Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency is an essential resource for academics and students who ask, “in what manner does society engender its members with the ability to act as epistemic agents, what actions constitute epistemic agency, and what type of beings can be epistemic agents?”
Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency is an essential resource for academics and students who ask, “in what manner does society engender its members with the ability to act as epistemic agents, what actions constitute epistemic agency, and what type of beings can be epistemic agents?”
Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency
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Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency
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Overview
Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency is an essential resource for academics and students who ask, “in what manner does society engender its members with the ability to act as epistemic agents, what actions constitute epistemic agency, and what type of beings can be epistemic agents?”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783483495 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2016 |
| Series: | Collective Studies in Knowledge and Society |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Contributors:
Finn Collin, Professor of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Fred D’Agostino, Professor of Philosophy, University of Queensland, Australia; Paul Faulkner, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK; Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick, UK; Sanford C. Goldberg, Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University, USA; ; Angelica Nuzzo, Professor of Philosophy, Brooklyn College, USA; Orestis Palermos, Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, UK; Duncan Pritchard, Professor of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, UK; Frank Scalambrino, Affiliate Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Dallas, USA; R. Valentine Dusek, Professor of Philosophy, University of New Hampshire, USA; Francis Remedios, independent scholar, Canada
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Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency
Decentralizing Epistemic Agency
By Patrick J. Reider
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Patrick J. Reider and ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-349-5
CHAPTER 1
A Proposed Research Program for Social Epistemology
Sanford C. Goldberg
In the last thirty years or so, philosophers, social scientists, and others have begun to speak of and pursue inquiry within a distinctly "social" epistemological framework. In one sense, the fact that there should be a "social" epistemology is easy to explain. As standardly conceived, epistemology is the theory of knowledge. As standardly practiced, the theory of knowledge is interested in the various sources of knowledge. We might think to explain the existence of a distinctly "social" epistemology, then, in terms of the existence of distinctly social sources of knowledge.
While there is much to this explanation, it is at best incomplete. For one thing, our community is implicated in our body of knowledge in ways that go far beyond that of being a source of information. For another, this purported explanation fails to make clear precisely why many theorists think that social epistemology presents a challenge to certain aspects of the epistemological tradition. In order to appreciate the nature of this challenge and to deepen our explanation for the existence (and rationale) of a distinctly social epistemology, we would do well to revisit the reasons for thinking that there are distinctly social sources of knowledge. These reasons point to a central deficiency in traditional epistemology. Once we recognize this deficiency, we will be in a position to appreciate the variety of different ways in which knowledge acquisition is (often, and perhaps even typically) a social activity.
Traditional epistemology is individualistic in its orientation: it focuses on the states, skills, and background information of individual epistemic subjects. As such it recognizes only two general ways for an individual to acquire knowledge of her environment: through perception (broadly construed), or through inference (relying on one's own background information). Once this framework is accepted, we are limited in the role(s) that other people can be recognized as playing in one's pursuit of knowledge. Put in the starkest terms possible, others' antics and appearances — their doings and sayings, their dress and manner of presentation etc. — are no different in principle from the antics and appearances of any of the objects in one's environment. That is to say, on this individualistic framework other people's antics and appearances have the status of evidence from which one can come to know things through inference. On this picture, when I come to know, for example, that the dean is in London through your telling me that she is, my route to knowledge here is no different in kind than the route by which I come to know that it's cold outside by seeing my brother reach for his parka, or the route by which I come to know that we have a mouse problem by observing the mouse droppings under the sink, or the route by which I come to know that it is currently raining by hearing the characteristic patter-patter-patter on my roof. In each case perception makes available to me a piece of evidence — an utterance of yours; a piece of nonverbal behavior of my brother's; mouse droppings; sounds coming from the roof — from which I go on to make inferences. In making these inferences, I am relying on my background information, both for interpreting the evidence in the first place (you have asserted that the dean is in London; those things are mouse droppings; that's the sound of rain), and for knowing which inferences to draw from my evidence (e.g. your asserting something is highly correlated with the truth of what you've asserted; the presence of mouse droppings is highly correlated with the nearby presence of mice; my brother's reaching for his parka is highly correlated with it's being cold outside).
I believe that this approach to the role others play in one's pursuit of knowledge fundamentally mischaracterizes that role. To be sure, we often do draw inferences from others' antics, speech, and appearances; and when we do, their antics, speech, and appearances serve as evidence. But there are also cases in which we rely on others as epistemic subjects in their own right. Perhaps the clearest and most straightforward example of this — but by no means the only one — is the case of testimony. When we accept another's word for something, we regard them not merely as providing potential evidence, but also, and more centrally, as manifesting the very results of their own epistemic sensibility. When one comes to acquire knowledge in this way, it is plausible to think that the epistemic task has been socially distributed; and we might speculate that subjects who share knowledge in this way constitute (part of) an epistemic community. That is to say, they are members of a group whose knowledge environment is structured by various social practices regarding the acquisition, storage, processing, transmission, and assessment of information.
