Archives For Critical Replies

Response to Ginev, “Scrutinizing Scientism from a Hermeneutic Point of View”, Robert P. Crease

Jim Collier —  May 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Robert P. Crease, Stony Brook University, robert.crease@stonybrook.edu

Crease, Robert P. 2013. “Response to Ginev, ‘Scrutinizing Scientism from a Hermeneutic Point of View’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (6): 18-22.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-MJ

Please refer to: Ginev, Dimitri. 2013. “Scrutinizing Scientism from a Hermeneutic Point of View.” Social Epistemology 27 (1): 68-89.

Dimitri Ginev describes scientism, prima facie, as “the postulation of the natural sciences’ norms, standards, and criteria of objectivity as an absolute system of reference in recognizing and resolving global social problems” (73). Scientism has been under ferocious attack for a long time at the hands of philosophers of science including Rorty, Habermas, and Heidegger. Yet, Ginev argues, these attacks are defective because of their ‘essentialism;’ that is, they assume, though in different ways, “invariant norms of theorizing, methodological devices, cognitive aims, goals, and values” (68). Continue Reading…

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Anthropology as multi-natural ontology? A response to Marianne de Laet’s “Anthropology as social epistemology”, Helene Ratner

Jim Collier —  May 5, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Helene Ratner, Copenhagen Business School, hr.lpf@cbs.dk

Ratner, Helene. 2013. “Anthropology as multi-natural ontology? A response to Marianne de Laet’s ‘Anthropology as social epistemology’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (6): 5-11.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-M4

Please refer to: de Laet, Marianne. 2012. “Anthropology as social epistemology?” Social Epistemology 26 (3-4): 419-33.

Introduction

As her title indicates, Marianne de Laet suggests that social epistemology could be thought of as anthropology, in terms of how this mode of knowing has helped flesh out the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. She does so firstly, by accounting for how anthropological methods and concepts have contributed to science and technology studies (STS) by providing an alternative to “believing the natives” i.e., scientists, hence challenging positivist and objectivist accounts of science.  She then specifies selected analytical insights of anthropology. The concepts ‘culture’ and ‘practice’, she argues, enable us to learn how “knowledge is social in an epistemic sense” (2012, 421). She concludes her argument by questioning the distinction between epistemology and ontology, maintaining that anthropology is social epistemology. Continue Reading…

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Reputation and Social Mechanisms : A Comment on Origgi’s “A Social Epistemology of Reputation”, Gianluca Manzo

Jim Collier —  April 26, 2013 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Gianluca Manzo, GEMASS–CNRS and University of Paris-Sorbonne, glmanzo@msh-paris.fr

Manzo, Gianluca. 2013. “Reputation and Social Mechanisms: A Comment on Origgi’s ‘A Social Epistemology of Reputation’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (5): 45-50.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-LG

Please refer to: Origgi, Gloria. 2012. “A Social Epistemology of Reputation.” Social Epistemology 26 (3-4): 399-418.

Origgi’s penetrating outlook on social life, combined with her deep knowledge of several streams of literature in economics, sociology and philosophy makes “A Social Epistemology of Reputation” a brilliant piece of work. Origgi’s article develops a general theoretical framework for studying the emergence and function of reputational hierarchies and dynamics in complex societies. Continue Reading…

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A Further Reply to Rockmore, Ilya Kasavin

Jim Collier —  April 6, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Ilya Kasavin, Russian Academy of Sciences itkasavin@gmail.com

Kasavin, Ilya. 2013. “A Further Reply to Rockmore.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (5) 12-14.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-JZ

Please refer to:

It is my pleasure to turn once more to the exchange with Tom Rockmore. I appreciate his critical remarks as they have forced me to express my position more radically.

