科学哲学ニューズレター

No.18, September 1997

Tetsuji Iseda: Can epistemology be social?: A review of recent attempts in social epistemology

Can epistemology be social?: A review of recent attempts in social epistemology

Tetsuji Iseda
University of Maryland at College Park

The recent development of Science Studies has stimulated many people to do interdisciplinary studies on science, and philosophers are no exceptions. Especially since the late eighties, philosophers inspired by SSK (sociology of scientific knowledge) works have been attempting to incorporate sociological insights into epistemological arguments. The purpose of this paper is to review some of these attempts. First, I analyze attempts in socialized epistemology as an extension of naturalized epistemology. A.I. Goldman and Philip Kitcher are representative people in this trend, and I also include David Hull in this category despite some differences between his approach and others'. Then, as an alternative to the above approach, I summarize Steve Fuller's social epistemology ('socialized epistemology' and 'social epistemology' are usually used interchangeably in the literature, but in this paper I use these terms to distinguish Fuller's view from the other approach). My conclusion is that both of these attempts have problems to overcome.

1. Socialized epistemology

1-1. From naturalized to socialized epistemology

Many philosophers have been trying to extend naturalized epistemology by incorporating sociological (and sometimes economic) insights into it. Naturalized epistemology was proposed by Quine in his paper "Epistemology naturalized" (1969) and has been developed by A.I. Goldman and others. There are many different trends in naturalistic approach, but several typical features should be mentioned here. First, naturalized epistemology regards the failures of traditional epistemology as the failure of foundationalism that seeks a firm foundation of knowledge. proposes to give up foundationalism itself. Rather, according to this view, we need to start by taking a large par t of science (especially psychology) for granted to do epistemology. Thus, Quine proposes that epistemology should be a behavioristic study of the relation between theory and evidence, and most naturalized epistemologists after him emphasize the importance of cognitive science in epistemology. Since epistemology is supposed to assess the validity of scientific knowledge, this means a circular relationship between science and epistemology. Nevertheless, if foundationalism is really hopeless, then maybe circularity is not that bad after all. Second, in naturalistic approach, justification is defined in term s of psychological states or processes (Kim 1988, 48). A typical definition is reliabilism: our belief is justified if it results from a reliable belief forming process, and a process is reliable if the process tends to produce tru e beliefs (Goldman 1992, 112-125). Our scientific knowledge is used to distinguish true beliefs from false ones. Finally, even though many naturalize d epistemologists, unlike Quine himself, recognize the importance of the normative task of epistemology, they still try to restrict the scope of normative judgment to actual psychological processes in various ways (Kornblit h 1994a nicely summarizes these various arguments) . A good example is what Fuller calls the "ought implies can" principle (Fuller 1992, 442). That is, when it is hard for people not to use a certain psychological process, they do not have the obligation not to use it, whether it is problematic or not. For example, many psychologists have studied the so-called "availability heuristic," namely the phenomena that people tend to assign a higher frequency to things which come to mind more easily than they do to other things (Tversky and Kahneman 1973, Nisbett and Ross 1980). This heuristic sometimes leads us t o an erroneous assessment of frequency, but Goldman argues that we don't have th e obligation to avoid it, if the heuristic is as stubborn as psychological studies suggest (Goldman 1992, 173-174).

Naturalized epistemology usually deals with individual psychological processes , but it is not hard to extend the scope of naturalistic arguments to the consensus formation process of a scientific community, and this is what socialized epistemology is about. The following subsections deal with three proponents of such social approach.

1-2. Goldman's 'social epistemics'

A.I. Goldman is not only a leading proponent of naturalized epistemology, but also a pioneer in the field of socialized epistemology (which he calls 'social epistemics'). He argues that there are a couple of reasons why epistemologists should be interested in sociology (Goldman 1992, 179-183). The first is that there are many potential cases of belief formation in which a social explanation is appropriate. Even rational beliefs call for a social explanatio n when we need to look at interpersonal influences among scientists. Second, sociological considerations are relevant to the normative aspects of epistemology, when we want to evaluate the epistemic merits of different socia l institutions.