I cannot pretend that this picture is anything but controversial among those who grew up in the more traditional, individualistic orientation that characterizes orthodox epistemology. Even so, I won't defend this picture further here. Instead, I would like to suggest how social epistemology looks from the vantage point of those who take this picture seriously. For those who do take this picture seriously, we stand in a fundamentally different relation to other epistemic subjects than we do to the rest of the items in our environment. Since the point at issue reflects the roles epistemic subjects play as epistemic agents in a common epistemic community, it will be helpful to begin by saying a few words about epistemic subjects, epistemic agents, and epistemic communities.
Throughout this chapter I will want to be able to refer to the sort of entity of whom we can intelligibly ascribe knowledge and other epistemic states (such as justified or rational belief). I will use the term epistemic subject to do so. Thus other people are epistemic subjects: we can intelligibly affirm or deny that Smith knows that it is raining, or that Jones believes with justification that the economy will improve. But so too some collectives might be epistemic subjects as well: at any rate we do affirm or deny such things as that the Obama administration knows that immigration laws in the United States need to be addressed, or that the firm's engineering team believes with justification that the bridge is no longer structurally sound. In addition to speaking of epistemic subjects, I will sometimes want to highlight the various roles that epistemic subjects play in acquiring, storing, processing, transmitting, or assessing information. When I want to highlight these roles, I will speak of them (not as epistemic subjects, which they remain, but rather) as epistemic agents. This difference in nomenclature — between "epistemic subject" and "epistemic agent" — marks a notional difference: to speak of an epistemic agent is to speak of an epistemic subject, albeit in a way that highlights the role(s) played by the subject in the process(es) by which knowledge is acquired, stored, processed, transmitted, or assessed. Finally, I will also be speaking of the practices, institutions, and norms that structure the relations between epistemic agents as they go about their information-seeking business (both individually and socially); to do so I will speak of their shared "epistemic community."
Having introduced these terms, I can now proceed to describe in more detail how (from the epistemic point of view) our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our relations to the rest of the items in our environment. Here I highlight three dimensions of difference. These dimensions correspond to what I will proceed to call the core project of social epistemology: that of characterizing the epistemic significance of other minds.
The first way in which our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our relations to the rest of the items in our environment is this: epistemic subjects stand in various epistemic dependency relations to other epistemic subjects in their shared epistemic community. The basic idea of an epistemic dependency relation can be brought out in terms of the nature of epistemic assessment itself, in which we assess a subject's belief (or her degree of belief) in a proposition. Such assessment aims to characterize how well-supported her belief is (alternatively: whether that degree of belief is warranted by her evidence). This sort of assessment is a fully normative affair, since it appeals to standards (e.g. of rationality, epistemic responsibility, and/or reliability, among other standards) whose satisfaction is required if the subject's (degree of) belief is to count as amounting to justified belief or knowledge. I describe one subject (S2) as epistemically dependent on another subject (S1), then, when an epistemic assessment of S2's belief — an assessment along one or more of the dimensions just described — requires an epistemic assessment of the role S1 played in the process through which S2 acquired (or sustained) the belief. (As we will see below, it will be helpful to think of S1 here not merely as an epistemic subject but as an epistemic agent.) It is of course a substantial assumption that we do exhibit epistemic dependence on others; traditional epistemology would deny this. But social epistemology as I understand it embraces this assumption, and with it recognizes that our epistemic tasks are often socially distributed among the members of our epistemic community. Relying on another person's say-so is one kind of epistemic dependence (for which see Goldberg 2010); but it is not the only kind, and it is a task of social epistemology to enumerate and describe the variety of kinds of epistemic dependence exhibited in our interactions with others.
A second way in which our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our relations to the rest of the items in our environment lies in the variety of norms that enable us to calibrate our expectations of one another as epistemic agents, as we pursue our inquiries (whether individually or jointly). Consider for example the expectations you have when you rely on your doctor, or your lawyer, or your accountant. You expect them to be knowledgeable in certain ways, to be apprised of the best practices, to be responsive to any relevant developments in their specialties, and so forth. Alternatively, consider the expectations you have of the other members of your research team, or of your business partners. You expect them to do their jobs properly, to notify the rest of the team (the other partners) if there are any developments that bear on the research of the whole team (the success of the business), and so forth. Or consider the expectations you have of your neighbors, friends, and family members. When you have long and mutually acknowledged traditions of informing one another of the news in certain domains, you come to expect this of one another. Or, to take a final example, consider the expectations you have when you encounter someone who tells you something. You expect her to be relevantly authoritative regarding the truth of what she said. In many and perhaps even all of these cases, the expectations themselves reflect various norms that regulate our interactions with other epistemic agents. In some cases, these norms are provided by professional or institutional organizations, and rationalize our reliance on members of those professions or institutions; in other cases, the norms in question are established explicitly, as a matter of agreement, e.g. among team members or business partners; in still other cases, the norms themselves are part of the practices (e.g. of information-sharing) that emerge over the course of repeated interaction between the parties, after the parties mutually (if perhaps only implicitly) acknowledge their mutual reliance on certain aspects of the practice; and in still other cases, the norms are part of sophisticated social practices (such as those regarding the practice of assertion) whose features are, if only implicitly, mutually acknowledged by all participants. (This is not intended to exhaust the possibilities.)
