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SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY

Second Edition

Steve Fuller

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA

http://iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders 800-842-6796

Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders bye-mail [email protected]

© 1988, 2002 Steve Fuller

Ali rights reserved. First edition 1988

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolu­
tion on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of Ameri­
can National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fuller, Steve, date

Social epistemology / Steve Fuller. - 2nd. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-34069-1 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-253-21515-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Social epistemology. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of. I. Title.

BD175 .F85 2002

001--dc21
2001045723
1 2 3 4 5 07 06 05 04 03 02
 CONTENTS

Introduction to the Second Edition lX

Foreword by Thomas Nickles XXV
Preface XXVll

PART ON E
ISSUES IN DEFINING THE FIELD OF SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY

1. An Overview of Social Epistemology 3

1. Social Epistemology as the Goal of AU Epistemology, 4
2. Social Epistemology as the Pursuit of Scandai
and Extravagance, 10
3. Nonnormative Social Epistemology.and Other Accommodating
Banalities, 17
4. Social Epistemology Rendered Normative and Epistemology
Rendered Interesting, 24

2. Social Epistemology and Social Metaphysics 31

1. Drawing the Distinction, 31
2. Transcendental and Naturalistic Approaches to
Representation, 36
2.1. Naturalism among the Savages, 45
2.2. Naturalism among the Systems, 4 7
3. Explaining Transcendentalism Naturalistically:
Bloor on Popper, 51

PARTTWO
ISSUES IN THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE
PRODUCTION

3. Realism, The Moving Target of Science Studies: A Tale of

Philosophers, Historians, and Sociologists in Hot Pursuit 65
1. Realism: Who's Got the Burden of Proof? 66
2. Why Is It Now So Difficult to Defeat the Realist? 69
3. Putting Scientific Realism to the Historical Test, 73
4. Kuhn and the Realism of Many-Worlds, 85
5. Regulative and Constitutive Realism in the Human Sciences, 89
6. The Ultimate Solution to the Problem of Realism, 96

V
vi Contents

4. Bearing the Burden of Proof: On the Frontier of Science

and History 99
1. Feyerabend and the Problem of "Rival Yet Incommensurable"
Theories, 100
2. The Missing Link: Burden of Proof, 105
3. Burden of Proof as Tacit Knowledge: Rule-Governedness, 111

5. Incommensurability Explained and Defended 117

1. Ecological Incommensurability, 117
2. Textual Incommensurability, 128

6. The Inscrutability of Silence and the Problem of Knowledge

in the Human Sciences 139
1. Inscrutability and the Analytic Philosophy of Language, 139
2. Inscrutability as a Neglected but Persistent Theme in
the History of the Human Sciences, 147
3. Conjuring Up Inscrutability in Thought Experiments, 151
4. Postscript: A Diagnosis of Davidsonism, 158

Appendix A: How to Do Subtle Things with Words--The lns and

Outs of Conceptual Scheming 163

PART THREE
ISSUES IN THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

7. The Demarcation of Science: A Problem Whose Demise Has

Been Greatly Exaggerated 175
1. Laudan and Gieryn on the Demarcation Problem, 175
2. The Two Histories of Science: Of Role and Player, 178
3. Science and Its Kindred Rotes, 182
4. Conflating Role and Player as an Historiographical
Strategy, 185
5. New Demarcation Criteria for Science, 188

8. Disciplinary Boundaries: A Conceptual Map of the Field 191

1. The Boundedness, Autonomy, and Purity of Disciplines, 191
2. Three Techniques for Detecting Disciplinary Boundaries, 193
3. Are Disciplinary Boundaries Necessary for the Growth of
Knowledge? 195
4. When Disciplines Collide: The Bernard Principle, 197
5. Disciplinary Ambivalence: Popperian and Foucauldian
Versions, 201
Contents Vil

9. The Elusiveness of Consensus in Science 207

1. Two Pure Types of Consensus and Four Mixed Ones, 208
2. The Elusive Object of Consensus in Science, 216
3. Consensus Rigging By Disciplinary Realignment, 221
4. Implications for the Historiography of Science, 226

