Day 4: 16th December 2021
|| Social Epistemology ||

The increase in collaborative research and institutional funding over the past few decades has made the social character of scientific knowledge production and justification all the more pronounced. It becomes important to investigate the epistemic role played by the social aspects – as biases, do they lead scientists astray from the rational project, or are they constitutive of group rationality; do institutional mechanisms of resource allocation lead to a diversity of theoretical approaches, or do they entrench orthodoxy; are disagreements between research programs merely a consequence of incomplete information that need to be overcome, or are they desirable methodological ends.
These questions, and similar others, suggest the need for a social epistemology of science that explores the philosophical foundations of science conceived primarily as a collective and institutional enterprise; and they will be taken up in this session.