The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Cite this entry Search the SEP • Advanced Search • Tools • RSS FeedTable of Contents• What's New• Archives• Projected ContentsEditorial Information• About the SEP• Editorial Board• How to Cite the SEP• Special CharactersSupport the SEPContact the SEP ©Metaphysics Research Lab,CSLI,Stanford University  Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia FreeThe Social Dimensions of Scientific KnowledgeFirst published Fri Apr 12, 2002; substantive revision Thu Aug 31, 2006Study of the social dimensions of scientific knowledge encompassesthe effects of scientific research on human life and social relations,the effects of social relations and values on scientific research, andthe social aspects of inquiry itself. Several factors have combined tomake these questions salient to contemporary philosophy of science.These factors include the emergence of social movements, likeenvironmentalism and feminism, critical of mainstream science; concernsabout the social effects of science-based technologies; epistemologicalquestions made salient by big science; new trends in the history ofscience, especially the move away from internalist historiography;anti-normative approaches in the sociology of science; turns inphilosophy to naturalism and pragmatism. This entry reviews thehistorical background to current research in this area, features ofcontemporary science which invite philosophical attention, thechallenge to normative philosophy from social, cultural, and feministstudies of science, and the principal philosophical models of thesocial character of scientific knowledge.1. Historical Background2. Big Science, Trust, and Authority3. Social, Cultural, and Feminist Studies of Science4. Models of the Social Character of Knowledge5. Social Direction of Science6. ConclusionBibliography Works Cited Further Reading Other Internet ResourcesRelated Entries1. Historical BackgroundPhilosophers who study the social character of scientific knowledgecan trace their lineage at least as far as John Stuart Mill. Mill,Charles Sanders Peirce, and Karl Popper all took some type of criticalinteraction as central to the validation of knowledge claims.Mill's arguments occur in his well-known political essay On Liberty,(Mill 1859) rather than in the context of his logical andmethodological writings, but he makes it clear that they are to applyto any kind of knowledge or truth claim. Mill argues from thefallibility of human knowers to the necessity of unobstructedopportunity for and practice of the critical discussion of ideas. Onlysuch critical discussion can assure us of the justifiability of the(true) beliefs we do have and can help us avoid falsity or thepartiality of belief or opinion framed in the context of just one pointof view. The achievement of knowledge, then, is a social or collective,not an individual, matter.Peirce's contribution to the social epistemology of science iscommonly taken to be his consensual theory of truth: "The opinionwhich is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate iswhat we mean by truth, and the object represented is the real."(Peirce 1878, 133) While often read as meaning that the truth iswhatever the community of inquirers converges on in the long run, thenotion in turn is interpretable as meaning more precisely either thattruth (and "the real") depends on the agreement of the community ofinquirers or that it is the effect of the real that it will in the endproduce agreement among inquirers. Whatever the correct reading ofthis particular statement, Peirce elsewhere makes it clear that, inhis view, truth is both attainable and beyond the reach of anyindividual. "We individually cannot hope to attain the ultimatephilosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it for the community ofphilosophers." (Peirce 1868, 40). Peirce puts great stock ininstigating doubt and critical interaction as means toknowledge. Thus, whether his theory of truth is consensualist orrealist, his view of the practices by which we attain it grants acentral place to dialogue and social interaction.Popper is often treated as a precursor of social epistemology becauseof his emphasis on the importance of criticism in the development ofscientific knowledge. Two concepts of criticism are found in his works(Popper 1963, 1972) and these can be related to logical and practicalsenses of falsification. The logical sense of falsification is justthe structure of a modus tollens argument, in which a hypothesis isfalsified by the demonstration that one of its logical consequences isfalse. This is one notion of criticism, but it is a matter of formalrelations between statements. The practical sense of falsificationrefers to the efforts of scientists to demonstrate the inadequacies ofone another's theories by demonstrating observational shortcomings orconceptual inconsistencies. This is a social activity. For Popper themethodology of science is falsificationist, and science progressesthrough the demonstration by falsification of the untenability oftheories and hypotheses. Popper's falsificationism is part of aneffort to demarcate genuine science from pseudo science, and has lostits plausibility as a description of scientific methodology as thedemarcation project has come under challenge from naturalist andhistoricist approaches in philosophy of science. While criticism doesplay an important role in some current approaches in socialepistemology, Popper's