Alvin Goldman

“Social epistemology is a field in the making.” So says Alvin Goldman, and he should know: he’s the one who started ploughing it. However, starting a new branch of philosophy isn’t easy: half your colleagues will tell you it’s not really a branch of philosophy and the other half will say it’s not really new. Goldman at least has the closest thing to empirical confirmation for the real existence of a subject you can get in academic philosophy: its own journal, Episteme.

So what is social epistemology? Goldman says it’s “examining the social dimension of how we know, what we know or whether we know,” as compared to traditional epistemology (or theory of knowledge) which focuses on how, what and whether we know, simpliciter.

“Historically, epistemology focused on how you can get the truth about the world. The question for social epistemology is something like, how does the social affect people’s attempts to get the truth? So what I want to do, and this has been part of my efforts for these 10 years or so, is to try to give a bigger focus to the social side of epistemology, while remaining continuous with the philosophical tradition.”

An example of a topic in social epistemology is what’s called peer disagreement. “The problem is this. Suppose I have a high respect for your intellect and for your skills, whatever skills are relevant. Maybe we’re talking about an event that we both witnessed and we disagree about what actually happened. Suppose your eyesight’s about as good as mine. And let’s suppose we have all the same evidence, we’re just as smart as one another, we have all the same cognitive abilities. We ought to agree with each other right? So what happens if we don’t? What happens when I find out that despite all these things, you disagree with me, and after continuing discussion, you continue to disagree with me? Should I change my opinion in light of your contrary opinion? That’s called the problem of peer disagreement. It’s well known in the epistemological community and is a kind of problem in what could be called social epistemology.”

An example like this raises the question of whether social epistemology is simply a part of traditional epistemology, what Goldman calls the preservationist view; whether it challenges traditional epistemology, which is the revisionist view; or whether it actually takes the subject somewhere new, what he calls the expansionist view. Goldman endorses the latter option.

“There are certain parts of analytic epistemology which are clearly at least somewhat social in nature, such as the study of testimony, which is, if somebody testifies to something, under what conditions should you believe them? When should you trust them? A version of that that I’ve written a paper on is, when should you trust experts? Sometimes experts disagree with one another. So how should the listener, or the reader, the inquirer decide whom to trust?

“That’s very continuous with traditional questions in epistemology, namely, when should you trust your senses? When should you trust your memories? When should you trust your reasoning? But in this case it’s when should you trust a social source? That is, somebody else who says something to you.”

Many people have been asking questions about the social side of knowledge in recent decades, but they have usually had a debunking agenda. For example, social constructivists and the strong program in the sociology of science have tried, in various ways, to show that ideas like “scientific knowledge” are fictions.

“Those movements wanted to focus on the social side of science, or knowledge, but often with a kind of rejection of standard epistemology,” explains Goldman. “People were unearthing cases in the history of science where scientists seemed to be heavily influenced by what they called social factors. That’s a very loose expression, but what they had in mind were various kinds of cultural factors which ought to have nothing to do with, say, physics. But then they provided evidence that it really did influence.

“Now when you talk about social influences in that framework, you’re thinking that the social undercuts the rational, that there’s a conflict between the social and the rational. I think that no doubt that can sometimes be the case, but on the other hand, you can get more knowledge by using social sources, that is by drawing on the experiences of others and what they have to contribute. They have maybe better ideas, maybe better education than you do on certain subjects, or they have just read more about it than you have.

“There the social doesn’t conflict with the rational, or with acquisition of knowledge, but complements it. So in my book, I talk about social epistemology focused on knowledge as the question of which kinds of interactions and which kinds of institutional frameworks are good for promoting knowledge or true belief in any way, in generating accurate information, and which are not?”

Social epistemology may appear to be a modest development in some ways, but in others, it changes the entire tone and direction of the subject. “Epistemologists, over the last 50 or more years, have spent a lot of time on the question of what exactly is it to know,” Goldman explains. “And you have a view which nobody now accepts as exactly right, that knowledge is justified true belief. I don’t think of that problem of how to define knowledge, which epistemologists spend a lot of time on, as in itself an important question for social epistemology. Although having said that, I also want to backtrack a little bit, because I myself am arguing now, that there’s a sense of knowledge in which it just means true belief. If you understand knowledge that way, then having knowledge is something like being informed on the subject, and lacking knowledge is being uninformed. So then, let’s ask, what kinds of social mechanisms or social interactions promote more information rather than lack of information or misinformation.”

This approach means that the focus is switched from the definitional side of epistemology to practical questions of what actually produces knowledge, and also the evaluative (“normative”) questions of what we are entitled to count as knowledge.

“A large part of epistemology, both traditional and social, has to do with normative concepts, for example, when are you justified in believing a proposition. Being justified or being unjustified are usually taken to have normative or evaluative content: if you believe something when you’re not justified in believing it, then you’re doing something wrong. Not morally wrong, but epistemically wrong, cognitively wrong. Similarly, if you believe something and it’s irrational of you to believe it, then again, you are not doing right in the cognitive or epistemic domain. So epistemology is heavily dedicated to questions of these kinds of evaluative matters. Usually the evaluations that epistemologists deal with are what should I believe? Or what should he believe in his circumstances, within his evidence?

