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4-Gfibhg! an Informa Business  Knowledge Steve Fuller KNOWLEDGE Knowledge The Philosophical Quest in History Steve Fuller Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 ISBN 978-1-8446-5817-6 ,!7IB8E4-gfibhg! www.routledge.com an informa business Knowledge The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, is often regarded as a dry topic that bears little relation to actual knowledge practices. This book aims to correct this by showing the roots, developments and prospects of modern epistemology from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day. Contemporary epistemology is shown to draw on the insights of a wide range of disciplines. Philosophy has always been concerned with how we balance aspiration, belief, experience and knowledge. Science has come to represent a very highly pri- vileged knowledge, whilst recent insights from psychology and sociology have questioned how knowledge is acquired and structured. Meanwhile, theology has shaped the quest for knowledge in ways which have only relatively recently become separate from more secular knowledge systems. The book offers readers a very broad, cross-disciplinary, and historically-informed assessment of the ways in which humanity has, and continues to, pursue, question, contest, expand and shape knowledge. Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. He is the author of twenty books, including The Knowledge Book and Science. Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 Page Intentionally Left Blank Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 Knowledge The philosophical quest in history Steve Fuller Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Steve Fuller The right of Steve Fuller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-84465-817-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-84465-818-3 (pbk) Typeset in Gill Sans by Cenveo Publisher Services Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 Contents List of tables vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction: is there a problem of or with knowledge? 1 1 Epistemology as cognitive economics 19 Social epistemology as the art of cognitive management, 19 . Two kinds of cognitive economy for social epistemology, 22 . The history of epistemology as a struggle over cognitive economy, 25 . The problem of the economic use of knowledge already produced, 29 . Why did our ancestors seem to know so much more than we know now?, 34 . Projecting the future of social epistemology: the proactionary imperative, 38 2 Epistemology as divine psychology 41 The divine origins of intellectual life, 41 . Secularizing the sacred mind: the centrality of theodicy, 46 . Theism by other means: sociology’s secular problematic, 54 . Why naturalism is too conservative to explain science, 59 . David Hume: naturalist philosopher of diminished expectations, 63 . The need for theism to explain science, 69 . The awkwardness of Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 natural theology in the secular world, 74 . Intelligent design: a “Left Creationist” affirmation of science, 86 . Darwinism’s own anti-humanist theodicy, 90 . Recap: the Creationist Left’s challenge to the science–religion nexus, 96 3 Epistemology as psychology of science 102 In the beginning the psychologist was the self-conscious scientist, 102 . The genealogy of validity: from the bank to vi Contents the lab bench, 106 . The need for psychology of science to improve the conduct of science, 117 . Conclusion: how scientific creativity went from being abundant to scarce, 121 4 Epistemology as philosophy of science 130 By misunderstanding Kuhn, we misunderstand our own times, 130 . Kuhn’s legacy of prescriptive/descriptive confusion, 134 . Popper’s (pre-)challenge to Kuhn and Kuhn’s anti-rationalist response, 141 . Kuhn’s contemporary legacy: the naturalization of consensus in science, 149 . The problem of positioning Popper on his own terms, 154 . The key to Popper: the psychologist who never really left the lab, 161 . The problem of assessing Popper’s philosophical fortunes, 166 5 Epistemology as sociology of science 169 In search of the “will to science”: from religious inspiration to remunerated research, 169 . Science and expertise: natural bedfellows or mortal enemies?, 177 . Expertise as site for normative recession in analytic social epistemology, 181 . Expertise as site for normative recession in science and technology studies, 187 . Learning from the past to redeem a normatively “fuller” social epistemology, 192 . The challenge ahead: the legacies of Kuhn and Latour as obstacles, 202 6 Epistemology as counterfactual historiography 210 The complementarity of freedom and determinism in the modern world-view, 210 . Freedom and determinism as a problem of historical perspective, 220 . Possible worlds as the micro-structure of freedom and determinism, 232 . The normative stakes of a flexibly revisable history, 242 . Giving the past back its future: the ultimate test of “giving voice”,250 Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 Conclusion: redeeming epistemology from the postmodern condition 262 Bibliography 280 Index 301 Tables 1 Social epistemology as (1) epistemology and (2) sociology. 6 2 The existential horizons of social epistemology. 15 3 The two philosophical traditions before cognitive economics. 26 4 The two philosophical traditions after cognitive economics. 29 5 The realm of the knowable. 35 6 Philosophy of science or for science? 145 7 The two modern world-views. 211 8 The two modal logics of history. 225 9 The epistemic rudiments of time travel. 228 Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 Acknowledgements I must acknowledge the support of those who over the past fifteen years have provided the conditions and criticism necessary to develop the arguments in these pages: Elisabeth Arweck, Babette Babich, Jesus Zamora Bonilla, James Robert Brown, Jim Collier, Manuel Crespo, Jean- Pierre Dupuy, Mark Erickson, Greg Feist, Bob Frodeman, Tom Glick, Jim Good, Michael Gorman, Mathew Guest, Morteza Hashemi Madani, Ian Jarvie, Byron Kaldis, Ilya Kasavin, Noretta Koertge, Veronika Lipinska, Juan Vicente Mayoral, Martin Medhurst, Jaume Navarro, Greg Radick, Paul Roth, Raphael Sassower, Sergio Sismondo, Nick Turnbull, Stephen Turner, Immanuel Wallerstein. I must also thank my long- suffering editor Tristan Palmer at Acumen. This book is dedicated to Emilie Whitaker, someone whose generosity of mind and spirit can merely be gestured at in a work such as this. I would like to acknowledge the Institute of Philosophy (Department of Social Epistemology) of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Science Foundation for funding the project on “Social Philosophy of Science” (grant #14-18-02227) which was made in support of some of this work. Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 Introduction Is there a problem of or with knowledge? Humans are gods in the making. An actual deity may be guiding or otherwise enabling the process, but even if that turns out to be false, Homo sapiens has distinguished itself from other animals most remarkably by acting as if having been touched by the divine. As a result, we live in the future perfect – that is, the time when our ideas will have come to be realized. In this respect, it is telling that induction becomes a significant “problem of knowledge” only in the final quarter of the nineteenth cen- tury, once Thomas Henry Huxley popularizes David Hume as a precursor of Charles Darwin’s view that we are animals conditioned by experience to believe that the future will be like the past. Before that time, only self- avowed “traditionalists”, such as Bishop Richard Whately, would have accorded the past such strictly epistemic weight. And notwithstanding the continued popularity of the “problem of induction” in analytic phi- losophical circles, we have come to value the future over the past in quite radical ways – albeit resulting in enormous distress, including incredible violence to various groups of people at various times, as well as the rest of the natural world. And even if postmodernism has made it no longer fashionable to believe in the idea of progress, we still hold personal sacrifice in high esteem while pathologizing those who “discount the future too heavily”, as the economists gingerly say. Compared with other animals, we seem to take our imaginative projections much more ser- iously than the evidence of experience would require – or even advise. Only an Abrahamic God could be sanguine about humanity’s track Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 10:04 05 April 2016 record based on its having adopted such a mind-centred, future-oriented view of the world. Of course, theologians may be correct that this is simply because we are so much like the deity that “People of the Book” have envisaged – one in whose “image and likeness” we were created. After all, the Abrahamic deity creates through dictation, something to which humans aspire, be it understood as the imposition of will, delivery on a promise or, more recently, the execution of a programme.
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