Look for
Compatible models
Do the participants understand the situation well enough for information to travel between them?
A lens
Epistemic alignment
Do the parts form sufficiently compatible understandings of what is going on?
Systems can be aligned in beliefs, models, evidentiary standards, calibration, or ways of handling uncertainty. But epistemic alignment does not always mean making everyone's beliefs more similar.
Try seeing it
Agreement is only one epistemic relationship.
People often need enough common understanding to communicate, interpret evidence, and act together. Scientists need shared measurement practices. Teams need sufficiently compatible situation models. Institutions need common ways of deciding what counts as evidence.
Yet a group can also depend on members seeing different evidence, making partially independent errors, or challenging one another's conclusions.
Distinguish from
Consensus
Agreement among members is not the same thing as accurate collective judgment.
Ask next
Where does epistemic diversity help?
Does the system benefit from different evidence, independent errors, competing models, or adversarial criticism?
A question to carry elsewhere