The Fate of Knowledge.

Rating:
Summary: Uggghhhhhh!!!!!
Review: I had to read this book for a Philosophy of Science graduate seminar. It started out very promising. Longino points out the social nature of science. Scientists read each other's work, work together in labs, etc.. There is a tremendous amount of interaction and critical dialogue that goes into the creation of data and the establishment of theories and ideas. She criticizes sociologists of science and philosophers alike for what she calls the rational-social dichotomy: the idea that rationality and sociality are mutually exclusive. The chapter on the sociologists of science (ch 2) was very interesting to me.

But then Longino gets to her positive theory. She wants to claim that knowledge is "irreducibly" social and that knowledge is pluralistic. I'm more sympathetic to the latter but the former is ... uhhh... not well taken. She has a complicated argument about theory underdetermination and how we need a properly structured community to select justified assumptions to properly bridge the gap between data and theory. But I see no reason to think that a community adds justification to assumptions or bridging principles that are not somehow reducible to what individuals do. She also claims that observation and reasoning are social processes, at least in the sciences. But, if we take a good analogy, is production and social cooperation through the division of labor "irreducibly" social? Are the material goods, like cars and computers, or the processes through which we produce them in factories or offices irreducibly social? Or are they simply the product of the combined actions of individuals? The latter seems the default position and Longino doesn't present any arguments for her position besides for underdetermination.

I didn't read the stuff on pluralism which, like I said, I'm more sympathetic to.

There is some interesting stuff in this book but alot of it is complex, incomprehensible, philosophical arguments. The arguments she makes are pretty technical alot of times and, most importantly, her theory didn't really add anything to my understanding of science. This book had alot of promise and I was dissapointed by it. An account of the social nature of science could be alot better.

Greg Feirman ([e-mail])