Miriam Solomon

Temple University
DRAFT: DO NOT QUOTE
Social Epistemology 1

1. Introduction
This essay discusses social epistemological ideas in sociology of science, feminist
epistemology, cognitive science and analytic philosophy. Social epistemology is not a single
tradition or school of thought. It includes a variety of critical responses to the traditional
individualist model of justification and knowledge. This traditional model began with Rene
Descartes. When Descartes said I think, therefore I am, he insisted that individual thought is
the foundation of knowledge as well as the beginning of metaphysics. He founded a modern
tradition of epistemology that describes individual thought and prescribes ways of improving its
rationality. So, for example, he described his own epistemic situation as awareness of his own
sensations and ideas, and recommended clarity and distinctness of ideas as a route to certain
knowledge. Descartes founded a modern tradition of epistemology that continued, through Kant
and beyond, to understand both justification and knowledge as achievements of individual
persons and individual reason.
This epistemic individualism was challenged in the nineteenth century, with the birth of
social theory and sociology. Philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Sanders Peirce, and
Karl Marx paid attention to ways in which social institutions and practices help as well as hinder

Thanks to Temple graduate students Aili Bresnehan, Phillip Honenberger, Alejandra Iannone, Matt Johnson, Erum
Naqvi and Cynthia Rogan de Ramirez for being the first audience for this chapter. They made helpful suggestions
for revision. Also thanks to Nick Pappas for commenting on the first draft.

the production of knowledge. Mill praised the epistemic virtues of dissent, claiming that it yields
the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error
(2003). Dissent is a social epistemic phenomenon because there need to be at least two different
views for dissent. Peirce, influenced by Georg Hegel, saw knowledge as socially achieved in
convergence at the ideal limit of inquiry. Marx argued that it is difficult for individuals to free
themselves from the deep assumptionsideologiesthat society has instilled in them.
For the most part, Anglo-American philosophers did not take this social turn for at least
another century. 2 Even the move to naturalism did not change the emphasis on individual
thought. Indeed, W.V. Quine argued in Epistemology Naturalized that epistemologyfalls
into place as a chapter of psychology, (1969) thus omitting the sociology of knowledge
altogether. Normative recommendations continued to focus on what individuals, rather than
groups and social institutions, can do to improve the clarity and rigor of their thinking. Quine
recommended faithfulness to experience, simplicity and conservatism. Others have emphasized
individual epistemic standards such as logical coherence, explanatory coherence or reliability. In
this tradition, terms like justified, knows, and doubts have been analyzed as intentional
states of particular people about particular propositions. It was not until Alvin Goldman
championed social epistemology, in the late 1980s, that naturalistic analytic epistemologists
began to look at social processes.
Meanwhile, a tradition of social theory, well known in Continental philosophy circles as
well as social science disciplines, developed in Continental Europe. The works of Emile
Durkheim, Max Weber, members of the Frankfurt School, and most recently Jurgen Habermas,
contain many social epistemological ideas, but have had little direct influence on analytic
2

An important exception was Ludwig Wittgensteinif he is counted as an Anglo-American philosopher. His work
on rule following provided the philosophical background to the Strong Programme in sociology of science, but was
not absorbed by analytic epistemologists.

philosophy. Their influence has been for the most part indirect, through their influence on
sociology of science, feminist epistemology and cognitive science. For comprehensiveness, this
essay should be supplemented with materials on social theory and Continental philosophy.
A quick and uncontroversial definition of social epistemology may be helpful. In his
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on social epistemology, Alvin Goldman writes,
Social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information (2006).
This is a very general definition that includes both descriptive and normative 3 social
epistemology. The phrase social dimensions is intended to be maximally inclusive. It includes
the range from modestly social epistemic phenomena (such as the reliance on others to correct
ones logical errors) to deeply social epistemic concepts (such as Charles Sanders Peirces view
that truth is what is achieved by a community in the limit of inquiry).
Don Fallis (2002) has discovered that although social epistemological ideas have older
sources, the term social epistemology first appeared in library science in the 1950s, when
Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera proposed that epistemology be broadened in order to provide a
theoretical framework for information science. They asked for the analysis of the production,
distribution and utilization of intellectual products in much the same fashion as that in which the
production, distribution and utilization of material products have long been investigated (Egan,
Shera 1952).
The term next occurs (in what appears to be an unrelated context) during the 1970s in the
writings of Strong Programme sociologists of knowledge such as Barry Barnes, David Bloor,
Steven Shapin and Harry Collins, who were writing in the wake of Thomas Kuhns The

Philosophers often make a distinction between what they call descriptive accounts and what they call
normative accounts. Descriptive accounts tell us how things are, in fact, while normative accounts tell us how
they could be improved. Another word for normative is prescriptive, referring to the prescriptions for action
that a normative account delivers.

Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

They called for an effort to ascertain the exact

nature of the links between accounts of natural reality and the social ordera social
epistemology appropriate for the history of science (Shapin 1979). Their approach depended on
careful historical case studies; like Thomas Kuhn, they looked to the history of science to explore
the social factors involved, and did not reject the findings even when they were at odds with
preconceptions about social factors conducive to scientific rationality. They also looked to the
work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, who was in turn influenced by Emile Durkheim and
Ludwig Wittgenstein, as an inspiration for interpreting intellectual activity in a social context
(Barnes, Shapin 1977). The Strong Programme (also sometimes called social constructivism,
the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), the Edinburgh Programme and the Bath
Programme) has continued to play an important role in the development of social epistemology,
and will be discussed further below. The philosopher-sociologist Steve Fuller did much to
popularize the term social epistemology, writing a book (1988) and creating a journal with that
title.
Although early feminist epistemologists and feminist philosophers of science such as
Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) and Sandra Harding (1986) did not use the term social
epistemology, they are properly regarded as important early and continuing contributors to
social epistemological ideas. The term social epistemology entered analytic epistemology
through the work of Alvin Goldman (1986), who distinguished what he calls primary, or
individual, epistemology from what he calls secondary or social epistemology and, while
focusing on individual epistemology, set out a future agenda of social epistemology, which he
delivered on just over a decade later (Goldman 1999). By that time, the term social

epistemology was in wide use in analytic epistemology and was the focus of an important
anthology (Schmitt 1994).
It is time to move on from a history of the term social epistemology to an account of the
content of social epistemological ideas. The next three sections will look at sociology of science,
feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, and cognitive science in turn, and then I will
describe the treatment of the topics in analytic philosophy of science and epistemology. Social
epistemology is best thought of as an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary set of projects.

2. Strong Programme Sociology of Science

Before the Kuhnian revolution in history and philosophy of science, Robert Mertons
(1942) notion of the ethos of science was the standard view of epistemic norms among
sociologists of science. He described this ethos as comprising universalism (lack of bias),
communalism (shared intellectual property), disinterestedness (selflessness) and organized
skepticism. Such an ethos, he thought, supports objective inquiry. Other socially produced
knowledge and belief systems, such as religious beliefs and political ideologies, are guided by
different ethoi, and result in less objective or even subjective knowledge. When scientists depart
from this ethos, according to Merton, they are no longer doing science. The Mertonian view
coheres 4 with the traditional philosophy of science view that science is knowledge produced by
the application of objective scientific method. There were competing accounts of this objective
scientific method (e.g. the accounts of Rudolf Carnap, Ernest Nagel, Carl Hempel, Karl Popper
and others) but all shared a commitment to empirically testable and bias-free science.

I say coheres rather than coincides because the Mertonian ethos is a set of social rather than individual
norms.

Thomas Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) showed that the scientific
community is not governed by a Mertonian ethos, at least for its most revolutionary
achievements. Arguing as a historian of science and focusing on the Scientific Revolution, Kuhn
showed that scientists, even when doing their best work, are influenced by interests and
ideologies. For example, during the Copernican Revolution, Keplers and Galileos views were
as much a result of their personalities and their religious and political beliefs as they were of the
application of scientific method. As Kuhn understood it, scientific method leaves a good deal of
leeway for contingent psychological and social factors to affect the outcome (1977).
Consequently, significant scientific change involves more than the application of scientific
method; it also requires the determining influence of psychological and social factors.
Although Kuhn did not extrapolate to the conclusion that scientific knowledge is no different
from other kinds of knowledge and belief systemsKuhn maintained that an imprecise kind of
scientific objectivity was important (1977)others working in the history and sociology of
science took this next step. For example, Shapin and Shaffer (1985) found that the confidence of
the early members of the Royal Society, such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, in the results
of their experiments rested in part on assumptions about social class; gentlemen were viewed as
more trustable than other witnesses. Self-named Strong Programme sociologists of science 5
saw no difference in rationality between science and other kinds of human knowledge, and
refrained from making a distinction between good science and bad science. They treated
scientific beliefs in exactly the same way that their colleagues in anthropology treated the belief
systems of tribal cultures. As mentioned above, they used the term social epistemology to

