Social epistemology is a naturalistic approach to the normative questions surrounding the organization of knowledge processes and products.In other words,it seeks to provide guidance on how and what we should know on ...Social epistemology is a naturalistic approach to the normative questions surrounding the organization of knowledge processes and products.In other words,it seeks to provide guidance on how and what we should know on the basis of how and what we already know.The subject matter corresponds to what the pragmatist philosophers used to call "the conduct of inquiry" and what may appear to today’s readers as an abstract form of science policy.Social epistemology advances beyond other theories of knowledge by taking seriously that knowledge is produced by agents who are not merely individually embodied but also collectively embedded in certain specifiable relationships that extend over large chunks of space and time.Moreover,for the social epistemologist,the ends of knowledge need to be established,not taken for granted.Words like ’validity’,’reliability’,and even ’truth’ itself,do not refer to ends inherent to the conduct of inquiry. Rather,they refer merely to constraints on inquiry that still leave wide open questions concerning the ends of knowledge: what sort of knowledge should be produced,by whom,and for whom? Knowledge policy captures the activity that addresses these questions,which(as discussed below) tend to be neglected by conventional science policy..展开更多
文摘Social epistemology is a naturalistic approach to the normative questions surrounding the organization of knowledge processes and products.In other words,it seeks to provide guidance on how and what we should know on the basis of how and what we already know.The subject matter corresponds to what the pragmatist philosophers used to call "the conduct of inquiry" and what may appear to today’s readers as an abstract form of science policy.Social epistemology advances beyond other theories of knowledge by taking seriously that knowledge is produced by agents who are not merely individually embodied but also collectively embedded in certain specifiable relationships that extend over large chunks of space and time.Moreover,for the social epistemologist,the ends of knowledge need to be established,not taken for granted.Words like ’validity’,’reliability’,and even ’truth’ itself,do not refer to ends inherent to the conduct of inquiry. Rather,they refer merely to constraints on inquiry that still leave wide open questions concerning the ends of knowledge: what sort of knowledge should be produced,by whom,and for whom? Knowledge policy captures the activity that addresses these questions,which(as discussed below) tend to be neglected by conventional science policy..
