Are you looking for trouble
The social constitution of knowledge reveals itself beautifully, and, to all of us, obviously.
From A Critical Introduction to Testimony, which starts with a quote from Wellbourne:
'A primitive community [of knowledge] consists of two people knowing the same thing and recognising each other as sharers in that knowledge; so each can act on the assumption of knowledge in the other and they will be able to act co-operatively.' Whether or not an individual knower can be credited with knowledge thus depends, at least in part, on whether others can potentially come to share in that knowledge and, equally importantly, on whether they can recognize him, and each other, as members of a community of knowledge that is held together by the requisite commitments and entitlements.
Kusch then continues to elaborate on this idea:
If two people, say a and b, form such a community with respect to an item of knowledge, say p, then each will know that p; each will know that the other knows that p; and each will know that the other knows that the other knows that p. Moreover, the community will have a 'dynamic quality'. That is to say, the community of a and b will be recognized by a and b as the product of an act of communication. Furthermore, a and b will regard themselves as 'sharing' in this knowledge, and as committed to teaching p as a fact, and as a truth. And finally, a and b will accept that they can be criticized if they later on fail to reckon with p. p will acquire the status of what is known in their community, and in this role it will mark an 'external, objective standpoint'.
For the most part, we tend to think and act as though the first part of this analysis was true, but we also think and act—especially in education—as though it doesn't have to be true, or perhaps that it wouldn't be true if we would all just come to some sophisticated realization (i.e., that it shouldn't be true), or maybe that we can make it not true through sheer tyranny of collective will.
Knowledge Is Social
Thus, almost everyone would be willing to admit that, when asked to write the word trouble, a student who reliably writes troubel doesn't know how to spell the word. The social constitution of knowledge will reveal itself beautifully, and, to all of us, obviously, whenever the student decides to write troubel in a search engine and is either asked—somewhat ironically—'Are you looking for trouble' or is ignored and shown results for trouble anyway.
Though, keep in mind that the consequences of the student's not knowing are not the point. We can safely assume for the sake of argument, especially today, that there will be no consequences at all, either to the student or to the larger social world. The point is that, even if the student knows how 'society' spells the word, and that he chooses to spell it differently, if he were to find himself in a social situation where the discrepancy was problematic, some negotiation would have to take place. This is what it means for knowledge to be socially constituted and that it can't be otherwise. He can certainly, over a lengthy period of time, bend the social world to his way of spelling, but this doesn't change the analysis—for troubel to count as 'knowing how to spell trouble', there must be some kind of social agreement on that point.
That is to say, a and b enter into a nexus of entitlements and commitments, and it is this nexus that makes it so that each one of them is entitled to claim that p.
But We Don't Want It to Be
Yet, we obviously know what the student means by troubel—we identify it almost instantly, especially in context, as a misspelled trouble. So, the meaning is mostly clear. And he's just transposed two letters. The other five letters are there and in the correct order. Who are we to say that the student doesn't know how to spell the word? This is where we go next when the social constitution of knowledge makes us morally queasy: we orient ourselves aspirationally toward epistemic individualism.
But because this kind of individualism is impossible to maintain and is theoretically incoherent, we can only apply shallow, decorative features of its tenets.
We police our words, for example. No more 'remediation' or 'mistakes' or 'misconceptions'. These all suggest that the student is deficient in some way in comparison to the social world. (We still do remediation and make functional use of the categories 'mistakes' and 'misconceptions'. We just don't use the words.)
We put desks in pods with the teacher-facilitator flowing amongst them rather than in carceral rows with the teacher-representative-of-the-state separated from them at the front. (We can't practically avoid the notion of teacher as epistemic authority. We just rearrange the furniture, among many other things, to make it seem like she isn't.)
We let students dress up their avatars or have their "interests" show up in word problems occasionally. They may even be automatically assigned content pitched to their "level". We call all of this personalization. (All just individual cheese on top of the social broccoli.)
This kind of collective dissociative disorder is why opinions within education often seem contradictory, paradoxical even—one opinion is practical and allows you to get through your day in the real social world and one is morally aspirational, telling you what you should be doing for every individual if only you were a better person, or if the world were a better place.
