Socializing Epistemology: An Introduction through Two Sample Issues Frederick F. Schmitt Social epistemology is the conceptual and normative study of the ...

The main aim of this article is to analyze a recent text by Nenad Miščević dealing with social epistemology in the context of Foucault's theory of knowledge. In the first part, we briefly note Miščević's thoughts on the difference between analytic and continental philosophy and his thoughts on the latter. In the second part, we analyze both Miščević’s thesis about Foucault's dual understanding of knowledge and his placement of social epistemology as a proper framework for Foucault’s (...) concept of “new” knowledge. In opposition to Miščević's dualistic view, we are more inclined to accept Goldman’s characterization of Foucault’s position as a revisionist project in the context of standard analytical epistemology that legitimately embraces even very serious expansions of epistemological themes. Finally, we propose that Miščević’s dualistic interpretation reflects his general dualistic position concerning the previously described distinction between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy. (shrink)

This book examines the social epistemological issues relating to technology for the sake of providing insights toward public self-awareness and informing matters of education, policy, and public deliberation.

Social epistemology may be defined as the conceptual and normative study of the social dimensions of knowledge. It studies the bearing of social relations, interests, roles, and institutions – what I will term “social conditions” – on the conceptual and normative conditions of knowledge. It differs from the sociology of knowledge in being a conceptual and normative, and not primarily empirical, study, and in limning the necessary and not merely the contingent social conditions of (...) knowledge. The central question of social epistemology is whether, and to what extent, the conditions of knowledge include social conditions. Is knowledge a property of knowers in isolation from their social setting (and in what sense of “isolation”), or does it involve a relation between knowers and their social circumstances? This question can take various forms and admit diverse answers, depending on the kinds of knowers, knowledge, and social relations we ask about. (shrink)

Many extant theories of placebo focus on their causal structure wherein placebo effects are those that originate from select features of the therapy (e.g., client expectations or “incidental” features like size and shape). Although such accounts can distinguish placebos from standard medical treatments, they cannot distinguish placebos from everyday occurrences, for example, when positive feedback improves our performance on a task. Providing a social-epistemological account of a treatment context can rule out such occurrences, and furthermore reveal a new way (...) to distinguish clinical placebos from standard medical treatments. (shrink)

This paper suggests that virtue epistemology can help decide how to respond to conflicts between different epistemic goals for social media. It is a contribution to critical epistemology of social media insofar as it supplements system-level consideration with insights from individualist epistemology. In particular, whereas the proposal of critical social epistemology of social media by Joshua Habgood-Coote suggests that conflicts between epistemic goals of social media have to be solved by ethical (...) consideration, I suggest that virtue epistemology can also solve at least some of these conflicts fully within the epistemic realm. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the arguments relating to the extent and manner to which social influences enable epistemic agents.

Журнал «Социальная эпистемология» (Social Epistemology), основанный в 1987 г. Стивом Фуллером, стал своеобразным подиумом для демонстрации концепций, сформулированных в рамках этого направления. В статье мы рассматриваем некоторые проблемы, поднятые на страницах этого журнала за последние три года, и дискуссии относительно их решения. Становится ясным, что они представляют собой общефилософские вопросы, заслуживающие пристального рассмотрения и свежего взгляда нашего отечественного исследователя.

This paper explores the specific questions raised for social epistemology encountered in code and software. It does so because these technologies increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment, and stretch across all aspects of our lives. The paper introduces and explores the way in which code and software become the conditions of possibility for human knowledge, crucially becoming computational epistemes, which we share with non-human but crucially knowledge-producing actors. As such, we need to take account (...) of this new computational world and think about how we live today in a highly mediated code-based world. Nonetheless, here I want to understand software epistemes as a broad concept related to the knowledge generated by both human and non-human actors. The aim is to explore changes that are made possible by the installation of code/software via computational devices, streams, clouds or networks. This is what Mitcham calls a ?new ecology of artifice?. By exploring two case studies, the paper attempts to materialise the practice of software epistemologies through a detailed analysis. This analysis is then drawn together with a notion of compactants to explore how studying tracking software and streams is a useful means of uncovering the agency of software and code for producing these new knowledges. (shrink)

