Generating Scientific 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

2017

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book dramatically develops Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a new philosophy of science, which I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a new conception of rationality – aim-oriented rationalism – which has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions. The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. That there is indeed much to be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress was the big idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. This was immensely influential. But the philosophes of the Enlightenment made mistakes, and these mistakes, inherited from the Enlightenment, are built into the institutional and intellectual structure of academic inquiry today. In his two great works, The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper corrected some of the mistakes of the Enlightenment – mistakes about the nature of scientific method and rationality. But Popper left other mistakes undetected and uncorrected. The present book seeks to push the Popperian research programme further, and correct what Popper left uncorrected. The fundamental idea that emerges is that there is an urgent need to bring about a revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of promoting wisdom and not just acquiring knowledge – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.

Journal of Philosophical Investigations , 2023

The paper offers a distinctive reading of Popper’s work, suggesting that his Logic of Scientific Discovery (LScD) might be re-interpreted in the light of his Open Society. Indeed, Popper can be interpreted as criticising certain aspects of his first book, and as a result improving upon them, in his second. It suggests translating what Popper says about ‘conventions’ into his later vocabulary of ‘social institutions’. Looking back, I believe that Popper never intended the language of conventions and decisions to be read individualistically. I remain unsure whether Popper was himself quite as clear about this as he could have been. My reading makes Popper a pioneer in the sociology of science. Scientific institutions are arenas of political power; but Popper did not discuss the structure and inter-relations of the social institutions of science, or offer a politics of science in the context of his methodology. What is missing from the skeletal sociology of LScD is the politics. We could put it in Popperian terms this way: scientific institutions are both open and closed. They are closed, firmly, to the inexpert, to the non-members; supposedly they are open to the qualified, provided the prerogatives of seniority and leadership are acknowledged. Despite these shortcomings, Popper’s critical and rational approach and his insistence on openness and intellectual honesty are still important today.

The widespread impression that recent philosophy of science has pioneered exploration of the ''social dimensions of scientific knowledge'' is shown to be in error, partly due to a lack of appreciation of historical precedent, and partly due to a misunderstanding of how the social sciences and philosophy have been intertwined over the last century. This paper argues that the referents of ''democracy'' are an important key in the American context, and that orthodoxies in the philosophy of science tend to be molded by the actual regimes of science organization within which they are embedded. These theses are illustrated by consideration of three representative philosophers of science:

Journal of Chemical Education, 1971

International journal of innovative research and development, 2017

Science and its products have tremendous impact on our lives and how we influence our immediate environment and the world at large. The importance of science goes far beyond how the product of science and technology influence us. Science, as compared to other areas of study or institutions, enjoys an unparalleled prestige in society (Delfino, 2014). This is why nations are making every effort to provide funding for science and technology projects and research, and provide incentives and scholarships to those who have chosen to study science. No wonder people trust what the scientist says than what a farmer, journalist, politician or businessman will say, even though the scientists may be not be saying so much. People often ask whether what is being said is scientifically proven. Science is seen by many as a highly rational and non-subjective inquiry, and scientists are seen as people who are able to collect, infer from evidence, and depend on evidence to derive 'scientifically proven' conclusion. The scientifically proven conclusions are devoid of prejudice and are not the product of ideology. Somehow these characteristics are paramount in the philosophy of science. According to Makumba (2005), philosophy of science may be looked at in three ways. First, as the formulation of worldviews that are consistent with important scientific theories as "an exposition of the presuppositions and predispositions of scientists" (p. 74) and thirdly as a discipline in which concepts and theories in the field of the sciences are critically analyzed and clarified. Philosophy of science may either be epistemology or metaphysics. Whichever way we look at the philosophy of science the general aim is to describe and understand how science works within all of its branches. We may have philosophical interest in Science because of the influence of science on us, but besides this, science answers some philosophical questions and is therefore important to philosophy. One of such questions has to do with the ways by which we can gain knowledge as opposed to beliefs and opinions (Mingers, 2008) and the general answer to such a question is that the scientific method must be followed. Whatever a government may believe, be it right or wrong, about the effects of filth on beaches, it will not act till science provides evidence in support of such belief. The views of scientist are accorded respect due to the fact that conclusions drawn by scientists are reached through proper and standard methods of collecting and analyzing evidence, and hence the conclusions of scientists are justified. Even in some cases, the conclusions are tested with the intention of making them false. Since Francis Bacon proposed the 'scientific method', it has been subjected to criticism, like that of Hume and Popper. It has seen modifications and alternatives, like the falsificationism doctrine Karl Popper preached. This essay discusses the philosophy of science by looking at two major areas; the scientific method and the growth 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.

Revista Pesquisa em Fisioterapia, 2017

Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 1994

Science & Education

Scientific research is a human endeavour, performed by communities of people. Disproportionate focus on only some of the features related to this obvious fact has been used to discredit the reliability of scientific knowledge and to relativize its value when compared with knowledge stemming from other sources. This epistemic relativism is widespread nowadays and is arguably dangerous for our collective future, as the threat of climate change and its denialism clearly shows. In this work, we argue that even though the social character of science is indeed real, it does not entail epistemic relativism with respect to scientific knowledge, but quite the opposite, as there are several characteristic behaviours of this specific human community that were built to increase the reliability of scientific outputs. Crucially, we believe that present-day scientific education is lacking in the description and analysis of these particularities of the scientific community as a social group and that further investing in this area could greatly improve the possibilities of critical analysis of the often very technical issues that the citizens and future citizens of our modern societies have to confront.