Author Information: Jim Collier, Virginia Tech, jim.collier@vt.edu.
Collier, James H. “Social Epistemology for the One and the Many: An Essay Review.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 15-40.
Jim Collier’s article “Social Epistemology for the One and the Many” will be published in four parts. The pdf of the article includes all four parts as a single essay, and gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3ZN
Steve Fuller has built a remarkable career in the academy, bringing brilliant and singular insight to help understand turbulent times. But we should always ask ourselves whether we let our own thought be eclipsed by the powers of our heroes.
Image by Babette Babich, courtesy of Steve Fuller
Early in Knowing Humanity in the Social World (2018), Remedios and Dusek treat the reader to a breathless summary of Steve Fuller’s exceptionalism (10-11). Fuller “by far” outpaces his interlocutors’ learning and knowledge while engaging with “wit and panache” in an “endlessly ironical dialectic” (10). Bookending Fuller’s eminence in a postscript, a 2014 interview, Remedios asks him directly in third person, “Is Fuller the super-agent” (131)? According to Remedios and Dusek, super-agents possess “godlike capabilities through extension of human capabilities with science and technology” (131). Fuller demurs.
Undeterred, Remedios re-asks the question: “So what about Steve Fuller as super-agent” (132)? Fuller then refers obliquely to a “knowledge policy maker person” (132).[1] Despite Fuller’s reticence, Remedios’s questions recall the book’s hyperbolic opening and highlights the desired rhetorical effect. The authors instruct their readers to see that embodied in Steve Fuller, and in following the path of his social epistemology—his word (as it were)—we find a regulative ideal of the unity of knowledge, if not godhood.
Through a Gleaming City Walks What Was Once a Man
Knowing Humanity in the Social World, in a compact 7 chapters with a conclusion, postscript interview, and glossary, wrestles determinedly with Steve Fuller’s most thorny ideas and debates. The book examines insightfully the development of Fuller’s scholarly activity since the year 2000. The authors contend that Fuller’s project shifts from epistemology and collective knowledge policy-making, to metaphysics and agent-oriented knowing. The emphasis on agents—epistemic agents need not be human individuals (25)—speaks to a form of idealism advanced in Fuller’s distinct conceptualization of transhumanism.
Concentrating on Fuller’s more recent work, especially during and after the publication of Humanity 2.0 (2011), Remedios and Dusek aim to weave a unified narrative. It is a formidable undertaking. Fuller’s atypical range of interests, inveterate work style, and academic activism, complicate the matter. Unfortunately, by lionizing Fuller or, rather, in abstracting and projecting his seeming attributes onto social epistemology writ large, Remedios and Dusek offset much of the wider impact of their book.[2] In the vain attempt to maintain a unified narrative, and keep a through line to social epistemology, the authors resort to Fullerism.
Fullerism, I argue, projects idealized versions of Fuller himself, his scholarship, and his reasoning, onto a contrived series of social roles, events, and debates. For Remedios and Dusek, Fuller models the actions of an “agent-oriented” epistemologist who regularly triumphs, in a more or less qualified fashion, at academic brinkmanship. The singular positioning of Fuller tells the story of social epistemology as a decidedly asocial process—as though the field arose and proceeds largely on the basis of individual initiative and brilliance.[3] In essence, Remedios and Dusek envision social epistemology through “great man,” or “super-agent,” theory or, using Fuller’s slightly less exaggerated pejorative term, by “genius mongering” (1993).
Fuller wrote the book’s Foreword. In it, he claims “significant continuity” (vii) in his work if one reads appropriately. In overdetermining Fuller’s rational authority owing to a working belief in academic charisma (Weber 1922 [1978], Clark 2005), as I suggest later, Remedios and Dusek succeed in nullifying the continuity they, and Fuller, intend to promote. Social epistemology, on Fuller’s initial formulation (1988), took up the organization and pursuit of knowledge by human beings with “imperfect cognitive capacities” (3) and incomplete access to one another’s activities.
This characterization, and resulting aim, seemingly applies to all humans—unless we posit new, upgraded humans and their inevitable cognitive perfection. Perfection being just a matter time, how do post-2000 social epistemologists address these issues? They promote the illusion of proactive agents until the future arrives. Time now to retire the epistemic policy maker that inhabited the pages of Social Epistemology.
