La nature sociale de la connaissance

Voici une citation tirée d'un intéressant article de Louise Barrett de l'Université de Liverpool (du même groupe que Robin Dunbar, "Evolutionary psychology and beharioural ecology"):

"Perhaps our greatest opportunistic and prosocial innovation as group-living animals has been to distribute our cognition to an unprecedented level by storing essential information in other minds, instead merely of our own. Wegner et al. (1991), for example, have shown how couples in long-term relationships tend to take responsibility for particular kinds of knowledge (he programmes the video; she deals with the mortgage) in a manner that increases their efficiency as a unit. Wegner (1986) argues persuasively for the ubiquity of this kind of ‘transactive memory’ in all walks of human life, from intimate relations to large organizations (see also Surowiecki 2004). Wilson et al. (2004), takinan explicit evolutionary perspective, have similarly shown the value of ‘thinking as a group’. Distributing our cognition into other minds and calling on this knowledge as part of highly cooperative endeavours seems to be the key to human culture (Richerson & Boyd 2005). Looking for its roots in the cooperative behaviour and distributed and embodied cognition of our primate cousins would now be a natural direction for the social intelligence hypothesis to take."

Je reviens à mon dialogue: est-ce qu'on n'y voit pas comment il sert justement à "distribuer" la connaissance, plutôt qu'à simplement la "transmettre" (je sais, la différence est plutôt subtile...) ? En particulier, le "savoir" technologique prend toute sa force quand il est distribué. Question: est-ce que le langage, qui aurait pu évoluer d'abord pour faciliter les interactions sociales, aurait ensuite pu trouver une application nouvelle dans le partage de connaissances techniques?