Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been enduringly influential in philosophy of science, challenging many common presuppositions about the nature of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. However, philosophers have misunderstood Kuhn's view, treating him as a relativist or social constructionist. In this book, Brad Wray argues that Kuhn provides a useful framework for developing an epistemology of science that takes account of the constructive role that social factors play in scientific inquiry. He examines the core (...) concepts of Structure and explains the main characteristics of both Kuhn's evolutionary epistemology and his social epistemology, relating Structure to Kuhn's developed view presented in his later writings. The discussion includes analyses of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the plate tectonics revolution in geology. The book will be useful for scholars working in science studies, sociologists and historians of science as well as philosophers of science. (shrink)

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

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)

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

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.

How do we form aesthetic judgements? And how should we do so? According to a very prominent tradition in aesthetics it would be wrong to form our aesthetic judgements about a particular object on the basis of anything other than first-hand acquaintance with the object itself (or some very close surrogate) and, in particular, it would be wrong to form such judgements merely on the basis of testimony. Further this tradition presupposes that our actual practice of forming aesthetic judgements typically (...) meets, or at least approximates, this ideal. In this paper I target this descriptive claim and argue—by appeal to some empirical work concerning belief polarization and echo chambers in aesthetics—that our actual practice of forming aesthetic judgements is heavily dependent on social sources such as testimony. I then briefly consider what normative implications this descriptive claim may have. (shrink)

"This collection is the first book-length examination of the various epistemological issues underlying legal trials. Trials are, among other things, centrally concerned with determining truth: whether a criminal defendant has in fact culpably committed the act of which they are accused, or whether a civil defendant is in fact responsible for the damages alleged by the plaintiff. But are trials truth-conducive? Assessing the value of trials as truth-seeking endeavors requires that we consider a host of underlying social epistemological questions. (...) The contributors to this volume address a number of these pressing questions, including but not limited to the following: How much credence should they give to eyewitness testimony? How should we balance the relative epistemic value of testimony offered by defense witnesses and prosecution witnesses? Are juries an effective means of arriving at justified beliefs about a defendant's guilt or innocence? When, if ever, is statistical information about a defendant's character relevant? What degree of certainty should we require to support a verdict of 'guilty'? How should standards of proof be interpreted for allegations that contain numerous discrete components? The Social Epistemology of Legal Trials will be of interest to scholars and upper-level students working on issues at the intersection of epistemology and philosophy of law"--. (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)

By exploring diverse and sometimes positive roles for ignorance, A Defense of Ignorance offers a revisionary approach to epistemology that challenges core assumptions about epistemic values. Townley contributes innovative ways of thinking about the practicalities and politics of knowledge and argues for an expanded domain of responsible epistemic conduct. All social scientists, especially those interested in knowledge and in feminist scholarship, stand to benefit from Townley's arguments.

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)

The dominant conception of delusion in psychiatry 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 individualistic conception, which characterizes delusions only by individualistic epistemic defects and abnormalities, to the 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)

I argue that introspection is a process which 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 and our aim is, thereby, to produce belief or knowledge about that state in ourselves. However, if we accept a popular theory of speech acts - so-called 'Gricean intentionalism' - this is precisely what speakers do when speaking to others, only (...) the addressee is different. On this basis, I argue that every bias or epistemic risk discovered by social epistemology will be applicable to introspection and other forms of self-directed representation. If so, it becomes unclear in what sense social epistemology is 'social,' but, more importantly, this result suggests that the field has been too narrowly construed and that its methods have direct application at the intrapersonal level. (shrink)

1. Mainstream Epistemology and Social Epistemology Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors largely followed this lead, so the history of epistemology, down to (...) our own time, has been a predominantly individualist affair. There are scattered exceptions. A handful of historical epistemologists gave brief space to the question of knowing, or believing justifiably, based on the testimony of others. Testimony-based knowledge would be one step into a more social epistemology. Hume took it for granted that we regularly rely on the factual statements of others, and argued that it is reasonable to do so if we have adequate reasons for trusting the veracity of these sources. However, reasons for such trust, according to Hume, must rest on personal observations of people’s veracity or reliability.1 Thomas Reid took a different view. He claimed that our natural attitude of trusting others is reasonable even if we know little if anything about others’ reliability. Testimony, at least sincere testimony, is always prima facie credible (Reid, 1970: 240-241). Here we have two philosophers of the 18th century both endorsing at least one element of what nowadays is called “social epistemology.” But these points did not much occupy either Hume’s or Reid’s corpus of philosophical writing; nor were these passages much studied or cited by their contemporaries and immediate successors. Fast forward now to the second half of the 20th century. Here we find intellectual currents pointing toward the socializing of epistemology. Several of these movements, however, were centered outside of philosophy and never adopted the label of “social epistemology,” or adopted it only belatedly. (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)

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)

