Social epistemology: What’s in it for psychologists?

Abstract

Social epistemology (the name of both a journal and a book [Fuller 1988; also Fuller 1989]) is an interdisciplinary project that mobilizes the empirical resources of the "sociology of knowledge" (understood very broadly to include social and cognitive psychology and the social history of intellectual life) for the purposes of informing a normative philosophy of science. Put simply, then, the social epistemologist gives informed advice on how inquiry should be conducted. Because of its prescriptive character, social epistemology is nowadays most naturally seen as a branch of philosophy. However, the social epistemologist differs from most other philosophical theorists of knowledge in two respects.First, she accepts the empirical methods and findings of the human sciences as constraining the nature of the advice she gives. No doubt, to psychologists this is just to concede the obvious. After all, what good would a norm or method be that people could not follow because it exceeded their cognitive capabilities? Yet the history of epistemological speculation has largely gone against this pragmatic sensibility. From Descartes onward, it has been argued that the imperfections and limitations of actual human beings are sufficiently variable, and the possibilities for improvement sufficiently great, that one might as well devise norms and methods that would lead an idealized inquirer to greater knowledge. The social epistemologist finds this position not only scientifically unsound but also politically naive, especially in its suggestion that people would automatically submit to a method that has been determined to be the most efficient means of solving their problems.The second respect in which the social epistemologist differs from more conventional colleagues is in her broadening the normative enterprise to include considerations of the ends of inquiry, which is to say, the reasons why we might be interested in pursuing knowledge. As opposed to most of her fellow philosophers (an exception is Laudan 1984Laudan , 1987, the social epistemologist does not recognize "truth" or "the representation of reality"