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What counts as knowledge? Whose knowledge counts?
Overview 1 A/Prof Evan Poata-Smith
At the end of this module, you should be able to:
- Evaluate the argument that we can be epistemologically
- bjective if we adopt the ‘right’ method of inquiry.
- Identify how our social location may affect what and how we know.
- Explain why particular knowledge systems achieve legitimacy and authority at the expense of other knowledge systems.
This will help you…
- Analyse the extent to which science exists apart from the forces that shape our everyday lives and the structure of our society.
- Describe and analyze how power structures shape what we ‘know’, how we ‘know’ it and, indeed, what is validated as knowledge.
Overview Key concepts
Assumptions about the nature of reality, knowledge and values.
- Epistemology – What is knowledge?
- Ontology (metaphysics) – What is real?
- Ethics –What is right or wrong?
- Aesthetics – What is beauty? What things are of value?
Module Epistemology What is Epistemology ?
Comes from two Greek words:
“Episteme” = knowledge, understanding. “Logia” = science, study.
Epistemological questions
What does it mean to “know”? What can we know? How can we know it? Why do we know some things and not others? How do we acquire knowledge? Can knowledge be certain? How can we differentiate truth from falsehood? Why do we believe certain claims and not others?
Like so many words, the word “know” is used in many different ways.
Module Epistemology 5
Epistemology – the nature of knowledge
Traditionally, philosophers have made the distinction between three types of knowledge:
1.Practical knowledge: knowledge that is skills-based, e.g. being able to drive or use a computer;
2.Knowledge by acquaintance: knowledge that doesn’t involve facts but familiarity with someone or an objects, e.g. I know my mother, I know what an apple looks like 3.Factual knowledge: knowledge based on fact, e.g. I know that the sun rises every morning –I know it is true.
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Epistemology
Epistemology – the nature of knowledge
What are the requirements for knowing something—as opposed to just believing it, or wondering about it, or dreaming about it?
Module Epistemology Epistemology – What is knowledge?
Traditionally, scholars have argued that knowledge is “justified, true belief”:
1.The person must be able to justify the claim;
2.The claim must be true, and
3.The person must believe in it.
It is not necessarily denied that knowers have identities and social locations, but they aren’t viewed as relevant factors to include in epistemic assessments.
Epistemology
This type of approach rests on a number of assumptions:
- That all knowers are essentially alike, so that in principle, any knower is interchangeable with any other knower.
- That all knowers are capable of autonomy or "self-sufficiency" in knowing.
§ What are the implications of this way of thinking?
§ The primary concern, therefore, is in evaluating the beliefs and disbeliefs of individuals in abstraction from their social
environment.
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“This bifurcation legitimates the assumption that the human perceiver occupies no space in the known cosmos; existing outside of history, the knower knows the world objectively. Thus, knowers are untainted by the world of opinions, perspectives, or values. Operating objectively (without bias), the knower sets out on the neutral mission of science: the application of abstract reasoning to the understanding of the natural environment.”
Ladislaus M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe
(1999) What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy
New York: Routledge, p. 25.
Objectivity?
Two ideas:
- Is it possible to be epistemologically objective, to somehow be a neutral mouthpiece for the world’s truths if one adopts the ‘right’ method of inquiry?
- Are scientists uniquely and exclusively equipped to be
- bjective?
Objectivity? Module 11 Social Epistemology
Basic arguments
§ Epistemology—the study of knowledge and justified belief—has
been heavily individualistic in focus.
§ The emphasis has been on evaluating doxastic attitudes (beliefs
and disbeliefs) of individuals in abstraction from their social environment.
§ The human epistemic situation, however, is largely shaped by
social relationships and institutions.
§ Social epistemology seeks to redress this imbalance by
investigating the epistemic effects of social interactions and social systems.
“Situated Knowledge”
§ Knowledge is not something created out of neutral, empirical
data; it is actively constructed.
§ Of course, in our efforts to know something we always have
at our disposal something to work with (i.e. material events, actions, texts, people etc.), but what we make of the meaning of all of this is always constructed in some significant way.
§ Knowledge claims are always interpretations that are
culturally and historically contingent, reflecting certain interests, and infused with moral and political values.
§ All forms of knowledge reflect the particular conditions in which they are produced, and at some level reflect social locations of knowledge producers.
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Objectivity? Module
Is there a danger of “relativism”?
§ Relativism is the idea that conditions of justification, criteria
of truth and falsity and standards of rationality are relative: therefore, there are no universal, unchanging frameworks or schemes for rational adjudication among competing knowledge claims.
§ Does a focus on social epistemology represent a slide into
subjectivism—a position where knowledge claims are indistinguishable from expressions of personal opinion, taste or bias?
“There probably is no absolute authority, no practice of all practices or schemes of all schemes. Yet it does not follow that conceptual schemes, practices and paradigms are radically idiosyncratic or purely subjective. Schemes, practices and paradigms evolve out of communal projects of inquiry. To sustain viability and authority, they must demonstrate their adequacy in enabling people to negotiate the everyday world and to cope with the decisions, problems, and puzzles they encounter daily.”
Lorraine Code
(1991) What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge
Objectivity? Module Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 4.
Objectivity v Subjectivity?
§ From the claim that no single scheme has absolute
explanatory power, it does not follow that all schemes are equally valid.
§ Key points:
- Knowledge is qualitatively variable: some knowledge is better than other knowledge.
- Social epistemologists are in a good position to take such qualitative variations into account and to analyse their implications.