10. From Moral Psychology to Cognitive Sociology: Making

Sense of the Forman Thesis 233
1. The Social Historian in the Grip of Moral Psychology, 233
2. Toward Cognitive Sociology and the Problem of
Objectivity, 239
3. Implications for Rewriting the Forman Thesis, 244

Appendix B: Having Them Change against Their Will--Policy

Simulations of Objectivity 251

PART FOUR
ISSUES IN KNOWLEDGE POLICY-MAKING

11. Toward a Revival of the Normative in the Sociology of

Knowledge 263
1. Normativity Lost, 264
2. Normativity Regained, 267
3. Freedom and the Administration of Knowledge
Production, 270

12. Social Epistemology and the Problem of Authoritarianism 277

1. The Lure and Avoidance of Cognitive Authoritarianism, 277
2. Expertise Politicized and Depoliticized, 283

Appendix C: Notes toward Designing a Core Curriculum for a

Graduate Program in Knowledge Policy Studies 289

Bibliography 295
Index 313
 INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

There is no doubt that social epistemology is taken much more seriously now
than when this book was first published in 1988. lt}w.s even made it into the most
recent edition of the Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought, which is published
every ten years (under the imprint "Fontana" in the U.K.). Here is the entry, in­
cluding the cross-references in italics:

social epistemology. An intellectual movement of broad cross-disciplinary provenance that

attempts to reconstruct the problems of epistemology once knowledge is regarded as intrinsi­
cally social. It is often seen as philosophical science policy or the normative wing of science
studies. Originating in studies of academic knowledge production, social epistemology has
begun to encompass knowledge in multicultural and public settings, as well as the conversion
of knowledge to information technology and intellectual property. The institutional presence
of the field began with the quarterly, Social Epistemology (Taylor & Francis, 1987- ). Despite
their many internai differences, social epistemologists agree on two points: (1) classical epis­
temology, philosophy of science and sociology of knowledge have presupposed an idealized
conception of scientific inquiry that is unsupported by the social history of scientific prac­
tices; (2) nevertheless, one still needs to articulate normatively appropriate ends and means
for science, given science's status as the exemplar of rationality for society at large. The
question for social epistemologists, then, is whether science's actual conduct is worthy of its
exalted social status and what political implications follow from one's answer. Those who say
"yes" assume that science is on the right track and offer guidance on whom people should
believe from among competing experts, whereas those who say "no" address the more fonda­
mental issue of determining the sort of knowledge that people need and the conditions under
which it ought to be produced and distributed.

I count myself among those social epistemologists who continue to say "no."
To understand why, I need to explain how the expression "social epistemology"
acquired general currency in philosophy (Remedios 2000). This is due to a special
issue of the journal Synthese explicitly devoted to the topic, which gave me the
idea of founding the journal and writing the book with the name Social Epistemol­
ogy. In late 1984, while completing a Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science at
the University of Pittsburgh, I was invited to contribute to the special issue, prob­
ably on the strength of my article that appeared in Erkenntnis earlier that year. The
issue consisted entirely of Anglo-American philosophers trained in the analytic
tradition, most of whom had already provided influential accounts of what it is for
an individual to know something.
The origin is not accidentai. Analytic epistemology still takes the Cartesian
individual to be the paradigm case of a knower, with social epistemology an em­
bellishment on that core model. In contrast, the French and German philosophical
traditions-be they influenced by Comtean positivism or Neo-Kantianism-have
generally stressed the shared and systematic character of episteme in "epistemol­
ogy," rather than the evidential support of the beliefs possessed by the individual
knower. Thus, they have focused on the distinctive methods of the special sci­
ences, especially as these reflect basic value differences in society at large. Recent
projects in this "always already socialized" epistemology include Michel Foucault 's
inquiries into the scientization of social judgments about "normal" and "patho­
logical" behavior and Juergen Habermas 's attempts to identify a distinct