Goldman considers four alternative bases for such an evaluative task, namely relativism, consensualism, expertism, and veritism. He finds difficulties with the first three, and endorses veritism, according to which social practices or institutions should be evaluated in terms of production of true beliefs. Obviously this is an extension of his reliabilism, but in this case Goldman thinks that justification is too narrow a concept to evaluate a social practice. He would rather talk about the "intellectual strength" of a practice , namely its reliability, power, fecundity, speed, and efficiency, in producing true beliefs (ibid. 195; a similar, but more clear-cut reliabilist approach is advocated in Kornblith 1994b). To apply these criteria, we need to assess the truth value of beliefs, and this assessment is done through established scientific procedures (205). Again he does not seem to think that this circularity is problematic (206).

Beside the above meta-level argument, Goldman did an interesting study on the belief formation process with an economist, M. Shaked (1991). This is an analysis of the credit-seeking activity of scientists. Goldman and Shaked firs t give a formal definition of credit (232). A contribution gets credit in accordance with the degree to which it changes other scientists' degree of belief that a certain theory is true. If scientists seek credit in this sense, then their activity can lead to more true beliefs when several further assumptions are met: such as that scientists are generally Baysians, and the likelihood assessment of the scientific community is objective enough. They obtain several interesting results with this model. For example, they show tha t the credit-seeking activity of scientists can lead to more true beliefs than genuine truth-seeking activity, under some specific conditions.

What is the point of such an analysis? Obviously their definition of credit is too artificial to be regarded as a description of actual credits recognized by scientists. On the other hand, they seem to avoid making normative judgments i n this paper. It seems to me that their purpose is to reconcile two views of science, namely scientists as those motivated by non-epistemic goals (as sociologists claim) and science as an efficient epistemic enterprise (as philosophers tend to believe).

1-3. Kitcher and division of cognitive labor

Philip Kitcher's elaborate analysis of the social dimension of scientific communities is another representative work in this field (Kitcher 1990, 1993).

Kitcher uses a variant of reliabilism as his standard of rationality, accordin g to which the rationality of a procedure of conceptual change is judged in term s of the ratio of progressive change, and progress is in turn judged in terms of the attainment of significant truth (his own formulations are fairly complicated; see Kitcher 1993, ch.4, ch.6). This standard is applied to both individual cognitive processes and scientific communities, but here we are concerned with the latter.

Kitcher is especially interested in the division of cognitive labor. The problem he deals with is as follows (Kitcher 1990, 5-8): if each scientist makes an ideally rational judgment about plausibility of rival theories or research programs, then all scientists choose the theory or program best supported by available empirical evidence. In an ideal situation, all scientists will pursue the same program. On the other hand, from the community's point of view, if there are rival theories or research programs, the best thing is to allocate scientists to each theory or program in accordance with the relative plausibility of those alternatives. Thus individual rationality and communal rationality seem to contradict with each other.

He tries to solve this predicament by introducing a further assumption that scientists are epistemically sullied agents, namely they seek not only truth, but also priority (Kitcher 1993, ch.8). If a scientist pursue the same program as many other scientists, the probability that this scientist will mak e the first discovery becomes quite low. On the other hand, even if a program is unlikely to succeed under available evidence, if it is actually a correct one and no one else pursues it, the scientist can become the first discoverer without competition. Therefore, if scientists behave as rational sullied agents, the community attains better allocation than the community of pure epistemic agents. Kitcher also analyzes the roles played by authority, tradition, local autocracy etc. in great mathematical detail. These seemingly non-epistemic elements of scientific practice are found to have certain epistemic functions.

Kitcher is fairly clear in that he is doing a normative task of identifying successful (i.e. progressive) social systems (Kitcher 1993, 303). But it seems to me that he fails to establish that the systems he endorses are more progressive than the alternatives. Even if scientists' efforts are allocated properly, if the communal criteria of acceptance of a discovery are bad ones, this community is unlikely to make progress. On the other hand, if the communa l criteria are good, this community is likely to make progress in the long run, whether or not the efforts are allocated properly. In this sense, Kitcher seem s to fail to establish the relevance of his argument to his own standard of rationality.

