6 Contrasting Conceptions of Social Epistemology Philip Kitcher I The history of epistemology has been dominated by an individualistic perspective on human knowledge, most dramatically displayed in Descartes’s scenario for the aspiring knower who was resolutely contemplating the dubitability of beliefs in the privacy of a stove-heated room.' Like other epistemologists before and after him, Descartes did not overlook the obvious fact that all of us leam from others. Individualists have believed, however, that this epistemic dependence could be transcended, holding that we have available to us individualistic grounds for accepting some propositions and that this set of propositions can be used to assess information we receive from others. Proceeding in this fashion, we can ultimately calibrate informants, much as we calibrate instruments, so that all that we claim to know comes to be based upon the exercise of our individual judgment” Neglect of social epistemology thus results, I believe, from (typically tacit) acceptance of a reductionist program. It is assumed that there is a Set of propositions—the individualistic basis—that we can know without reliance on others, Given this individualistic basis, we are supposed to be able to assess the reliability of potential sources by checking their deliverances against propositions in the basis. Once a source’s reliability has been evaluated in this way, simple inductive inferences can lead us 12 PHILIP KITCHER: to employ that source in instances in which individualistic checking is impossible. So it is assumed that all that we take ourselves to know can be obtained by relying only on sources whose credentials have been individualistically checked. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever carried out this reductionist program in any detail. There are plainly two sources of problems: one arising from the possibility that we employ sources for whom comparisons with the individualistic basis are far too slender to Support the extensive use we make of them (think, for example, of the paucity of ways in which we can check directly the deliverances of national news media); the other stemming from the worry that there may be no propositions that we can know without being epistemically dependent on others. These points are analogous in obvious ways to objections encountered by logical empiricist programs for the reduction of "theoretical" knowledge; and just as the issue of the theory-ladenness of perception was crucial to that debate, so too, it seems to me, the second concem, which stresses the social dependence of all our knowledge, is fundamental to the prospects of individualistic reduction.? Both in our abstract thinking and in our perceptual experience, the conclusions we draw depend on the conceptual repertoire that we deploy and on the habits for reaching or inhibiting belief in which we have been trained. Early absorption of the lore of our societies affects us even at those points at which we appear most able to take our epistemic lives into our own hands. These points can probably best be appreciated by considering the differences between our formation of belief, both in perception and in reasoning, and the analogous processes that occur in others whose initial socialization is different.‘ Unless we hold, as Descartes did, that there is some presuppositionless point from which we can begin inquiry, we must abandon the individualistic reduction as a failure. But, since my primary purpose in what follows is to contrast different styles of social epistemology, I shall not try to present the argument in detail, leaving would-be individualists the challenge of showing that prospects for reduction are brighter than I have taken them to be, Social epistemology begins at the point of rejecting the individualistic reduction. One may go on in a number of different ways. I shall start with an approach that remains relatively close to the individualistic wadition.CONTRASTING CONCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 3 nie According to a venerable conception of knowledge, the primary subjects of knowledge are individual human beings. To talk about the knowledge current in a community is to say something, possibly quite complex, about what the members of that community know. Ascription of knowledge to individuals tums on recognizing that they have beliefs with special properties: beliefs that are true and that are "properly grounded," "justified," or "warranted." So one comes to the traditional formula, "X knows that p just in case p and X believes that p and X is justified in believing that p" or its more sophisticated modem equivalents (for example, "X knows that p just in case p and X believes that p and X’s belief that p was formed by a process that is reliable (in the appropriate sense)").> Theories of knowledge that begin from this familiar type of account may venture into social epistemology solely because they are persuaded of the breakdown of the individualistic reduction canvassed above. In consequence, the exact point at which epistemology becomes social is in the appreciation of the possibility that whether or not a subject is justified (or whether or not a belief-forming process counts as reliable in the pertinent sense) turns on the properties of other people or of the group to which the subject belongs. For purposes of convenience in what follows, I shall assume a (bland and undeveloped) version of a reliabilist-account of knowledge—although I believe that the distinctions I shall draw and the questions I shall raise would emerge in strictly parallel fashion, given any of the main alternatives to reliabilism. We can thus present the elements of a minimal social epistemology as follows: (1) Individuals are the primary subjects of knowledge. To ascribe knowledge to a community is to make an assertion about the epistemic states of members