What is scope of knowledge?

Scope of knowledge is a concept in personal epistemology: A schema that works in one context may fail entirely in another.

Example: You build a mental model of 'how meetings work' from your engineering team — agenda, timeboxed, decisions logged. Then you join a board meeting at a nonprofit and try to apply the same schema. No agenda gets circulated, the conversation meanders through relationships and politics, and decisions happen in the hallway afterward. Your meeting schema isn't wrong. It's scoped to a domain it was never designed to leave.

This concept is part of Phase 11 (Schema Foundations) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema foundations.