Social Aspect of Knowledge and the Problem Of Relativism

“This latter [logic of knowledge] is concerned not with questions of fact (Kant’s quid facti?), but only with questions of justification or validity (Kant’s quid juris?). Its questions are of the following kind. Can a statement be justified? And if so, how? Is it testable? Is it logically dependent on certain other statements? Or does it perhaps contradict them?”

Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery

The attitude -which is a largely postmodernist- that advocates that knowledge is entirely social direct to the discussion of the relation between "knowledge and social". When social epistemology is broadly considered as an analysing of the forms of knowledge, judgment and justification of groups and communities, -in this large and slippery territory- the meaning of knowledge shifts from philosophical to social field. The social meaning of scientific knowledge, the scientists as a society, the historicity of knowledge, the politics of knowledge are the subjects of this field. Social epistemology as an epistemological method is necessitated by the following reasons: the social environment and social practices are related to knowledge, in as much as the individual is a member of a society concerning both the acquisition and the justification of knowledge. In this context, it is a necessity that konowledge is evaluated as a social and linguistic practice in terms of testimony, rationality and transmission to others. It is a question that whether this assessment does enclose all forms of knowledge and that philosophical validity of their methods. This case requires an important distinction for some writers, including Alvin Goldman. Since epistemology is placed in the focus of the sociological problem before it becomes the philosophical problem. Culture-based explanation models, or sociologism in general require relativism as a necessity since they inspire the function of the definition and justification of knowledge to construction from the social context.

Goldman has produced a classification model in order to defend social epistemology and to overcome approaches that undermine the philosophical foundations in this field. Accordingly, social epistemological approaches are classified according to their relation to the presuppositions of traditional epistemology. According to Goldman, there are three types of social epistemology (SE): Revisionist SE, Preservationist SE and Expansionist SE. According to the author, the Revisionist approach is not a "real" social epistemology because of its destructive attitude to the bases of traditional epistemology, while the others are "real".

While Goldman is creating this classification, he starts to work out some of the presuppositions of classical epistemology:

In classical epistemology;

-Epistemic agents are only individuals. Knowledge is individual; something is only known as an individual,

-Epistemology is founded on normative concepts such as justification, rationality and knowledge -they are searched for in epistemology; the normative standards of rationality and justifiedness are not always relativistic,

-The central notions of epistemic attainment such as knowledge and justification entail truth (a stated proposition must be true),

-Truth is mind-independent,

-In epistemology, "doxastic decision-making" (DDM) is the main field of investigation. (Goldman, “Why social epistemology is real epistemology?”)

When considered in terms of these epistemological preassumptions, according to Goldman, Preservationism which is based on the bases of classical epistemology and has a relatively conservative attitude and, the Expansionist approach which extends the social context a bit further, taking into account the differentiated epistemic characteristics of the groups on the same basis form a new aspect.

The Revisionist attitude refers to approaches that aim to completely undermine the (above-mentioned) basises which includes those principles like the normative standards, the individuality of the knowledge, the independence of the truth from mind. Revisionist approach is largely aroused from issue of relativism: contextualist explanations which rely on the difference of rationality and social constructivism as well as the tendency to interpret every phenomenon in social and political context feed the idea that there ara a relativistic nature of epistemic validity and truth. It can be said that the fact that relativism is focused on (factual) "truths" rather than "truthfulness" and its relation to rationality, leads to the idealization of the actual.

-Things about different fields are judged in the same plane. Since it is not a kind of relativism that Kant refers to human knowledge, but a relativism that is entirely focused on culture and context.

This can be expressed in a parallel with moral philosophy:

It is also meaningful for epistemology that Kant distinguishes between moral orders which are conditional (hypothetical) and condition-free (categorical). The types of knowledge that are not related to the condition, the habitat, the context -at least the relevant status to knowledge of mathematics as boundary knowledge of between doxa and episteme, since Plato- have a normative structure that can not be regarded as relative.

Regarding the attitude observed in the sociology of Scientific Knowledge, which corresponds to the most explicit statement of the Revisionist approach, the following note is important:

Although Goldman describes this area as Revisionist, it appears that he considers the "objective" character of scientific knowledge more than necessary. Indeed, although wanted to be regarded as extreme, it may not be that both Brown's definition of science as a social institution making noise in behalf of power, and the overriding conclusion that politics is the determining factor in the theory choice of the Strong Programme.

Remembering Heisenberg's rationale for the Uncertainty principle requires reassessing the epistemic status attributed to scientific knowledge. -From another point of view, the argument of Gadamer about the objectivity of science is remarkable in this respect. Even so it would not be meaningful for Barnes and Bloor to deny that there are norms of context-free and supra-cultural reasoning in this assessment: The phrase "institutionalized faith" is reasonable for scientific knowledge, but that does not mean that it is reasonable for every kind of knowledge.