LX
X Introduction to the Second Edition

"emancipatory" interest for knowledge whose societal relevance transcends the

parochial interests of positivist and interpretivist social science.
But these continental concerns are not entirely alien to Anglo-American phi­
losophy. Versions have flourished in the field called "philosophy of science." The
field arose from continental European epistemologists migrating to Britain and
America with the rise of Nazism. The Golden Age of the philosophy of science is
captured in Lakatos and Musgrave (l 970), which motivated my entry into the
field. In the long term, Hilary Putnam and Ian Hacking have probably been the
most distinguished North American beneficiaries of this European migration. The
original Austrian, German, and French migrants never hid their belief that the fate
of civilization hinged on the coordination and regulation of scientific inquiry. Simi­
lar views have animated American pragmatism, which explicitly defined itself
against what John Dewey derided as the "spectator theory of knowledge" adopted
by the Cartesian approach to epistemology. However, pragmatists have tended to
envisage the social regulation of inquiry more in terms of a self-organizing com­
munity than the top-down legislative style of the logical positivists, with Karl
Popper occupying an intermediate position. My own social epistemology is rooted
in these concerns.
From the standpoint of ordinary English usage, the Cartesian attempt to reduce
knowledge to some variant of "justified true belief" is an artificial specification of
what counts as knowledge, in which the "belief' condition has privileged crea­
tures with a conscience, or consciousness, as knowledge-bearers. This ontological
assumption is rarely questioned by analytic epistemologists. To be sure, some
notion of "truth" and "justification" (at Jeast in the weak sense of demonstrating
correspondence to a standard) is ordinarily implied by "knowledge." But this con­
dition alone permits knowledge to be attributed equally to brains, books, and
databanks. Thus, I have been Jess interested in identifying what people "really
believe" (whatever that means) than in how knowledge operates as a principle of
social organization-for example, by motivating people to act in certain ways
with regard to each other and their environments. Moreover, I have distanced
myself from the ever popular "consensus theory of truth," which works by some
weighted aggregation of beliefs. Rather, I have been drawn to Foucault, behavior­
ism, and rhetoric-all of which share a preoccupation with knowledge as a means
to produce certain effects, regardless of the agents' beliefs, unless those beliefs
contribute to the production of the relevant effects.
The English Janguage easily obscures the issue because "know" and "knowl­
edge" are made to caver too much semantic ground. But philosophically, it makes
a big difference whether one's inquiries into the nature of knowledge are anchored
in the verb "to know" or the noun "knowledge." Thus, we say that books contain
knowledge but they do not know things. French and German helpfully distinguish
between these two senses of "knowledge." Each language has a word for "knowl­
edge" that is more like our word "cognition," i.e., the result of being in a certain
state of mind: connaissance and Erkenntnis. Epistemology, in this sense, is then
clearly aligned with philosophy of mind. But each language also has a word more
like our word "science" which implies the control of something outside the mind
without implying that one is in a particular mental state: savoir and Wissenschaft.
Introduction to the Second Edition xi

