CONCEPT
The Epistemic Base
Mokyr's term for the total stock of propositional and prescriptive knowledge available to a society — whose width determines the ceiling of technological creativity and whose channels determine how closely a society approaches that ceiling.
The epistemic base is Joel Mokyr's analytical object of primary interest — the total accumulated stock of useful knowledge available to a society at a given moment, comprising both propositional knowledge (understanding that something is the case) and prescriptive knowledge (knowing how to do something about it). Mokyr argues that two properties of the epistemic base determine a society's technological capacity: its width (how much knowledge it contains) and its efficiency (how well the channels connecting its components function). The width sets the ceiling of possibility; the efficiency determines how closely the society approaches that ceiling.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework developed in The Gifts of Athena treats the epistemic base as a measurable object with its own dynamics. The base expands through the generation of new knowledge — scientific discovery, technical refinement, artistic innovation — and through the preservation of knowledge across generations. It contracts when knowledge is lost, suppressed, or fails to transmit across generational
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