Sociologists of Science at the University of Edinburgh coined the term Strong Programme in order to distinguish
their approach from the Mertonian approach. The latter was viewed as a weak program because it used the full
resources of sociological analysis only for biased or bad science, leaving good science to the traditional
philosophical account.

describe their project of finding out how scientific knowledge is socially constructed. Social
constructivism is one approach to social epistemology.
The reception of the Strong Programme from scientists and philosophers of science has not
been friendly. The exchange between social constructivists on the one hand and scientists and
traditional philosophers of science on the other hand is widely referred to as The Science
Wars, and reached its height in the 1990s. The dispute ended in a stalemate: sociologists of
science refused to develop a normative view 6 and scientists and traditional philosophers of
science refused to relinquish their traditional normative views. Sociologists of science wanted
to do good description, first and foremost, of the social processes used in construction of
scientific knowledge. Philosophers and scientists were anxious to defend the rationality of
science, and were not ready to look at alternatives to traditional logical empiricist account of
scientific method. Sociologists of science were, understandably, frustrated with the historical
inaccuracies that philosophers tolerated in the interests of defending scientific rationality.
Philosophers of science and scientists were equally frustrated with what they perceived as the
Strong Programme denial of the rationality of science and its refusal to distinguish good
science from bad science. Fortunately, both sides of the debate have progressed since then.

3. Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, which began in the late 1970s and
1980s, is another source of empirical findings about the epistemic role of social factors,
particularly ideological and political factors. Early work in these fields showed that ideologies

A normative account tells us how scientists should reason and is opposed to a descriptive account of the perhaps
flawed ways in which scientists in fact reason.

about gender affect the formulation of theories and the design of research programs. Evelyn Fox
Keller, for example, argued that Barbara McClintocks heterodox contributions to genetics were
strongly influenced by an affinity for non-hierarchical theories (Keller 1983). McClintock
rejected the dominant view that genes independently determine phenotype and considered the
possibility that genes could regulate one another. Evelyn Fox Keller gave a psychoanalyticsociological account of the influence of gender on science, arguing that McClintocks scientific
preference for interactive over hierarchical models 7 was shaped by her experiences being raised
as female and working as a woman in a largely male field.
Other early feminist critics, such as Dorothy Smith (1974), Hilary Rose (1983), Nancy
Hartsock (1983), and Sandra Harding (1986) adapted Marxist sociological accounts and
proposed feminist standpoint theory which argues that feminist consciousness raising
provides a powerful epistemic tool for the critique of ideology in science. On this account, those
who are politically disadvantaged are in a position to know more about some topics than those
who are politically advantaged. So long as they overcome the false consciousness which is a
typical result of political indoctrination they can see more than those who benefit from social
inequality. For example, feminist standpoints are advantageous for investigating the experience
of divorce, labor economics, the behavior of non-human primates, and indeed any area of
knowledge that has itself been influenced by gender ideology. According to Karen Barad
(2007), there is gender ideology even in the abstract field of theoretical physics. Alison Wylie
(2004) has argued convincingly that the usefulness of standpoint is contingent on the subject
matter being investigated, and cannot be ascertained a priori.
7

An interactive model is one in which phenomena emerge as a result of complex and multidirectional causes while
a hierarchical model is one in which phenomena result from a centrally organized process in which causes operate
unidirectionally. Francis Cricks central dogma of genetics, in which DNA produces RNA which produces proteins,
is an example of a hierarchical model. Interactionist phenomena that challenge Cricks central dogma include
genetic transposition and epigenetics.

