John Dewey did not view knowledge primarily as a commodity possessed by isolated individuals. He tended to see inquiry as a cooperative activity emerging from communities confronting shared problems. In that sense, knowledge behaves very differently from material goods.

If I give you an apple, I no longer have the apple.

If I share an idea, a method, or a discovery, I still possess it.

In fact, the knowledge may become more valuable as more people participate in testing, criticizing, refining, and extending it.

That's one reason philosophers, educators, and commons theorists often distinguish between:

• Rival goods (food, land, physical objects)
• Non-rival goods (knowledge, language, mathematics, scientific discoveries)

Knowledge is unusual because its use by one person does not necessarily diminish its use by another.

Your observation about people is related.

Many economic models begin from isolated individuals making choices. Dewey begins from association. Human beings become intelligent not merely by possessing information but by participating in social inquiry.

A community of inquiry is not simply:

Many individuals with knowledge.

It is:

Many individuals creating knowledge together.

That changes the entire framing.

The central question becomes less:

How do we allocate scarce knowledge?

and more:

How do we organize institutions that allow inquiry, learning, and communication to flourish?

Dewey was deeply interested in education, democracy, journalism, and public deliberation. He believed intelligence was distributed across society rather than concentrated in a few experts or leaders.

The production of knowledge often accelerates when it is shared openly.

The internet, open-source software, scientific collaboration, and public libraries all illustrate this dynamic. The more participants you have, the larger the potential community of inquiry becomes.

In that sense, a community of inquiry is almost the opposite of the image of society implied by a strict rational-choice framework. Instead of autonomous utility maximizers exchanging scarce goods, you have people jointly investigating problems, revising beliefs, and creating new possibilities that did not previously exist.

The scarcity framework asks:

How should we divide what we already have?

The Deweyan framework often asks:

How can collective inquiry create something new?