own views are more closely approximated byevolutionary epistemology, especially that version that treatscognitive progress as the effect of selection against incorrecttheories and hypotheses.The work of Mill, Peirce, and Popper is a resource for philosopherspresently exploring the social dimensions of scientific knowledge.However, the current debates are framed in the context of developmentsin both philosophy of science and in history and social studies ofscience following the collapse of the logical empiricistconsensus. The philosophers of the Vienna Circle are conventionallyassociated with an uncritical form of positivism and with the logicalempiricism that replaced American pragmatism in the 1940s and1950s. According to some recent scholars, however, they saw naturalscience as a potent force for progressive social change. (Cartwright,Cat, and Chang 1996; Giere and Richardson, eds., 1996; Uebel 2005)With its grounding in observation and public forms of verification,science for them constituted a superior alternative to what they sawas metaphysical obscurantism, an obscurantism that led not only to badthinking but to bad politics. While one development of this point ofview leads to scientism, the view that any meaningful question can beanswered by the methods of science; another development leads toinquiry into what social conditions promote the growth of scientificknowledge. Logical empiricism, the version of Vienna Circle philosophythat developed in the United States, focused on logical, internalaspects of scientific knowledge and discouraged philosophical inquiryinto the social dimensions of science. These came into prominenceagain after the publication of Thomas Kuhn's Structure ofScientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962). A new generation ofsociologists of science took Kuhn's emphasis on the role ofnon-evidential community factors in scientific change even furtherthan he had and argued that scientific judgment was determined bysocial factors, such as professional interests and politicalideologies. This family of positions has provoked a counter-responseamong philosophers. These responses are marked by an effort to grantsome social character to scientific knowledge while at the same timemaintaining its epistemological legitimacy, which they take to beundermined by the new sociology. At the same time, features of theorganization of scientific inquiry compel philosophers to considertheir implications for the normative analysis of scientificpractices.2. Big Science, Trust, and AuthorityThe second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of whathas come to be known as Big Science: the organization of large numbersof scientists bringing different bodies of expertise to a commonresearch project. The original model was the Manhattan Project,undertaken during the Second World War to develop an atomic weapon.Theoretical and experimental physicists located at various sites acrossthe country, though principally at Los Alamos, New Mexico, worked onsub-problems of the project under the overall direction of J. RobertOppenheimer. While academic and military research have since been tosome degree separated, much experimental research in physics,especially high energy particle physics, continues to be pursued bylarge teams of researchers. Research in other areas of science as well,for example the work comprehended under the umbrella of the HumanGenome Project, has taken on some of the properties of Big Science,requiring multiple forms of expertise. In addition, the dependence ofresearch on central funding bodies prompts questions about the degreeof independence of contemporary scientific knowledge from its socialand economic context.John Hardwig (1985) articulated one philosophical dilemma posed bysuch large teams of researchers. Each member or subgroup participatingin such a project is required because each has a crucial bit ofexpertise not possessed by any other member or subgroup. This may beknowledge of a part of the instrumentation, the ability to perform acertain kind of calculation, the ability to make a certain kind ofmeasurement or observation. The other members are not in a position toevaluate the results of other members' work, and hence, all must takeone anothers' results on trust. The consequence is an experimentalresult, (for example, the measurement of a property such as the decayrate or spin of a given particle) the evidence for which is not fullyunderstood by any single participant in the experiment. This leadsHardwig to ask two questions, one about the evidential status oftestimony, and one about the nature of the knowing subject in thesecases. With respect to the latter, Hardwig says that either the groupas a whole, but no single member, knows or it is possible to knowvicariously. Neither of these is palatable to him. Talking about thegroup or the community knowing smacks of superorganisms andtranscendent entities and Hardwig shrinks from that solution. Vicariousknowledge, knowing without oneself possessing the evidence for thetruth of what one knows, requires, according to Hardwig, too much of adeparture from our ordinary concepts of knowledge.The first question is, as Hardwig notes, part of a more generaldiscussion about the epistemic value of testimony. Much of what passesfor common knowledge is acquired from others. We depend on experts totell us what is wrong with our appliances, our cars, our bodies.Indeed, much of what we later come to know