Study Of Contemporary Western Social Epistemology

At the broad background of the sociological and psychological turnof philosophy of science in the half later of twentieth century,epistemology inevitably has been impacted strongly as an important branchof philosophy. Social epistemology critically inherited classicalepistemology. According to the old epistemic question——'what isknowledge, how do we get it?' ,social epistemology based on philosophytake enquiring the social process of human intellectual activity as itspursuit, and then improving the acquisition of human knowledge.In fact, America synthese published a special issue named socialepistemology in 1987 which should be the original age of socialepistemology. Actually, that is also the basic point of this paper. Fromthe origin of its thought, social epistemology is affected directly comingfrom three theories: firstly, Jess Hauk Shera whowas an expert in libraryand information science points out an idea of construction of socialepistemology; secondly, there is the "strong program"′s causality insociology of scientific knowledge; the third is Quine′s 'naturalizedepistemology' which was inherited by social epistemology. It is the abovethree theories that makes social epistemology appearing a characteristicof 'description' which was rejected by classical epistemology.Contrary to our common sense, social epistemology has not removedthe ingredient of truth in knowledge, especially scientific knowledge.Social epistemology accepts the objectivity and truth of scientificknowledge as well as classical epistemology. A theory of veritism intendsto enquire the truth of knowledge in social practice. That is to say,pursuit of truth is the intention of veritism. Still, veritism alsoextends the scope of enquiring knowledge from individuals to socialpractice. The approach to acquiring knowledge is the way of causalreliability. Appeal to Bayes′Theorem in probability, the veritisticvalue of concrete social practices were illuminated. Eventually, socialepistemology expands the scope of classical epistemology, maintaining the function of its "normativity".With the contemporary age of knowledge becoming commercial products,to acquire knowledge at the best certainly is becoming the question ofhuman attention. Then the study on the organization of cognitive laboris considered as one of the important constitutions in social epistemology.Adhere to this pursuit, social epistemology adopts political factors intoepistemology, abiding by a democratic political principle of "norm"and then suggesting a political legitimized approach to the productionof knowledge. In this approach, social epistemology operates two level's norm: prescriptive norm and evaluative norm. The former belongs tometal-level and the latter belongs to objective level. Scientists stayat the metal-level their research following an operation of democraticnorm, while knowledge-analysts are at the objective level of their workfollowing an operation of a kind of efficient norm. For the origin of knowledge, social epistemology endows other's testimony with a fundamentalist epistemic status as well as that ofperception, memory and reason. As a kind of knowledge' s origin, testimonyadheres to the principle of acceptability based on trust. Within the fieldof social practice, layperson or novice acquires knowledge throughexpertise——other's testimony. To a degree, layman' s epistemicdependence on expert attends by a certain necessity of "blindness"As an extension of the study in social epistemology, we analyzed " social constructivism " which was called as " broad socialepistemology ". Then we point out the variety of fact ascribing in socialconstructivism and three ideas against it. By dint of the concept of "semantic constructivism",we think of sociology of scientific knowledgeas a kind of "broad social epistemology"As far as we concerned, social epistemology as a kind of new fieldappearing in twenty years is not a completely organic integrity at theaspect of its theories, and in generally constitutes a intercross fieldbased on philosophy including many of experiential disciplines. But westill can see that social epistemology maintains the function of normcoming from classical epistemology and adds up the characteristic ofdescription on its own. Finally, the orientation to the practice of knowledge pursuing constitutes of a main tendency in social epistemology.Just as Martin Kush who is a scholar in Cambridge saying: as an excitingnew field, social epistemology belongs to the future but no the past.