En este ensayo exploramos una perspectiva epistemológica en la que el elemento social y colectivo del conocimiento juega un papel fundamental en la explicación de su producción y transmisión. Primero presentamos y criticamos una posición individualista que ha sido dominante en la epistemología contemporánea y cuyas raíces pueden trazarse, al menos, hasta Descartes. Posteriormente introducimos y defendemos nuestra propia mirada, una en la que el conocimiento es un proceso constituido por un conjunto de actividades y prácticas que tiene un carácter (...) material. (shrink)

En este ensayo exploramos una perspectiva epistemológica en la que el elemento social y colectivo del conocimiento juega un papel fundamental en la explicación de su producción y transmisión. Primero presentamos y criticamos una posición individualista que ha sido dominante en la epistemología contemporánea y cuyas raíces pueden trazarse, al menos, hasta Descartes. Posteriormente introducimos y defendemos nuestra propia mirada, una en la que el conocimiento es un proceso constituido por un conjunto de actividades y prácticas que tiene un carácter (...) material. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is showing an increasing interest in the social aspects and the social organisation of science—the ways social values and social interactions and structures play a role in the creation of knowledge and the ways this role should be taken into account in the organisation of science and science policy. My thesis explores a number of issues related to this theme. I argue that a prominent approach to the social organisation of science—Philip Kitcher’s well-ordered science—runs into a number (...) of problems. They undermine its philosophical plausibility and practical usefulness. I agree with Kitcher that arguments about the social organisation of science should recognise profound societal consequences of science. Kitcher argues that the appropriate organisation of science should therefore take into account laypersons’ values and needs when making decisions concerning research planning, evaluation and application. My criticisms show that this is not enough. Drawing on Helen Longino ideas, I argue that laypersons’ perspectives and knowledge may also be relevant when doing research. In order to show how more inclusive research practices may be possible, I discuss connections between philosophy of science and some developments in science policy, which has also recently shown considerable interest in democratic participation. I demonstrate how public participation experiments in science policy may sometimes be close enough to what the philosopher would recommend. Their analysis can thus be helpful for understanding how societal developments may provide opportunities for the involvement of laypersons in science and what factors may endanger its success. I conclude that a way to pursue a more socially relevant philosophy of science is to focus on the points of contact and possibilities of cooperation between philosophical proposals and these public participation initiatives. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...) relevant to robustness analysis. I close by briefly outlining a promising alternative approach inspired by Horwich’s (1982) eliminative account of evidential diversity. (shrink)

The ‘death of evidence’ issue in Canada raises the spectre of politicized science, and thus the question of what role social values may have in science and how this meshes with objectivity and evidence. I first criticize philosophical accounts that have to separate different steps of research to restrict the influence of social and other non-epistemic values. A prominent account that social values may play a role even in the context of theory acceptance is the argument from inductive risk. It (...) maintains that the more severe the social consequences of erroneously accepting a theory would be, the more evidence is needed before the theory may be accepted. However, an implication of this position is that increasing evidence makes the impact of social values converge to zero; and I argue for a stronger role for social values. On this position, social values may determine a theory’s conditions of adequacy, which among other things can include co.. (shrink)

The reformist philosophy of the classical pragmatist tradition has gradually evolved into the now-fashionable revolutionary styles of pragmatism, some scientistic, some literary. This evolution is traced from Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, through Schiller, Lewis, Hook,and Quine, to Rorty’s literary-political neo-pragmatism. Rather than get hung up on the question of which variants qualify as authentic pragmatism, it is better — more fruitful, and appropriately forward looking— to ask what we can learn from the older tradition, and what we can salvage (...) from the new. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.

This article deals with the problematic concepts of the rational and the social, which have been typically seen as dichotomous in the history and philosophy of science literature. I argue that this view is mistaken and that the social can be seen as something that enables rationality in science, and further, that a scientific community as well as an individual can be taken as an epistemic subject. Furthermore, I consider how scientific communities could be seen as freely acting and choosing (...) agents. Fundamentally, this boils down to the question whether we accept the voluntarist conception of human beings, one consequence of which is that scientists possess, in principle, the capacity for deliberative reflection and choice. If this is accepted, we can talk about the degrees of autonomy that communities possess. I also examine what kinds of decisions an autonomous community should make in order to produce objective knowledge. My suggestion is that objectivity be understood as intersubjectivity: a view is objective when it has been exposed to critical reflection from various points of view, and due to this, transcends subjective idiosyncrasies. (shrink)