Remedios and Dusek impose a transhumanist narrative, bolstered by an unalloyed technological determinism, onto Fuller’s lauded intellectual biography. Fuller’s learnedness and interventionist role-play in various controversies gives lessons for aspirants to follow on the path of social epistemology. The path leads unremittingly to humanity 2.0—the “unstoppable Singularity” (Horner 2017). When the Singularity arrives (in 2045) as foretold by Ray Kurzweil, and assured to us by his Silicon Valley brethren, we perfect our imperfect cognitive capacities and have complete access—by uploading our consciousness to a computer cloud-like function (or some such)—to all our epistemic activities.
We might ascend to our perfection and unification sooner if we adopt Fuller’s metaphysical turn and regime of self-experimentation and risk-taking supported by proactionary social policies. Still, even if we aspire to be less than active, or proactive, epistemic agents—or humans (even so!)—an unshakable belief in technological determinism covers all bets made by futurists.[4]
Critique of a Shadow
In the three parts of this essay review I articulate the tensions, if not contradictions, and consequences for the conduct of social epistemology, if we accept Remedios and Dusek’s account. I believe these consequences go well beyond their book and affect the general conduct, and our reflexive understanding, of the field of social epistemology that stems more or less directly from Steve Fuller’s work.[5]
The sui generis nature of the work and the distinct normative landscape it inhabits, calls for a critical approach that Remedios and Dusek cannot articulate fully in the truncated framework of Knowing Humanity in the Social World. Remedios and Dusek’s shortcuts precipitate conflating Fuller with Fullerism and Fullerism with social epistemology. I maintain the following:
First, Remedios and Dusek present social epistemology wholly as Fullerism; that is, current social epistemology amounts to glorifying Fuller’s supposed acumen and prolificacy.
Second, Remedios and Dusek depict the epistemic agent as a social actor by staging roles and casting Fuller in them—“knower of the future” (3), public intellectual (5), intellectual provocateur (121), or designated, or aspiring, super-agent (131-132). Social epistemology inhabits a tediously didactic world in which social intercourse imparts triumphal object lessons owing to Fuller’s academic charisma.
Third, Remedios and Dusek submit to a powerful form of technological determinism as expressed in the Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron 1996), packaged by Ray Kurzweil (2005), and elaborated in Fuller’s “trilogy on transhumanism” (vii). Such determinism leaves unexamined the questionable, if not absurd, claims made on behalf of transhumanism, generally, and in Fuller’s “own promethean project of transhumanism” (99).
In the conclusion, I express consternation about social epistemology’s current state and future course. Among the broader field’s participants, we can expect a continuation of crosstalk and general indifference.[6] Analytic philosophers studying social epistemology, given their relative institutional security and faithful puzzle-solving, will persevere. I continue to believe we might fruitfully reimagine social epistemology through our necessarily collaborative textual practices. Yet always ahead, a glimmering personal future replete with academic favor, beckons and awaits.
Contact details: jim.collier@vt.edu
References
Barbrook, Richard and Andy Cameron. “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44-72.
Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 1996. https://bit.ly/1KavIVC.
Barron, Colin. “A Strong Distinction Between Humans and Non-humans Is No Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate Between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller.” History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 2 (2003): 77–99.
Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.
Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Fuller, Steve. Social Epistemology. Bloomington and Indianapolis, University of Indiana Press, 1988.
Fuller, Steve. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Fuller, Steve. “The Normative Turn: Counterfactuals and a Philosophical Historiography of Science.” Isis 99, no. 3 (September 2008): 576-584.
Fuller, Steve. “A Response to Michael Crow.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 25 November 2015. https://goo.gl/WwxFmW.
Fuller, Steve and Luke Robert Mason. “Virtual Futures Podcast #3: Transhumanism and Risk, with Professor Steve Fuller.” Virtual Futures 16 August 2017. https://bit.ly/2mE8vCs.
Grafton, Anthony. “The Nutty Professors: The History of Academic Charisma.” The New Yorker October 26, 2006. https://bit.ly/2mxOs8Q.