This is the first book to explore the connections and interactions between social epistemology and epistemic relativism. The essays in the volume are organized around three distinct philosophical approaches to this topic: 1) foundational questions concerning deep disagreement, the variability of epistemic norms, and the relationship between relativism and reliabilism; 2) the role of relativistic themes in feminist social epistemology; and 3) the relationship between the sociology of knowledge, philosophy of science, and social epistemology. (...) Recent trends in social epistemology seek to rectify earlier work that conceptualized cognitive achievements primarily on the level of isolated individuals. Relativism insists that epistemic judgements or beliefs are justified or unjustified only relative to systems of standards-there is not neutral way of adjudicating between them. By bringing together these two strands of epistemology, this volume offers unique perspectives on a number of central epistemological questions. Social Epistemology and Relativism will be of interest to researchers working in epistemology, feminist philosophy, and the sociology of knowledge. (shrink)

Looking broadly at the history of philosophy, I develop the ideas of 'cognitive management' and 'cognitive economy', which have always informed my conception of social epistemology. I elaborate two general tendencies, which have been also expressed in more conventional philosophical terms, such as Kant's famous contrast of 'rationalism' and 'empiricism'. The former tradition stresses the mind's capacity to remake the world in its own image, whereas the latter stresses the mind's receptiveness to the inherent character of the world. (...) In 'economic' terms, the resulting conceptions of knowledge are, respectively, 'demand' and 'supply' driven. In the former case, knowledge consists in the realization of the mind's own needs; in the latter, knowledge is proportionate what the world has to offer. In terms of access to ultimate truth, the former tends to overestimate (i.e. 'proactionary'), the latter to underestimate (i.e. 'precautionary'). I also discuss the idea of 'undiscovered public knowledge' as a pressing problem in cognitive management that relates to the scale and scope of the scientific enterprise in our time. (shrink)

Offers a vital, unique and agenda-setting perspective for the field of social epistemology – the philosophical basis for prescribing the social means and ends for pursuing knowledge.

Social Epistemology, as formulated by Steve Fuller, is based on the suggestion that rational knowledge policy must be held accountable to ‘brute facts’ about the nature of our human cognitive pursuits, whatever these may be. One difficulty for Fuller concerns the conception of the social which underwrites social epistemology. I argue that social epistemology conflates the social with human psychological properties that are available for public scrutiny and, accordingly, that social (...) class='Hi'>epistemology is best viewed as a brand of psychologism. Though Fuller's proposal signifies an important step in the ongoing attempt by scholars to eradicate the last traces of Descartes' epistemological device of a disembodiedres cogitans, I conclude that his conception of the social is too weak to serve as the basis for a socially-embedded discipline in anything but name only. (shrink)

What are the proper epistemic aims of social media sites? A great deal of social media critique presupposes an exceptionalist attitude, according to which social media is either uniquely good, or uniquely bad for our collective knowledge-generating practices. Exceptionalism about social media is troublesome, both because it leads to oversimplistic narratives, and because it prevents us making relevant comparisons to other epistemic systems. The goal of this chapter is to offer an anti-exceptionalist account of the epistemic (...) aims of social media. I will argue that social systems (and epistemic institutions in general) ought to pursue three distinct epistemic goals: promoting good epistemic outcomes for users, realising epistemically good institutional features, and achieving structural epistemic justice. Although these goals are often mutually supportive, I will consider a number of cases in which these values conflict. This means that there are epistemic dilemmas about how to design social media platforms (and other kinds of epistemic system) which can only be resolved by appealing to ethical considerations. This discussion highlights that just as in the political realm, there is no such thing as a neutral epistemic system. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has reflected a growing interest in the social dimension of the subject. This volume presents new work by leading philosophers on a wide range of topics in social epistemology, such as the nature of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, and the social genealogy of the concept of knowledge.

