manwithoutqualities

Blaise Cronin’s comments that the term social epistemology has provenance going back to the 1950s library science is absolutely correct.  The point that needs to be made, however, is that this “in vogue” term does not denote a unified tradition.

Given the rather amorphous and diffuse nature of social epistemology its domain, approach, structure and value are highly contested. This is reflected in the two approaches that inform social epistemology: the sociology of knowledge tradition and the classical analytical epistemology tradition with its new-found interest in the social dimensions to knowledge. Implicit in the former is that all knowledge is social in character and hence this tradition has a non-normative flavor to it: the tripartite concepts of truth, justification, and rationality, the sine qua non of orthodox epistemology going back to Plato, appear to be committed to normative nihilism. Indeed because of the downplaying or even dispensing of these concepts, some quarters within orthodox epistemology tend not even to recognize this project as epistemology. By the same token, many within the sociology of knowledge tradition consider the orthodox project as redundant and outmoded, unable to address the all pervasive role sociality has on human experience, its manifold practices and ultimately on knowledge and truth.

I have chosen to employ the distinction of philosophical social epistemology (PSE) to stand for the tradition variously known as ‘‘orthodox,’’ ‘‘analytical,’’ ‘‘classical’’ or ‘‘veritistic’’ social epistemology, and sociological social epistemology (SSE) to denote the sociological tradition. This is not to say that the latter is not or cannot be philosophical – it merely marks a difference in structural emphasis. While there is certainly a distinction to be drawn between PSE and SSE, the distinction is not as neat as many would like to believe: there are a bewildering number of cross-currents that feed into both variants of current social epistemology. PSE seeks to redress classical epistemology’s myopia in giving some credence to the view that individual belief is mediated by a social context.

In the complex term ‘‘social epistemology’’ does the element ‘‘social’’ denote a social aspect (the corollary being that there is a non-social aspect) or is all epistemology intrinsically social? How does one apportion the extent to which individuals’ cognitive states are causally dependent upon their social milieu? These are the central questions that animate meta-discussion of social epistemology and indeed in the philosophy of mind, manifest in the discussion between narrow and broad content in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.

For an overview of PSE see Alvin Goldman’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry.

The journal EPISTEME is PSE orientated; the journal referred to by Blaise Cronin, Social Epistemology, is primarily SSE orientated.