depends on what wepreviously learned as children from our parents. We acquire knowledgeof the world through the institutions of education, journalism, andscientific inquiry. Philosophers disagree about the status of beliefsacquired in this way. Here is the question: If A knows thatp on the basis of evidence e, B has reasonto think A trustworthy and B believes p onthe basis of A's testimony that p, does Balso know that p? Some philosophers, like Locke and Hume,argued that only what one has observed oneself could count as a goodreason for belief, and that the testimony of another is, therefore,never sufficient warrant for belief. Thus, B does not knowsimply on the basis of A's testimony. While this result isconsistent with traditional philosophical empiricism and rationalism,which emphasized the individual's sense experience or rationalapprehension as foundations of knowledge, it does have the consequencethat we do not know most of what we think we know.A number of philosophers have recently offered alternative analysesfocusing on one or another element in the problem. Some argue thattestimony by a qualified expert is itself evidential, (Schmitt 1988),others that the expert's evidence constitutes good reason for, but isnot itself evidential for the recipient of testimony (Hardwig 1985,1988), others that what is transmitted in testimony is knowledge andnot just propositional content and thus the question of the kind ofreason a recipient of testimony has is not to the point (Welbourne1981).However this dispute is resolved, questions of trust and authorityarise in a particularly pointed way in the sciences, and Hardwig'sdilemma for the physics experiment is also a specific version of a moregeneral phenomenon. A popular conception of science, fed partly byPopper's falsificationism, is that it is epistemically reliable becausethe results of experiments and studies are checked by independentrepetition. In practice, however, only some results are so checked andmany are simply accepted on trust. Thus, just as in the non-scientificworld information is accepted on trust, so in science, knowledge growsby depending on the testimony of others. What are the implications ofaccepting this fact for our conceptions of the reliability ofscientific knowledge?David Hull, in his (1988) argues that because the overall structureof reward and punishment in the sciences is a powerful incentive not tocheat, further epistemological analysis of the sciences is unnecessary.But some celebrated recent episodes, such as the purported productionof "cold fusion" were characterized by the failure of replicationattempts to produce the same phenomenon. And, while the advocates ofcold fusion were convinced that their experiments had produced thephenomenon, there have also been cases of outright fraud. Thus, even ifthe structure of reward and punishment is an incentive not to cheat, itdoes not guarantee the veridicality of every research report.The reward individual scientists seek is credit. That is, they seekrecognition, to have their work cited as important and as necessary tofurther scientific progress. The scientific community seeks truetheories or adequate models. Credit, or recognition, accrues toindividuals to the extent they are perceived as having contributed tothat community goal. Without strong community policing structures,there is a strong incentive to cheat, to try to obtain credit withoutnecessarily having done the work. Communities and individuals are thenfaced with the question: when is it appropriate to trust and whennot?Both Alvin Goldman (Goldman and Cox 1994) and Philip Kitcher (1993)treat this as a question to be answered by means of decision theoreticmodels. The decision theoretic approach to problems of trust andauthority treats both credit and truth as utilities. The challengethen is to devise formulas that show that actions designed to maximizecredit also maximize truth. Kitcher, in particular, develops formulasintended to show that even in situations peopled by non-epistemicallymotivated individuals (that is, individuals motivated more by a desirefor credit than by a desire for truth), the reward structure of thecommunity can be organized in such a way as to maximize truth andfoster scientific progress. Kitcher also applies this approach toproblems in the division of cognitive labor, i.e. to the questionswhether (and when) to pursue research that calls a community consensusinto question or to pursue research that extends the models andtheories upon which a community agrees.Steve Fuller and Joseph Rouse are both concerned with politicaldimensions of cognitive authority. Rouse in his (1987) integratedanalytic and continental philosophy of science and technology todevelop what might be called a critical pragmatism. This perspectivefacilitated an analysis of the transformative impact of science onhuman life and social relations. Fuller (1988) partially accepts theempirical sociologists' claim that traditional normative accounts ofscientific knowledge fail to get a purchase on actual scientificpractices, but takes this as a challenge to relocate the normativeconcerns of philosophers. These should include the distribution andcirculation of knowledge claims. The task of social epistemology ofscience is regulation of the production of knowledge by regulating therhetorical, technological, and administrative means of itscommunication. Big science is typically interdisciplinary. A special case ofinterdisciploinary