Information providing and gathering increasingly involve technologies like search ‎engines, which actively shape their epistemic surroundings. Yet, a satisfying account ‎of the epistemic responsibilities associated with them does not exist. We analyze ‎automatically generated search suggestions from the perspective of social ‎epistemology to illustrate how epistemic responsibilities associated with a ‎technology can be derived and assigned. Drawing on our previously developed ‎theoretical framework that connects responsible epistemic behavior to ‎practicability, we address two questions: first, given the different technological (...) ‎possibilities available to searchers, the search technology, and search providers, ‎who should bear which responsibilities? Second, given the technology’s ‎epistemically relevant features and potential harms, how should search terms be ‎autocompleted? Our analysis reveals that epistemic responsibility lies mostly with ‎search providers, which should eliminate three categories of autosuggestions: those ‎that result from organized attacks, those that perpetuate damaging stereotypes, and ‎those that associate negative characteristics with specific individuals.‎. (shrink)

Medieval epistemology begins as ideal theory: when is one ideally situated with regard to one's grasp of the way things are? Taking as their starting point Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, scholastic authors conceive of the goal of cognitive inquiry as the achievement of scientia, a systematic body of beliefs, grasped as certain, and grounded in demonstrative reasons that show the reason why things are so. Obviously, however, there is not much we know in this way. The very strictness of this (...) ideal in fact gives rise to a body of literature on how Aristotle's framework might be relaxed in various ways, for certain specific purposes. In asking such questions, scholastic authors are in effect pursuing the project of social epistemology, by trying to adapt their ideal theory to the circumstances of everyday life. (shrink)

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

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)

In this combined examination of the history, theories, and practices in the teaching of English, the author presents compelling insight and practical solutions to the crisis in English education and the conflict among critical theories, radical pedagogy, classroom practice, epistemics, the pressure to vocationalize the curriculum, and the corporatization of institutes of learning.

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)

In the past two decades, epistemologists have significantly expanded the focus of their field. To the traditional question that has dominated the debate — under what conditions does belief amount to knowledge? — they have added questions about testimony, epistemic virtues and vices, epistemic trust, and more. This broadening of the range of epistemic concern has coincided with an expansion in conceptions of epistemic agency beyond the individualism characteristic of most earlier epistemology. We believe that these developments have not (...) gone far enough. While the weak anti-individualism we see in contemporary epistemology may be adequate for the kinds of cases it tends to focus on, a great deal of human knowledge production and transmission does not conform to these models. Furthermore, the dispositions and norms that are knowledge-conducive in the familiar cases may not be knowledge-conducive generally. In fact, dispositions that, at an individual level, count as epistemic vices may be epistemic virtues in common social contexts. We argue that this overlooked feature of human social life means that epistemology must become more deeply and pervasively social. (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)

The Future of Social Epistemology: A Collective Vision sets an agenda for exploring the future of what we – human beings reimagining our selves and our society – want, need and ought to know. The book examines, concretely, practically and speculatively, key ideas such as the public conduct of philosophy, models for extending and distributing knowledge, the interplay among individuals and groups, risk taking and the welfare state, and envisioning people and societies remade through the breakneck pace of (...) scientific and technological change. An international team of contributors offers a ‘collective vision’, one that speaks to what they see unfolding and how to plan and conduct the dialogue and work leading to a knowable and desirable world. The book describes and advances an intellectual agenda for the future of social epistemology. (shrink)

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)

A conception of legitimacy is at the core of normative theories of democracy. Many different conceptions of legitimacy have been put forward, either explicitly or implicitly. In this article, I shall first provide a taxonomy of conceptions of legitimacy that can be identified in contemporary democratic theory. The taxonomy covers both aggregative and deliberative democracy. I then argue for a conception of democratic legitimacy that takes the epistemic dimension of public deliberation seriously. In contrast to standard interpretations of epistemic democracy, (...) however, the conception I put forward avoids procedure-independent standards of correctness. Instead, it relies on a procedural social epistemology and defines legitimacy entirely in terms of the fairness of procedures. I call this conception of democratic legitimacy `Pure Epistemic Proceduralism'. I shall argue that it should be preferred over `Rational Epistemic Proceduralism', the conception of legitimacy that underlies the standard interpretation of epistemic democracy. Key Words: legitimacy • deliberative democracy • epistemic democracy • social epistemology. (shrink)

In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within the (...) contemporary discussion of the epistemology of testimony—a presumption that I will term the personalist requirement—fails to account for those very practices of knowers that I detail here. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternate account of testimonial warrant, one that has heretofore been underappreciated, ought to be given more serious consideration—in particular because it is well suited to account for those actual practices of knowers that the personalist requirement leaves unrecognized. (shrink)

This chapter examines some key developments in discussions of the social dimensions of knowing-how, focusing on work on the social function of the concept of knowing-how, testimony, demonstrating one's knowledge to other people, and epistemic injustice. I show how a conception of knowing-how as a form of 'downstream knowledge' can help to unify various phenomena discussed within this literature, and I also consider how these ideas might connect with issues concerning wisdom, moral knowledge, and moral testimony.