of the community. (2) X knows that p if and only if (a) X believes that p and (b) p and (c) X’s belief that p was formed by a reliable process. (3) The reliability of the process that produces X’s belief that p depends on the properties and actions of agents other than X. My designation of this position as minimal is intended to prepare the way for recognition of far more radical versions of social epistemology. As we shall see, these may reject the individualistic assumption (1), modify conditions (2b) and/or (2c), and make corresponding alterations—in (3).114 PHILIP KITCHER: However, before considering these possibilities, I want to explore the epistemological agenda for a position based on (1)-(3). One primary task for a theory of knowledge of this form consists in understanding the reliability of various types of belief-generating processes. Part of this task consists in recognizing the standards of reliability that should be invoked in particular contexts—the law courts, the laboratory, the everyday transmission of information, for examples—and aspects of identification of such standards surely involve questions of social epistemology.© However, the main social epistemological project consists in the investigation of the reliability of various types of social processes. Once we have recognized that individuals form beliefs by relying on information supplied by others, there are serious issues about the conditions that should be met if the community is to form a consensus on a particular issue—questions about the division of opinion and of cognitive effort within the community, and issues about the proper attribution of authority. 1 shall refer to the field of problems just outlined as the study of the organization of cognitive labor. Just as individualistic epistemology concems itself with those processes that promote an individual’s attainment of truc belief, so too social epistemology should be concemed with the organization of communities of knowers and with the processes that occur among knowers within such communities that promote both the collective and the individual acquisition of true belief. Consider, for instance, the problem of consensus formation. Communities that set lenient standards for the adoption of a proposal made by some subset of their members as part of community lore are evidently more likely to pass on false beliefs than those that are more exacting. By the same token, communities that demand exacting independent checks of such proposals will be inclined to waste valuable cognitive efforts. How should the balance be struck? We have here a well-defined optimization problem that can be treated precisely by making assumptions about the cognitive capacities of individuals and about the positions that they hold within the society. To the extent that we can make realistic presuppositions about human cognitive capacities and about the social relations found in actual communities of inquirers, we can explain, appraise, and in principle improve our collective epistemic performance. In similar fashion, the standard institutions of inquiry can submit to precise critical analyses. The considerations of the last paragraph suggest a way of thinking about the requirements on knowledge that enables us to defuse an important objection.’ Reliabilist analyses of knowledge and justificationCONTRASTING CONCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY us (as well as other approaches to the problem of analysing "X knows that p") often seem to take as their target the precise reconstruction of our everyday intuitions about what would count as instances of human knowledge. But why should these ordinary intuitions be privileged? Why should we want to exhibit the structure of the concept of knowledge we currently possess? The obvious answer is that an explicit account of the everyday concept might enable us to improve it or to replace it with amore adequate concept. However, skeptics may legitimately demand to know what criterion of adequacy is alluded to here. What tums on whether we define "knowledge" in one way rather than another, or on whether we set this or that standard of reliability? Recognizing the role that classifying propositions as items of knowledge plays in the achievement of consensus, and thus in both the transmission of belief and the shaping of further inquiry, enables us to reply to this skeptical query. Assume that the ultimate standard for appraising the processes that guide our investigations is their propensity to lead to the community-wide acceptance of truth (or, better, of significant truth)? Proposals for classifying beliefs as justified or as known under conditions that vary with respect to the type of reliability that is understood can be evaluated according to the social roles that such classifications would play in the genesis of community-wide true belief. Some standards for justification, for example, might be too liberal in that they would allow too easily for the introduction and dissemination of error. Hence the problem of deciding how consensus should properly be formed is deeply relevant to the issue of the standards that analyses of knowledge and justification should satisfy. Analytic epistemology thus presupposes answers to questions in social epistemology. Il The enterprise of the preceding section is attractive: it offers a plethora of precise, challenging problems, all connected with the central issues of the theory of knowledge, and all virtually unexplored. Nonetheless, for all its charms, this project is not what most of those who take the social tum in epistemology find exciting and liberating."