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The Philosophical Quest in
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Steve Fuller
ISBN 978-1-8446-5817-6
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www.routledge.com(cid:15)aninformabusiness
Knowledge
Thetheoryofknowledge,orepistemology,isoftenregardedasadrytopicthatbears
little relation to actual knowledge practices. This book aims to correct this by
showing the roots, developments and prospects of modern epistemology from its
beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day.
Contemporary epistemology is shown to draw on the insights of a wide range of
disciplines. Philosophy has always been concerned with how we balance aspiration,
belief, experience and knowledge. Science has come to represent a very highly pri-
vileged knowledge, whilst recent insights from psychology and sociology have
questioned how knowledge is acquired and structured. Meanwhile, theology has
shaped the quest for knowledge in ways which have only relatively recently become
separate from more secular knowledge systems.
The book offers readers a very broad, cross-disciplinary, and historically-informed
assessment of the ways in which humanity has, and continues to, pursue, question,
contest, expand and shape knowledge.
Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University
of Warwick. He is the author of twenty books, including The Knowledge Book and
Science.
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Knowledge
The philosophical quest in history
Steve Fuller
Firstpublished 2015
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Contents
List of tables vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: is there a problem of or with knowledge? 1
1 Epistemology as cognitive economics 19
Social epistemology as the art of cognitive management, 19 .
Two kinds of cognitive economy for social epistemology, 22 .
The history of epistemology as a struggle over cognitive
economy, 25 . The problem of the economic use of knowledge
already produced, 29 . Why did our ancestors seem to know
so much more than we know now?, 34 . Projecting the future
of social epistemology: the proactionary imperative, 38
2 Epistemology as divine psychology 41
The divine origins of intellectual life, 41 . Secularizing the
sacred mind: the centrality of theodicy, 46 . Theism by other
means: sociology’s secular problematic, 54 . Why naturalism
is too conservative to explain science, 59 . David Hume:
naturalist philosopher of diminished expectations, 63 . The
need for theism to explain science, 69 . The awkwardness of
natural theology in the secular world, 74 . Intelligent design: a
“Left Creationist” affirmation of science, 86 . Darwinism’s
own anti-humanist theodicy, 90 . Recap: the Creationist
Left’s challenge to the science–religion nexus, 96
3 Epistemology as psychology of science 102
In the beginning the psychologist was the self-conscious
scientist, 102 . The genealogy of validity: from the bank to
vi Contents
the lab bench, 106 . The need for psychology of science to
improve the conduct of science, 117 . Conclusion: how
scientific creativity went from being abundant to scarce, 121
4 Epistemology as philosophy of science 130
By misunderstanding Kuhn, we misunderstand our own
times, 130 . Kuhn’s legacy of prescriptive/descriptive
confusion, 134 . Popper’s (pre-)challenge to Kuhn and Kuhn’s
anti-rationalist response, 141 . Kuhn’s contemporary legacy:
the naturalization of consensus in science, 149 . The problem
of positioning Popper on his own terms, 154 . The key to
Popper: the psychologist who never really left the lab, 161 .
The problem of assessing Popper’s philosophical fortunes, 166
5 Epistemology as sociology of science 169
In search of the “will to science”: from religious inspiration
to remunerated research, 169 . Science and expertise:
natural bedfellows or mortal enemies?, 177 . Expertise as site
for normative recession in analytic social epistemology, 181 .
Expertise as site for normative recession in science and
technology studies, 187 . Learning from the past to redeem a
normatively “fuller” social epistemology, 192 . The challenge
ahead: the legacies of Kuhn and Latour as obstacles, 202
6 Epistemology as counterfactual historiography 210
The complementarity of freedom and determinism in the
modern world-view, 210 . Freedom and determinism as a
problem of historical perspective, 220 . Possible worlds as the
micro-structure of freedom and determinism, 232 . The
normative stakes of a flexibly revisable history, 242 . Giving
the past back its future: the ultimate test of “giving voice”, 250
Conclusion: redeeming epistemology from the postmodern
condition 262
Bibliography 280
Index 301
Tables
1 Social epistemology as (1) epistemology and (2) sociology. 6
2 The existential horizons of social epistemology. 15
3 The two philosophical traditions before cognitive economics. 26
4 The two philosophical traditions after cognitive economics. 29
5 The realm of the knowable. 35
6 Philosophy of science or for science? 145
7 The two modern world-views. 211
8 The two modal logics of history. 225
9 The epistemic rudiments of time travel. 228
Acknowledgements
I must acknowledge the support of those who over the past fifteen years
have provided the conditions and criticism necessary to develop the
arguments in these pages: Elisabeth Arweck, Babette Babich, Jesus
Zamora Bonilla, James Robert Brown, Jim Collier, Manuel Crespo, Jean-
Pierre Dupuy, Mark Erickson, Greg Feist, Bob Frodeman, Tom Glick,
Jim Good, Michael Gorman, Mathew Guest, Morteza Hashemi Madani,
Ian Jarvie, Byron Kaldis, Ilya Kasavin, Noretta Koertge, Veronika
Lipinska, Juan Vicente Mayoral, Martin Medhurst, Jaume Navarro, Greg
Radick, Paul Roth, Raphael Sassower, Sergio Sismondo, Nick Turnbull,
Stephen Turner, Immanuel Wallerstein. I must also thank my long-
suffering editor Tristan Palmer at Acumen. This book is dedicated to
Emilie Whitaker, someone whose generosity of mind and spirit can
merely be gestured at in a work such as this.
I would like to acknowledge the Institute of Philosophy (Department
of Social Epistemology) of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the
Russian Science Foundation for funding the project on “Social Philosophy
of Science” (grant #14-18-02227) which was made in support of some of
this work.
Introduction
of with
Is there a problem or knowledge?
Humans are gods in the making. An actual deity may be guiding or
otherwise enabling the process, but even if that turns out to be false,
Homo sapiens has distinguished itself from other animals most remarkably
by acting as if having been touched by the divine. As a result, we live in
the future perfect – that is, the time when our ideas will have come to be
realized. In this respect, it is telling that induction becomes a significant
“problem of knowledge” only in the final quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury, once Thomas Henry Huxley popularizes David Hume as a precursor
of Charles Darwin’s view that we are animals conditioned by experience
to believe that the future will be like the past. Before that time, only self-
avowed “traditionalists”, such as Bishop Richard Whately, would have
accorded the past such strictly epistemic weight. And notwithstanding
the continued popularity of the “problem of induction” in analytic phi-
losophical circles, we have come to value the future over the past in quite
radical ways – albeit resulting in enormous distress, including incredible
violence to various groups of people at various times, as well as the rest of
the natural world. And even if postmodernism has made it no longer
fashionable to believe in the idea of progress, we still hold personal
sacrifice in high esteem while pathologizing those who “discount the
future too heavily”, as the economists gingerly say. Compared with other
animals, we seem to take our imaginative projections much more ser-
iously than the evidence of experience would require – or even advise.
Only an Abrahamic God could be sanguine about humanity’s track
record based on its having adopted such a mind-centred, future-oriented
view of the world. Of course, theologians may be correct that this is
simply because we are so much like the deity that “People of the Book”
have envisaged – one in whose “image and likeness” we were created.
After all, the Abrahamic deity creates through dictation, something to
which humans aspire, be it understood as the imposition of will, delivery
on a promise or, more recently, the execution of a programme.
Against this backdrop, “knowledge” is a troublesome concept: It draws
attention to just how far short we still fall from divine perfection, even
assuming that it is a reasonable aspiration. Thus, philosophers – in the