While sociologists of science are content with describing the social construction of
knowledge, and do not challenge the results of scientific inquiry, feminist epistemologists and
philosophers of science are typically science critics. They offer normative recommendations,
arguing that knowledge can be improved through feminist critique and new normative ideals.
Evelyn Fox Keller recommends methodological pluralism 8; Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway
(1991) recommend strong objectivity; and Helen Longino (Longino 1990), whose views have
been influenced by Jurgen Habermass account of rationality, recommends specific social
standards for objectivity.
Longinos views are worth describing in detail at this point, because they are a good
illustration of a social normative account of scientific objectivityperhaps the first such detailed
systematic account. Longinos intellectual roots are in both feminist criticism and analytic
philosophy of science. Currently (2002), Longino refers to her views as critical contextual
empiricism. There are four norms in critical contextual empiricism, which Longino claims are
obtained by reflection on the meaning of objectivity. These norms are:

equality of intellectual authority (or tempered equality which respects differences in

expertise)

Some shared values, especially the valuing of empirical success

public forums for criticism (e.g. conferences, replies to papers in journals)

responsiveness to criticism

To the degree that a scientific community satisfies these norms and also produces theories (or
models) that conform to the world, it satisfies conditions for scientific knowledge: its theories
will not only be true, but also justified. Note that the norms are satisfied by communities, not
8

Methodological pluralism is the view that there is more than one scientific method (in whole or in part).

individual persons, although some individuals have to satisfy some conditions (e.g. they have to
be responsive to particular criticism).
The result of satisfying these four norms, according to Longino, is, typically, pluralism
about theories and research programs as well as methods. Pluralism about theories is the view
that more than one theory should be pursued in the long run, not just temporarily while looking
for a winner. Empirical success is the one universally shared value in scientific research, but it
comes in many forms and is not sufficient to arbitrate scientific disputes. Thus theories are
underdetermined by the available evidence and more than one theory of a single domain can be
empirically successful. Different theories can be empirically successful in different ways. And
the best criticism usually comes from scientists who are working on different theories. Hence
pluralism is the typical and the preferable state of scientific research.
Other normative accounts in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science are not
quite as detailed, but also represent a break with individualist normative accounts. Sandra
Harding argues that strong objectivityan epistemic stance that is achieved by politically
engaged groups of subjugated people, rather than what she calls the weak objectivity
traditionally described by philosophers of science 9--is particularly productive in scientific
research. Donna Haraway has a similar view that vision is better from below (1991), and she
expresses the strong objectivity view more poetically, saying that it comprises the joining
of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position (Haraway 1991).

Weak objectivity is a rhetorically loaded term that would of course be rejected by philosophers of science
working with models of unbiased individualistic accounts of scientific method. It is a clever move on the part of
Sandra Harding (1993) to designate feminist standpoint as strong objectivity, suggesting that it achieves greater
objectivity than logical empiricist methods. (Likewise, the terminology of Strong Programme sociology of science
suggests a deeper social analysis than the Mertonian approach.)

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Feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science have given social accounts of

knowledge and the goals of inquiry, as well as accounts of (scientific) objectivity. Just as
Longino argued that objectivity is accomplished by communities, rather than individuals, Lynn
Hankinson Nelson (1990, 1993) argued that knowledge is possessed by societies, rather than by
individuals. Harding, Longino, Nelson, and many others argue that the goals of inquiry should
include satisfying values as well as purely epistemic objectives.

4. Social Epistemology in Cognitive Science

Much of early cognitive science was influenced by psychology and analytic philosophy, and
quite individualistic in focus. A few early cognitive scientists came from anthropological and
Continental philosophy backgrounds, rather than the more typical psychology and analytic
philosophy backgrounds. Lucy Suchman showed that social and physical location are intrinsic to
cognitive processes (1987). Edwin Hutchinss Cognition in the Wild (1995) argued that accurate
marine navigation on large vessels, in the pre-GPS era, depended on the coordinated efforts of
several crew members who are located at different points on the ship. Since then, the field of
distributed artificial intelligence has expanded greatly, to include work on multi-agent systems,
aggregated systems, collective intelligence, distributed collaboration and social computing.
Christian List and Philip Pettit have recently developed an account of group agency that
shows how a group can outperform all of its individual members at tracking truth (2011). They
examine different ways of aggregating the judgments of individuals, some of which create
paradoxes. Their work is at the intersection of artificial intelligence, philosophy and social
choice theory.