In recent years, feminist philosophy of science has been subjected to criticism. The debate has focused on the implications of the underdetermination thesis for accounts of the role of social values in scientific reasoning. My aim here is to offer a different approach. I suggest that feminist philosophers of science contribute to our understanding of science by (1) producing gender‐sensitive analyses of the social dimensions of scientific inquiry and (2) examining the relevance of these analyses for normative issues in philosophy (...) of science. (shrink)

Epistemologists generally think that genuine warrant that is available to anyone must be available to everyone who is exposed to the relevant causal inputs and is able and willing to properly exercise her rationality. The motivating idea behind this requirement is roughly that an objective view is one that is not bound to a particular perspective. In this paper I ask whether the aperspectivality of our warrants is a precondition for securing the objectivity of our claims. I draw upon a (...) Sellarsian account of perception in order to argue that it is not; rather, inquirers can have contingent properties and perspectives that give them access to forms of rational warrant and objective knowledge that others do not have. The universal accessibility of reasons, on my account, is not a precondition for the legitimacy of any actual warrant, but rather a regulative ideal governing inquiry and communication. (shrink)

We offer a new account of the role of values in theory choice that captures a temporal dimension to the values themselves. We argue that non-epistemic values sometimes serve as “inquiry tickets,” justifying scientists’ pursuit of certain questions in the short run, while the answers to those questions mitigate transient underdetermination in the long run. Our account of inquiry tickets shows that the role of non-epistemic values need not be restricted to belief or acceptance in order to be relevant to (...) hypothesis choice: the relevance of non-epistemic values to a particular cognitive attitude with respect to h vary over time. (shrink)

Epistemologists generally think that genuine warrant that is available to anyone must be available to everyone who is exposed to the relevant causal inputs and is able and willing to properly exercise her rationality. The motivating idea behind this requirement is roughly that an objective view is one that is not bound to a particular perspective. In this paper I ask whether the aperspectivality of our warrants is a precondition for securing the objectivity of our claims. I draw upon a (...) Sellarsian account of perception in order to argue that it is not; rather, inquirers can have contingent properties and perspectives that give them access to forms of rational warrant and objective knowledge that others do not have. The universal accessibility of reasons, on my account, is not a precondition for the legitimacy of any actual warrant, but rather a regulative ideal governing inquiry and communication. (shrink)

This book is a sustained defense of the compatibility of the presence of idealizations in the sciences and scientific realism. So, the book is essentially a detailed response to the infamous arguments raised by Nancy Cartwright to the effect that idealization and scientific realism are incompatible.

We can understand objectivity, in the broadest sense of the term, as epistemic accountability to the real. Since at least the 1986 publication of Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism, so-called standpoint epistemologists have sought to build an understanding of such objectivity that does not essentially anchor it to a dislocated, ‘view from nowhere’ stance on the part of the judging subject. Instead, these theorists have argued that a proper understanding of objectivity must recognize that different agential standpoints offer (...) different access to objective truths, with some standpoints holding better epistemic potential than others. As Harding puts it, standpoint epistemology calls for “a critical evaluation of which social situations tend to generate the most objective knowledge claims” so as to identify those standpoints that “produce empirically more accurate descriptions and theoretically richer explanations” (1991, 142, 149). Which standpoints enable the most objectivity with respect to a particular inquiry is, for the standpoint theorists, always an empirical at least as much as a conceptual question; it requires attention to the actual, material relationship between knowers, knowledge practices, and objects known. Standpoint epistemology was developed primarily by self-identiªed feminist epistemologists. Virtually all developments of standpoint episte-. (shrink)

The rich and ongoing debate about constructivism in chemistry education includes questions about the relationship, for better or worse, between applications of the theory in pedagogy and in epistemology. This paper presents an examination of the potential to use connections of epistemological and pedagogical constructivism to one another. It examines connections linked to the content, processes, and premises of science with a goal of prompting further research in these areas.

While scientific pluralism enjoys widespread popularity within the philosophy of science, a related position, epistemic relativism, does not have much traction. Defenders of scientific pluralism, however, dread the question of whether scientific pluralism entails epistemic relativism. It is often argued that if a scientific pluralist accepts epistemic relativism, she will be unable to pass judgment because she believes that “anything goes”. In this article, I will show this concern to be unnecessary. I will also argue that common strategies to differentiate (...) relativism and pluralism fail. Building upon this analysis, I will propose a new way of looking at both positions’ relations. This article aims to understand what explains the friction between scientific pluralism and epistemic relativism. I will demonstrate that conceptualizing both epistemic relativism and scientific pluralism as “stances” sheds better light on their relation and demonstrates that it is, in principle, possible to support both positions at the same time. Preferred policies and levels of analysis, however, cause friction in practice. (shrink)