For example, the French translation of "knowledge" in Francis Bacon's "knowl­

edge is power" is savoir (e.g., in Comte, Foucault), whereas Descartes and Sartre
were concerned with connaissance. The result of this linguistic division of labor
in French and German is that both philosophical traditions have discussions that
anglophones would class as philosophy of mind (connaissance!Erkenntnis) and
philosophy of science (savoir!Wissenschaji), but these occur in relative isolation
from each other, and there is no field of "epistemology" that overlaps with both of
them.
In continental European philosophy, the philosophy of mind is basically phe­
nomenology, whereas the philosophy of science is focused on disciplinary prac­
tices. Depending on the context, "epistemology" is identified with one or the other
tradition, but with neither consistently. For example, in the early twentieth cen­
tury, who is more of an "epistemologist": Edmund Husserl or Ernst Cassirer? An
argument can be made for both, yet neither their works nor their legacies overlap
as much as one would expect-except negatively, as with Martin Heidegger, who
came to reject both. The expectation that there should be overlap may be due to
the conditions under which "epistemology" was coined in English by the Ger­
man-trained Scottish philosopher, David Ferrier, in the third quarter of the nine­
teenth century. Ferrier was interested in mind-brainrelations and the possibility of
a scientific study of how we know. Indeed, he would probably recognize what he
called "epistemology" in today's cognitive science. The problem was compounded
with the influx of European philosophical traditions into the United States, espe­
cially the logical positivists. They were clearly striving for some holistic sense of
knowledge that bridged the difference between Erkenntnis and Wissenschaft, ei­
ther by reducing the former to the latter (physicalism) or the latter to the former
(phenomenalism).
One problem that may have nagged the logical positivists in trying to square
belief with knowledge is the following: On the one hand, the stress on belief means
that a universal feature of knowledge pertains to its "subjective" character-that
is, one's mental state, regardless of what that state is about. On the other hand, the
objective features of knowledge appear to be particularized to patterns in the world
which, once grasped, can be used by someone in any number of mental states,
including those who regard the thing grasped as an error in need of elimination.
Yet, the idea that knowledge is a universai subjective mental state about particular
objective things does not quite ring true to either ordinary usage or a more gener­
alized "normative" perspective that includes moral and political concerns. For
example, it does not take into account what has often been called the "value­
neutrality" of science, whereby one can competently use the laws of physics to
produce either nuclear energy or nuclear bombs. But equally, the idea fails to
account for how a tribe may deal with its environment in sophisticated and sys­
tematic ways, while refusing to accept scientific explanations for their own suc­
cess and even scientific efforts at improving on that success.
If anything, these two examples point to the contrary tesson, namely, that a
universal sense of knowledge may accompany a diversity of mental states, includ­
ing ones oriented to mutually exclusive ends. Not surprisingly, then, philosophers
as different as Popper and Foucault have denied that one must believe what one
Xll Introduction to the Second Edition

knows. I stand with them here. Thus, I have argued that the normative mission of
social epistemology is not met until the ends of knowledge are explicitly addressed,
since it is all too easy for knowledge to be embedded in ways that we would
consider wrong or contestable.
Another way to capture the difference between my own social epistemology
and the versions featured in that original issue of Synthese is to consider two strat­
egies for generating philosophically interesting "problems of knowledge":

Strategy A
(1) The thing I know best is the thing with which I have had the most direct
acquaintance, namely my own mind. After all, without it, I could not have
made this very observation. But my mind is possibly not all that exists.
(2) How, then, do I determine whether other possible things exist, and, if
they exist, how can I know them, given that they seem quite different from
my own mind?
Strategy B
(1) We ordinarily experience everyone (and everything) as living in the same
world. Yet, as people articulate their experience, it becomes clear that there
are significant differences in the aspects of the world to which we have
direct access.
(2) What, then, accounts for these differences in access to our common real­
ity, and what enables us to ignore them in everyday life, as we suppose that
our own access is the one shared by ail (right-minded) people?

Whereas Strategy A captures the tradition of inquiry that unîtes Descartes' and
Quine's progeny in analytic epistemology, Strategy B extends from Augustinian
theodicy (How can divine harmony be compatible with day-to-day strife?), through
Leibnitz to Hegel-as well as Karl Marx, Karl Mannheim, David Bloor, and my­
self. There are some important differences in the sorts of epistemological prob­
lems that the two strategies generate. Strategy A poses the problem of knowledge
inside-out: How do we get out of our individual heads and into some common
reality? Strategy B poses it outside-in: How do we get beyond our common reality
and into the mindsets that separate people?
According to the inside-out strategy, knowledge is posed as a problem for each
individual to solve by approximating a standard to which the cognitive agent may
or may not have conscious access. There is no sense that epistemic access may be
a scarce good, with one agent's access to knowledge perhaps impeding, compet­
ing with, or making demands on the epistemic access of some other agent. This
would be more in accord with the outside-in strategy. Here the cognitive agent is
portrayed as choosing between one of two or more alternative research trajecto­
ries, fully realizing that resources are limited and that other agents will be making
similar decisions at roughly the same time. This image of the knower as a "bounded
rationalist" engaged in "knowledge management" has been a thread running
throughout my career (Fuller 1985; Fuller 2001).
Strategies A and B both operate with epistemological premises that are taken to
be liabilities in advancing the search for knowledge. For Strategy A, a self-cen-
Introduction to the Second Edition xiii

