ABSTRACT
The sociology of knowledge has had a chequered history. The sociology of knowledge argument shows that knowledge is institutionalized cognition. This chapter considers various generalizations on a network and the associated probabilities. The probabilities of generalizations were initially introduced as givens, transmitted on the basis of authority to new members of a community. Hesse network and the simultaneous evaluation of innumerable cognitive strategies require the simultaneous management of every probability. Changes in linguistic usage and associated changes in knowledge must relate to specific collective goals and interests. Contingent restrictions in cognition are essential to coherent learning and anything one might be inclined to call the growth of knowledge. In any context where information is flowing there must be some tendency to make routine habituated cognitive operations the initial basis for decoding messages. Without some such tendency to cognitive laziness, innumerable alternative versions of a message would be equally plausible.