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5. Social Epistemology in Analytic Philosophy of Science

Some philosophers of science responding to the findings of the Strong Programme
showed a willingness to acknowledge the role of selected social epistemic factors: those
apparently biased processes that they could appreciate as ultimately beneficial for science. In
particular, they examined social epistemic processes that could contribute to a beneficial division
of epistemic labor. David Hull (1988), for example, was not troubled about social processes that
lead different scientists to different conclusions, because he saw the benefit to the scientific
community in having more than one research strategy pursued at one time. Adapting a clich, he
wrote Let a thousand theories bloom (Hull 1988). Similarly Philip Kitcher acknowledged that
scientists sometimes select theories with what he called sullied motives such as self-interest,
but argued that this can contribute to beneficial distribution of cognitive labor, as scientists try to
carve out distinctive epistemological niches. He wrote, Particular kinds of social arrangements
make good epistemic use of the grubbiest motives (1993). In making such suggestions, Hull
and Kitcher evaluated individual epistemic judgments in terms of what they contribute to a
community epistemic endeavor such as the community effort to find significant truth. The
traditional normative perspective is the individual effort to find truth. From this perspective,
only those individuals who find the truth, or perhaps the most plausible theory, are using good
reasoning. Hull and Kitcher were shifting the normative standpoint from the individual scientist
to the community of scientists. Analytic epistemologists, in particular Alvin Goldman
(Goldman, Shaked 1991) also discussed the division of cognitive labor, finding that, when a
social normative perspective is taken, models of economic rationality based on self-interest can
also serve as models of epistemic rationality.
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Other philosophers of science who discussed the division of cognitive labor around that
time include Ronald Giere (1988), Miriam Solomon (1993) and Paul Thagard (1993). They had
different accounts of the causes of division of cognitive labor. For example Solomon points to
the differential effects of cognitive biases such as salience: in the early part of the twentieth
century geologists who did fieldwork in the Southern Hemisphere took the evidence there more
seriously than those who merely read about it, and were more likely to accept continental drift.
Yet another way of understanding the causes of division of cognitive labor is found in
accounts of epistemic diversity. These can range from the observation that individuals vary in
their willingness to consider revolutionary theories (e.g. (Grinnell 1987, Sulloway 1996)) to
claims from feminist standpoint theory about the importance of social diversity to epistemic
diversity (e.g. (Longino 1990, Anderson 2006, Kukla 2006, Solomon 2006b, Wylie 2006)).
Accounts of the division of cognitive labor are generally intended to apply during times
of uncertainty in science, when it is unclear which theory or method may prove successful.
Typically, narratives are told that begin in dissent and end in consensus, suggesting that
eventually all come to recognize the superior approach. Two social epistemic possibilities are
often overlooked. First, the possibility that although consensus results, individuals come to
agreement for different reasons. Examples of such accounts are in Husein Sarkar (1983, 2007)
and Solomon (2001). Second, it is sometimes argued that consensus is not the normative goal of
science, and dissent or pluralism can be the stable and desirable state of affairs (e.g. (Longino
1990, Solomon 2001, Kellert, Longino & Waters 2006)).

6. Analytic Social Epistemology

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Analytic social epistemologists have, for the most part, worked on trust and testimony,
expertise and authority, and disagreement and criticism. Trust and testimony have been the
central focus. They typically refer back to David Hume as a starting point. In the Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding, Hume had a reductivist account of trust in that he argued
that our trust in testimony from others is justified by our past experience that they are usually
truthful. Several of the recent analytic accounts of trust are non-reductivist, meaning that they
do not think that trust can be justified in terms of reason or prior experience. Their ideas were
influenced by preceding work in philosophy of language and mind that eschews individualism
(e.g. (Wittgenstein 1968, 1958, Putnam 1975, Burge 1979)).
Although Strong Programme sociologists of science such as Steven Shapin and Harry
Collins have had much to say about the same topics, analytic social epistemologists rarely
engage with this literature, regarding it as (at best) descriptive accounts that are not relevant to
the normative projects of ascertaining the justifications for trust, belief in testimony, assessments
of expertise and reactions to disagreement. 10 The general point made by analytic epistemologists
is familiarwhat we actually do and what we ought to do (epistemically or ethically) do not
coincide, because often we do not do what we ought to do, either because we do not care to or
because we try to and fail. Philosophers focus on the normative (what we ought to do) while
descriptive social and psychological scientists focus on the descriptive (what we, in fact, do).
Although the conceptual distinction between descriptive and normative is clear,
knowledge of the descriptive is still relevant to knowledge of the normative. This is because,
broadly speaking, ought implies can. Normative standards must be standards that are attainable

