How is scientific knowledge to be
construed? Sociologists stress non-cognitive, social factors. Philosophers of
science tend to stress cognitive and logical factors. The trouble for
sociologists is to accommodate the intuition that knowledge implies normative
commitments. The trouble for philosophers is the intuitive fact that issues
about acceptance, learning and the social nature of inquiry, seem inherently
non-cognitive. Longino argues that reconciliation between both strands is
possible.

Longino’s strategy is not to take a
firm stance in either camp but rather to show how philosophers can, and ought
to, gain important insights from social accounts of knowledge. Her strategy is
to go for an underlying assumption that has been too easily shared by both
camps. The assumption is a distinction between the rational and the social. In
short, Longino argues that philosophers tend to stress rational aspects of
knowledge failing to consider that perhaps knowledge-producing social
activities aren’t after all irrational. She wants to convince philosophers that
accepting social factors as a significant part of the whole story of scientific
knowledge doesn’t mean that knowledge loses its normative force. Essentially,
Longino’s recipe is to distinguish between several (three) senses of
‘knowledge’ and argue that in all senses some part of the sense has a social
element to it. This common part of the senses of ‘knowledge’ is what Longino
labels ‘the social character of knowledge’. Since she leaves the rest of
‘knowledge’ (more or less) in line with more traditional, philosophical
accounts of knowledge, she has a concept of knowledge that does have a social
character.

An interesting topic that Longino
picks up is ‘social’ threads in contemporary epistemology. Unfortunately,
however, her account is interesting for readers who already accept the central
premise of her argument, namely that knowledge has a social character. The book
doesn’t provide convincing arguments to the effect that one ought to accept the
sociality of knowledge (she has argued to this effect in her previous book).
Rather, her arguments focus on working out the details for how rational
accounts of knowledge can be seen to be compatible with her central assumption.

Furthermore, given how many
qualifiers for Longino’s argument one has to admit, her book is perhaps best
seen as opening more lines of inquiry rather than concluding them. For
instance, her argument for seeing epistemic justification as a notion that has
a dialectical element (in the sense of denoting reasons in the game of
contesting and accepting beliefs) is not highly controversial once one has
already granted the ‘social’ sense of knowledge. Moreover, her overall strategy
appears to bring about epistemologists’ arguments that are also already
exploring the alleged social character of knowledge rather than finding ones
that might implicitly presuppose it. If one is happy to admit that knowledge
has a social character the book raises the question: ‘how to accommodate what
appears to be right in contemporary epistemology with this fact?’

The most promising way of answering
the question from an epistemologist’s side has to be one that accommodates
presuppositions into testing and accepting knowledge claims. An account that
has started inquiry into this direction is contextualism concerning epistemic
justification. Longino touches this topic but leaves more detailed discussion
of it out, finding contextualism in principle suitable for her purposes.
Unfortunately, this is an instantiation of Longino’s treatment of many issues
in contemporary epistemology. She mentions many accounts and either rejects or
accepts their entailments depending on whether they are suitable for her
argumentative purposes. In principle there is nothing wrong with this strategy.
However, if reconciliation between epistemology and social accounts of
knowledge is desired, then argumentation of this type is more likely to annoy
epistemologists than convince them.

©
2002 Antti Karjalainen

Antti Karjalainen
(M.A.) is a PhD-student at the University of Bristol (U.K.), Department of
Philosophy. His dissertation is on Contextualism in Epistemology. His interests
are in epistemology, logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of science.

Categories: Philosophical