science is presented by risk assessment, whichinvolves both research on the effects of various substances orpractices and the evaluation of those effects once identified. Theidea is to gain an understanding of both positive effects and ofnegative effects and a method of evaluating these. In this case, weare dealing not only with the problems of trust and authority amongspecialists from different disciplines, but also with the effects ofnew technologies in the social world. Typically, such assessment isprompted by the prospects of deploying science-based technologies. Therisks studied are generally of harm to human health or to theenvironment. Interest in applying philosophical analysis to riskassessment originated in response to debates about the development andexpansion of nuclear power-generating technologies. In addition, theapplication of cost-benefit analysis and attempts to understanddecision-making under conditions of uncertainty became topics ofinterest as extensions of formal modeling techniques (Giere 1991).These discussions intersect with debates about the scope of rationaldecision theory and have expanded to include other technologies aswell as applications of scientific research in agriculture and in themyriad forms of biological engineering. Essays on the relationbetween science and social values in risk research collected in thevolume edited by Deborah Mayo and Rachelle Hollander (1991) attempt tosteer a course between uncritical reliance on cost-benefit models andtheir absolute rejection. Coming from a slightly different angle, theprecautionary principle represents an approach shifting the burden ofproof in regulatory decisions from demonstration of harm todemonstration of safety of substances and practices. Carl Cranor(2004) explores versions of the principle and defends its use incertain decision contexts. Shrader-Frechette (2002) has advocatedmodels of ethically weighted cost-benefit analysis and greater publicinvolvement in risk assessment. Philosophers of science have alsoworked to make visible the ways in which values play a role in theresearch assessing the effects of technoscientifically producedsubstances and practices themselves, as distinct from the challengesof assigning values to identified risks and benefits. See Douglas2000, Lacey 2005, Shrader-Frechette 1994. 3. Social, Cultural, and Feminist Studies of ScienceKuhn's critique of logical empiricism included a strong naturalism.Scientific rationality was to be understood by studying actual episodesin the history of science, not by formal analyses developed from apriori concepts of knowledge and reason (Kuhn 1962, 1977). Sociologistsand sociologically inclined historians of science took this as amandate for the examination of the full spectrum of scientists'practices without any prior prejudice as to which were epistemicallylegitimate and which not. That very distinction came under suspicionfrom the new social scholars, often labeled "social constructivists."They urged that understanding the production of scientific knowledgerequired looking at all the factors causally relevant to the acceptanceof a scientific idea, not just at those the researcher thinks should berelevant.A wide range of approaches in social and cultural studies of sciencehas come under the umbrella label of "social constructivism." Bothterms in the label are understood differently in different programs ofresearch. While constructivists agree in holding that those factorstreated as evidential, or as rationally justifying acceptance, shouldnot be privileged at the expense of other causally relevant factors,they differ in their view of which factors are causal or worthexamination. Macro-analytic approaches, such as those associated withthe so-called Strong Programme in the Sociology of ScientificKnowledge, treat social relations as an external, independent variableand scientific judgment and content as a dependent variable.Micro-analyses or laboratory studies, on the other hand, abjure theimplied separation of social context and scientific practice and focuson the social relations within scientific research programs andcommunities and on those that bind research-productive andresearch-receptive communities together.Researchers also differ in the degree to which they treat the socialand the cognitive dimensions of inquiry as independent or interactive.The researchers associated with the macro-analytic Strong Programme inthe Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Barry Barnes, David Bloor, HarryCollins, Donald MacKenzie, Andrew Pickering, Steve Shapin) wereparticularly interested in the role of large scale social phenomena,whether widely held social/political ideologies or group professionalinterests, on the settlement of scientific controversies. Some landmarkstudies in this genre include Andrew Pickering's (1984) study ofcompeting professional interests in the interpretation of high energyparticle physics experiments, and Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer's(1985) study of the controversy between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbesabout the proper interpretation of experiments with vacuum pumps.The micro-sociological or laboratory studies approach featuresethnographic study of particular research groups, tracing the myriadactivities and interactions that eventuate in the production andacceptance of a scientific fact or datum. Karin Knorr Cetina's (1981)reports her year-long study of a plant science laboratory at UCBerkeley. Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar's (1986) study of RogerGuillemin's neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Salk Institute isanother classic in this genre. These scholars argued in subsequentwork that their form of study showed that philosophical analyses ofrationality, of evidence, of truth and knowledge, were irrelevant tounderstanding scientific knowledge. Sharon Traweek's (1988)comparative study of the cultures of Japanese and North American highenergy physics communities pointed to the parallels between cosmologyand social organization without making such extravagant andprovocative epistemological claims. The efforts of philosophers ofscience to articulate norms of scientific reasoning and judgment were,to all these scholars, misdirected, because actual scientists reliedon quite different kinds of considerations in the practice ofscience.Until recently, apart from a few anomalous figures like CarolineHerschel, Barbara McClintock, and Marie Curie, the sciences were amale preserve. Feminist scholars have asked what bearing themasculinity of the scientific profession has had on the content ofscience and on conceptions of scientific knowledge andpractice. Drawing on work by feminist scientists, exposing andcritiquing gender biased science, and on theories of gender, feministhistorians and philosophers of science have offered a variety ofmodels of scientific knowledge and reasoning intended to accommodatethe critique of accepted science and the concomitant proposal andadvocacy of alternatives. Evelyn Keller (1985) proposed apsycho-dynamic model of knowledge and objectivity, arguing that acertain psychological profile, facilitated by typical patterns ofmasculine psychological development, associated knowledge andobjectivity with domination. The association of knowledge and controlcontinues to be a topic of concern for feminist thinkers as it is alsofor environmentally concerned critics of the sciences. In thisconnection, see especially Lacey's (2005) study of the controversyconcerning transgenic crops. Other feminists turned to Marxist modelsof social relations and developed versions of standpoint theory, whichholds that the beliefs held by a group reflect the social interests ofthat group. As a consequence, the scientific theories accepted in acontext marked by divisions of power such as gender will reflect theinterests of those in power. Alternative theoretical perspectives canbe expected from those systematically excluded from power. (Rose 1983;Haraway 1978).Still other feminists have argued that some standard philosophicalapproaches to the sciences can be used to express feminist concerns.Nelson (1990) adopts Quine's holism and naturalism to analyze debatesin recent biology. Elizabeth Potter (2001) adapts Mary Hesse's networktheory of scientific inference to analyse gendered aspects of 17thcentury physics. Helen Longino (1990) develops a contextual empiricismto analyze research in human evolution and in neuroendocrinology. Inaddition to the direct role played by gender bias, scholars haveattended to the ways shared values in the context of reception canconfer an a priori implausibility on certain ideas. Keller (1983)argued that this was the fate of Barbara McClintock's unorthodoxproposals of genetic transposition. Stephen Kellert (1993) makes asimilar suggestion regarding the resistance to so-called chaostheory.What the feminist and empirical sociological analyses have in commonis the view that the social organization of the scientific communityhas a bearing on the knowledge produced by that community. There aredeep differences, however, in their views as to what features of thatsocial organization are deemed relevant and how they are expressed inthe theories and models accepted by a given community. The genderrelations focused on by feminists went unrecognized by sociologistspursuing macro- or microsociological research programs. The feministscientists and scholars further differ from the scholars in empiricalsocial and cultural studies of science in their call for alternativetheories and approaches in the sciences. These calls imply thatphilosophical concerns with truth and justification are not onlylegitimate but useful tools in advancing feminist transformative goalsfor the sciences. As can be seen in their varying treatments ofobjectivity, however, philosophical concepts are often reworked inorder to be made applicable to the content or episodes of interest(See Anderson 2004, Haraway 1988, Harding 1993, Keller 1985, Longino1990, Nelson 1990, Wylie 2005)4. Models of the Social Character of KnowledgeSince 1980, interest in developing philosophical accounts ofscientific knowledge that incorporate the social dimensions ofscientific practice has been on the increase. Some philosophers seeattention to the social as a straightforward extension of alreadydeveloped approaches in epistemology. Others, inclined toward some formof naturalism, have taken the work in empirical social studies ofscience discussed above seriously. They have, however, diverged quiteconsiderably in their treatment of the social. Some, understand thesocial as biasing or distorting, and hence see the social as opposed toor competing with the cognitive or epistemic. These philosophers see thesociologists' disdain for normative philosophical concerns as part of ageneral debunking of science that demands a response. They attempteither to rebut