The Epistemic Fallacy
“The epistemic fallacy involves the fallacious inference that because there is no epistemologically objective view of the world, there is also no objective world ontologically. Such an inference leads to the extravagant and relativist claim that, to the extent that we embrace different world-views, we inhabit objectively different worlds.”
Margaret S. Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas V. Porpora (2004), Transcendance: Critical Realism and God, London: Routledge, p. 1.
Objectivity? Module § Most social epistemologists do not argue that the circumstances Objectivity v Subjectivity? 17
of the knower are all that counts in knowledge evaluation. § A focus on social epistemology by no means implies that the
identities of the knower are the final word, capable of bearing the entire burden of justification and evaluation.
Central point:
• The claim that the circumstances of the knower are not epistemologically definitive is quite different from the claim that those circumstances are of no epistemological consequence.
Objectivity? Module
Two ideas:
- Is it possible to be epistemologically objective, to somehow be a neutral mouthpiece for the world’s truths if one adopts the ‘right’ method of inquiry?
- Are scientists uniquely and exclusively equipped to be
- bjective?
Objectivity? Module 19
R.C. Lewontin (1992), Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, New York: Harper Perennial, Chapter One “A Reasonable Skepticism” pp. 3-16.
Central arguments:
- Science does not exist apart from the forces that rule our everyday lives and that govern the structure of our society.
- Science is a social institution completely integrated into and influenced by the structure of all our other social institutions.
- The problems that science deals with, the ideas that it uses in investigating those problems, even the so-called scientific results that come out of scientific investigation, are all deeply influenced by predispositions that derive from the society in which we live.
“Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience.”
R.C. Lewontin
(1992) Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, New York: Harper Perennial.
Objectivity? Module § Science is also molded by society because it is a human Political Economy of Science 21
activity that takes time and money, and so is guided by, and directed by, those forces in the world that have control over money and time.
§ People earn their living by science, and as a consequence the
dominant social and economic forces in society determine to a large extent what science does and how it does it.
§ Furthermore, these forces have the power to appropriate
from science ideas that are particularly suited to the maintenance and continued prosperity of the social structures of which they are a part.
Indigenous People & Science Module
The privileging of Western science as the 'teller of truth’.
Despite the growing interest in IKS, indigenous knowledge systems are often treated as mystical curiosities rather than constituting value-free, 'scientific' contributions.
The Latin scientia (from scire to 'know) was a generic term
encompassing all forms of knowledge—in recent centuries science has come to include only certain kinds of technical knowledge.
Science has come to be recognized as both a specific body of knowledge and a process of obtaining that knowledge.
Whose knowledge counts? Module 23
General ideology of modern
science places physics on a pedestal as the model science which all other sciences should strive to emulate.
Reinforces the idea that science should be “value-free”, especially with respect to social problems.
Epistemological separation of knower and known.
Whose knowledge counts?
Indigenous peoples' engagement with Western science was one in which they were the subjects of morbid curiosity and were examined as one would examine the flora and fauna of a country.
The advent of Social Darwinism acted to reinforce
racial hierarchies and the representation of indigenous people as intellectually inferior.
Prevailing colonial attitudes, reinforced by a wide range of government policies, resulted in minimal recognition and often the devaluing of Indigenous knowledge systems.
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“The story of the Scientific Revolution in Europe itself is framed in the ethnocentric West-is-best discourse of colonialism. The irony of the story is that Western science is not an essentialized European achievement, as knowledge interchanges between Europe and various non-Western cultures had taken place for hundreds of years preceding the Western Enlightenment.”
Ladislaus M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe
(1999) What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy
New York: Routledge, p. 25.
Indigenous knowledge is often compared unfavourably with “Western” or “scientific” knowledge”.
Indigenous people have participated in creating science in profound ways that are often not acknowledged or recognised.
Examples:
- Virtually every plant and animal species we eat today was domesticated by experimentation and de facto genetic engineering practiced by peoples with oral cultures.
- The science of medicine began and continues to draw on knowledge of plants’ therapeutic properties discovered by people over thousands of years.
- Chemistry, metallurgy and the materials sciences in general originated in knowledge produced by ancient miners, smiths, and potters.
Whose knowledge counts? Module
Geography and cartography of the
Americas and the Pacific Ocean are founded on the knowledge of indigenous peoples.
Anonymous sailors and fishers were the original source of scientific data regarding tides, oceans currents, and prevailing winds.
These contributions, however, are not always acknowledged or valued appropriately.
Scientific and technological ideas and inventions usually attributed to the West include, for example:
- China— magnetic science, quantitative cartography, cast iron, the mechanical clock, and harnesses for horses.
- Polynesia— knowledge of navigation and sea currents.
- Aboriginal peoples— knowledge of flora and fauna of Australia (Scheurich & Young, 1997; Hess, 1995; Baker, 1996).
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“No history of science could be less balanced than the traditional romantic narratives of Newtons, Darwins, and Einsteins transforming the world by the force of their unique brainpower.”
Clifford D. Conner
(2005) A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanics”
New York: Nation Books, p. 4.
Clifford D. Conner (2005), A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanics”, New York: Nation Books.
The so-called “Great Men of Science” were not unimportant, but their achievements were predicated on prior contributions—by anonymous ordinary people “…most of whom have never been thought of as great and many of whom were not men” (Connor 2005, p.4).
The contributions of the history of science made by socially subordinate peoples and those with oral knowledge systems have not left the paper trail that historians customarily depend on for evidence.
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