Abstract
Today’s natural science has become a highly collaborative endeavor. To create scientific knowledge, scientists with specialized expertise observe systematically, analyze data and interpret combined experimental evidence to formulate a scientific knowledge claim. In so doing, most scientists depend deeply and immediately on their peers. Experiments have typically become too time-consuming and resource-intensive to be carried out by any one single scientist. Only in research groups can scientists accumulate the necessary expertise, labor, financial means and physical infrastructure to carry out cutting-edge research. For this reason, this book analyzes the collaborative creation of scientific knowledge in research groups, thereby addressing two questions that are continuously troubling philosophy: What is scientific knowledge—is it genuinely collective? And how can it be created, particularly under the conditions of actual experimental scientific practice?
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Notes
- 1.
As a field of philosophical inquiry, social epistemology is, as much of the philosophy of science is, rooted in the tradition of analytic philosophy. To inquire about the “social epistemology” of science means to inquire about the possibilities of well-founded belief and the (scientific) knowledge that scientists, individually and collectively, possess. Social epistemology, as a branch of general epistemology, is a relatively young field of philosophical inquiry. The programmatic beginnings of social epistemology as a field can be traced to the work of Fuller (1988), Longino (1990), Goldman (1999) and, for example, (Schmitt, 1994). Some social epistemologists have begun to engage with comprehensive, empirically detailed case studies (see, e.g., Bergin, 2002; Rehg & Staley, 2008; Staley, 2007). Despite the field’s interest in the social dimensions of knowledge, however, philosophers in the field of social epistemology typically do not refer to social-scientific studies of science or social-scientific empirical methods.
- 2.
The expression “Big Science” was coined by Weinberg (1961).
- 3.
For a thorough epistemological analysis of Quine’s position see Haack (2009, ch. 6).
- 4.
An alternative to knowledge as justified true belief is reliabilism, which understands knowledge as reliable belief (Goldman, 2011). Note that a reliabilist position remains within the paradigm of knowledge as belief. For a more fundamental critique of knowledge as belief see, e.g., Vendler (1972), Craig (1990), Welbourne (2001), and Kusch (2002).
- 5.
The notion of knowledge-how, and particularly its relation to the notion of knowledge-that, i.e., propositional knowledge, is debated. Arguably, not all knowledge-how can be reduced to knowledge-that (Fantl, 2012; Ryle, 1971). This seems to be the case even in scientific practice where knowledge-how serves the aim of producing scientific knowledge-that. More important, however, is the relation between knowledge-how and articulation. Both knowledge-that and knowledge-how can be imagined to remain unarticulated in a given context. But insofar as knowledge-how pertains to incorporated knowledge, it stands to reason that it poses a particular challenge for exhaustive articulation. For this reason, it is questionable whether we should consider knowledge-how to be “knowledge” in the sense of justified true belief. “Skill” or Polanyi’s term of “inarticulate intelligence” may be a more apt vocabulary (Polanyi, 1962, p. 71).
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Wagenknecht, S. (2016). Introduction. In: A Social Epistemology of Research Groups. New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52410-2_1
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