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Justin Biddle Department of Philosophy University of Notre Dame February 18, 2008 Monday, 4:00pm-6:00pm Nursing 127 Helen Longino's "sociopragmatism," which she has developed in her Science as Social Knowledge and The Fate of Knowledge, is one of the most sophisticated recent attempts to defend a social theory of science, according to which scientific knowledge is necessarily social. Despite the fact that scientific research is shot through with values, she argues that the goals of objectivity and epistemic acceptability are still attainable — but only if research is produced within communities that that approximate Mill's ideal of a free marketplace of ideas. I argue, however, that Longino's embedding of her epistemology of science within the framework of Mill's political liberalism leads her to accept a conception of individual epistemic agents that is incompatible with viewing scientific knowledge as necessarily social. Following this, I articulate an alternative conception of the individual, one inspired in part by pragmatist and communitarian political thought and in part by the writings of Kuhn and Lakatos, and I argue that this conception is not only more plausible than the one presupposed by both Mill and Longino, but also better suited to a truly social theory of science.  |
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Last updated 4/8/08 10:33 PM
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