Who owns the knowledge that I share?

A significant proportion of the collective wisdom of any organisation comes from its employees. However, organisations are still struggling with ways to compel their employees to share their best knowledge. The paper introduces the concept of knowledge ownership as a major building block in theorising knowledge sharing in the firm. A distinction is made between organisational ownership which refers to the organisation’s rights to knowledge and individual ownership which refers to the individual’s rights to knowledge. On the basis of this, the paper examines the relationship between employee ownership perceptions and their willingness to share their knowledge assets, both tangible and intangible. In conjunction, the paper also examines the influence of the work environment on fostering employee ownership beliefs. The paper proposes a model to examine the relationship between knowledge sharing and the perceptions of knowledge ownership in the context of codified and tacit knowledge assets

Non-Pickwickian Belief and 'the Gettier Problem'

That in Gettier's alleged counterexamples to the traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief the belief condition is satisfied has rarely been questioned. Yet there is reason to doubt that a rational person would come to believe what Gettier's protagonists are said to believe in the way they are said to have come to believe it. If they would not, the examples are not counter-examples to the traditional analysis. I go on to discuss a number of examples inspired by Gettier's and argue that they, too, fail to be counter-examples either for reasons similar to those I have urged or because it is not clear that their subject does not know

Getting Gettier Right: Reply to Mizrahi

Moti Mizrahi has argued that Gettier cases are misleading, since they involve a certain kind of semantic failure. In a recent paper, I criticized Mizrahi’s argument. Mizrahi has since responded. This is a response to his response

How to Define the Notion of Knowledge which Solves the Gettier Problem

Our contention is that to solve the Gettier Problem, a notion of infallible knowledge involving the substantial truth theory is necessary. We assume that acts of sense experience have propositional content, and that atomic empirical propositions need the existence of non-mental objects to be true. This approach allows for making the distinction between epistemically good justifiers and ontologically good justifiers, and leads to a definition of propositional empirical knowledge free of the Gettier Problem. Our explication of the Gettier Problem rejects Hetherington’s (2012) view that the Gettier Problem rests on jointly unsatisfiable constraints, sheds a new light on Floridi’s (2004) result, avoids the Pyrrhonian skepticism, as well as the skepticism defended by Kirkham (1984), and vindicates the substantial notion of truth

Why Gettier Cases Are Still Misleading: A Reply to Atkins

In this paper, I respond to Philip Atkins’ reply to my attempt to explain why Gettier cases (and Gettier-style cases) are misleading. I have argued that Gettier cases (and Gettier-style cases) are misdealing because the candidates for knowledge in such cases contain ambiguous designators. Atkins denies that Gettier’s original cases contain ambiguous designators and offers his intuition that the subjects in Gettier’s original cases do not know. I argue that his reply amounts to mere intuition mongering and I explain why Gettier cases, even Atkins’ revised version of Gettier’s Case I, still contain ambiguous designators

Who owns native nature? Discourses of rights to land, culture, and knowledge in New Zealand

Michael Brown famously asked ‘Who owns native culture?’ This paper revisits that question by analyzing what happens to culture when the culturally defined boundary between it and nature becomes salient in the context of disputes between indigenous and settler populations. My case study is the dispute between the New Zealand government and Maori tribal groupings concerning ownership of the foreshore and seabed. Having been granted the right to test their claims in court in 2003, Maori groups were enraged when the government legislated the right out of existence in 2004. Though the reasons for doing so were clearly political, contrasting cultural assumptions appeared to set Maori and Pakeha (New Zealanders of European origin) at odds. While couching ownership of part of nature as an IPR issue may seem counter-intuitive, I argue that as soon as a property claim destabilizes the nature/culture boundary, IPR discourse becomes pertinent

Definite Descriptions and the Gettier Example

This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it eithe

Asymmetry of Information within Family Networks

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of mis-perception of living standards among households within the same network. We contrast altruism, pressure, exchange and risk sharing as motives to transfer in simple models with asymmetric information. Testing the model predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by recipients of transfers. Our findings suggest that recipients set the terms of the transfers, either by exerting pressure on donors or because they hold substantial bargaining power in their exchange relationships

Stockholding: from participation to location and to participation spillovers

This paper provides a joint analysis of household stockholding participation, stock location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers, using data from the US Survey of Consumer Finances. Our multivariate choice model matches observed participation rates, conditional and unconditional, and asset location patterns. Financial education and sophistication strongly affect direct stockholding and mutual fund participation, while social interactions affect stockholding through retirement accounts only. Household characteristics influence stockholding through retirement accounts conditional on owning retirement accounts, unlike what happens with stockholding through mutual funds. Although stockholding is more common among retirement account owners, this fact is mainly due to their characteristics that led them to buy retirement accounts in the first place rather than to any informational advantages gained through retirement account ownership itself. Finally, our results suggest that, taking stockholding as given, stock location is not arbitrary but crucially depends on investor characteristics. JEL Classification: G11, E21, D14, C3

Faulkner\u27s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns

Faulkner\u27s Subject offers a reading of William Faulkner for our time, and does so by rethinking his masterpieces through the lenses of current critical theory. The book attends equally to the power of his work and to the current theoretical issues that would call that power into question. Drawing on poststructuralist, ideological, and gender theory, Weinstein examines the harrowing process of becoming oneself at the heart of these novels. This self is always male, and it achieves focus only through strategically mystifying or marginalizing women and blacks. The cosmos he called his own--the textual world he produced, of which he would be sole owner and proprietor--merges as a cosmos no one owns, a verbal territory also generated (and biased) by the larger culture\u27s discourses of gender and race. Like personal identity itself, it is a cosmos no one owns