The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology

David Coady, James Chase, David Coady, James Chase

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317393146
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

While applied epistemology has been neglected for much of the twentieth century, it has seen emerging interest in recent years, with key thinkers in the field helping to put it on the philosophical map. Although it is an old tradition, current technological and social developments have dramatically changed both the questions it faces and the methodology required to answer those questions. Recent developments also make it a particularly important and exciting area for research and teaching in the twenty-first century. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising entries by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six main parts:

• The Internet
• Politics
• Science
• Epistemic institutions
• Individual investigators
• Theory and practice in philosophy.

Within these sections, the core topics and debates are presented, analyzed, and set into broader historical and disciplinary contexts. The central topics covered include: the prehistory of applied epistemology, expertise and scientific authority, epistemic aspects of political and social philosophy, epistemology and the law, and epistemology and medicine.

Essential reading for students and researchers in epistemology, political philosophy, and applied ethics the Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as law, sociology, and politics.

PART I

Introduction

1

The return of applied epistemology

James Chase and David Coady

An applied turn in epistemology?

The term ‘applied epistemology’ has been in irregular use for some time. It has occasionally been associated with pre-existing disciplines or practices: critical thinking, or the information sciences, or casuistry.¹ But most often it simply invokes an analogy, direct or implicit, with applied ethics – for instance, when looking for a label for the activities standing to traditional epistemology and meta-epistemology as applied ethics stands to normative ethics and meta-ethics (Battersby 1989). And since applied ethics has been a well-known going concern for decades, the analogy does work by feeding our imagination: it highlights the many ways in which we might regard philosophical work as constituting applied epistemology. But the fact that applied ethics was also consciously launched by way of critique of normative ethics and meta-ethics is also useful; here the analogy flags potential concerns with the way the analytic epistemological tradition has developed.

In the 1960s and 1970s, analytic ethics faced an internal critique led by such figures as Peter Singer and James Rachels. According to this critique, the analytic focus on normative and meta-ethical work had become lopsided, harmfully aloof from practical matters of deciding what to do, and threatening a kind of self-imposed irrelevance. Instead, ethicists had contributions to make by way of clarifying popular moral debates, applying ethical theory to important contemporary issues, and engaging with political figures, scientists, and the public on ethical matters. This applied ethical revolution was successful at establishing new ethical practices and bringing other concerns from the perceived fringe of academic ethics to the center of the stage. Journals such as Philosophy and Public Affairs appeared, collections of work on applied ethics were published, fields such as bioethics, environmental ethics, healthcare ethics, and business ethics arose or took newly determinate shape, and university curricula shifted to accommodate the new focus.

Around the same time, analytic epistemology also faced internal critiques, sounded by well-known philosophers in two exceptionally widely read and influential works: W. V. O. Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized” (originally an address at the 14th International Congress of Philosophy in 1968, and collected in the 1969 Ontological Relativity and Other Essays) and Richard Rorty’s 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Quine’s essay appraises the foundationalist program within empiricism from Hume to Carnap, but his critique widens in scope to epistemology as a whole (conceived of as a form of first philosophy). On one prominent interpretation of Quine’s project, the traditional agenda of epistemological topics and the normativity of epistemic concepts are to be jettisoned wholesale, in favor of the new – and appropriately naturalized – project of descriptive epistemology, a chapter of psychology bordering on linguistics.² Quine recommends the psychologist Donald Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology program as an example. Rorty’s book also takes on traditional epistemology, but with a wider historical backdrop, and his telling of the tale ends with a different recommendation. On Rorty’s account, traditional epistemology is a defensive maneuver inaugurated by Kant and his nineteenth-century followers to keep philosophy in being as an intellectual discipline in the face of the rampant sciences. The “theory of knowledge,” the very core of philosophy as it is now to be understood, is to underlie all other disciplinary endeavors, and an epistemological tradition is then read back into the early modern tradition as a whole, highlighting the well-known epistemological works of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and so forth. Like Quine, Rorty thinks this whole apparatus has, by the twentieth century, become dangerously dependent on a handful of doubtful claims about the nature of sense data and their relations to our knowledge and the world. But Quine’s descriptive turn to science is also rejected. Instead, Rorty suggests, epistemology, and its baggage of scheme and content, concept and intuition, should simply come to an end, replaced by a kind of historically aware study of our conversations, reason-giving practices, and manners of discourse.