This paper reviews current debates in social epistemology about the relations ‎between ‎knowledge ‎and consensus. These relations are philosophically interesting on their ‎own, but ‎also have ‎practical consequences, as consensus takes an increasingly significant ‎role in ‎informing public ‎decision making. The paper addresses the following questions. ‎When is a ‎consensus attributable to an epistemic community? Under what conditions may ‎we ‎legitimately infer that a consensual view is knowledge-based or otherwise ‎epistemically ‎justified? Should consensus be the aim of scientific (...) inquiry, and if so, what ‎kind of ‎consensus? How should dissent be handled? It is argued that a legitimate inference ‎that a ‎theory is correct from the fact that there is a scientific consensus on it requires taking ‎into ‎consideration both cognitive properties of the theory as well as social properties of ‎the ‎consensus. The last section of the paper reviews computational models of ‎consensus ‎formation.‎. (shrink)

I argue that introspection recruits the same mental mechanism as that which is required for the production of ordinary speech acts. In introspection, in effect, we intentionally tell ourselves that we are in some mental state, aiming thereby to produce belief about that state in ourselves. On one popular view of speech acts, however, this is precisely what speakers do when speaking to others. On this basis, I argue that every bias discovered by social epistemology applies to introspection (...) and other forms of self-directed representation. If so, it becomes unclear in what sense social epistemology is social. (shrink)

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in epistemology.

In this essay Juho Ritola develops a justificationist approach to social epistemology, which holds that normatively satisfactory social processes pertaining to the acquisition, storage, dissemination, and use of knowledge must be evidence-based processes that include appropriate reflective attitudes by the relevant agents and, consequently, the relevant institutions. This implies that the teaching of critical thinking and reasoning in general should strive to bring about such attitudes in students. Ritola begins by sketching a justificationist approach and defending it (...) on a general level against the criticism posed by Alvin Goldman. He then defends it on the level of individual reasoners against the argument set out by Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout. Based on empirical evidence, Bishop and Trout argue that the kind of reflection advocated by a justificationist approach to reasoning leads to worse outcomes than the use of various statistical prediction rules. Ritola, in contrast, maintains that one cannot and should not replace critical reflection on evidence by a mechanical application of rules. Instead, he asserts, statistical prediction rules and empirical evidence regarding our reasoning performance are part of the total evidence that we should reflect on in our critical reasoning. (shrink)

Examining the origin and development of my views of social epistemology, I contrast my position with the position held by analytic social epistemologists. Analytic social epistemology (ASE) has failed to make significant progress owing, in part, to a minimal understanding of actual knowledge practices, a minimised role for philosophers in ongoing inquiry, and a focus on maintaining the status quo of epistemology as a field. As a way forward, I propose questions and future areas (...) of inquiry for a post-ASE to address. (shrink)

Much work performed under the banner of social epistemology still centers the problems of the individual cognitive agent. AU distinguishes multiple senses of "social," some of which are more social than others, and argues that different senses are at work in various contributions to social epistemology. Drawing on work in history and philosophy of science and addressing the literature on testimony and disagreement in particular, this paper argues for a more thoroughgoing approach in (...) class='Hi'>social epistemology. (shrink)

Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge ‎generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and ‎algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is ‎provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation ‎in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for ‎journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining (...) ‎knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition ‎and truth-seeking. This paper articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of ‎knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-‎mediated knowledge. ‎. (shrink)

The discussion is devoted to the notion of context and its use in connection to the notion of interdisciplinarity. These two notions are claimed to be crucial for understanding how “naturalization of social epistemology” can be possible and whether it can be exhausted by an interpretation of knowledge in social context and whether it has its own philosophical importance. These questions were initially raised in the works of I.Kasavin.

Any experimental field consists of preparing special conditions for examining interesting objects for research. So naturally, the particular ways in which scientists prepare their objects determine the kind and the content of knowledge produced. This book provides a framework for the analysis of experimental practices - the Social Epistemology of Experiment - that incorporates both the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ dimensions of knowledge production. The Social Epistemology of Experiment is applied to experimental economics and in (...) so doing, it introduces the epistemic role of the participation of human subjects in experiments and the causal efficacy of institutions in constraining and enabling human behaviour. It also develops the role of the social and socially established practices in overcoming the methodological difficulties associated with experimenting with humans subjects in the social sciences as well as the effect of scientists’ interventions in the laboratory worlds. This book provides an historical and contextualized account of the emergence of experimental economics, the methodological discussions that have informed and constituted it, its main research programmes, and stylized facts. The analysis of its three main research programmes – market experiments, game theory experiments and individual decision-making experiments – shows how economics experiments are particularly tailored to produce knowledge about market institutions and individual behaviour in contexts where there might be conflicts of individual and social goals, and also about the processes of individual decision-making. (shrink)