“At the foundation, probably that’s where most epistemology is: What are we entitled to believe? But it focuses on, am I entitled to believe things about the external world? Am I entitled to believe things about the past? Or the problem with induction is: am I entitled to believe things about the future based on what I’ve observed in the past?

“So let’s start with the idea that a central – or perhaps the central – group of questions, are questions of an evaluative, normative nature having to do with beliefs. What I want to say is, what we should focus on in social epistemology is what are good ways, evaluatively good ways, of organising social practices and social institutions that are good from the point of view of what people believe, and help them get true beliefs or be informed, and then avoid making mistakes.”

It all sounds very convincing, but for my money, it’s a shame that Goldman spent most of his talk making a case that social epistemology is a worthwhile, bona fide discipline, rather than giving us good examples of it actually at work. He even started his Seoul talk by quoting William Alston, who wrote of Goldman’s book, Knowledge in a Social World, “It is worthy of note that much of the material in Goldman’s book would be rejected by many contemporary epistemologists as ‘not real epistemology’.” Isn’t there a danger that by worrying too much about whether it is or is not real epistemology, rather than whether it is or is not worth doing, Goldman ends up in a merely taxonomical dispute?

“Well, in a way, that’s fair,” he admits. “I don’t care myself that much. But when I try to tell these things to my colleagues, they say – well it’s not that they actually say that to me, maybe I could read it in their faces sometimes – but a lot of people would say this isn’t real epistemology. Well I don’t deny for a moment that it looks very different from what most traditional epistemology looks like. But it’s at least continuous with epistemology. Disciplines and sub-disciplines, academic fields, they’re not fixed once and for all in what they have to do.

“So I give you the example of economics. Classical economics is a very axiomatic type of system, working out the consequences of certain assumptions about the rational consumer and the rational entrepreneur and so on and so forth, applied to certain institutional situations, competition and so on. But in recent decades, economics has seen important movements in experimental economics, a sub-field that’s earned at least two Nobel prizes in economics so far. And now there’s a big movement of neural economics, combining neuroscience with economics.

“Well economics is a highly developed subject with a lot of smart people. But they don’t feel they have to go on doing things exactly the same way. They’re still of course interested in many of the same questions, but there are a lot of new ones.”

It’s not even that Goldman is not interested in traditional epistemology: he’s done enough of it. “I’m just arguing, here let’s not do only that. Let’s have another, let’s have a more expansive view of what epistemology can be. Because other people, the public, they need us. They need us to use our kinds of theoretical abilities and predilections, apply ourselves to these topics, because they’re important social topics. And they’re not going to be addressed by other disciplines the same way we would address them, because the other disciplines have different interests.”

To take a concrete example, a recent PhD student of Goldman’s is writing a chapter for a forthcoming book on the pros and cons of Wikipedia, a real example of the perils and pitfalls of social knowledge.

“Here’s a a simple model I think of the difference that you start out with between original Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica is all experts. Wikipedia is all free market – anybody who wants to contribute can contribute and revise. This is a question that applies to a lot of different areas of social epistemology. Free market versus non-free market. So a chapter in my earlier book was inspired by some classical claims by famous historical writers, like John Milton in the 17th century and John Stuart Mill in the 19th century, and repeated by a lot of 20th century American legal writers, saying that the best test of a proposition is how it fares in the marketplace of ideas.

“So the idea is that the best way to get the truth is to let all ideas compete. That’s the free market idea, and this has taken the idea of a market in the economist’s sense very seriously. Some people have claimed something to the effect that just as you’ll get the best products, of a general consumer kind, if you have a free market, so you’ll get the best information and knowledge in society by free market systems.

“So I collaborated with an economist on this question, kind of knocking that idea about. I’m not sure we were the first to attack it, but in any case, there are big holes in that idea. It doesn’t follow from economics.

“So it isn’t clear, a priori, or by theoretical arguments, that an unconstrained free market is the best way to do anything. So apply it to Wikipedia, I don’t know if this idea that anybody can just jump in and edit an entry in Wikipedia is good at all.”

Anyone who has the misfortune to have information about themselves on Wikipedia will surely agree. But for the moment at least, it remains to be seen if social epistemologists can make a distinctive and worthwhile contribution to fixing the well-known problems of Wikipedia. After all, it’s not as though they were the first to spot the problem.

There are plenty of other real-world problems for social epistemologists to get stuck into.

“I read the daily newspaper, usually The New York Times, and I can find in a given week several items that I think of as beautiful examples of applied social epistemology, where people are tapping into certain issues having to do with suppression of information or questions of journalism, which have a real impact on what people know and don’t know. So I often clip these or save them from the web and so on.

“So I think of social epistemology as interfacing the questions that every citizen is encountering on various fronts. They’re not entirely new questions. But what we don’t have is a theory about how to approach these problems. And philosophers in general, and philosophy in the past, have not given us any theoretical basis for approaching these kinds of issues. You can say, well they’re all part of political philosophy, or they’re all part of social philosophy, without saying social epistemology, just social philosophy. But they are parts of political philosophy or social philosophy that people haven’t dealt with in any systematic way.”

Goldman is a convincing salesman who clearly believes in his product. The test will be if the branch of philosophy he has been so lovingly nurturing actually bears fruit.