1-4. Hull's evolutionary account

Even though David Hull is not usually classified as a naturalized epistemologist, his position is even closer to Quine than that of Goldman or Kitcher. He abandons traditional epistemology because he cannot take the "mindless doubt" of skeptics seriously (Hull 1988c, 243). He sees no possibility of answering the skeptics. Hull also dismisses normative epistemology because there is no justification of knowledge claims that epistemologists have been looking for (Hull 1988a, 13). The project to which h e commits himself is, thus, purely descriptive and non-skeptical. What he tries to show is that "science is so organized that self interest promotes the greater good," namely the increase of "our knowledge of the empirical world" (Hull 1988a, 357). Notice that he presumes that science does produce knowledge of the empirical world.

Hull's analysis of scientific practice is marked by his extensive use of analogy with the evolutionary process. He also tries to support his argument with his own case study of the history of taxonomic systems in biology (Hull 1988a, chs. 2-7).

Hull applies notions in evolutionary biology, such as replicators, interactors , selection etc. to scientists themselves (Hull 1988a, 434). Replicators in science are beliefs, goals, methodologies, and so on. Interactors are scientists. Scientists act for their conceptual inclusive fitness, namely, so as to encourage other scientists to use their work. For example, scientists give credit to other scientists in their own work because this increases the credibility of the work. This will in turn increase the probability that the work will be cited by other scientists (Hull 1988a, 310). Similar relationships exist between a scientist and his/her own graduate students (Hull 1988b, 127-128). The scientist should balance these considerations to maximize his/her own conceptual inclusive fitness. This make s a scientific practice a kind of competitive cooperation (Hull 1988a, 319).

Let us suppose that his descriptions of scientific practices are accurate (and surely he can cite many actual cases to support his discussions). Does this lead to an increase of knowledge about the world? Not necessarily. Hull notice s this, and adds an assumption that erroneous claims are likely to be discovered and punished severely (Hull 1988a, 320). But which claims are erroneous? If he simply means claims which are recognized as erroneous by the scientific community, the first half of his assumption becomes trivially true. If not, he needs some independent criterion of error, and this seems to require an involvement in traditional epistemology.

1-5. A critical assessment of these arguments

Naturalized and socialized epistemology are supposed to be alternatives to traditional epistemology. But even if foundationalism has serious problems, this does not automatically warrant to accept a large part of science. We need an argument here, and such an argument should fall in the domain of traditiona l epistemology. If this is so, I do not see any incompatibility between these alternatives. The models by Goldman and Shaked, Kitcher, and Hull can be seen as applied epistemology which bridges traditional epistemology and actual scientific practice. Their rejection of an a priori normative argument may have come from their misconception of normativity. As Kim (1988) argues, more sophisticated meta-ethical considerations are likely to resolve the seeming conflict between traditional and naturalized/socialized epistemology. But this paper is not the place to pursue that possibility.

2. Fuller's social epistemology

2-1. Fuller's argument

Steve Fuller also takes sociological findings seriously, but his position show s remarkable contrasts with that of naturalized epistemologists, so it is worth discussing separately.

Fuller proposes "social epistemology" as science policy-making, which is a normative enterprise to look for better scientific institutions, informed by psychology and sociology (Fuller 1988, 3). The starting point of social epistemology is the worry that "left to its own devices, science will not necessarily produce the sort of knowledge that we are interested in having" (Fuller 1992, 392). Usually we want knowledge not for its own sake but for som e independent purposes like social welfare, and we should judge the efficacy of science from this outside point of view. For such judgments, Fuller proposes t o use an experimental method. For example, we can conduct experiments taking independent variables such as group size and communication constraints, and dependent variables such as the sort of knowledge produced (Fuller 1992, 405). Of course the experimental results are artificial in a sense, but this does no t bother social epistemologists. If we find effective institutional structures i n experimental settings, what social epistemologists may want to do is make "the world behave more like the laboratory than vice versa" (Fuller 1992, 406).