tered relativism is the initial liability that needs to be overcome: I am in my own

head, but I suspect that there are other things out there different from me. How do
I find out? Not surprisingly, this strategy stresses methods that are biased toward
realism, such as looking for ("primary") qualities that remain invariant under a
variety of observations and transformations. For Strategy B, on the other hand, a
totalizing realism is the initial liability: We all live in the same world, therefore
everyone must think like me, at least when they are thinking right. But why does
this not seem to be the case? (Are they crazy?) The relevant corrective here is a
dose of methodological relativism: Precisely because our reality is common, it
cannot explain our palpable differences. We are thus better off regarding claims to
common reality as disguised partial perspectives, or "ideologies," that may gain
certain local material advantage by capitalizing on our weakness for thinking in
terms of totalizing forms of realism.
Adherence to Strategy B has led to considerable philosophical misunderstand­
ing. For example, most sociologists-certainly Mannheim and Bloor-have been
realists and have believed that the people they study are also realists, at least in the
sense of believing that contact with reality is part of what Arthur Fine has dubbed
our "natural ontological attitude." However, this rather modest commitment to
realism is bound to seem strange to philosophers wedded to Strategy A. For al­
though adherents to Strategy B typically grant that there is a "fact of the malter"
about the norms governing a community of inquirers, because these norms govern
only that community and no other (until demonstrated by studies ofother commu­
nities), the burden of proof turns out to rest on those who claim the norms are
generalizable across communities.
Once the generalizability of norms is questioned in this fashion, social episte­
mology shifts from logic and metaphysics to politics and ethics. Thus, for me, any
form ofknowledge that purports to be universal in scope-that is, true for every­
one everywhere-must be subject to democratic governance. The burden of proof
rests on those heirs of Plato who believe that there is universally valid knowledge
that is nevertheless accessible only to an elite. I find this possibility incoherent, let
alone undesirable. Yet, ifthis situation exists as an empirical fact (which, ofcourse,
it does now), then the job ofthe social epistemologist is to make up the difference,
either by spreading this supposedly universai knowledge to the unenlightened or
revising one's sense of universal knowledge to meet the needs of the supposedly
unenlightened. This is my concept ofprolescience, which would grant education
a constitutive role in the universalization of knowledge claims (Fuller 1993b,
p. xviii; Fuller 1999).
In this respect, I consider myself an agent of Enlightenment and, in particular,
a follower of Auguste Comte, who coined both "positivism" and "sociology."
Like Comte, I have culled the results of the sciences for insights into the conduct
of inquiry in general (Fuller 1993a). I even endorse the rather unpopular Comtean
rationale for sociology as the ultimate metascience, namely, that it comprehends
the less complex sciences in a complex whole that empowers it to direct the course
of society. The key point about this rather grandiose view of sociology is that it
presupposes that the older sciences-physics, chemistry, etc.-are "simpler" not
only in terms of dealing with more limited areas of reality under relatively
XIV Introduction to the Second Edition