Hinchman, Edward S. “Review of “Patrick J. Reider (ed.), Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2 July 2018. https://ntrda.me/2NzvPgt.
Horgan, John. “Steve Fuller and the Value of Intellectual Provocation.” Scientific American, Cross-Check 27 March 2015. https://bit.ly/2f1UI5l.
Horner, Christine. “Humanity 2.0: The Unstoppability of Singularity.” Huffpost 8 June 2017. https://bit.ly/2zTXdn6.
Joosse, Paul.“Becoming a God: Max Weber and the Social Construction of Charisma.” Journal of Classical Sociology 14, no. 3 (2014): 266–283.
Kurzweil, Ray. “The Virtual Book Revisited.” The Library Journal 1 February 1, 1993. https://bit.ly/2AySoQx.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Penguin Books, 2005.
Lynch, Michael. “From Ruse to Farce.” Social Studies of Science 36, vol 6 (2006): 819–826.
Lynch, William T. “Social Epistemology Transformed: Steve Fuller’s Account of Knowledge as a Divine Spark for Human Domination.” Symposion 3, vol. 2 (2016): 191-205.
McShane, Sveta and Jason Dorrier. “Ray Kurzweil Predicts Three Technologies Will Define Our Future.” Singularity Hub 19 April 2016. https://bit.ly/2MaQRl4.
Pein, Corey. Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley. Henry Holt and Co. Kindle Edition, 2017.
Remedios, Francis. Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Lexington Books, 2003.
Remedios, Francis X. and Val Dusek. Knowing Humanity in the Social World: The Path of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018.
Rushkoff, Douglas. “Survival of the Richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.” Medium 5 July 2018. https://bit.ly/2MRgeIw.
Shera, J.H. Sociological Foundations of Librarianship. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970.
Simonite, Tom. “Moore’s Law Is Dead. Now What?” MIT Technology Review 13 May 13, 2016. https://bit.ly/1VVn5CK.
Talbot, Margaret. “Darwin in the Dock.” The New Yorker December 5, 2005. 66-77. https://bit.ly/2LV0IPa.
Uebel, Thomas. Review of “Francis Remedios, Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 3 March 2005. https://ntrda.me/2uT2u92
Weber, Max. Economy and Society, 2 vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley, CA; London; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1922 (1978).
[1] Such a person gives the impression of being a properly trained university administrator who can advise and lead on matters regarding knowledge transfer and distribution. As Fuller suggests in The Academic Caesar (2016), proper training refers to knowing and practicing the ways of social epistemology—particularly if one is a university administrator. Perhaps a “proto- Academic Caesar” lives in Michael Crow of Arizona State University. See “A Response to Michael Crow,” Steve Fuller (https://goo.gl/WwxFmW, 2015).
[2] In the Acknowledgements, Remedios and Dusek graciously mention a small conference in May 2017 in which the participants discussed the book in its infancy (xiii). During a spirited exchange, I expressed concerns that the project seemed like a hagiography of Fuller. I also worried that Remedios and Dusek left unaccounted in the project their own efforts, and the vital efforts of conference participants and the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, in building and advancing social epistemology.
[3] Fuller published Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times in 2000 (paperback edition in 2001). While Remedios and Dusek give the book passing treatment, one might return to Thomas Kuhn on the occasion of this review not only as “philosophical history,” but also as a prescient allegory regarding the far-reaching unintended, even harmful, consequences resulting from an overwrought staging of a singular scholar and their work.
[4] Echoing Kurzweil, Remedios and Dusek invoke the trinity of “biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer technology” as accelerating inevitably to the Singularity. For a counter-narrative, read Tom Simonite, “Moore’s Law Is Dead. Now What?” MIT Technology Review, May 13, 2016. https://goo.gl/EBUkDg.
[5] In his 2003 book, Remedios identifies the social epistemology related to Fuller’s work as “political social epistemology” (99). However, the phrase does not appear in the current book. I am unclear about the conceptual relation between “political social epistemology” and “Fuller’s social epistemology” aside from the apparently settled issue of who possesses it.
[6] Edward Hinchman’s recent review (2018) of Patrick Reider’s Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency illustrates this crosstalk and the predictable retreat to comfortable conceptual environs (https://ntrda.me/2NzvPgt).
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