"Social epistemology" refers here to the work of analytic epistemologists and philosophers of science interested in providing an empirically adequate account of organized knowledge systems, with special emphasis on scientific inquiry. I critically survey the last ten years of this research. Unlike the pragmatist and Continental schools of philosophy, for which knowledge is "always already" social, progress in analytic social epistemology has been plagued by an oversharp distinction between individual and collective cognition; and a failure (...) to query the ends of science in addition to its means. Consequently, most analytic social epistemologists operate with a relatively weak sense of "normativity," one modelled more on taken-for-granted logical principles than legislated policy correctives. (shrink)

In his new book, Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History, Steve Fuller returns to core themes of his program of social epistemology that he first outlined in his 1988 book, Social Epistemology. He develops a new, unorthodox theology and philosophy building upon his testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in defense of intelligent design, leading to a call for maximal human experimentation. Beginning from the theological premise rooted in the Abrahamic religious tradition that we (...) are created in the image of God, Fuller argues that the spark of the divine within us distinguishes us from animals. I argue that Fuller’s recent work takes us away from key insights of his original work. In contrast, I advocate for a program of social epistemology rooted in evolutionary science rather than intelligent design, emphasize a precautionary and ecological approach rather than a proactionary approach that favors risky human experimentation, and attend to our material and sociological embeddedness rather than a transhumanist repudiation of the body. (shrink)

Locke's reputation as a sceptic regarding testimony, and the resultant mockery by epistemologists with social inclinations, is well known. In particular Michael Welbourne, in his article ‘The Community of Knowledge’ (1981), depicts Lockean epistemology as fundamentally opposed to a social conception of knowledge, claiming that he ‘could not even conceive of the possibility of a community of knowledge’. This interpretation of Locke is flawed. Whilst Locke does not grant the honorific ‘knowledge’ to anything short of certainty, he (...) nonetheless held what we would call ‘testimonial knowledge’ in appropriate esteem. This can be shown by his careful distinction between testimony and mere received opinion. Furthermore, this distinction is dependent upon a knowledge community which enables hearers of testimony to access alternative accounts. In view of this, we can consider Locke's Conduct of the Understanding in a new light. Dedicated to the autodidact adult, The Conduct directs the learner to reason clearly and well. One goal is to render adult students capable of assessing testimony. The advice given is social in nature. The student must not limit his study to ‘one sort of men or one sort of books’. Otherwise, he faces the sort of cognitive isolation which would render him a mere receiver of opinion. The picture of Locke that emerges is not that of a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic regarding testimonial knowledge, but of a philosopher who formed an embryonic social epistemology embedded within a programme of adult education. (shrink)

This book investigates how collaborative scientific practice yields scientific knowledge. At a time when most of today’s scientific knowledge is created in research groups, the author reconsiders the social character of science to address the question of whether collaboratively created knowledge should be considered as collective achievement, and if so, in which sense. Combining philosophical analysis with qualitative empirical inquiry, this book provides a comparative case study of mono- and interdisciplinary research groups, offering insight into the day-to-day practice of (...) scientists. The book includes field observations and interviews with scientists to present an empirically-grounded perspective on much-debated questions concerning research groups’ division of labor, relations of epistemic dependence and trust. (shrink)

The digital divide refers to inequalities in access to information technology. One of the main reasons why the digital divide is an important issue is that access to information technology has a tremendous impact on people's ability to acquire knowledge. According to Alvin Goldman (1999), the project of social epistemology is to identify policies and practices that have good epistemic consequences. In this paper, I argue that this sort of approach to social epistemology can help us (...) to decide on policies for dealing with the digital divide. I argue, however, that Goldman's specific proposals for evaluating policies are not adequate. I make an alternative proposal based on the work of John Rawls (1971) on distributive justice. (shrink)

Epistemology has historically focused on individual inquirers conducting their private intellectual affairs independently of one another. As a descriptive matter, however, what people believe and know is largely a function of their community and culture, narrowly or broadly construed. Most of what we believe is influenced, directly or indirectly, by the utterances and writings of others. So social epistemology deserves at least equal standing alongside the individual sector of epistemology.

