An Appraisal of Alvin Goldman’s Social Epistemology

Elias Ifeanyi E Uzoigwe

doi:10.26858/predestinasi.v13i1.19211

Abstract

This work is aimed at giving an insight into the issues raised by Goldman in his argument that social epistemology is ‘real epistemology’. Goldman wants to convince the mainstream epistemologists and the philosophical world in general that social epistemology is real epistemology by distinguishing between three forms of social epistemology: revisionist, preservationist, and expansionist. These three forms of social epistemology construed and proposed by Goldman differ in how they relate to the basic assumptions of traditional/classical epistemology. While acknowledging the various authors for their divergent views and contributions to social epistemic discourse, this work holds that though Goldman, more than any other social epistemologist, raised a fresh perspective in social epistemology, yet, there is a missing link in his submission. Goldman’s preservationist social epistemology, which he argued is “real epistemology”, fails to give at least, a spotlight on what this work calls historical social epistemology. This does not in any way downplay Goldman’s giant stride in awakening epistemologists from their slumber which led some scholars to include issues like analytic social epistemology, diagnostic social epistemology, naturalistic social epistemology, and political social epistemology in the epistemic lexicon; and by so doing, expanding the frontiers of the epistemic domain of philosophical enterprise. It is the position of this research that Goldman’s social epistemology elicited a renewed interest in epistemologists and scholars alike in the social dimension of knowledge. This work employs historical, conceptual, contextual, and textual methods of analyses.

Highlights

The social dimension of knowledge has been unduly neglected, and scholars, especially those of the epistemic divide consider it imperative to strike the balance; and as a result, socialising movements emerged, because, for them, knowledge has a social perspective
What Goldman is trying to establish here is that there is epistemic content even in a democratic process of a given society. Especially as it is encapsulated in his work, Knowledge in a Social World, Goldman argues that social epistemology should be seen as complementing rather than replacing traditional epistemology
On this view social epistemology retains traditional epistemology’s normative focus on how epistemic practices and systems in terms of their ability to produce “verististc value”

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The social dimension of knowledge has been unduly neglected, and scholars, especially those of the epistemic divide consider it imperative to strike the balance; and as a result, socialising movements emerged, because, for them, knowledge has a social perspective. The movement does not reject a concern for individual epistemic decision making, but it finds at least equal importance in the study of epistemic decision making in social contexts The emphasis has been on choices among belief, disbelief, and agnosticism (suspension of judgment) that confront individual epistemic agents. Such agents are assumed to observe the world (or their own minds) and reflect

16 Predestinasi

A HISTORICAL SURVEY OF SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY

CONCLUSION