10

Two exceptions are Peter Lipton and Martin Kusch, who discuss Strong Programme work in detail (Kusch 2002,
1998). Both of them were UK-based philosophers of science (Peter Lipton is deceased and Martin Kusch is now at
the University of Vienna), and therefore perhaps more familiar with the subtleties of the work of Barnes, Bloor,
Shapin, Collins et al than USA-based analytic epistemologists.

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(on pain of irrelevance), and the descriptive tells us about what is attainable. Perhaps in the
future more analytic social epistemologists and sociologists of science will realize that they have
many questions in common.
Another distinction is helpful before turning to the details of analytic social
epistemological accounts of trust, testimony, expertise and disagreement. This is the distinction
widely used in analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind between internalism and
externalism. For our purposes, the distinction is most easily understood as that between
intuitive rationality and instrumental rationality. An internalist justification tells us, in
terms of reasons that we can go through ourselves, how a belief is justified. The idea is that the
reasons are internal to each cognizer. On the other hand, an externalist justification is one
that shows us why our beliefs are true, or reliable, whether or not we can give an explicit
justification for them. An example of an internalist justification is a short mathematical proof,
which can be done by one person and held in the mind all at once. An example of an externalist
justification is an argument that something read on Wikipedia is likely to be true, because
information scientists have found Wikipedia to be a reliable source. 11 Most internalist accounts
are individualist, but not all: Longino (Longino 1990, Longino 2002) is an interesting example of
a social, yet still internalist, account. I classify Longinos account as internalist because,
according to her, it rests on intuitive analysis of the concepts of objectivity and knowledge
(2002). Externalist accounts may be individualist or social. Analytic epistemologists have
sometimes rejected social (as opposed to individual) normative accounts on the grounds that they
do not accord with intuitions about rationality, which they take to be intuitions about individual
11

Academics often look down on Wikipedia, because its procedures are quite different from the usual academic
standards. Such academics would not accept a Wikipedia article as a source of knowledge. Yet several studies
have shown Wikipedia to have high reliability in some areas (for references, see the Wikipedia article on
Reliability of Wikipedia!) An externalist about knowledge and justification cares only about reliability, and
marvels that a crowdsourced article can do as well as an expertly written and peer reviewed article.

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rationality. Longinos ideas are a helpful counter to this, suggesting that we have intuitions
about socially accomplished rationality as well.
The most frequently treated topics in analytic social epistemology are (i) trust and
testimony (ii) expertise and authority and (iii) disagreement and criticism. (I link closely
associated topics together.) For each of these topics, the literature is primarily focused on
normative questions for individuals. 12 For example, when am I justified in trusting the
testimony of a stranger? How do I decide which expert to believe? What is my rational response
to discovering that my epistemic peer disagrees with me about something? These topics are only
thinly social, not only because normative questions are asked about individuals, but also
because the epistemic community is thought of as a collection of individuals, without a structure
to that collection. They are social only because they are epistemic phenomena that require more
than one person. Topics treated less often include (iv) collaboration and epistemic diversity, (v)
the ethics and politics of knowledge, and (v) epistemic agency. As I go through these topics, I
try to connect the analytic social epistemology literature with wider intellectual currents.

(i) Trust and testimony

Much of what we believe is based on what others tell us. Since people are often mistaken, and
sometimes dishonest, when are we justified in believing what they say? When is their testimony
reliable? As discussed above, accounts of testimony can be reductive or non-reductive. Most
analytic epistemological accounts of testimony are reductive. They are also typically internalist

12

I hope that someday there will also be exploration of these topics from a normative social perspective: for
example, which kinds of relationships of epistemic trust work best in the scientific community? How much should
decisions be left to experts? Does criticism improve the general discourse?

