge. We show that the extended uses are nevertheless felicitous. We represent epistemic relations in a possible worlds framework, and take an interactional approach that considers speech acts as part of joint communicative acts.

One of the five schemes in social forestry program in Indonesia is customary forest recognition. Kenegerian Rumbio Customary Forest, a customary forest in Riau Province, is failed in the recognition process. The objectives of this study are to analyze the failure factors of collective action and to formulate strategies to encourage the success of collective action on recognition of Kenegerian Rumbio Customary Forest. This research was built by using both quantitative and qualitative approach where the data were collected by using survey and in-depth interviews. The research results found that improper facilitation caused by communication issues between involved parties, the absence of the symbolic power, the failure in forming the common knowledge are the factors leading to the failure of collective action. To reconstruct the collective action, this study offered four strategies: (1) to frequently communicate with personal approach to the two highest indigenous leaders with whom facilitators have difficulty communicating well, (2) to mediate the two conflicted indigenous leaders for generating their motivation to propose their forest, (3) to conduct socialization to all indigenous leaders (40 jini) and community representatives to increase an understanding regarding the purpose and importance of recognition of customary forest, and (4) to conduct a participatory mapping to reduce area border issues among two sub-tribes.

One of the five schemes in social forestry program in Indonesia is customary forest recognition. Kenegerian Rumbio Customary Forest, a customary forest in Riau Province, is failed in the recognition process. The objectives of this study are to analyze the failure factors of collective action and to formulate strategies to encourage the success of collective action on recognition of Kenegerian Rumbio Customary Forest. This research was built by using both quantitative and qualitative approach where the data were collected by using survey and in-depth interviews. The research results found that improper facilitation caused by communication issues between involved parties, the absence of the symbolic power, the failure in forming the common knowledge are the factors leading to the failure of collective action. To reconstruct the collective action, this study offered four strategies: (1) to frequently communicate with personal approach to the two highest indigenous leaders with whom facilitators have difficulty communicating well, (2) to mediate the two conflicted indigenous leaders for generating their motivation to propose their forest, (3) to conduct socialization to all indigenous leaders (40 jini) and community representatives to increase an understanding regarding the purpose and importance of recognition of customary forest, and (4) to conduct a participatory mapping to reduce area border issues among two sub-tribes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few recent developments in information technology have been as hyped as blockchain, the first implementation of which was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Such hype furnishes ample reason to be skeptical about the promise of blockchain implementations, but I contend that there's something to the hype. In particular, I think that certain blockchain implementations, in the right material, social, and political conditions, constitute excellent bases for common knowledge. As a case study, I focus on trust in election outcomes, where the ledger records not financial transactions but vote tallies. I argue that blockchain implementations could foster warranted trust in vote tallies and thereby trust in the democratic process. Finally, I argue that if the promise of blockchain implementations as democratic infrastructure is to be realized, then democracies first need to ensure that these material, social, and political conditions obtain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For as long as there have been theories about common knowledge, they have been exposed to a certain amount of skepticism. Recent more sophisticated arguments question whether agents can acquire common attitudes and whether they are needed in social reasoning. I argue that this skepticism arises from assumptions about practical reasoning that, considered in themselves, are at worst implausible and at best controversial. A proper approach to the acquisition of attitudes and their deployment in decision making leaves room for common attitudes. Postulating them is no worse off than similar idealizations that are usefully made in logic and economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decision theory and game theory are extended to allow for information processing errors. This extended theory is then used to reexamine market speculation and consensus, both when all actions (opinions) are common knowledge and when they may not be. Five axioms of information processing are shown to be especially important to speculation and consensus. They are called nondelusion, knowing that you know (KTYK), nested, balanced, and positively balanced. We show that it is necessary and sufficient that each agent's information processing errors be (1) nondeluded and balanced so that the agents cannot agree to disagree, (2) nondeluded and positively balanced so that it cannot be common knowledge that they are speculating, and (3) nondeluded and KTYK and nested so that agents cannot speculate in equilibrium. Each condition is strictly weaker than the next one, and the last is strictly weaker than partition information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy systems are well known for their good balances between approximation accuracy and interpretability. Among a wide variety of existing TSK fuzzy systems, most of them are driven by special knowledge since the learned parameters of each fuzzy rule are totally different. However, common knowledge is equally important and useful in practice and hence a TSK fuzzy system embedded with common knowledge should be more intuitive and interpretable when tackling with real-world problems. In this paper, we propose a common and special knowledge-driven TSK fuzzy system (CSK-TSK-FS), in which the parameters corresponding to each feature in then-parts of fuzzy rules always keep invariant and these parameters are viewed as common knowledge. As for its modeling, except the gradient descent techniques and other existing training algorithms, we can obtain a trained CSK-TSK-FS from a trained GMM or a trained FLNN because the proposed fuzzy system CSK-TSK-FS is mathematically equivalent to a special GMM and a FLNN. CSK-TSK-FS has three characteristics: (1) with the classical centroid defuzzification strategy, the involved common knowledge can be separated from fuzzy rules such that the interpretability of CSK-TSK-FS can be enhanced; (2) it can be trained quickly by the proposed LLM-based training algorithm; (3) the equivalence relationships among CSK-TSK-FS, GMM and FLNN allow them to share some commonality in training such that the proposed LLM-based training algorithm provides a novel fast training tool for training GMM and FLNN. Experimental results on UCI, KEEL and epileptic EEG datasets demonstrate the promising classification of CSK-TSK-FS.