We agree on a number of points. We both wish to avoid an overly simplistic appeal to a contextual understanding of meaning. But when Rockmore wants to make a stronger claim that context functions not only to understand meaning, but also to justify truth claims, is this really offering a stronger position? Is it reasonable to separate definitively meaning from truth clams? Don’t truth claims have meaning? Continue Reading…

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The Role of Culture and Understanding in Research, Carl Martin Allwood

Jim Collier —  April 3, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Carl Martin Allwood, University of Gothenburg, Sweden cma@psy.gu.se

Allwood, Carl Martin. 2013. “The Role of Culture and Understanding in Research.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (5) 1-11.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-JL

Please refer to: Hwang, Kwang-Kuo. 2013. “Linking science to culture: Challenge to psychologists.” Social Epistemology 27 (1): 105-122.

The generation of scientific knowledge is a central issue in the social epistemology of knowledge. How then, can the generation of scientific knowledge best be described? In the sociology of knowledge, science tends to be seen as closely linked to society at large and it is usually seen as the central task of the sociology of knowledge to investigate and analyze this relationship (Yearley 2005). Therefore it is of interest to read the article “Linking Science to Culture: Challenge to Psychologists” in Social Epistemology (Hwang 2013) where Professor Hwang claims that scientific knowledge is, or at least should be, constructed in a process whereby researchers create microworlds which he argues are completely separated from what he calls their “lifeworlds”. In this rejoinder I will scrutinize this and other claims and also answer some of the criticisms that he levels against my article on the culture concept used in the Indigenous Psychologies (Allwood 2011a, b; Hwang 2011). The indigenous psychologies (IPs) are psychology research programs that aim for the approach to be scientific but that see mainstream psychology as too Western, and specifically too US, in its cultural foundation. Instead the psychology developed should be rooted in the culture of the society being investigated. Continue Reading…

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Epistemology or Politics? Louise Antony

Jim Collier —  March 20, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Louise Antony, University of Massachusetts Amherst, louise.antony@gmail.com

Antony, Louise. 2013. Epistemology or Politics? Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (4) 16-23.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-Je

Please refer to: Scheman, Naomi. 2012. “Toward a Sustainable Epistemology.” Social Epistemology 26 (3-4): 471-489.

Naomi Scheman calls attention to a number of cases in which science, as it is currently institutionalized in wealthy capitalist societies, neglects human needs or thwarts human values, specifically by neglecting the perspectives of marginalized people, or by disparaging the knowledge they possess. I share Scheman’s indignation about these cases, and about many other outrages perpetrated by the elite classes of the industrialized, capitalist West against subordinated people within and outside the societies they dominate. But I am not convinced by her analysis of the problem. Where Scheman sees a cognitive problem, I see a political one. Continue Reading…

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Reply to Krimsky, Henry Bauer

Jim Collier —  March 16, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Henry Bauer, Virginia Tech, hhbauer@vt.edu

Bauer, Henry. 2013. “Reply to Krimsky.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (4): 13-15.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-IZ

Please refer to:

Krimsky sees or interprets the evidence differently than I do. Science has always been conservative, he writes, implying that there’s nothing new to note about that. By contrast, I claim that intolerance of minority views has increased quite palpably, and that there are powerful institutional forces driving intolerance that were not earlier in play.

I’m a little puzzled that Krimsky didn’t recognize the strength of the evidence of change since his own book, Science in the Private Interest (2003; which I cite at a number of points), documents so well the degree to which late-20th-century science has been corrupted by personal and corporate conflicts of interest, which was not the case in earlier times. Continue Reading…

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“Ecologizing” Berry’s Computational Ecology, Nathan R. Johnson and Damien Smith Pfister

Jim Collier —  March 8, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Nathan R. Johnson, Purdue University, nrjohnson@purdue.edu and Damien Smith Pfister, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, dpfister2@unl.edu

Johnson, Nathan R. and Damien Smith Pfister. 2013. “‘Ecologizing’ Berry’s Computational Ecology.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (4) 7-9.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-IA

Please refer to: Berry, David M. 2012. “The Social Epistemologies of Software.” Social Epistemology 26 (3-4): 379-398

David M. Berry’s “The Social Epistemologies of Software” can be profitably read in a number of ways: as a rich explanation of how the hyper-reflexivity of networked software underlines the intense sociality of computational knowledge formation; as a careful account of social software at the cusp of pervasive computing and the internet of things; as an effort to publicize the ironically similar phenomena of “web bugs” and “lifestreaming;” as a first step in theorizing what he calls “compactants,” the “computational actants” that monitor behavior, geolocation, affects, and more; and as a warning about the under-appreciated normative dimensions of screenic representations and the computational care of the self.

