Engineering anti-individualism : a case study in social epistemology
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Date
02/07/2013Author
Kerr, Eric Thomson
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Abstract
This dissertation is a contribution to two fields of study: applied social
epistemology and the philosophy of technology. That is, it is a
philosophical study, based on empirical fieldwork research, of social
and technical knowledge. Social knowledge here is defined as
knowledge acquired through the interactions between epistemic agents
and social institutions. Technical knowledge is here defined as
knowledge about technical artefacts (including how to design, produce,
and operate them). I argue that the two must be considered collectively
both in the sense that they are best considered in the light of
collectivist approaches to knowledge and in the sense that they must be
considered together as part of the same analysis. An analysis solely of
the interactions between human epistemic agents operating within
social institutions does not give adequate credit to the technological
artefacts that help to produce knowledge; an analysis of technical
knowledge which does not include an analysis of how that technical
knowledge is generated within a rich and complex social network
would be similarly incomplete. I argue that it is often inappropriate to
separate analyses of technical knowledge from social knowledge and
that although not all social knowledge is technical knowledge, all
technical knowledge is, by definition, social. Further, the influence of
technology on epistemic cultures is so pervasive that it also forms or
'envelops' what we consider to be an epistemic agent.