The Future of Social Epistemology

A Collective Vision

James H. Collier

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783482672
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophie
• Thema: Épistémologie en philosophie

The Future of Social Epistemology: A Collective Vision sets an agenda for exploring the future of what we – human beings reimagining our selves and our society – want, need and ought to know. The book examines, concretely, practically and speculatively, key ideas such as the public conduct of philosophy, models for extending and distributing knowledge, the interplay among individuals and groups, risk taking and the welfare state, and envisioning people and societies remade through the breakneck pace of scientific and technological change. An international team of contributors offers a ‘collective vision’, one that speaks to what they see unfolding and how to plan and conduct the dialogue and work leading to a knowable and desirable world. The book describes and advances an intellectual agenda for the future of social epistemology.

Part I

CONDUCTING SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY

Chapter 1

How Can We Collectivize a Set of Visions about Social Epistemology?

Fred D’Agostino

As readers will be aware, this volume results from an earlier, online encounter involving participants from a range of disciplines and tackling a range of topics that have come to be associated with the idea of social epistemology. It was an important feature of this earlier encounter that the individual contributions to it appeared more or less one by one over an extended period of time so that, in theory at least, each contributor, except for the first few, had before her the contributions that had already been made. Notwithstanding this situation, almost no one referred, in her own contribution, to any of the contributions that had already been posted. This is understandable, given the pressures of time, but it was also very striking, especially in a project organized around the central ideas of social epistemology which, not to trivialize its many facets, is certainly devoted to the idea that learning is unavoidably and indeed thankfully a social activity, so that what one person says can correct or amplify or contextualize what another says. Very little of that happened in the earlier encounter.

DIVERSITY AND COLLABORATION

There is, of course, an “upside” to the fact that each contributor developed his own ideas more or less without reference to the thinking of others who, in the online encounter anyway, posted before him. A diversity of thinking is certainly important in the development of better thinking—that is fundamental. But responding to what others have said, rather than “saying your piece,” can inhibit the diversity of thinking through a variety of familiar mechanisms. Certainly, fewer different things will get said if each participant does respond to the contributions of earlier participants. In this situation, what the earlier participants “put on the table” becomes an agenda for others following them, so that, unless what they might have wanted, antecedently, to say fits that agenda, they may not be able to say it (without, anyway, “changing the subject”).

Of course, when contributors do respond to what others have already said, we are likelier to get a connected and “thematic” discourse that may be easier for the outsider, for instance, to follow. Indeed, such a connected discourse may give contributors themselves a sense that they all belong to a discursive community in which what each says gets recognized as a contribution to an ongoing discussion and perhaps even valued by the others.

Nevertheless, as Navarro (2013, 27) puts it, being responsive to what’s already been said can lead to “a herding effect” which can “produce suboptimal . . . outcomes.” We all end up talking about a few points, not to be distinguished in relation to their importance and potential relevance to collective objectives from others not discussed, except in relation to their order of introduction into the discussion. Precisely the points that, had they been made, might have carried the discussion to an “optimal outcome” may never get made or, even if made, will not be heard as contributions insofar as they depart from an evolving “script” for the discussion.

There is, then, something to be celebrated in the way in which participants in the earlier, online discussion “got their two cents in” more or less without reference to what others had already said. Diversity has been preserved, not inhibited. Nevertheless, now that a variety of topics and concepts are on the table, we can at least begin to put them in contact with one another in order to build up a picture of their relations and indeed of their utility, when taken together, in promoting the growth of knowledge.

Again, where to start is potentially quite arbitrary. While we want to put themes that were developed independently into contact with one another, we do not want to let that produce another kind of “herding effect.” Certainly, I am more interested in some of the many topics introduced in this collection than in others. I will look for a strategic entering wedge, but others would see the wedge somewhere else entirely. My attempt at a (partial) synthesis is meant, then, as an illustration of how we can put things together to develop something that amplifies, corrects, and nuances. It is not meant to preempt others’ attempts to do the same sort of thing but in ways that reflect their interests and concerns.

ASSEMBLING OUR IDEAS

Here, then, is an example of how we might start to put ideas together. It reflects my own current interest in the disciplines and how they work to secure the engagement of different individuals in common projects (for earlier work on this project, see D’Agostino 2012). In his contribution, Patrick Reider (2014) refers to people’s tendency “to refrain from investing significant resources into projects with no accepted criterion of return” (54). This is certainly familiar in the literature about the scholarly disciplines. Each discipline, on some accounts, defines a standard list of problems or issues of strategic importance and constitutes, inter alia, a reward system for scholars addressing those issues (see, for instance, Whitley 1984). Since a “criterion of return” depends, within the scholarly community as much as within the market for goods and services, on what other individuals are willing to recognize as valuable, Reider quite properly concludes that “the perceived good of knowledge acquisition and production cannot be a pure expression of a solitary individual” (54). This is a nice point and, I think, is properly characterized as an ontological point. If the criterion of return in a given domain is a social artifact—a solitary individual does not get, on her own, to determine how the community will recognize and value her contribution—then, since the growth of knowledge depends, inter alia, on how knowledge-making activity is rewarded, the growth of knowledge is a matter that is mediated socially, just as social epistemology has insisted (see, of course, Fuller 1988, 3).

