Epistemology And The Social

Offers a vital, unique and agenda-setting perspective for the field of social epistemology – the philosophical basis for prescribing the social means and ends for pursuing knowledge.

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has been enduringly influential in philosophy of science, challenging many common presuppositions about the nature of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. However, philosophers have misunderstood Kuhn's view, treating him as a relativist or social constructionist. In this book, Brad Wray argues that Kuhn provides a useful framework for developing an epistemology of science that takes account of the constructive role that social factors play in scientific inquiry. He examines the core concepts of Structure and explains the main characteristics of both Kuhn's evolutionary epistemology and his social epistemology, relating Structure to Kuhn's developed view presented in his later writings. The discussion includes analyses of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the plate tectonics revolution in geology. The book will be useful for scholars working in science studies, sociologists and historians of science as well as philosophers of science.

Selections from the work of an influential contributor to the methodology of the social sciences. He treats: measurement, experimental design, epistemology, and sociology of science each section introduced by the editor, Samuel Overman. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

This is the book that launched the research program of social epistemology, which has fuelled imaginations and provoked debates across many disciplines around the world. Its opening question remains as pressing as ever: How should knowledge production be organised. The second edition contains a substantial new introduction, in which Fuller reflects on social epistemology's place in the history of analytic and continental epistemology and discusses the inspiration he has drawn from a wide variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences. It also includes a spirited attack on alternative philosophical groundings for social epistemology and a detailed response to the standard criticism that social epistemology has received from realist philosophers and natural scientists during the "Science Wars."In Social Epistemology Fuller seeks to reconcile normative philosophy of science and empirical sociology of knowledge. He reinterprets key problems in the philosophy of science, such as realism, the nature of objectivity, the demarcation of science from other disciplines, and the nature of our knowledge of other times and places. In the course of this reinterpretation, which draws on concepts and arguments from many branches of the humanities and social sciences, Fuller considers such philosophically neglected questions as: How is the burden of proof determined in science? On what basis is the historian licensed to say that a "consensus" has been reached on a scientific claim? What implications do our patently imperfect means of linguistic transmission have for the notion that science "retains and accumulates" knowledge? Finally, Fuller proposes a course of "Knowledge Policy Studies" designed to make the theory of knowledge a branch of political theory and thereby to hasten the evolution of the epistemologist into a knowledge policy maker. In its new edition, the book remains a provocative contribution to the debate on the production, dissemination, and interpretation of knowledge in the sciences.

This book investigates how collaborative scientific practice yields scientific knowledge. At a time when most of today’s scientific knowledge is created in research groups, the author reconsiders the social character of science to address the question of whether collaboratively created knowledge should be considered as collective achievement, and if so, in which sense. Combining philosophical analysis with qualitative empirical inquiry, this book provides a comparative case study of mono- and interdisciplinary research groups, offering insight into the day-to-day practice of scientists. The book includes field observations and interviews with scientists to present an empirically-grounded perspective on much-debated questions concerning research groups’ division of labor, relations of epistemic dependence and trust.

For political philosophers, Morris provides an epistemology that integrates social interests within a normative account of knowledge.

In this wide-ranging collection of never before published essays, distinguished scholars in the fields of philosophy and economics examine such questions as whether testimony is a basic source of knowledge, the degree to which notions of a good argument are determined by speakers and their audiences, the role of individual biases in the development of science, and the social aspects of group belief and group justification. The collection ends with the first comprehensive bibliography of social epistemology.

Edited by an international team of leading scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology is the first major reference work devoted to this growing field. The Handbook’s 46 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, and written by philosophers and social theorists from around the world, are organized into eight main parts: Historical Backgrounds The Epistemology of Testimony Disagreement, Diversity, and Relativism Science and Social Epistemology The Epistemology of Groups Feminist Epistemology The Epistemology of Democracy Further Horizons for Social Epistemology With lists of references after each chapter and a comprehensive index, this volume will prove to be the definitive guide to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of social epistemology.