Journal peer review is an essential part of academic practices.1 But how well does it serve its purpose and which factors have an influence on how close it comes to achieving its aims? Peer review has been widely discussed in empirical literature: it has been studied both qualitatively and quantitatively (e.g., by Cole, who in his 1992 book uses data on how grant applications submitted to National Science Foundation were...

This article is a response to William Lynch’s, ‘Social Epistemology Transformed: Steve Fuller’s Account of Knowledge as a Divine Spark for Human Domination,’ an extended and thoughtful reflection on my Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History. I grant that Lynch has captured well, albeit critically, the spirit and content of the book – and the thirty-year intellectual journey that led to it. In this piece, I respond at two levels. First, I justify my posture towards my predecessors and (...) contemporaries, which Lynch shrewdly sees as my opposition to deference. However, most of the response concerns an elaboration of my theodicy-focussed sense of social epistemology, which is long-standing but only started to become prominent about ten years ago, in light of my involvement in the evolution controversies. Here I aim to draw together a set of my abiding interests – scientific, theological and philosophical – in trying to provide a normative foundation for the future of humanity. (shrink)

Social epistemology existed in the scholastic tradition in the shape of doctrines on the legitimate use of probable opinions. Medieval scholasticism had developed sophisticated approaches in this respect, but the apogee of scholastic theoretical reflection on social epistemology occurred in the Baroque era and its Catholic moral theology. The huge debate on probable opinions at that time produced the most far-reaching and deepest investigations into the moral and epistemological foundations and limitations of opinion-based, reasonable discourse prior (...) to the late twentieth century. It is time to recover the arguments and claims of Baroque scholastic social epistemology, not only to fill a lacuna in intellectual history but also to see whether some of its challenges are still with us today. (shrink)

This essay argues that the really useful character of reflexivity is that it enables a radical critique of representation and its conventional material and rhetorical practices. It is uniquely able to produce paradox and thus disrupt discourses by undermining authorial privilege. Because Fuller's social epistemology is insensitive to its own reflexive implications, and limits itself to normative questions about knowledge policy, it is too limited — and limiting — to provide a context that can nurture reflexivity.

Fuller's program of social epistemology engages a rhetoric of inquiry that can be usefully compared and contrasted with other discursive theories of knowledge, such as that of Richard Rorty. Resisting the model of “conversation,” Fuller strikes an activist posture and lays the groundwork for normative “knowledge policy,” in which persuasion and credibility play key roles. The image of investigation is one that overtly rejects the “storehouse” conception of knowledge and invokes the metaphors of distributive economics. Productive questions arise (...) as to how notions of creation and distribution might guide this rhetoric. (shrink)

We monitor the informational environment and catch reputational cues, gather signals from our informants and develop our trustful attitudes in context. I present an epistemology of reputation as a way of using social configurations to acquire information. I review the definitions of reputation that exist in the social sciences, stress the importance of the relational/social dimension of reputation as a property of entities, and put forward a definition of reputation suitable for epistemology. I then sketch (...) social configurations that allow us to extract reputational information and some typical heuristics we use to navigate the social information around us. (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)

What are the proper epistemic aims of social media sites? A great deal of social media critique is in the grips of an Epistemic Apocalypse narrative, which claims that the technologies associated with social media have catastrophically undermined our traditional knowledge-generating practices, and that the remedy is to recreate our pre-catastrophe practices as closely as possible. This narrative relies on a number of questionable assumptions, and problematically narrows the imaginative possibilities for redesigning social media. Our goal (...) in this paper is to shake off the epistemic apocalypse narrative and offer a better account of the epistemic aims of social media. I will pursue a critical approach to social epistemology that appreciates the non-ideal features of epistemic systems, and the ways in which knowledge production can be a site of domination, and apply this framework to thinking about the epistemic design of social media sites. I will argue that social systems 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 lead to dilemmas about how to design epistemic institutions, which can only be resolved by appealing to ethical considerations. I will close by considering some ways in which social media might realise these aims. (shrink)

This paper highlights some connections between work on truth approximation and work in social epistemology, in particular work on peer disagreement. In some of the literature on truth approximation, questions have been addressed concerning the efficiency of research strategies for approximating the truth. So far, social aspects of research strategies have not received any attention in this context. Recent findings in the field of opinion dynamics suggest that this is a mistake. How scientists exchange and take into (...) account information about each others’ beliefs may greatly influence the accuracy and speed with which the scientific community as a whole approximates the truth. On the other hand, social epistemologists concerned with peer disagreement have so far neglected the question of how practices of responding to disagreements with peers fare with respect to the goal of approximating the truth. Again, work on opinion dynamics shows that this may be a mistake, and that how we ought to respond to disagreements with our peers may depend on the specific purposes of our investigations. (shrink)