It is hard to argue with the premise that software’s influence is increasingly ubiquitous. Similarly, the notion that scholars and citizens ought to turn their critical faculties toward code is similarly unimpeachable. If, indeed, “code and software [have] become the conditions of possibility for human living, crucially becoming computational ecologies,” then we must take them seriously (Berry 2012, 379). Berry’s hope is that more critical attention to code and software will expose how contemporary social epistemologies of software are constituted and thus enable “intervention, contestation, and the unbuilding of code/software” (Berry 2012, 393). Though the “techniques needed [to understand code/software] are still in their infancy,” they will necessarily require a multidisciplinary effort (Berry 2012, 392). Continue Reading…

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Is there an emancipatory ontology of matter? A response to Myra Hird, Zsuzsa Gille

Jim Collier —  March 3, 2013 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Zsuzsa Gille, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gille@illinois.edu

Gille, Zsuzsa. 2013. “Is there an emancipatory ontology of matter? A response to Myra Hird.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (4) 1-6.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-Ig

Please refer to: Hird, Myra J. 2012. “Knowing Waste: Towards an Inhuman Epistemology.” Social Epistemology 26 (3-4): 453-469.

As a long-time member of the waste studies fan club, I read Myra Hird’s “Knowing Waste: Towards an Inhuman Epistemology” with great interest, and I hope readers of Social Epistemology, and Myra herself, will forgive me a polemic tone for the sake of inciting discussion. Such debates can only be good for waste studies and for scholars interested in developing nuanced understandings of materiality.

In this article, Hird demonstrates that one of the key definitional aspects of waste, trash, garbage or litter, [1] is that it is indeterminate — essentially never fully knowable — and that when determinacy is foisted upon it environmental problems ensue. She argues that the significance of waste for feminist epistemology is in illustrating the environmental and political advantages of recognizing indeterminacy by rendering matter/nature/waste/the body an active partner in the knower-known relationship. Continue Reading…

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Against consensus — but to what end? Reply to Riggio, Steve Fuller

Jim Collier —  February 24, 2013 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Steve Fuller, University of Warwick, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology S.W.Fuller@warwick.ac.uk, Homepage: http://bit.ly/q3GBmi

Fuller, Steve. 2013. “Against consensus — but to what end? Reply to Riggio.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (3) 25-31.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-HN

Please refer to:

Thanks to Adam Riggio (2012) for taking the time to develop his own position in relation to my own. While we agree on many specific matters, I am unsure that our conclusions point in the same direction. However, let me start by crediting Riggio for appreciating the long-standing anti-consensualism of my social epistemology. [1] This has put me at odds with most people — excepting the Popperians, of course — who one might consider social epistemologists. These include: the Habermasian deliberative democrats who strive for a non-coercive normative consensus, the Foucaultian disciplinarians who take the existence of any normative consensus as ipso facto coercive, and last (and perhaps least) the analytic philosophers whose preoccupations with trust, expertise, and authority are all in the aid of forging some normatively appropriate consensus that corresponds to whatever passes for political correctness. Moreover, recently even rhetoricians, from whom one might expect a more instinctively agonistic approach to epistemic matters, have rallied around a version of analytic social epistemology that looks to expert consensus as a safe haven in the stormy debates over the status of, say, global climate change or Darwinian evolution (Ceccarelli 2011). Continue Reading…

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