In each case the call to revolution was a mixed success. Quine’s critique targets local aspects of the epistemological tradition as it presented itself to him, and so while the call for a naturalized epistemology produced or re-energized many rivals to traditional normative epistemology (such as evolutionary epistemology), its main impact has been renewal within the normative tradition itself, prompting, for instance, reliabilist analyses of the concept of justification. (In fact, Quine’s later writings are themselves much more welcoming of the normative aspects of epistemology than at least some of the naturalizing projects he inspired.) Rorty’s historical reconstruction has been very much contested, and whether his final position comes to a viable pragmatism or a corrosive skepticism is a subject of debate. But in any case, his critique and counterproposal can also be now seen as part of a wider anti-realist (and in part pragmatist) moment within analytic philosophy that itself prompted renewal within normative epistemology, at the hands of philosophers such as Hilary Putnam and Michael Dummett. But in both cases, the particular details are used to launch a concern about epistemology with its own staying power, that of irrelevance. A background concern for both Quine and Rorty is that analytic epistemology has been shaped almost entirely by an interest in the theory of knowledge, its scope, structure and limits, as those subjects have been understood since at least the early modern period. It has had rather too little to do with the practices of epistemic agents and communities, and the specific epistemic problems that might arise out of or for them. So, while the focus of Quine and Rorty was not specifically the creation of a new sub-discipline, ‘applied epistemology’, the concerns about relevance made manifest in the ethical case are also present implicitly here. Yet there is no applied epistemological revolution in the period: no new journals with that focus, no curricular changes, no new sub-disciplines.

The absence of an applied turn in epistemology to match the applied turn in ethics is especially puzzling when one considers how many issues of contemporary concern to the general public are epistemic in nature. Much of this concern is driven by technological change. Over the last three decades an information revolution has transformed the ways in which we acquire knowledge and justify our beliefs. Now when we want to find something out or check whether something we believe is really true, our first port of call is almost certainly the World Wide Web (see Smart and Shadbolt, Chapter 2). Once we are there, we will almost certainly use Wikipedia (see Frost-Arnold, Chapter 3) or Google (see Gunn and Lynch, Chapter 4) or, quite possibly, both. These technological developments have raised new epistemic issues just as surely as advances in reproductive technology fifty-odd years ago raised new ethical issues. The latter developments provided much of the impetus for the applied turn in ethics, but the former changes have so far failed to lead to a comparable turn in epistemology. Such a turn seems both inevitable and desirable.

Not all developments motivating an applied turn in epistemology (or an epistemic turn in applied philosophy) are technological, or at any rate, they are not all purely technological. Political and social developments (which are of course implicated in technological change) have always raised epistemic issues of their own, which philosophy has traditionally engaged with. John Stuart Mill’s famous defense of free speech, for example, rests largely on epistemic principles (see Halliday and McCabe, Chapter 6). More recently, however, epistemology has tended to be marginalized in political philosophy, which is often thought of as a branch of ethics. Many applied philosophers have been willing to write about the ethical issues raised by recent Western military interventions, for example, by appealing to principles of just war theory, but few have had anything to say about the equally important epistemic issues raised by these wars, such as the nature of the evidence presented to the public in support of the casus belli or what we can know about the true motives of the governments prosecuting the wars. Similarly, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 prompted many applied philosophers to participate in public discussion about business ethics and the nature of greed and self-interest, but very few spoke of the equally important epistemic issues facing financial markets (see Warenski, Chapter 15). Likewise, the ethics of social phenomena such as gossip, rumor, and propaganda have been much discussed by applied philosophers, but relatively few of them have been prepared to discuss the epistemic issues raised by these phenomena (see Bertolotti and Magnani, Chapter 20; Gelfert, Chapter 19; and Marlin, Chapter 9, respectively).

