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SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY_FIVE

                                                  April   15, 2017
                                                  October  3, 2018

The slim volume "Social Epistemology: 5 Questions"
is a really good survey of this field.  Or sub-field.     SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY

It's essentially mail interviews with 16 of the
leading lights, where everyone is asked the same       This is published by
five relatively general questions.                     "The Automatic Press",
                                                       which has done a
     For example "What have been some                  series of such books--
     of the major advances in the field?"              I think the joke is
                                                       once you've got the
     One of my favorite answers was something          five questions and
     like: "There hasn't been any advances,            compiled a list of
     we've all just published a bunch of               names to ask, the book
     papers, no one cares about this."                 is essentially done.

                                                                        
                I think I'm interested in *Applied* Social Epistemology:
                so yeah 25 years of theory doesn't do much for me.  

                Are there experimental 
                social epistemologists?                   (An excellent
                                                          band name.)      
                                                                     

  It's a little hard to sum up the general thrust of Social
  Epistemology, there are a few different threads running through
  it.  Some of them start with Hume on Testimony and then try to
  think about how that works with larger groups of people, some
  start with things like the Condorcet Jury Theorem, and try to
  work with results from the social sciences (e.g. Erik J. Olsson
  mentions that there's research showing the quality of a jury's
  judgements are improved by increasing the size of the jury).
  A lot of them got involved with fighting the good fight against
  the non-Kuhnian Kuhnians like Rorty and Foucault.



  Outside of "Social Epistemology", other names one might look for are:

    "Sociology of Science": in the hopes that it's gotten over
    the Science Wars crap.

    "Cultural Cognition": originally associated with Hutchins
    ("Cognition in the Wild") who observed that the understanding
    of how to run a large naval vessel was distributed across the
    crew and not held by any one person. The phrase has since
    been adopted by Dan Kahan who often seems to use it as a
    synonym for "Motivated Reasoning".

    "Collective Intelligence": using Big Data to sell shit to
    suckers-- maybe it's best thought of as a branch of
    literature about advertising.

  But then there's the whole world of business management
  literature: I still don't know what they call this stuff over there.

     "Reorganization for maximum synergy"?



  Some entries for my reading-list:

       o  Helen Logino,  _Science as Social Knowledge_
       o  Alvin Goldman, _Knowledge in a Social World_
       o  Lorraine Code, _Epistemic Responsibility_


  But where I actually went from there was to back-up and re-read
  Thomas Kuhn: "Structure" is over 50 years old now, and
  "The Road Since" has got some good material in it as well.


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