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Social epistemology addresses questions of the organization of knowledge processes and products. The field reflects an interdisciplinary gap between philosophy and sociology: Philosophy tends to stress normative approaches without considering their empirical realizability or political consequences. Sociology suffers the reverse problem of capturing the empirical and ideological character of knowledge, but without offering guidance on how knowledge policy should be conducted; hence the debilitating sense of relativism” traditionally associated with the sociology of knowledge.
From the nineteenth century onward, epistemologies descended from French positivism and German idealism have consistently stressed the systematic and collective character of knowledge. In contrast, Anglo-American philosophy has remained wedded to the individual – be it Cartesian or Darwinian – as the paradigm case of the knower. In this context, social epistemology” is explicitly designed to redress the balance.
Social epistemologies may be compared in terms of the presumptive answers they provide to the following research questions:
- Are the norms of inquiry autonomous from the norms governing the rest of society?
- Is there anything more to a ”form of inquiry” than the manner in which inquirers are arranged?
- Do truth and the other normative aims of science remain unchanged as particular forms of inquiry come and go?
- Is there anything more to the problem of knowledge” than a matter of whose actions are licensed on the basis of which claims made under what circumstances?
- Is the social character of knowledge reducible to the aggregated beliefs of some group of individuals?
- Is social epistemology’s purview limited to the identification of mechanisms and institutions that meet conceptually satisfying definitions of knowledge?
Bibliography:
- Fuller, S. (1988) Social Epistemology. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
- Harding, S. (1991) Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
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