Knowledge in a Social World

682 Pages·1999·2.87 MB·English

by  Alvin I. Goldman

Goldman, Alvin I. Regents Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona
Knowledge in a Social World
Publication date 1999 (this edition)
Print ISBN-10: 0-19-8238207
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19823820-1
doi:10.1093/0198238207.001.0001

Abstract: A certain conception of social epistemology is articulated
and applied to numerous social arenas. This conception retains epistemology's
traditional interest in truth and reliable inquiry, but replaces its customary emphasis
on solitary knowers with a focus on social institutions and interpersonal practices.
Postmodernism, science studies, and pragmatism pose worries about the meaning
and attainability of objective truth and knowledge. After laying these concerns to rest,
“veritistic” social epistemology is advanced as a normative discipline seeking
practices and institutions that would best foster knowledge. The book explores forms
and methods of communication, including norms of argumentation, information
technology, and institutional structures governing speech and the media. Social
dimensions of knowledge quests are explored in science, law, democracy, and
education. The book examines popular topics in contemporary epistemology such as
testimony and Bayesianism, while breaking new ground by connecting epistemology
with historically unrelated branches of philosophy such as political and legal theory.
Democracy's success, it is argued, requires the attainment of certain epistemic
desiderata, and substantive justice depends on well-chosen procedures of legal
evidence.
Keywords: argumentation, Bayesianism, democracy, information technology,
knowledge, legal evidence, media, science studies, social epistemology, truth