the claims of the sociologists or to reconcile thedemonstration of the role of interests in science with its ultimaterationality. Others treat the social as instead constitutive ofrationality. This division parallels to some degree the divisionbetween macro-analyses and micro-analyses in the sociology of sciencedescribed above.Philosophers who treat the social as biasing or distorting tend tofocus on the constructivists' view that there are no universalprinciples of rationality or principles of evidence that can be used toidentify in any context-independent way which factors are evidentialand which not. They can be divided into roughly two camps: defenders ofrationality and reconciliationists who seek to disarm the sociologists'analyses by incorporating them into a broader rationalframework. Philosophers concerned to defend the rationality of science againstsociological misrepresentations include Larry Laudan (1984) James Brown(1989, 1994), Alvin Goldman (1987, 1995) and Susan Haack (1996). Thedetails of these philosophers' approaches differ, but they agree inholding that scientists are persuaded by what they regard as the bestevidence or argument, the evidence most indicative of the truth bytheir lights, and in holding that arguments and evidence are theappropriate focus of attention for understanding the production ofscientific knowledge. When evidential considerations have not trumpednon-evidential considerations, we have an instance of bad science. Theyread the sociologists as arguing that a principled distinction betweenevidential and nonevidential considerations cannot be drawn and devotetheir efforts to refuting those arguments. The social character ofscience is understood as a matter of the aggregation of individuals,not their interactions, and public knowledge as simply the additiveoutcome of many individuals making sound epistemic judgments.Individual rationality and individual knowledge are thus the properfocus of philosophers of science. Exhibiting principles of rationalityapplicable to individual reasoning is sufficient to demonstrate therationality of science, at least in its ideal form.Reconciliationists include Ronald Giere, Mary Hesse, and PhilipKitcher. Giere (1988) models scientific judgment using decision theory.This permits incorporating scientists' interests as one of theparameters of the decision matrix. Mary Hesse (1980) employs a networkmodel of scientific inference that resembles W.V.O. Quine's web ofbelief in that its constituents are heterogeneous in character, but allsubject to revision in relation to changes elsewhere in the network.She understands the social factors as coherence conditions operating intandem with logical constraints to determine the relative plausibilityof beliefs in the network.The most elaborate reconciliationist position is that developed inPhilip Kitcher's (1993). In addition to modeling relations of authorityand the division of cognitive labor as described above, he offers whathe terms a compromise between extreme rationalists and sociologicaldebunkers. The compromise model appeals to a principle of rationality,which Kitcher calls the External Standard. It is deemed externalbecause it is proposed as holding independently of any particularhistorical, cultural or social context. Thus, not only is it external, but it is also universal. The principle applies to change ofbelief (or shift from one practice to another, in Kitcher's broaderlocution), not to belief. It treats a shift (in practice or belief) asrational if and only "the process through which the shift was made hasa success ratio at least as high as that of any other process used byhuman beings (ever) ..." (Kitcher 1993, 303). Kitcher's compromiseproposes that scientific ideas develop over time and benefit from thecontributions of many differently motivated researchers. This is theconcession to the sociologically oriented scholars. In the end,however, those theories that get accepted are those that satisfyKitcher's External Standard. Kitcher thus joins Goldman, Haack, andLaudan in the view that it is possible to articulate a prioriconditions of rationality or of epistemic warrant that operateindependently of, or, perhaps one might say, orthogonally to, thesocial relations of science.A third set of models is integrationist in character. Nelson (1990)uses Quine's arguments against the independently foundational status ofobservation statements as the basis for what she calls a feministempiricism. According to Nelson, no principled distinction can be madebetween the theories, observations, or values of a community. Whatcounts as evidence, in her view, is fixed by the entire complex of acommunity's theories, value commitments, and observations. There isneither knowledge nor evidence apart from such a shared complex. Thecommunity is the primary knower on this view and individual knowledgeis dependent on the knowledge and values of the community.Miriam Solomon's social empiricism is focused on scientificrationality (Solomon 1992, 1994a, 1994b). It, too, involves denying auniversal principled distinction among the causes of belief. Solomondraws on contemporary cognitive science literature to argue that biasesare simply any factors that influence belief. They are not necessarilydistorting, and can be productive of insight and rational belief.Salience and availability (of data, of measurement technologies) arebiases as much as social ideologies. The distinctive feature ofSolomon's social