16

in that they appeal to reasons that the listener can give, such as evidence that the speaker has the
relevant training and evidence that the speaker is honest. Elizabeth Fricker (Fricker 1987) gave
one of the earliest such accounts. Alvin Goldman (2002) has an unusual reductive theory about
trust. He claims that human beings are more likely to trust the beliefs of those with whom they
have a prior bond of affection. He calls this the bonding approach to belief acceptability, or
BABA. Goldman argues that this practice is reliable, when understood through evolutionary
psychology: those with affective bonds will have less incentive to deceive one another than those
without. BABA is in fact the foundation of parent-child educational interactions. (Goldman
does not explore the reliability of BABA in the scientific community.) Note that Goldman is
giving an externalist and affective account of the justification for belief in testimony.
C.A. J. Coady, probably the first philosopher to write a book about testimony (1992),
offers a non-reductive account of the justification for belief in testimony. He argues that
testimony is like perception or memory in that it may be accepted without justification, so long
as there are no specific reasons for doubt. Martin Kusch (2002) deepens the non-reductive view
into what he calls a communitarian viewpoint that is more deeply social than the reductive
accounts of testimony. Kusch also engages with the Strong Programme claims about particular
cultures of trust; the connection is through a shared interest in the philosophy of the later
Wittgenstein (see for example (1968, 1958)).
Margaret Gilbert (1989, 2006) distinguishes group testimony from individual testimony.
She develops a sophisticated account of the group testimony, showing that group testimony may
not coincide with the testimony of the individuals in a group. This is also a more deeply social
treatment of testimony.

17

Feminist analytic epistemologists such as Naomi Scheman offer accounts of trust that
supplement both the accounts of Strong Programme sociologists and traditional social
epistemologists (2001, 2005). They focus more on the role of power in social systems and less
on individual social actors, pointing out that differences in power (due to race, ethnicity, gender,
disability etc) affect both the rationality and the likelihood of trust.

(ii) Expertise and authority

When people defer to experts, they signal that others are in a position to make better judgments
about a particular subject matter than they are, in part because of their different experiences but
also because of their different skills and training. Analytic social epistemologists have been
concerned with questions such as: How do we know that someone is an expert? Do lay persons
determine expertise in the same way as experts? And can we rationally decide between experts,
when the experts disagree about some issue? Alvin Goldmans Experts: which ones should you
trust? (2001) was an initial exploration that looked at the contributions of evidence of experts
track records, internal coherency of arguments, aggregation of experts, possible use of metaexperts and evidence of experts biases. In general, analytic epistemologists are interested in
distinguishing earned (or genuine) authority from unearned (or false) authority.
Harry Collins and Robert Evans (2007) approached the same topic from the point of view
of Strong Programme sociology of science, and produced a Periodic Table of Expertises
showing the different kinds of expertise used in science, including new categories such as
interactional expertise, contributory expertise and meta-expertises. While their approach
is primarily descriptive, what they say has implications for normative questions about the

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genuineness of authority, and perhaps analytic social epistemologists will work on this in the
future.

(iii) Disagreement and Criticism

If everyone shared evidence and reasoned in the same way, we would always agree with each
other. Even if mistakes occurred, they would be corrected by criticism. The reality is that even
experts do not always agree, and criticism does not merely correct mistakes. Recently analytic
social epistemologists have become interested in the rational response to disagreement with an
epistemic peer 13 (e.g.(Christensen 2009)). This is a question about rationality for individuals; it
is social epistemology only in the thin sense that more than one person is required for
disagreement. Group social normative accountsthose which look at the phenomenon of
disagreement from a social rather than an individual perspectiveare typically less troubled by
disagreement, and look at its advantages in terms of the deeper purposes of criticism e.g. (1990)
or the distribution of cognitive effort (Solomon 2006a).

(iv) Collaboration and Cognitive Diversity

Analytic social epistemologies have made recommendations for the epistemology of
mass collaboration, such as in Wikipedia (Fallis 2008). This is a particular kind of collaboration,
in which collaborators work at a distance and independently. The question is particularly

13

An epistemic peer is someone who is equal in intellectual authority. So peer disagreement includes
disagreement between experts, and disagreement between novices, but not expert-novice disagreement.