Knowledge in a Social World
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Knowledge in a Social World
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD
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To my brother Malcolm
whose intellectual challenges kindled my early curiosity
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Preface
This is the best of times, or this is the worst of times, for the
social pursuit of knowledge. Optimists point with pride to the
World Wide Web and the Information Superhighway. They exult
in the fact that with every new photograph from the Hubble
Space Telescope we get more precise information about distant
galaxies and greater insight into the origin of the universe.
When have we been better endowed with information and
knowledge? Pessimists point to more worrisome conditions.
Broadcast political news in America increasingly comes in bite-
sized morsels, and the average citizen has been shown to have
sparse political knowledge. Ownership and control of news
outlets increasingly reside in a few powerful media
conglomerates. A small number of industrial corporations have
more public communications power than any private
businesses have ever possessed in world history (Bagdikian
1997: ix-x). On this scenario we seem perilously close to an
Orwellian nightmare. How should these dramatically divergent
perspectives be reconciled? Just how good or how bad are the
prospects for knowledge in contemporary society?
This book does not provide an inventory of the current
conditions for knowledge. It does, however, explore the ways
that human knowledge can be increased via social
transactions, whatever the present starting point happens to
be. It is a cliché that ours is an information age; certainly it is an
era in which issues of knowledge and information bombard us
from every direction. What is missing, however, is a general
theory of societal knowledge. What exactly is knowledge, as
opposed to ignorance and error, and how can social factors
contribute to its growth? This book attempts to construct such a
theory. It lays philosophical foundations for a social theory of
knowledge, and it assesses particular practices and institutions
in terms of these foundations. It might be viewed as a
philosopher's contribution to the shaping of an information-rich
society.
This project falls within the subfield of philosophy that is
standardly called "epistemology," but the project aims to widen
epistemology's vista. Traditional epistemology has long
preserved the Cartesian image of inquiry as an activity of
isolated thinkers, each pursuing truth in a spirit of individualism
and pure self-reliance. This image ignores the interpersonal
and institutional contexts in which most knowledge endeavors
are actually undertaken. Epistemology must come to grips with
the social interactions that both brighten and threaten the
prospects for knowledge. Although initial steps in the social
direction have been taken in recent years, the present book
aims to
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construct a unified framework and a more detailed agenda for
this epistemological expansion.
There is another reason to pursue this project. Many academic
corridors are flooded by the fashionable currents of
postmodernism and (radical) social constructionism, which
purport to be replacements for traditional epistemology. These
movements are appropriately sensitive to social factors in
thought and discourse, but they repudiate the hallmarks of
traditional epistemology: the quest for truth, reason, and
objectivity. They imagine that social factors necessarily cripple
the prospect of anybody ascertaining truth at all; the very
intelligibility of objective truth or knowledge is denied. These
misguided ideas have led to rampant relativism in fields outside
of philosophy, including law, history, education, cultural studies,
and science studies. Many philosophers serenely dismiss these
movements with the wave of a hand, but their influence has
serious consequences and should not be taken lightly. Worries
on this score have been expressed by Farber and Sherry
(1997) concerning the law, and by Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob
(1994) concerning history. Analogous concerns led the
physicist Alan Sokal to effect a celebrated spoof of cultural
studies by publishing an article full of gibberish (Sokal 1996a)
in a leading postmodern journal. He wanted to demonstrate the
total absence of intellectual standards in this academic
subculture (Sokal 1996b). While Sokal's spoof was cunning and
amusing, we also need sustained, philosophical responses to
these movements. Portions of this book undertake this task.
In contrast to relativism and anti-objectivism, I maintain that
social practices can make both positive and negative
contributions to knowledge. The task is to show just which
social practices, under what conditions, will promote knowledge
rather than subvert it. The notion that positive epistemic value
can flow from social interchange appears in at least two recent
epistemological works: C. A. J. Coady's (1992) book on
testimony and Philip Kitcher's (1993) book on the philosophy of
science. These comprise perhaps the closest neighbors to the
present essay. Each of these works, however, has a fairly
restricted scope compared to the wide domain carved out here.
Although testimony is a core example of a social practice, it is
not the only social practice that deserves attention from
epistemology. Similarly, although science is the most dissected
arena in which social ingredients influence epistemic outcomes,
it is by no means the only such arena. Journalism, law, politics,
and education are also crucial domains in which accuracy of
judgment and communication should be a desideratum, and in
which the impact of different institutional practices needs to be
explored.
Because this book offers take-home messages not only for
philosophers but for practitioners of many disciplines—lawyers,
political scientists, communication theorists, economists, and
educators—I have tried to keep it as accessible as possible.
Although philosophical issues are explored in depth,
technicalities are avoided wherever possible and the essential
ideas are explained from scratch. Still, some readers may wish
to skip the denser philosophical
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material. Chapter 2, on truth, is the most difficult chapter but the
most easily omitted. Non-philosophers can bypass it without
significant loss.
I have been pondering these issues, learning new subjects,
and gathering material for this book for over twenty years.
Research support has fortunately come my way from several
national funding sources, to which I am most grateful: the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities
Center, and the National Science Foundation (grant number
SES-8204737). In 1975-6, at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences, I framed the conception of
epistemology as a multidisciplinary enterprise with two main
parts: individual and social. Individual epistemology should be
linked to the cognitive sciences, and social epistemology
should be linked to those social science and policy disciplines
that study knowledge in its social and institutional contexts. At
first I envisioned a single book that would synthesize both
individual and social epistemology, but that was clearly
unrealistic. So the first half of the project was published as
Epistemology and Cognition (Goldman 1986), a book-length
treatment of epistemology and cognitive science. The
connection between individual and social epistemology was
briefly sketched there (and mentioned earlier in Goldman
1978). Beginning in 1987, a series of social epistemology
articles appeared that were ultimately transmuted into chunks
of the present book: Goldman 1987, 1991, 1994a, 1994b,
1995a, 1995b, Goldman and Shaked 1991a, Cox and Goldman
1994, Goldman and Cox 1996, and Talbott and Goldman 1998.
Work on this book per se began in the fall of 1994, partly with
the support of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for
Philosophy of Science. Later institutional support came from
the University of Arizona's Udall Center for Public Policy
Studies. An invitation to give the Earl and Edna Stice Lecture at
the University of Washington provided an opportunity to float
the general plan of the book. Drafts of various chapters were
subsequently read to philosophy departments at Princeton
University, the University of Utah, the University of Oklahoma,
and the University of Glasgow, and to law school forums at Yale
University, the University of Arizona, and the University of
California, Berkeley. Helpful comments were received from
audience participants in all of these venues.
I have been the beneficiary of diligent work and sage advice
from many research assistants, graduate seminar participants,
and colleagues in both my own and other departments. The
most sustained research assistance came from Joel Pust, who
carefully read early drafts of many chapters and offered incisive
suggestions throughout. Tim Bayne contributed invaluable
advice on later versions of all the chapters, plus dedicated
pursuit of bibliographical details. Mark Wunderlich worked on
Chapter 10, and his formal insights were especially helpful. As
readers of the manuscript for the press, William Alston and an
anonymous referee offered many good pointers on quite a
range of chapters. It is difficult to recall everyone whose
suggestions and criticisms
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changed the course of the book, but here are some that stand
out in my mind: on Chapter 1, James Conant, Melissa Berry,
and Holly Smith; on Chapter 2, Marian David; on Chapter 3,
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Dave Truncellito, and Mark Wunderlich;
on Chapter 4, Kurt Meyers, Shaughan Lavine, Moshe Shaked,
and Todd Stewart; on Chapter 5, Scott Jacobs and Sally
Jackson; on Chapter 6, Holly Smith, Carla Stoffle, Martin
Fricke, Peter Ludlow, and Don Fallis; on Chapter 7, Jules
Coleman and Brad Thompson; on Chapter 8, Shaughan Lavine
and Moshe Shaked; on Chapter 9, Brian Leiter and David
Golove; on Chapter 10, Brad Jones, Tom Christiano, and Dave
Schmidtz; and on Chapter 11, Harvey Siegel, Scott LaBarge,
and Yetta Goodman. Warm thanks go to all of these informants
and critics. The undetected and unexcised errors, as usual,
must be assigned to the author. Finally, I wish to thank my
editor Peter Momtchiloff for more than the usual amount of
valuable advice and encouragement.
A.I.G.
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Contents
Part One Foundations
1 Epistemology and Postmodern Resistance 3
1.1 Truth seeking in the social world 3
1.2 Veriphobia 7
1.3 Six criticisms of truth-based
epistemology 9
1.4 The argument from social construction
10
1.5 Language and worldmaking 17
1.6 The unknowability criticism 22
1.7 The denial of epistemic privilege 26
1.8 The argument from domination 33
1.9 The argument from bias 37
2 Truth 41
2.1 Approaches to the theory of truth 41
2.2 Instrumentalism and relativism 42
2.3 Epistemic approaches to truth 44