SOCIAL KNOWING: THE SOCIAL SENSE OF ‘SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE’

Synthese

From its inception in 1987 social epistemology has been divided into analytic (ASE) and critical (CSE) approaches, represented by Alvin I. Goldman and Steve Fuller, respectively. In this paper, the agendas and some basic ideas of ASE and CSE are compared and assessed by bringing into the discussion also other participants of the debates on the social aspects of scientific knowledgeamong them Raimo Tuomela, Philip Kitcher and Helen Longino. The six topics to be analyzed include individual and collective epistemic agents; the notion of scientific community; realism and constructivism; truth-seeking communities; epistemic and social values; science, experts, and democracy.

In the context of most social theories, perhaps with the exemption of variants of Marxism, the matter of knowledge has not been treated as problematic. The central hypothesis of this paper, and thus of a theory of modern society as a knowledge society, however is that knowledge, and not nature, accidents, violence, catastrophes, power, etc., is more than ever the basis and guide of human action in all areas of contemporary society. The study of knowledge societies is a response to the fundamental observation that modern science is by no means, as is still often assumed, only the key and access to the mysteries of nature and human behavior, but above all the becoming of a world: Knowledge as a motor, not just a camera (cf. MacKenzie, 2006). The extraordinary importance of scientific knowledge in particular does not mean, however, that it will succeed in simply overrunning traditional ways of life and attitudes, as has been hoped or feared time and again.

Frontiers in Psychology , 2022

A three-tiered account of social cognition is set out-along with the corresponding variety of social knowledge that results from this social cognition-and applied to the special case of scientific collaboration. The first tier is socially-facilitated cognition, which results in socially-facilitated knowledge. This is a form of cognition which, while genuinely social (in that social factors play an important explanatory role in producing the target cognitive success), falls short of socially extended cognition. The second tier is socially extended cognition, which generates socially extended knowledge. This form of cognition is social in the specific sense of the information-processing of other agents forms part of the socially extended cognitive process at issue. It is argued, however, that the core notion of socially extended cognition is individual in nature, in that the target cognitive success is significantly creditable to the socially extended cognitive agency of the individual. Socially extended cognition, in its core sense, thus generates individual knowledge. Finally, there is distributed cognition, which generates distributed knowledge. This is where the cognitive successes produced by a research team are attributable to a group agent rather than to individuals within the team. Accordingly, where this form of social cognition generates knowledge (distributed knowledge), the knowledge is irreducibly group knowledge. It is argued that by making clear this threetiered structure of social scientific knowledge a prima facie challenge is posed for defenders of distributed scientific cognition and knowledge to explain why this form of social knowledge is being exhibited and not one of the two weaker (and metaphysically less demanding) forms of social knowledge.