Norm-sanctioned expectations, I submit, are not so much predictions of the behavior of our fellows — although they may give rise to such predictions — as they are normative expectations of our fellows. For example, your expectation that your doctor knows best practices for the treatment of your condition is not (or not merely) based on the evidence that doctors are generally reliable in this way; rather, it constitutes something you normatively expect of her. It is akin to parents' expectation that their teenager will be home by midnight (an expectation to which they are entitled even if their teenager has a long history of staying out too late). These expectations enable us to solve complicated coordination problems we face as we seek to acquire knowledge in communities that exhibit a highly differentiated division of intellectual labor. I regard it as a central task for social epistemology to enumerate and describe the norms that underwrite these expectations, to articulate their epistemic bearing on the predictive expectations they underwrite, and ultimately to evaluate the norms themselves in terms of their role in securing true belief and knowledge.
Since the notions of normative and predictive expectations will loom large in the sections to follow, it is important to be clear about the relationship between them. To a first approximation, one epistemic agent, S2, normatively expects something from another epistemic agent, S1, when S2holds S1 responsible in the relevant way. Such normative expectations are warranted by the norms of prevailing practice (for a defense of which see Goldberg (forthcoming)). When a normative expectation is warranted in this way, I will speak of agents' entitlement to have the normative expectation in question. As I noted above, there are two fundamental theoretical questions regarding normative expectations. First, given a set of normative expectations sanctioned by the norms of a given practice, do these expectations actually conduce to epistemically good outcomes? In asking this, we are taking a critical perspective on the norms and practices of a given community, with the aim of assessing how well these norms and practices serve epistemological ends. (As I will argue in section 3, this is one place where the traditional normative vocabulary of e.g., epistemology, will come in handy.) Second, how do the normative expectations to which an agent is entitled relate to corresponding predictive expectations she has? The latter expectations are a species of belief (about the future), and hence are straightforwardly assessable from an epistemic point of view. But it remains to be seen how being entitled to hold someone responsible for an outcome relates to the justification one has for believing that one will get that outcome. And this point brings me to the third way in which our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our relations to the rest of the items in our environment.
Given the normative expectations one has on those on whom one epistemically relies, as well as the epistemic dependence that results thereby, the epistemic assessment of beliefs formed through one of the "social routes" to knowledge (Goldman 2002; see also Goldman 1999 and 2009) is decidedly different from the epistemic assessment of beliefs not so formed. Insofar as epistemic tasks really are socially distributed, our assessment itself must be a social one. It must take into account not only the other individual(s) on whom the belief epistemically depends, but also the social practices and the norms that regulate these practices. This will include the various practices and norms that constitute what we might call the "epistemic environment" in which agents go about their knowledge-seeking business — and (as noted in the preceding paragraph) their relationship to the justification of belief. To the extent that one's epistemic environment bears on the proper assessment of one's beliefs, we will need to rethink the nature of epistemic assessment, in a way that reflects the various epistemic dependencies and social norms that are implicated in the production and sustainment of belief. I regard it as a task for social epistemology to reconceive the nature of epistemic assessment, and, where needed, to reconceive the categories employed in the assessment.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: What is Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency? Patrick J. Reider / Part I: Anchor Articles / 1. “A Proposed Research Program for Social Epistemology”Sanford C. Goldberg / 2. A Sense of Epistemic Agency Fit for Social Epistemology
Steve Fuller / Part II:Responses and Further Considerations / Analytic Social Epistemology and its Alternatives / 3. Two Kinds of Social Epistemology and the Foundations of Epistemic Agency Finn Collin / Fuller's Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency Francis Remedios and R. Valentine Dusek / Limits to Epistemic Agency / 5. Agency and Disagreement Paul Faulkner / 6. Disciplines, the Division of Epistemic Labor, and Agency Fred D'Agostino / Human and Non-human Epistemic Agents / 7. The Distribution of Epistemic Agency Orestis Palermos and Duncan Pritchard / 8. Toward Fluid Epistemic Agency: Differentiating the Terms Being, Subject, Agent, Person, and Self Frank Scalambrino / Social Epistemology and German Idealism / 9. “Epistemic Agency”: A Hegelian Perspective Angelica Nuzzo / 10. Epistemic Agency as a Social Achievement: Rorty, Putnam, and Neo-German Idealism Patrick J. Reider / Authors of this Text / Index