Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, editor, Interface administrators, Administrators (Semantic MediaWiki), Curators (Semantic MediaWiki), Suppressors, Administrators, Widget editors
11,019
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
The nineteenth century British philosopher and political economist [[John S. Mill|John Stuart Mill]] (1806-1873) argued, in a political essay called ''On Liberty'' (1859), [[CiteRef:: Mill (2003)]] that because individual human knowers are fallible, critical discussion of ideas between persons with differing views is necessary to help individuals avoid the falsity or partiality of beliefs framed in the context of only one point of view. For Mill, then, the achievement of knowledge is thus a social rather than an individual matter. [[CiteRef::Longino (2016a)]] The American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) emphasized the instigation of doubt and critical interaction within a community as means to knowledge. He formulated a consensual theory of truth, in which the acceptance of the truth of a proposition depends on the agreement of a community of inquirers. For Peirce then, communities are epistemic agents that can take stances towards propositions. [[CiteRef::Peirce (1878)]][[CiteRef::Longino (2016a)]]
The epidemiologist [[Ludwig Fleck|Ludwig Ludwik Fleck]] (1896-1961) made one of the first attempts to apply the concept of communities as epistemic agents specifically to the process of scientific change. In ''Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact'' (1935) [[CiteRef::Fleck (1979)]], he argued that cognition was necessarily a collective social activity, since it depends on prior knowledge obtained from other people. New ideas arise within collective epistemic agents which he called ''thought collectives''; groups of people who participate in the mutual exchange of ideas. As an emergent consequence of mutual understandings and misunderstandings within such a group, a particular ''thought style'' arises, which determines how individual members of the thought collective think and perceive within the relevant domain. Scientific facts are socially constructed by thought collectives interacting with the world through observation and experiment, and can be revised or abandoned based on these interactions. [[CiteRef::Fleck (1979)]][[CiteRef:: Sady (2016)]]
[[Karl Popper]] (1902-1994) [[CiteRef::Popper (1963)]][[CiteRef::Popper (1972)]] advocated a falsificationist view of theory assessment. For Popper, members of a scientific community attempt to demonstrate the inadequacies of one another's theories by finding observational shortcomings or conceptual inadequacies. This is, necessarily, a community activity in which the community acts as an epistemic agent either accepting or rejecting a theory based on the outcome of such attempts. The outcome is that only the most empirically adequate and conceptually sound theories survive such community scrutiny. This is a kind of evolutionary epistemology [[CiteRef::Longino (2016a)]]