empiricism is her contrast between individual andcommunity rationality. The theory or belief that it is rational toaccept is that which has the greatest amount of empirical success.Individuals can persist in beliefs that are less rational than otherson this view, if the totality of available evidence (or empirical data)is not available to them. What matters to science, however, is thatcommunity judgments be rational. A community is rational when thetheories it accepts are those with all or the most empirical successes.Thus, the community can be rational even when its members areirrational. Indeed, individual irrationality can contribute tocommunity rationality in that individuals committed to a theory thataccounts for their data keep that data in the range of phenomena anytheory accepted by the entire community must eventually explain. Inorder that the totality of relevant constraints on theory acceptanceremain available to the entire community, biases must be appropriatelydistributed. Thus Solomon proposes appropriate distribution of biasesas a normative condition on the structure of scientificcommunities.Finally, in Longino's critical contextual empiricism, the cognitiveprocesses that eventuate in scientific knowledge are themselves social(Longino 1990). Longino's starting point is a version of theunderdetermination argument: the semantic gap between statementsdescribing data and statements expressing hypotheses or theories to beconfirmed or disconfirmed by that data means that evidential relationscannot be formally specified and that data cannot support one theory orhypothesis to the exclusion of all alternatives. Instead, suchrelations are mediated by background assumptions. Eventually, in thechain of justification, one reaches assumptions for which no evidenceis available. If these are the context in which evidential relationsare constituted, questions arise concerning how the acceptance of suchassumptions can be legitimated. According to Longino, the only checkagainst the arbitrary dominance of subjective (metaphysical, political,aesthetic) preference in such cases is critical interaction among themembers of the scientific community or among members of differentcommunities. Longino takes the underdetermination argument to expressin logical terms the point made by the sociologically orientedresearchers: the individuals participating in the production ofscientific knowledge are historically, geographically, and sociallysituated and their observations and reasoning reflect their situations.This fact does not undermine the normative enterprise of philosophy,but requires its expansion to include within its scope the socialinteractions within and between scientific communities. What counts asknowledge is determined by such interactions. Longino claims thatscientific communities do institutionalize some critical practices (forexample, peer review), but argues that such practices and institutionsmust satisfy conditions of effectiveness in order to qualify asobjective.5. Social Direction of ScienceModern science has been regarded as both a model of democraticself-governance and an activity requiring and facilitating democraticpractices in its supporting social context (Popper 1950, Bronowski1956). In this perspective, science is seen as embedded in anddependent on its supporting social context, but insulated in itspractices from the influence of that context. As the reach of scienceand science-based technologies has extended further and further intothe economy and daily life of industrialized societies, new attentionis paid to the governance of science. Regardless of one's views aboutthe social character of knowledge, there are further questionsconcerning what research to pursue, what social resources to devote toit, who should make such decisions, and how they should be made.Philip Kitcher (Conclusions, Science, Truth, and Democracy, 2001) hasopened these questions to philosophical scrutiny. Kitcher largelyendorses the epistemological views of his (1993). In this new work,however, he argues that there is no absolute standard of thesignificance (practical or epistemic) of research projects, nor anystandard of the good apart from subjective preferences. The onlynon-arbitrary way to defend judgments concerning research agendas inthe absence of absolute standards is through democratic means ofestablishing collective preferences. Kitcher, thus, attempts to spellout procedures by which decisions concerning what research directionsto pursue can be made in a democratic manner. The result, which hecalls well-ordered science, is a system in which the decisionsactually made track the decisions that would be a made by a suitablyconstituted representative body collectively deliberating with theassistance of relevant information (concerning, e.g., cost andfeasibility) supplied by experts.Kitcher's "well-ordered science" has attracted attention from otherphilosophers, from scientists, and from scholars of public policy.Winning praise as a first step, it has also elicited a variety ofcriticisms and further questions. The criticisms of his proposalrange from worries about the excessive idealism of the conception toworries that it will enshrine the preferences of a much smaller groupthan those who will be affected by research decisions. Kitcher'sproposal at best works for a system in which all or most scientificresearch is publicly funded. But the proportion of private,corporate, funding of science compared to