Subjective General Knowledge

Is general knowledge only defined in relation to a specific group or in relation to the entire population?

I can think of two meanings.

1. General knowledge for a group of people is information you expect all people in that group to have been exposed to at some point in time (e.g. advanced calculus to math professors and history of curling to professional curlers).
2. General knowledge is information that you expect all people (regardless of cultural background etc.) to have been exposed to (e.g. who fought against whom in WWII, who founded Facebook).

I would tend to think of the first as "specific knowledge" and the second as "general knowledge". Is this a standard distinction or can all information be considered "general knowledge" to a specific population.

Solution 1:

I think neither.

General knowledge is usually defined in relation to an individual.

Example: John is highly qualified in Physics but he also has extensive general knowledge.

This means that John knows about many different subjects. He probably reads widely in many different fields, current affairs, history, politics, literature theatre, the arts and so on. As well as being a specialist (in Physics), he is also a generalist. A person who has a great deal of general knowledge would do well on a quiz show.

Solution 2:

Assuming Benjy Kessler indeed meant "common knowledge" and not "general knowledge" (or alternatively, not getting into the semantics, but rather the more general meaning of the question), I think that one always needs to specify what culture and what society is being considered, when asking whether something is specific or common knowledge.

My gut says that there is such a thing as being too specific -- to say that the history of curling is common knowledge among curling fans may be considering too small a group. On the other hand, to say that the Jewish holidays are common knowledge among Jews (not even practicing Jews, at that) is a little more easily said. There are things I wouldn't expect a Christian to know about Islam, but I would expect any Muslim to know, regardless of their level of observance. There are things I wouldn't expect a Finn to know about Canadian history, but I would expect a Canadian to know, etc.

Either way, "regardless of cultural background" is never something you can say. Maybe Western culture is all there is in your eyes, but obviously that's also specifying a certain cultural background - albeit a pretty common one.