Longino's View Of Scientific Knowledge And Its Skillful Expansion

Helen Longino is one of the key drivers of contemporary scientific epistemology.She established her socialized view of scientific knowledge when she communicated the logical space with social space.The approach which and How to constitute a system that contains both normativity and objectivity through a socialized approach that combined the rational and the social together,is her important task she faced.Longino talked about knowledge from an empirical,contextual and critical perspective.But her analysis of the social is limited to discourse interaction and results in some questions.According to these,this dissertation try to expand her socialized approach from a view of skillful knowledge,in order to make up for her limitations and enrich her philosophical thought by a practical way.Three parts are contained: the first is to understand Longino's view of scientific knowledge,and then some critics and limitations are teased out,and the third is to propose a skillful expansion to her socialized view based on those problems.This dissertation mainly consists of 6 parts.Introduction presents the background of Longino's philosophical thoughts and shows the aim of this topic.The research significance and existing problems of this topic are illustrated from domestic and overseas research status,and emphases and difficulties of the study are pointed out.In Chapter One,traditional value-free standing and the dichotomy of rational-social views about scientific knowledge are criticized detailedly by Longino.According to her argument,value-free favorers could not explain the under-determination between data evidences and hypotheses properly,and both of the dichotomizers got stuck in a communication impasse because they misunderstood and misused the three meanings of concept “knowledge”.In Chapter Two,Longino comes up with a view of socialized knowledge.She substitutes socialized cognition for dichotomized cognition,and as a result,a kind ofsocialized knowledge could be formed by combining the rational and the social.Chapter Three welcomes main three critics by different philosophers.Goldman's socialized approach differs from Longino and he was skeptical about the openness of Longino's normative framework.Kitcher,from a minimum of social epistemology,incorporated Longino into the ranks of relativism.Solomon emphasized the importance of community rationality in scientific process and thus she regarded Longino as the individualism.Longino also responded to these critics separately.Chapter Four exposes three limitations of Longino's view in the light of those critics and put forward a breakthrough way: turn our attention from social context to actional context,from socialized knowledge to skillful knowledge,from interactive objectivity to embodied objectivity.Longno ignored another dichotomy of the explicit and the tacit in knowledge representation.That ‘s why her view could be expanded.Studying them from the skill dimension of scientific knowledge will help to solve the questions raised by this explicit-tacit dichotomyChapter Five gives a detailed skill-expansion to Longino's view of scientific knowledge.There is another kind of under-determination between embodied experiences and skillful performances.Experience ability and actional contextual satisfaction were two normative conditions in the growth of skillful knowledge.The processes of achieving embodied experience,actional context and effective examination produce another kind of critical contextual empiricism in practical way.That is a skillized expansion,which lead a critical science to an embodied science.From the study above,following conclusions are drawn:(1)The socialization of scientific knowledge is the inevitable result of Longino's transcending traditional philosophy of science in value neutrality and dichotomy.(2)The view of Longino's scientific knowledge still has the space to discuss more on relativism,individualism and normative questions.(3)Socialized knowledge based on data evidence could not give satisfactory interpretations to questions of the relativism and individualism.Butan expansion from the view of skillful knowledge could not only compensate for these limitations,but also carry forward her socialized approach from a practical perspective.