Although the applied turn in epistemology is not on the scale of the applied turn in ethics, it would not be true to say that there has been no applied turn at all. There has been a “social turn” in epistemology over the last two or three decades, and much of the work done under the flag of “social epistemology” could equally well be classified as “applied epistemology.” Like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman who discovers that he has been speaking prose his whole life without knowing it, it will come as news to many social epistemologists that they have been doing applied philosophy without recognizing it by that name. Although applied epistemology and social epistemology overlap, they are not the same. Not all social epistemology is particularly applied and not all applied epistemology is particularly social. In applied epistemology we are concerned with practical questions about what we should believe and how we (individually and collectively) should pursue knowledge, wisdom, and other epistemic values. Although many of these questions are (in one way or another) social questions, not all of them are, any more than all questions in applied ethics are social questions.

Applied epistemology in early modern philosophy

We have given a rough indication of what we take applied epistemology to involve; is it possible to go further? As it’s developed to date, it’s certainly not just the application of pre-existing epistemological work to some problem or situation; like ethics, epistemology can sustain case-based reasoning (casuistry) that fights shy of such principles. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (2016) argues that there are several quite distinct conceptions of ‘applied philosophy’, most clearly present in work in applied ethics, but all (Lippert-Rasmussen argues) extending to other fields in philosophy. The conceptions Lippert-Rasmussen discusses are clearly applicable to epistemology, but however useful they are as marking differing conceptions of applied philosophy in general, we will take a slightly different approach. On our view, applied epistemology is best thought of as a family resemblance concept, involving the dimensions that Lippert-Rasmussen usefully outlines (as rival conceptions), but also perhaps others. As such, we suggest that applied epistemology is a matter of degree, and characterized by one or more of the following:³

(i)a concern for relevance to the ordinary affairs of everyday (non-philosophical) life;

(ii)being addressed to an audience that isn’t exclusively philosophical;

(iii)being addressed to a specific issue arising in a specific context (rather than addressed to ‘timeless’ concerns of skepticism or the analysis of knowledge);

(iv)developing a body of theory with an eye to its action-guiding applications;

(v)bringing a body of pre-existing theory into relation with a problem outside philosophy to allow us to think differently about that problem;

(vi)being informed by (that is, conditionalizing on) empirical facts in some way;

(vii)seeking to effect social or political change through philosophical work.

Any or all of these factors mark work in epistemology that is at least to some extent applied rather than theoretical in nature. Some, such as relevance, seem especially central, but none of these dimensions is plausible as the core of a tight conceptual analysis of applied epistemology, and seeking to impose such a structure here would be unhelpfully prescriptive.

By this measure, it should not be at all controversial that a great deal of work in applied epistemology has been carried out historically. Indeed, many of the classics of epistemology in the Western tradition can fruitfully be understood as works of applied epistemology from which the application has been subtracted through historical amnesia. Philosophers in general have enquired into the nature and limits of knowledge and rational belief, not out of idle curiosity, but because these issues had a practical significance and because they wanted to contribute to debates of topical concern. Much philosophical writing in the early modern period is, unsurprisingly, written for a more general audience than that of self-avowed philosophers, and seeks to effect social or political change, or is intended to facilitate thinking about the epistemic aspects of scientific inquiry or personal conduct. One way in which this happens is in working out the consequences of a major epistemological claim. In the empiricist tradition, for instance, the implications of that doctrine for the limits on our knowledge are often invoked practically, including by the most well-known figures. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding has ambitions of this kind – it was prompted by a 1671 discussion about revealed religion, and a major goal is to chart the middle path between religious authoritarianism (a target in Book 1) and religious enthusiasm (seen off in Book 4). That the epistemology on offer was highly relevant to questions about religious belief was immediately apparent, and as a result the Essay was the subject of much controversy. Berkeley brings his own empiricism to bear in offering a resolution of a contemporary scientific problem (Barrow’s objection to the geometric theory of vision) in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision of 1709, and in rejecting Newtonian accounts of absolute space, time, and motion in his De Motu of 1721. And Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” (published as Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) rests his well-known case on a principle of evidence drawn from his empiricist epistemology. A second notable feature of early modern epistemological work is that not all of it is third personal in nature in the way analytic epistemology, and even post-Kantian epistemology as a whole, has generally been. Instead, much writing is on questions of method or heuristic, advice which is intended to be directly relevant to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• PART I Introduction
• PART II The Internet
• PART III Politics
• PART IV Science
• PART V Epistemic institutions
• PART VI Individual investigators
• PART VII Theory and practice in philosophy
• Index