One of the peculiarities of Fuller's argument is that he thinks that the normative assessments cannot be purely epistemic -- it is always science policy-making at the same time. He has several arguments why epistemic issues and policy-making issues are not separable. First, even if scientists want tru e information about their research objectives, this does not mean that they want it above all else (Fuller 1996, 162). Any epistemic activity has associated costs, and any normative argument about science need to consider these costs. He also argues that we are in a post-epistemic world in which mutual critical scrutiny of scientists can not work properly (Fuller 1994). The major problem is the size of scientific activity. Some time ago, when scientific enterprise was smaller, "it was reasonable to presume that whatever one wrote would be subject to critical scrutiny by the relevant disciplinary community" (43). But now, since the number of scientists and their publications have increased remarkably, we cannot expect such ideal readers. Now a scientific research project is really scrutinized when the funding is determined, and the scrutiny is relative to the funder's interest. But if science is conducted to meet such interests, research is no longer evaluated as products of inquiry. It is just another kind of business.

2-2. A critical assessment of Fuller's argument

I think in some points Fuller's argument is better than those by naturalized epistemologists. I agree with him that epistemology is an essentially normativ e enterprise, and that the scope of normative judgments should not be restricted to actual processes. I also think that his emphasis on an experimental method suggests a better relationship between philosophers and sociologists. But what I can never agree with him on is his claim about inseparability of epistemic and non-epistemic judgments. It is true that when we make a final assessment about a scientific institution we need to count everything in. But this does not mean that we cannot distinguish epistemic considerations and non-epistemic ones in the course of the assessment. I think the problem is his naive conception of normativity. Again, sophisticated meta-ethics can help here. In this respect, Miriam Solomon's "social empiricism" (1994) proposes an interesting revision of Fuller.

3. Conclusions

Since the purpose of this paper is to review these attempts, I have provided only sketchy assessments of them. They ask many interesting questions which ar e not asked in traditional epistemology, and some of them are surely useful if w e want to apply traditional epistemology to the evaluation of actual scientific practices. I think that social/socialized epistemologies are not conceived in this way mainly because the proponents of them have only naive understanding o f normativity.


References (pages refer to reprints when reprints are listed.)

Fuller, S. (1988) Social Epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
-----. (1992) "Epistemology radically naturalized: recovering the experimental, the normative, and the social", in R. Giere (ed.) Cognitive Models of Science, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
-----. (1994) "The sphere of critical thinking in a post-epistemic world", in Informal Logic 16, 39-53.
-----. (1996) "Recent work in social epistemology", in American Philosophical Quarterly 33, 149-166.
Goldman, A. I. (1992) Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences.Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Goldman, A.I. and Shaked, M. (1991) "An economic model of scientific activity and truth acquisition", reprinted in Goldman 1992, 227-254.
Hull, D. L. (1988a) Science as a process: an evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-----. (1988b) "A mechanism and its metaphysics: an evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science" in Biology and Philosophy 3, 123-155.
-----. (1988c) "A period of development: a response" in Biology and Philosophy 3, 241-263.
Kim, J. (1988) "What is 'naturalized epistemology'?" reprinted in Kornblith ed 1994, 33-55.
Kitcher, P. (1990) "The division of cognitive labor" in Journal of Philosophy 87, 5-22.
-----.(1993) The Advancement of Science: science without legend, objectivity without illusions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kornblith, H. (1994a)"Introduction: what is naturalized epistemology" in Kornblith ed. 1994, 1-14.
-----.(1994b) "A conservative approach to social epistemology", in Schmitt ed. 1994, 93-110.
Kornblith, H. ed. (1994) Naturalizing Epistemology 2nd edition. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Nisbett, R. and Ross, L. (1980) Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcoming s of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Quine, W.V.(1969) "Epistemology naturalized", reprinted in Kornblith ed. 1994.
Schmitt F.F., ed. (1994) Socializing Epistemology: The Social Dimensions of Knowledge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Solomon, M. (1994) "Social Empiricism", in Nous 28, 325-343.
Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1973) "Availability: a heuristic for judging frequency and probability", in Cognitive Psychology 5, 207-232.

(c) Tetsuji Iseda


Editor's Note
Tetsuji Iseda, one of my students, now working for Ph.D. in the University of Maryland, has contributed a review essay. Although Japanese scholars are recently more interested in social epistemology, very few seem to know enough about conceptual problems involved in normative issues. Since Iseda is acquainted both with ethics and philosophy of science, we may expect him to produce a good work in this field.

Soshichi Uchii
September 16, 1997

Last modified Nov. 29, 2008