© In the rest of this essay, I want to explore various ways in which one can try to reject some of the traditional epistemological assumptions that are taken over in (1)-(3), and thus make a more radical break with the epistemological past. My own bias in favor of the more limited conception of social epistemology outlined in section II will be evident in what follows. Nonetheless, because the issues are complex, I cannot116 PHILIP KITCHER hope to offer detailed, knockdown arguments in favor of that conception. Instead, I intend to identify the major issues that divide various conceptions and to see what notions must be clarified if the debate among them is to be more fruitfully pursued. A relatively minor deviation from the project of section II consists in retaining the overall conception offered in (1)-(3) but retracting a part of the individualism maintained in (1) by allowing that there may be properties relevant to collective inquiry that cannot be reduced to properties of and relations among individual inquirers. The optimality analyses envisaged in section II—and those articulated in preliminary attempts to work out the enterprise envisaged there—adopt as their preferred framework the language of rational decision theory, microeconomics, and other parts of social science that are resolutely committed to methodological individualism. In principle, one might want to allow for an expansion of this framework to incorporate references to irreducible collectivities (or collective properties). While I hold no brief for reductionism in general (recognizing the limitations of particular types of reductionist programs in biology and psychology)," there seems to be no reason to be committed to an expansion of this framework in advance of detailed arguments that show why specific social facets of inquiry are affected by irreducible social factors. Casual gestures in the direction of Durkheim are not sufficient. For it is not only a matter of controversy whether Durkheim's alleged social facts are needed to explain the phenomena that concemed him,'? but also quite possible that there should be irreducible social causes in some areas of human life (for example, suicide, forms of religious life) and not in others (for example, the growth of human knowledge). As I have already remarked, this is a minor deviation, and one that could quite easily be accommodated. A more consistent methodological holist would, I suspect, be far more inclined to question the principles (1) and (2) than to try to tack some social causes onto a fundamentally individualist project. One important criticism of the version of social epistemology developed in section II is that it slights the social by making the most individualistic parts of social science—psychology, microeconomics—central to the development of social epistemology. If we were to start, instead, with sociology, political theory, or cultural anthropology as our paradigms of social science, we might develop a far more social social epistemology. Consider many of the slogans that are currently fashionable in discussions of social epistemology: "knowledge is power"; "knowledge circulates in communities"; "knowledge is institutionalized belief.""*CONTRASTING CONCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 7 These slogans invite us to invert the traditional picture of knowledge as produced by individuals, who may be dependent upon the epistemic efforts of other individuals, and as becoming community-wide knowledge through recognition of the characteristics of what has been individually produced. Instead, we should regard the community-wide knowledge as primary, identifying individual knowledge with belief that accords (in some sense to be explained) with the knowledge current in the community. As it stands, this thesis is vague.’ I suggest the following more precise version of it: starting with an account of community knowledge, the social epistemologist proposes that items of individual belief count as knowledge just in case, first, the propositions believed are members of the set known in the community and, second, the processes that underlie the formation of the beliefs are of types approved as knowledge-generating within the community. Social epistemologies of this form thus reject (1), and they may also diverge from (2b) and (2c). One source of the repudiation of (1) lies in appreciation of the multiplicity of ways in which contemporary scientific knowledge is embodied—in printed texts, in pictures, in instruments, in experimental systems, in artifacts, in social institutions."* Faced with this diversity of forms of knowledge, philosophical focus on the beliefs of an individual May seem a peculiar obsession. Moreover, when we examine the different embodiments of knowledge, it may appear that what they have in common is not any propositional content with a distinctive status, but rather an ability to be employed in various ways, to direct the activities of people and other things. The experimental apparatus enables us to control certain phenomena. The diagram serves to display what we ought to perceive. These, like other embodiments of knowledge, are devices for intervening in nature and for regulating our social conduct. To count something as knowledge is to recognize it as having a certain power. Despite the suggestiveness of these ideas, the account of knowledge they "embody" seems to me intolerably vague. What sorts of entities can count as items of knowledge? What differentiates those entities of these types which are pieces of knowledge from those which are not? One route that social epistemology can take at this juncture is to adopt a full-blooded relativism, averring that the types of entities that can count as items of knowledge are as diverse as the "forms of life" in which they are embedded, and that the standards of knowledge are simply those of social acceptance. It is enough that an instrument, diagram, or text is “reproduced and circulated," or that it forms “part of an enduring network” within a society—under such conditions it counts as an item of knowledge within that society. There are apparent losses in settling for