that of public funding hasbeen increasing, thus calling into question the effectiveness of amodel that presupposes largely public control (Mirowski and Sent 2002,Krimsky 2003). Kitcher's model, it should be noted, still effects asignificant separation between the actual conduct of research anddecisions concerning the direction of research and scholars who see amore intimate relation between social processes and values in thecontext and those in the conduct of research will be dissatisfied withit.The counterfactual character of the proposal raises questions aboutthe extent to which well-ordered science really is democratic. If theactual decisions do not need to be the result of democratic proceduresbut only to be the same as those that would result, from suchprocedures how do we know which decisions those are without actuallygoing through the deliberative exercise? Even if the process isactually carried out, there are places, e.g. in choice of expertswhose advice is sought, which permit individual preferences to subvertor bias the preferences of the whole (Roth 2003). Furthermore, giventhat the effects of scientific research are potentially global, whiledemocratic decisions are at best national, national decisions willhave an effect well beyond the population represented by the decisionmakers. Sheila Jasanoff has also commented that even in contemporaryindustrialized democracies there are quite different sciencegovernance regimes. There is not one model of democratic decisionmaking, but many, and the differences translate into quite differentpolicies (Jasanoff 2005).6. ConclusionPhilosophical study of the social dimensions of scientific knowledgehas been intensifying in the decades since 1970. Social controversiesabout the sciences and science based technologies as well asdevelopments in philosophical naturalism and social epistemologycombine to drive thinking in this area forward. Scholars in a numberof cognate disciplines continue to investigate the myriad socialrelations within scientific communities and between them and theirsocial, economic, and institutional contexts. These investigationsprovide both source material for philosophical analysis and challengesto conventional approaches to understanding scientific knowledge.While philosophers were initially focused on what might be termednarrowly epistemic concerns in their response to this work, they areexpanding that focus to include attention to the ethical and politicalquestions its analyses make salient.BibliographyWorks Cited Anderson, Elizabeth. 2004. "Uses of Value Judgements inScience" Hypatia 19, 1-24.Barnes, Barry and David Bloor. 1982. "Relativism, Rationalism, andthe Sociology of Knowledge." 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Knowledge and Power: Toward a PoliticalPhilosophy of Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Schmitt, Frederick. 1988. “On the Road to Social EpistemicInterdependence.” Social Epistemology2: 297-307.Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the AirPump.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. 1994. "Expert Judgment and NuclearRisks: The Case for More Populist Poliicy." Journal of SocialPhilosophy 25: 45-70.–––. 2002. Environmental Justice: CreatingEquality; Reclaiming Democracy. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.Solomon. Miriam. 1992. "Scientific Rationality and HumanReasoning." Philosophy of Science 59,3:439-54.–––. 1994a. “Social Empiricism.”Nous 28, no.3: 323-343.–––. 1994b. “A More SocialEpistemology.” In Socializing Epistemology: The SocialDimensions of Knowledge, ed. Frederick Schmitt,pp. 217-233. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World ofHigh Energy Physicists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Uebel, Thomas. 2004. "Political Philosophy of Science in LogicalEmpiricism: The Left Vienna Circle." Studies in History andPhilosophy of Science 36: 754-773.Welbourne, Michael. 1981. “The Community of Knowledge.”Philosophical Quarterly 31, no. 125:302-314.Wylie, Alison. 2002. Thinking from Things. Los Angeles,CA: University of California Press.Further ReadingFleck, Ludwig. 1973. The Genesis and Development of aScientific Fact. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Goldman, Alvin. 1999. Knowledge in a Social World. NewYork, NY: Oxford University Press.Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What?Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring theSciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.Levi, Isaac. 1980. The Enterprise of Knowledge. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.Longino, Helen E. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.McMullin, Ernan, ed. 1992. Social Dimensions of ScientificKnowledge. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press.Sismondo, Sergio. 1996. Science Without Myth. Albany, NY:State University of New York Press.Solomon, Miriam. 2001. Social Empiricism. Cambridge, MA:Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Other Internet Resources[Please contact the author with suggestions.] Related Entries epistemology: evolutionary | epistemology: social | ethics: environmental | feminist (interventions): epistemology and philosophy of science | Kuhn, Thomas | Mill, John Stuart | naturalism | Peirce, Charles Sanders | Popper, Karl | pragmatism | rationality: historicist theories of Copyright © 2006 byHelen Longino<hlongino@stanford.edu> |
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