Having established the ontological grounds of a genuinely social epistemology, Reider also notes, however, that “when knowledge production and acquisition have no clear sense of benefit (material, spiritual, physical, ethical, etc.) or privilege, the degree to which a community is willing to invest in it diminishes” (54). This point is also a good one and it is a methodological point, rather than an ontological one. What it says, and again this is recognized in the literature about the disciplines, is that you cannot expect scholars to conduct research on topics or using tools that are not valued within their communities of inquiry. If they do, they cannot expect a “return on their investment” in the form of the kind of recognition and reward that will be distributed to others working within the mainstream. This point too, though in quite a different way, is relevant to understanding the project of social epistemology.

To see this we need, however, another point, one made explicitly by Melissa Orozco—namely, that “the emergence of this new interdisciplinary project [of social epistemology], in any existing version, was not friendly to existing approaches to knowledge” (17).

We now have two premises of an argument that explains something about social epistemology. Here goes.

1.The criterion of return on investment is defined with respect to the recognized approaches within a given domain of inquiry.

2.Social epistemology situates itself outside those approaches that are recognized within the domain, specifically, of epistemology as a subdiscipline of philosophy.

Accordingly it will be risky, at best, to invest one’s energies in prosecuting the project of social epistemology; there is no community whose criterion of return allocates recognition and reward to the practices that are constitutive of social epistemology.

Put crudely and with greater generality, scholars pursuing a new, unfamiliar, only partly institutionalized research agenda will not be able to present their findings for evaluation against already established criteria of return and hence risk not getting the sorts of returns that sustain commitment to the project. Notice the resonance of this point to the slightly different, but certainly related one of Stephen Norrie (2013) in his acute analysis of the way in which critical theory “is completely incompatible with existing academic practice” (32) (and its criteria of return), and of Inanna Hamati-Ataya (2014) in her point about the inconceivability “outside the SE community” of its “premises . . . constitutive theoretical traditions and the empirical literature it draws on and produces” (44). It is also, I think, alluded to by Elisabeth Simbürger (2014) in her reference to “the labour relations of academic knowledge production” (5). Insofar as social epistemology, or indeed any other “revolutionary” approach, rejects established projects and their criteria of return, it becomes a risky enterprise for individuals to engage in who have careers to make which can be made, at least typically, only through the mechanisms of recognition and reward that they have distanced themselves from.

On the other hand, as Orozco (2014) also points out, the separateness of social epistemology (from more established academic programs) might facilitate “its creative drive and quest for a vision,” an idea related, I think, to Jonathan Matheson’s (2014) point about the importance, in avoiding “confirmation bias,” in a group dynamics which (like the one we are attempting here) not only suffers, but honors, the participation of dissenting members, or, anyway, members with a diversity of interests and approaches. Again, the reasoning is familiar. If we are willing to forego recognition and reward, we need not narrow our range of interests and concerns (to fit the disciplinary template). But this means that our diversity of interests and concerns remains available to us as individuals and, more importantly, to our collaborators and colleagues. And this means that all the potential for correction, amplification, and nuance that is implicit in that diversity remains available to us as we form and refine our views. We do not inhabit an echo chamber in which each of us is singing from the same sheet. We may not know, with the sort of certainty and confidence of the fully disciplined scholar, how to allocate recognition and reward, but we do not have to wonder, we can hear, what scholars with different views have to tell us; they will not be inhibited from telling us out of fear of not being rewarded for their orthodoxy. Of course, they won’t be as reliably rewarded anyway. That is what follows from there not being an orthodoxy. Rewards come, or not, depending on the reactions of individuals.

With a well-established research agenda, we have a more or less mechanical allocation of recognition and rewards. Without such an agenda, recognition and reward are haphazard and unreliably delivered on an ad hoc basis. With an established agenda, we risk “conformism” in thought, with all that implies. Without such an agenda, we have the potential for the creative combination of ideas and techniques that do not already “go together” or apply (as seen from more conventional standpoints). Social epistemology explains all this when it looks at the production of knowledge in the various disciplines. But, as a scholarly formation, it also experiences all this: it is creative, but recognition and rewards are not delivered mechanically, and hence it is a risky enterprise.

This issue is crucial for all knowledge production. How do we manage or, better still, “tune” the tension between reliable distribution of rewards (which seems to require set standards and hence an orthodoxy) and the conditions required for genuine creativity (which seem to demand diversity in thinking and action and hence a heterodoxy).

Certainly, to be on the side of creativity is, at least potentially and probably typically, to put some distance between oneself and the system of routine recognition and reward. It therefore requires courage or a bias toward risk taking to pursue this path. But it will also require, I submit, the development of institutional forms, perhaps sitting at an angle to what Norrie refers to as existing “trajectories of career advancement” that take up the challenge of providing both a sympathetic audience and one that is also capable of critical engagement in support of standards of excellence.

Let me take these points in order.

It is, as the remarks of Reider remind us, psychologically harder to pursue a path that has not already been well trodden by others to the extent, perhaps, that it has been “domesticated,” stripped of its founding excitements and risks. For this we need recognition but can’t reliably get it, in many cases, from our immediate colleagues in the offices down the corridor from us. So we need to support each other in our joint and risky venture.

Secondly, however, we need to make up as we go precisely the criteria that will enable us to distinguish between good and better and, indeed, not so good work within this emerging landscape of ideas and methods. If we want social epistemology, or indeed an...