Symmetry as a Guide to Post-truth Times: A Response to Lynch

Sociology as the research method for science, technology and knowledge reveals historicity, variability, relativity, contextuality along with the situatedness of scientific beliefs. The usu-al outcome of sociological and epistemologi-cal research would be the dependence of knowledge from various forms of collective subjectivity in contrast to neutral “objective reality”, as scientific realists believe, crystal-lized in rational worldviews. Not surprising if historically the project of social epistemology meets diverse and incompatible reactions on its main principle and program of sociological justification of knowledge. In the inner and outer contexts, social epistemology has been differently correlated with the questions of objectivity, scientific realism and relativism. Its method could be treated in a range of atti-tudes: skeptically as it follows from internal-ism and scientific rationalism; or neutrally as a kind of facticity researched by sociologists; or, on the contrary, as a reliable way for increas-ing objectivity and reflexivity of cognition. What we explore is the following question: scientific knowledge as well as any kind of knowledge must be objective (from a pur-pose-oriented setting of cognition), even if sociology shows its relativity and subjectivity. What is specified in the subsequent dilemma: how subjective and objective properties of knowledge can be combinated and how should social epistemology explain this? It must be said additionally that the method of social epistemology takes normative and de-scriptive forms, with different obligations. As a normative discipline, it must set the criteria for objectivity and somehow lead the scien-tists. As a descriptive discipline, it may tell what kinds of factors actually influence the practice, escaping from responsibility for what is happening. But even then social epistemol-ogy cannot avoid the reluctant explanations of what is objective and subjective, social and factual, collective and individual types of knowledge.

One of the major themes of Steve Fuller's project of social epistemology is a reconciliation of the normative concerns of epistemologists with the empirical concerns of sociologists of knowledge. Fuller views social epistemologists as knowledge policy makers, who will provide direction for improvements in the cognitive division of labour. However, this paper argues that Fuller's conception of knowledge production and his approval of a panglossian approach to epistemology fail to provide the normative force he claims, and leave us unable to identify anything epistemic about our knowledge-seeking practices.

In this paper we investigate the intellectual origins of Egan and Shera’s project of social epistemology at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago and the importance of bibliographic organization for its development. This can be considered a piece of historical research that mainly relies on the retrieval and interpretation of key publications, some of them not very well known, by some of the main actor and commentators of social epistemology in the past century. We present and discuss the development of the concept of bibliographic organization and its main aspects and characteristics in the context of social epistemology. In our analysis, we focus on its relationship with other key concepts for knowledge organization and social epistemology such as bibliography, classification, cataloguing, and indexing.

ABSTRACTMedieval epistemology begins as ideal theory: when is one ideally situated with regard to one's grasp of the way things are? Taking as their starting point Aristotle'sPosterior Analytics, scholastic authors conceive of the goal of cognitive inquiry as the achievement ofscientia, a systematic body of beliefs, grasped as certain, and grounded in demonstrative reasons that show the reason why things are so. Obviously, however, there is not much we know in this way. The very strictness of this ideal in fact gives rise to a body of literature on how Aristotle's framework might be relaxed in various ways, for certain specific purposes. In asking such questions, scholastic authors are in effect pursuing the project of social epistemology, by trying to adapt their ideal theory to the circumstances of everyday life.