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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Social Epistemology and the Project of Mapping Science Kamili Posey Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1097 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE PROJECT OF MAPPING SCIENCE BY KAMILI POSEY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York. 2015 © 2015 KAMILI POSEY All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Nikolas Pappas ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Iakovos Vasiliou ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ Date Executive Officer Samir Chopra ______________________________________________ Linda Alcoff ______________________________________________ Robert Sinclair ______________________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE PROJECT OF MAPPING SCIENCE BY KAMILI POSEY ADVISOR: SAMIR CHOPRA One area of debate in naturalized epistemology is how to best interpret the relationship between naturalism and traditional analytic epistemology. This is particularly the case for epistemologists who commit to methodological forms of naturalism: First, I contend that methodological naturalists must commit, at minimum, to the idea that the best methods of knowledge-production in science ought to determine the best methods of knowledge-production full stop. I also contend that the best methods of knowledge-production in science are determined by and performed within scientific communities. Thus a methodological naturalist, to minimally call herself such, ought to consider knowledge-production within “communities of inquirers” utilizing community-determined methods (truth-conducive or not) as the fundamental framework of the method of science. Second, I contend that “communities of inquirers,” more broadly, including the paradigmatic “scientific community,” ought to be the primary terrain of naturalized epistemologists committed to methodological naturalism. And, because of this, I claim that all naturalized epistemologists ought to be social epistemologists. I agree that this may seem undesirable: social epistemology, following Rorty (1979), has a history of focusing on groups, institutions, and collective doxastic agents in consensus-based models that are either non-veritistic or radically deflationist about truth and objectivity. This has led to the exclusion of social epistemology from the traditional canon of epistemology, and the rejection of Peirce’s (1877) “communities of inquirers” view as too entangled with social and political “noise” to be conducive to finding truth. But I think this is an unnecessary interpretation. I claim, following Goldman (1999), that social epistemology can be truth-directed or “veritistic” in practice – even if not in the way that Goldman iv (1999) imagines. Ultimately, I argue, inspired by the American pragmatists, and particularly Dewey and Peirce, we do not have to reject truth and objectivity in order to maintain a social account of knowledge-production. Lastly, I suggest that one benefit of this view of epistemology is that it relocates a crucial area of philosophical inquiry from within the walls of “academic philosophy” and situates it where it actually belongs – in the world. One benefit of doing this is that epistemologists can make meaningful use of emerging tools in information science to visualize and theorize the activities within various “communities of inquirers:” this includes such tools as large-scale data mining, scientific citation mapping, topic and/or cluster mapping, and data visualizations. v PREFACE “A philosopher is like a fly buzzing around in a fly bottle, according to Wittgenstein. A theory of the bottle, it doesn’t need. What it needs is to be shown the way out. Kant has an almost complete opposite metaphor. He imagines a dove resentful about air resistance; it could fly better, surely, if the air would just get out of the way. A lot of philosophy is these two metaphors battling it out. You are always trying to break free of something. This makes sense if you’re the bottled-up fly. But not if you’re the ungrateful dove. It can be very hard to tell.” -Stephen Yablo vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page………………………………………………………………………………………………………i Copyright Page………………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Approval Page………………………………………………………………………………………………..iii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………..iv-v Preface………………………………………………………………………………………………………..vi Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………………vi-ix List of Illustrations………………………………..…………………………………………………..………x 1. The Introduction 1.1. The Proposal…………………………........………………………………..……..………1 1.2. The Motivation………………………………………………………………………...….14 1.3. The Payoff………………………………………………………………………….….….16 1.4. The Methodology……………………………………………………………………..….17 1.5. Project Outline…………………………………………………………………….….….18 2. On Naturalism 2.1. Methodological Naturalism and the Scope of “Science”……………………………25 2.2. Methodological Naturalism and The Pragmatist Conception of Science…………………………………………………………………………………..35 2.3. Social Epistemology and a More Honest Naturalism……………………………….38 3. Arguments for Social Epistemology 3.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...40 3.2 Radical Social Epistemology…………………………………..................................45 3.2.1 Against Radical Social Epistemology……………………………………….50 3.2.2 Can RSE Be Saved?................................................................................56 3.3 Consensus-Based Social Epistemology……………………………………………..63 3.3.1 Background……………………………………………….…………………...63 3.3.2 Rortyian Pragmatism………………………………….................................66 vii 3.3.3 Feminist Philosophy of Science and Feminist Epistemologies………………………………………………......................72 3.3.4 Solomon (2001) and Standpoint Epistemologies of Science.………………………………………………………………………73 3.3.5 Against (CSE)…….……………………………………………..…………..76 4. Veritistic Social Epistemology…………..…………………………………..…….…….........79 4.1 Goldman (1999) and the Social Epistemological Project……………..………….79 4.2 V-Values, Non-Epistemic Interests, and Questions of Interest……………….…84 4.3 Extrapolating from Testimony: Does Goldman (1999) Give Us a Bayesian Social Epistemology?...........................................................................................90 4.4.1 Goldman (1999) and the “Problem of Priors”………………………...….92 4.4.2 Replies: Kitcher (2002) and Fallis (2002)…………………………….…..95 4.4.3 Concluding Remarks…………………………………….…………………98 5. Veritistic Social Epistemology in a Pragmatist Framework………………………………..99 5.1 Pragmatism, Realism, and Convergence……………………………….…..…….99 5.2 Pragmatism and the Convergence Thesis: A Bayesian Approach..................101 5.2.1 Scoping Methods: A Subjectivist-Objectivist Approach.………………102 5.2.2 Dutch Books, Diachronic Coherence, and Revising the Reflection Principle……………………………………………………………...…….104 5.2.3 General Non-Partitioned Reflection……………………………….....…110 5.2.4 Scoping (GNR): Defeater Beliefs, Inert Beliefs, and “R-Reflection” …………………………………………………………………..……...….112 5.3 A Note on Bayesian Aggregation…………………………….…………………..113 5.4 Epistemic Disagreement and Epistemic Peers………....……………………...116 5.5 What’s Next?: Mapping The Epistemic Terrain…….….……………………….120 6. A Network-Level Epistemology: Representing Large-Scale Data…….….……………122 6.1 Systems-Oriented Social Epistemology and the Problem of Scale………….122 6.2 A Network-Level Epistemology…...…………………………….……………….125 viii 6.2.1 Scientific Citation Studies and Scientific Citation Mapping………...126 6.2.2 “Open” and “Closed” Network-Mapping for Social Epistemology …………………………………………………………………….……...129 6.2.3 Can “Closed” Systems Contribute to Knowledge?..........................134 6.2.4 Network-Mapping and Emerging and Waning Clusters…...............135 6.3 Representing Large-Scale Data: Concluding Remarks…………….……..…136 6.4 A Final Note on the “Social” Part of Social Epistemology………….......……137 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………..…………….139 Network Analysis Maps – Bibliographic Information……………………………...……148 ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1, Map of Scientific Paradigms………………………………………….…………………..139 Figure 2, The Structure of Science………………………………………………………………….140 Figure 3, Science-Related Wikipedian Activity…………………………………………………….141 x Chapter I The Introduction 1.1 The Proposal I assume that a good number of working philosophers subscribe to some variety of naturalism; even though it does come riddled with problems. Although I do not assume that most working philosophers subscribe to ontological naturalism, or that we need be dogmatic about what we mean by the “science” part of naturalism (See: Timothy Williamson’s 2011 NYTimes article, “What Is Naturalism?” for a good discussion of this).1 It could very well be that philosophy
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