Social epistemology is a wide-ranging field of study concerned with investigating how various social factors, practices, and institutions affect our prospects of gaining and spreading knowledge. Philosophers working in social epistemology have focused on a range of topics, including trust and testimony, the effects of social location on knowing, and whether or not groups of people can have knowledge that is not reducible to the knowledge of the individual members of the group. Much of (...) the work in social epistemology is not concerned specifically with science and scientists but, rather, with knowing agents in general. This chapter will be concerned narrowly with the social epistemology of scientific knowledge. After a brief discussion of Thomas Kuhn's contribution to the social epistemology of science, the chapter addresses the following issues: the ideal epistemic community; collaboration and trust; social values and bias; and science policy and expertise. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of methodology in the social epistemology of science. (shrink)

The literature in agent-based social simulation suggests that a model is validated when it is shown to ‘successfully’, ‘adequately’ or ‘satisfactorily’ represent the target phenomenon. The notion of ‘successful’, ‘adequate’ or ‘satisfactory’ representation, however, is both underspecified and difficult to generalise, in part, because practitioners use a multiplicity of criteria to judge representation, some of which are not entirely dependent on the testing of a computational model during validation processes. This article argues that practitioners should address social (...) class='Hi'>epistemology to achieve a deeper understanding of how warrants for belief in the adequacy of representation are produced. Two fundamental social processes for validation: interpretation and commensuration, are discussed to justify this claim. The analysis is advanced with a twofold aim. First, it shows that the conceptualisation of validation could greatly benefit from incorporating elements of social epistemology, for the criteria used to judge adequacy of representation are influenced by the social, cognitive and physical organisation of social simulation. Second, it evidences that standardisation tools such as protocols and frameworks fall short in accounting for key elements of social epistemology that affect different instances of validation processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new way to integrate historical accounts of social interaction in scientific practice with philosophical examination of scientific knowledge. The relation between descriptive accounts of scientific practice, on the one hand, and normative accounts of scientific knowledge, on the other, is a vexed one. This vexatiousness is one instance of the gap between normative and descriptive domains. The general problem of the normative/descriptive divide takes striking and problematic form in the case of social (...) aspects of scientific knowledge. With respect to this issue, history and philosophy of science appear starkly incompatible. I show how this dualism can be overcome, drawing on social action theory and the recent history of cellular immunology. (shrink)

An analysis of Steve Fuller’s social epistemology and epistemic agency.

Recent approaches to the social epistemology of belief formation have appealed to an epidemiological model, on which the mechanisms explaining how we form beliefs from our society or community along the lines of infectious disease. More specifically, Alvin Goldman (2001) proposes an etiology of (social) belief along the lines of an epistemological epidemiology. On this “contagion model,” beliefs are construed as diseases that infect people via some socio-epistemic community. This paper reconsiders Goldman’s epidemiological approach in terms of (...) epistemic trust. By focusing on beliefs as diseases, Goldman misconstrues and underestimates the central role that epistemic trust plays in their formation (maintenance, revision, etc.). I suggest that we put trust, accordingly, as the center of an epidemiological model of social doxology—epistemic trust, rather than beliefs, is the disease with which one is infected. So, contra Goldman, beliefs themselves aren’t the disease—they are symptoms. Trust, on this approach, can be viewed as a pathology. This point connects Annette Baier’s (1994) work on moral trust—taking a cue from her “pathologies of trust.” The real pathology centered in social doxology is the epistemic trust manifested by those beliefs. Accordingly, I shall explore (and tentatively defend) an epidemiological model for such “pathological” epistemic trust inspired by Baier’s work on moral trust, one which can more adequately account for the infectious epistemic trust at work in social belief formation. (shrink)

