Steve Fuller and Social Epistemology

Abstract

Steve Fuller’s approach, named Social Epistemology, operates at a meta-level with respect to the rest of the main STS figures. Fuller undertakes a historico-critical survey of the development of STS itself and offers advice concerning its future development. Social Epistemology carries on the normative agenda of classical epistemology, which, according to Fuller, has been abandoned in orthodox STS. Fuller shares STS’s critical attitude to traditional philosophy of science, however, and its realist commitment. Realism is typically based upon the conception that science converges towards a final theory, which may be taken to define reality per se. Fuller accepts the standard post-Kuhnian arguments against convergence, adding a few more of his own. But while rejecting philosophy’s standard universalist and transcendentalist conception of science, Fuller goes against current STS in retaining a place for a globalist conception of science in which the latter is assessed from the point of view of the interests of all of mankind, not only local constituencies. Social Epistemology will serve as a tool for this endeavour. It represents a naturalistic approach to epistemology, aimed at discovering empirically how material constraints and organizational parameters influence the process of producing scientific results. Moreover, Social Epistemology aims not only at improving the instrumental efficacy of science, but alto at assessing the normative goals of science. The instruments of this endeavour recommended by Fuller comprise various organizational arrangements which together amount to what Fuller refers to as a “New Constitution for Science”. They also involve rhetoric which is aimed at modifying the way we think and talk about science. Fuller berates his fellow STS’ers for what he sees as their refusal to play a constructive role in such a transformation of science; and to the extent that they engage with practical scientific issues, it is often on the wrong side, viz. as tacit collaborators in the neo-liberalist effort to turn science into a tool for business interests. Unfortunately, Fuller’s rejection of realism with respect to science prevents him from making a sufficiently radical break with the STS tradition.