19

interesting, because it is not fully understood why the results in Wikipedia are as reliable, or
more reliable, than expert accounts. 14
One purpose of collaboration is division of labor, and other common purposes include
access to multiple expertises and inclusion of cognitive diversity. Paul Thagard (1997) has
classified the different kinds of collaboration in science: between teacher and apprentice,
between peers working in the same area and between peers working in different areas. Frederick
Grinnell (Grinnell 1987) has explored the impact of diversity of individual cognitive styles on
collaboration, often referring to the benefits of conservative older scientists working with more
unconventional younger scientists. Feminist standpoint theorists have looked at the influence of
political standpoints, both individual and collective, on knowledge. Different standpoints, as
well as different perspectives, produce diversity of thought.

(v) The Ethics and Politics of Knowledge

Miranda Fricker 15, who works at the intersection of analytic social epistemology and feminist
philosophy, has developed the concept of testimonial injustice (2007). The idea is that groups
of people can be wronged in their capacity as knowers because of prejudice. This is the flipside
of the Strong Programmes finding that epistemic credibility is socially constructed: particular
constructions may not coincide with actual credibility, so that some groups of people may suffer
a credibility deficit.

14

See Reliability of Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia, accessed October 31, 2011.

(There are other resources, if the reader finds this justification circular.)
15
Elizabeth and Miranda Fricker are sisters who both work in areas of social epistemology. I use full names to
avoid confusion.

20

Miranda Fricker has also developed the concept of hermeneutical injustice (2007)
suffered when people do not have the conceptual resources to understand their social world.
This is also an epistemic injustice in which groups of people are harmed as knowers, but in this
case what is harmed is not credibility but self-understanding. The cause of hermeneutical
injustice is prejudice: the same prejudices that cause oppression of groups also make that
oppression less visible to the oppressed, and make ignorance of the nature of the oppression
acceptable. For example, before the concept of sexual harassment developed, women interpreted
their experiences in the workplace in terms of specific relationships and tried to explain them in
terms of the actions and decisions of individuals. After the concept of sexual harassment
developed, there was an eye-opening moment experienced by those women who were finally
able to interpret some of their experiences in political terms, which made more sense of them
than did apolitical individual stories.
For both kinds of epistemic injustice, the harm is at the same time epistemic and ethical.
It should not be assumed a priori that epistemic harms are ethical harms (or vice versa), but there
is often a connection. The new term Agnotology (developed by historians of science Robert
Proctor and Londa Schiebinger) refers in general to the cultural production of ignorance about
particular topics. The term is intended to broaden the scope of epistemology, through analysis
of how we do not know as well as how we know. Many examples in Agnotology are of
epistemic harms that are at the same time harms to groups of people. For example, in the
eighteenth century, Europeans were kept ignorant of West Indian knowledge about abortifacients
(Schiebinger 2008). Miranda Frickers hermeneutical injustice is an example of Agnotology.

(vi) Epistemic agency

21

Margaret Gilbert (1989) was one of the first analytic social epistemologists to suggest that
groups have some aspects of epistemic agency. In particular, as mentioned above, she argues
that groups can testify and be held responsible for their testimony. Lynn Hankinson Nelson
(1990), a feminist analytic epistemologist, argued that scientific knowledge is possessed by
societies rather than by individuals. Sandra Harding, Helen Longino, Miriam Solomon and
others also implicitly acknowledge some aspects of group agency when they understand
scientific objectivity as something that is achieved socially.
Not all social epistemologists have been willing to extend the concept of epistemic
agency to groups. For example, Goldman has resisted this move, preferring to reserve terms
such as knows and is justified for individual thinkers. He writes, Social epistemology can
be built on social relations among individuals without committing itself to collective or
socialized agents that bear epistemic properties (2002).

(vii)

Further topics

Further topics for social epistemological analysis include norms of peer review for both
journals and granting agencies, the hierarchical organization of the scientific community, private
versus public funding, university versus industry research and the differences between keyboardto-keyboard and face-to-face collaborations.

7. Conclusions
Social epistemology offers many suggestions for thinking differently about both descriptive
and normative epistemological questions. Together with other situated knowledge approaches
22

such as attention to goals, language, knowledge artifacts, historical contexts and individual
embodiments (Solomon 2006c), the tools of social epistemology can help make epistemology
applied, rather than abstract and general. Normative epistemic recommendations are much more
valuable, as well as more testable, when they are tailored to specific contexts.

23

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