Knowledge And Shared Knowledge

Attempting to separate whether shared knowledge shapes personal knowledge or personal knowledge shapes shared knowledge, would be like trying to decipher which came first; the chicken or the egg. It's a cycle with no clear beginning or end that can end in an infinite spiral of possibilities. Attempting to understand the separate terms will show just how intertwined they really are. Personal knowledge, also known as knowledge by acquaintance is defined as the knowledge possessed by an individual, which is generally gathered through either observation or personal, first-hand experiences. Shared knowledge is typically referred to as a highly structured and systematic product of gathered knowledge from more than one individual. Shared knowledge

However to what extent is the personal knowledge gathered a valid source of knowledge? And how do reason and perception influence our understanding of shared knowledge? The question of whether the act of turning shared knowledge into personal knowledge is reliable, accurate or beneficial will also be posed.
Even though shared knowledge may create distorted and false personal knowledge and decision making, the act of interpreting and presumably most important, understanding such shared knowledge would allow us to construct decent and valid personal knowledge in both the natural and social sciences.

How can personal knowledge be shaped through shared knowledge?
How does reason and perception influence personal knowledge gathered from shared knowledge?
From my own experiences I can say that through my understandings of how a free market system works, how different factors in the economy inevitably influence various stakeholders, it has made me

These actions can lead to hasty generalizations and misinterpretations. An example of one bold and rather irrational strategy is Edward Jenner’s experiment in 1796, on an eight-year-old boy in order to find a vaccine for smallpox. He injected the eight-year-old boy first with cowpox pustule into an incision on the boys arm. He was attempting to test his theory, drawn from a folklore of the countryside. Due to, mainly, luck and chance, he concluded that the boy was immune to the smallpox disease when he injected him with the smallpox virus. This experiment would have great ethical consequences now a days, but shows to what extremes some scientists would go. Nevertheless, his personal knowledge helped shape the shared knowledge of medicine, which in turn influenced the understanding of other scientists such as the English physician Edward Ballard who, based on other scientific observations at that time, was able to feed off of the shared knowledge pool and was able to increase the potency of vaccinations over