Study of the social dimensions of scientific knowledge encompasses the effects of scientific research on human life and social relations, the effects of social relations and values on scientific research, and the social aspects of inquiry itself. Several factors have combined to make these questions salient to contemporary philosophy of science. These factors include the emergence of social movements, like environmentalism and feminism, critical of mainstream science; concerns about the social effects of science-based technologies; epistemological questions made salient by big science; new trends in the history of science, especially the move away from internalist historiography; anti-normative approaches in the sociology of science; turns in philosophy to naturalism and pragmatism. This entry reviews the historical background to current research in this area and features of contemporary science that invite philosophical attention. The philosophical work can roughly be classified into two camps. One acknowledges that scientific inquiry is in fact carried out in social settings and asks whether and how standard epistemology must be supplemented to address this feature. The other treats sociality as a fundamental aspect of knowledge and asks how standard epistemology must be modified from this broadly social perspective. Concerns in the supplementing approach include such matters as trust and answerability raised by multiple authorship, the division of cognitive labor, the reliability of peer review, the challenges of privately funded science, as well as concerns arising from the role of scientific research in society. The reformist approach highlights the challenge to normative philosophy from social, cultural, and feminist studies of science while seeking to develop philosophical models of the social character of scientific knowledge, and treats the questions of the division of cognitive labor, expertise and authority, the interactions of science and society, etc., from the perspective of philosophical models of the irreducibly social character of scientific knowledge. 1. Historical Background Philosophers who study the social character of scientific knowledge can trace their lineage at least as far as John Stuart Mill. Mill, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Karl Popper all took some type of critical interaction among persons as central to the validation of knowledge claims. Mill's arguments occur in his well-known political essay On Liberty, (Mill 1859) rather than in the context of his logical and methodological writings, but he makes it clear that they are to apply to any kind of knowledge or truth claim. Mill argues from the fallibility of human knowers to the necessity of unobstructed opportunity for and practice of the critical discussion of ideas. Only such critical discussion can assure us of the justifiability of the (true) beliefs we do have and can help us avoid falsity or the partiality of belief or opinion framed in the context of just one point of view. Critical interaction maintains the freshness of our reasons and is instrumental in the improvement of both the content and the reasons of our beliefs. The achievement of knowledge, then, is a social or collective, not an individual, matter. Peirce's contribution to the social epistemology of science is commonly taken to be his consensual theory of truth: " The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by truth, and the object represented is the real. " (Peirce 1878, 133) While often read as meaning that the truth is whatever the community of inquirers converges on in the long run, the notion is interpretable as meaning more precisely either that truth (and " the real ") depends on the agreement of the community of inquirers or that it is an effect of the real that it will in the end produce agreement among inquirers. Whatever the correct reading of this particular statement, Peirce elsewhere makes it clear that, in his view, truth is both attainable and beyond the reach of any individual. " We individually cannot hope

Erkenntnis, 2018

Bird's (2010; 2014) account of social knowledge (SK) denies that scientific social knowledge supervenes solely on the mental states of individuals. Lackey (2014) objects that SK cannot accommodate 1) a knowledge-action principle and 2) the role of group defeaters. I argue that Lackey's knowledge-action principle is ambiguous. On one disambiguation, it is false; on the other, it is true but poses no threat to SK. Regarding group defeaters, I argue that there are at least two options available to the defender of SK, both taken from literature on individual defeaters and applied to group defeaters. Finally, I argue that Lackey's description of the case of Dr. N. – as a case in which the scientific community does not know but is merely in a position to know – is mistaken. It assumes that Dr. N.'s publication is not scientific knowledge. An analogy to the individual case shows that it is plausible that the scientific community is not merely in a position to know, although its members are. This leaves intact a conception of social knowledge on which it does not supervene on the mental states of individuals.

Radical Philosophy, 1989

The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms that ...

Analytic Philosophy, 2021

While social epistemology is a diverse field, much of it still understands knowledge as an individual status—albeit an individual status that crucially depends on various social factors (such as testimony). Further, the literature on group knowledge until now has primarily focused on limited, specialized groups that may be said to know this or that as a group. I wish to argue, to the contrary, that all knowledge-attributions ascribe a collective status; and that this follows more or less directly from an essential function of entitlement-ascriptions: Ascriptions of knowledge and entitlement serve a primarily social function in that they facilitate coordination by maintaining consensus around true beliefs, true theories, and truth-producing methodologies. This conclusion will shed light on ways in which traditional theories of knowledge (such as foundationalism and coherentism) fail to capture a central function of our epistemic practice.

Revista Pesquisa em Fisioterapia, 2017

Episteme

Psychological-epistemic accounts take scientific progress to consist in the development of some psychological-epistemic attitude. Disagreements over what the relevant attitude is – true belief, knowledge, or understanding – divide proponents of the semantic, epistemic, and noetic accounts of scientific progress, respectively. Proponents of all such accounts face a common challenge. On the face of it, only individuals have psychological attitudes. However, as I argue in what follows, increases in individual true belief, knowledge, and understanding are neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific progress. Rather than being fatal to the semantic, epistemic, and noetic accounts, this objection shows that these accounts are most plausible when they take the psychological states relevant to scientific progress to be states of communities, rather than individuals. I draw on recent work in social epistemology to develop two ways in which communities can be the bearers of irreducible ps...