Synthese (2014) 191:4037–4067 DOI 10.1007/s11229-014-0514-2 An epistemological analysis of gossip and gossip-based knowledge Tommaso Bertolotti · Lorenzo Magnani Received: 1 July 2013 / Accepted: 23 June 2014 / Published online: 23 July 2014 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract Gossip has been the object of a number of different studies in the past 50 years, rehabilitating it not only as something worth being studied, but also as a piv- otal informational and social structure of human cognition: Dunbar (Rev Gen Psychol 8(2):100–110, 2004) interestingly linked the emergence of language to nothing less than its ability to afford gossip. Different facets of gossip were analyzed by anthropol- ogists, linguists, psychologists and philosophers, but few attempts were made to frame gossip within an epistemological framework (for instance Ayim in (Good gossip, pp. 85–99, 1994)). Our intention in this paper is to provide a consistent epistemological (applied and social) account of gossip, understood as broadly evaluative talk between two or more people, comfortably acquainted between each other, about an absent third party they are both at least acquainted with. Hence, relying on the most recent multidis- ciplinary literature about the topic, the first part of this paper will concern the epistemic dynamics of gossip: whereas the sociobiological tradition individuates in gossip the clue for the (theoretically cumbersome) group mind and group-level adaptations Wil- son et al. (The evolution of cognition, pp. 347–365, 2002), we will suggest the more parsimonious modeling of gossip as a soft-assembled epistemic synergy, understood as a function-dominant interaction able to project a higher organizational level—in our case, the group as group-of-gossips. We will argue that the aim of this synergy is indeed to update a Knowledge Base of social information between the group (as a projected whole) and its members. The second and third part will instead focus on the epistemological labeling of the inferences characterizing gossip: our contention T. Bertolotti (B ) · L. Magnani Department of Humanities - Philosophy Section and Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, Piazza Botta 6, 27100 Pavia, Italy e-mail: bertolotti@unipv.it L. Magnani e-mail: lmagnani@unipv.it 123