The project of veristic social epistemology is based on the evaluation of social practices directed at acquiring knowledge and avoiding error. This research aims to analyse the social and technological dimensions of information processes. A number of practices in the network environment have a significant impact on the cognitive processes of individuals. They give rise to the acquisition of both true and false beliefs, ranging from reliable information practices to unreliable disinformation practices. The prevalence of phenomena (...) such as echo chambers, fake news, clickbait or deepfakes indicates that the condition of the contemporary infosphere is under serious threat. Disinformation processes, reinforced by technological progress, prompt reflection on the reliability of social practices. In addition to the strictly veristic consequences, the importance of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice should also be pointed out. (shrink)

The dominant conception of delusion in psychiatry (in textbooks, research papers, diagnostic manuals, etc.) is predominantly epistemic. Delusions are almost always characterized in terms of their epistemic defects, i.e., defects with respect to evidence, reasoning, judgment, etc. However, there is an individualistic bias in the epistemic conception; the alleged epistemic defects and abnormalities in delusions relate to individualistic epistemic processes rather than social epistemic processes. We endorse the social epistemological turn in recent philosophical epistemology, and claim that (...) a corresponding turn is needed in the study of delusions. It is a turn from the (purely) individualistic conception, which characterizes delusions only by individualistic epistemic defects and abnormalities, to the (partially) social epistemic conception, which characterizes delusions by individualistic as well as social epistemic defects and abnormalities. This paper is intended as an initial step toward such a social epistemological turn. In particular, we will develop a new model of the development of delusions according to which testimonial abnormalities, including testimonial isolation and testimonial discount, are a causal factor in the development of delusions. (shrink)

What marks ours as the "post-epistemic era" is that it refuses to confer any special privilege on knowledge production as a social practice: whatever normative strictures apply to social practices in general, they apply specifically to epistemic practices as well. I trace how we have reached this state by distinguishing two conceptions of normativity in the history of epistemology: a top-down approach epitomized by Kant and Bentham, and a bottom-up approach associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. The advantage (...) of the latter is that it clearly distinguishes the emergence of norms from the conditions of their maintenance. I then show how more recent evolutionary epistemology has, in a pejorative way, "naturalized" socially constructed norms of cognitive competence, whereas the logical positivists — long the bane of "progressive" epistemologists — recognized the fully artificial character of epistemic norms and hence qualify as the first social epistemologists. (shrink)

The place of social epistemology within contemporary philosophy, as well as its relation to other academic disciplines, is the topic of an ongoing debate. One camp within that debate holds that social epistemology should be pursued strictly from within the perspective of individualistic analytic epistemology. In contrast, a second camp holds that social epistemology is an interdisciplinary field that should be given priority over traditional analytic epistemology, with the specific aim of radically (...) transforming the latter to fit the results and methodology of the former. We are rather suspicious of this apparent tension, which we believe can be significantly mitigated by paying attention to certain recent advances within philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Accordingly, we attempt to explain how extended knowledge, the result of combining active externalism from contemporary philosophy of mind with contemporary epistemology, can offer an alternative conception of the future of social epistemology. (shrink)

Epistemology needs a social branch to complement its traditional, ‘individualist’ branch. Like its individualist sister, social epistemology would be an evaluative enterprise. It would assess (actual and possible) social practices in terms of their propensities to promote or inhibit knowledge, where knowledge is understood in the sense of true belief. Social epistemology should examine the practices of many types of players, as well as technological and institutional structures: speakers, hearers, gate-keepers of communication (e.g., (...) editors, publishers, referees), communication technologies and their applications, and legal and economic arrangements that influence the epistemic quality of public speech. A mixture of analytical tools should be employed to assess practices in terms of their likely knowledge outcomes, tools that include Bayesian probability theory, economic theory, and empirical inquiry. (shrink)

Social epistemology is the normative theory of socioepistemic practices. Teaching is a socioepistemic practice, so educational practices belong on the agenda of social epistemology. A current question is whether intelligent design should be taught in biology classes. This paper focuses on the argument from “fairness” or “equal time.” The principal aim of education is knowledge transmission, but evidence renders it doubtful that giving intelligent design equal time would promote knowledge transmission. In making curricular decisions, boards of (...) education should consult the experts. Are novices capable of identifying genuine experts? This social epistemological question is answered affirmatively. (shrink)

Comparison of Steve Fuller's and Alvin Goldman's social epistemologies.