restricted conditions (e.g., laboratories), but also in their own limited understand­
ing of the methods of science. In other words, the Comtean vision is less one of
mindlessly applying what worked for physics to all the other disciplines than of
becoming more self-conscious and hence more open-minded about the nature of
scientific inquiry. Thus, I have preferred Popper over his logical positivist cousins
in drawing mostly negative metascientific conclusions that serve to level the dif­
ference between so-called "expert" and "Jay" forms of inquiry.
Moreover, I am influenced by Hegel and the German idealist tradition in hold­
ing that the "natural" and "social" sciences are mutually alienated sides of a holis­
tic sense of inquiry. A good contemporary example is the relationship between the
discourses of "body" and "mind" with respect to a comprehensive understanding
of human beings. One discourse is not simply "better" than the other because
ultimately they are talking about the same thing from different standpoints. In­
deed, the "two cultures" problem that besets the natural and social sciences is not
based on any genuinely contradictory positions between the two sides, but rather
a 150-year-old communication breakdown (or "incommensurability") that increas­
ingly occurs in environments with scarce resources, which then provides ground
for antagonism (Fuller 1993b, chs. 1-2; Fuller 1997, esp. ch. 5). At a finer-grained
level, one could perhaps make an analogous argument about the relationship be­
tween philosophy and sociology, which would explain why I originally remarked
that "social epistemology" first strikes many people as an oxymoron.
Thus, the features of knowledge that an analytic epistemologist is inclined to
consider conceptually necessary, I treat as default hypotheses that are subject to
revision in light of further inquiry. After all, there is no reason to presume that,
simply out of their own accord, the findings of the special sciences will eventually
add up to a coherent overall account of the knowledge system. To be sure, this
raises a delicate issue. The need for stable first-order inquiries has traditionally
inhibited second-order impulses to study the nature of inquiry. In Kuhnian terms,
the demands of normal science limit the incentives for revolutionary change only
to those periods in which a paradigm has accumulated enough anomalies to place
it in a state of crisis. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" seems to underlie most normal
scientific practice. Even Thomas Kuhn realized that scientists who applied their
first-order methods to a second-order study of the grounds of their inquiries-a
"science of science," so to speak-typically undermined their commitment to the
first-order inquiries. At the very least, they came to realize the potential legiti­
macy of alternative research trajectories that have been historically suppressed
(cf. Fuller 1999). Consequently, Kuhn held that it is just as well that scientists
acquire an "Orwellian" (as in the Ministry of Information in 1984) sense of disci­
plinary history that masks the contingency that would be otherwise revealed by a
more empirically informed account of that history (Kuhn 1970, p. 167). My re­
cent study of the origins and impacts of Kuhn expressly focused on the impact of
this Orwellianism on second-order studies of the nature of inquiry (Fuller 2000b).
Given the historie resistance to second-order studies of the nature of inquiry, it
should corne as no surprise that the relationship between the empirical and norma­
tive dimensions of inquiry has been vexed. The two major models of this relation­
ship are the geometrical and the dialectical, so named after their roots in ancient
Introduction to the Second Edition XV

Greek practices. According to the geometrical model, the normative dimension is

cast as "basic" or "pure" inquiry, in which the inquirer's value orientation is in­
scribed in a set of objects or concepts on which the empirical dimension is then
constructed. This latter dimension is defined as "deductions" or "applications,"
depending on whether the inquiry is science or technology. As in geometry, the
first principles circumscribe the range of permissible inferences. In contrast, the
dialectical mode! shifts the terms of the relationship between the normative and
empirical dimensions from a hierarchical to a conflictual one. Specifically, the
normative dimension appears as an ideal or goal that is then realized within con­
straints or in spite of resistance, which in tum define the empirical dimension. As
in dialectics, what results from this tension is a "synthesis" that "realizes" the
ideal in a sense that is more akin to completion than instantiation.
Philosophers have usually opted for either the geometrical or the dialectical
model of inquiry, with a few attempting to integrate the two into one system; e.g.,
Kant's, which specifies the terms in which objects of cognition are, respectively,
"constituted" and "regulated." Outside of philosophy, the difference between the
two models is typically exemplified by the distinction between science (geometri­
cal) andpolitics (dialectical). However, I have argued that the natural descendants
of these models are better seen in purely sociological terms. In that case, the geo­
metrical model is exemplified by the Kuhnian paradigm and the dialectical model
by the social movement (Fuller 2000b, ch. 8). Both science and politics can adopt
either form, such that science may be movement-like (as it arguably was during
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment) and politics may be paradigm-like (as it
arguably was in Marxist ideology). Nevertheless, for analytic purposes, it is use­
ful to keep the geometrical-dialectical distinction sharp in order to track the for­
tunes of the normative and empirical dimensions of inquiry. Whereas the geo­
metrical model treats the empirical as already normatively infused, the dialectical
mode! treats the empirical as a challenge for the normative to overcome. In short,
the geometrical mode! will tend to characterize the world in ways it can accept,
whereas the dialectical mode! will tend to characterize it in ways it would correct.
At the meta-level this produces two types of social epistemology, as exempli­
fied by (1) Goldman (1999) and (2) Fuller (1993b):

(1) Geometrical: The basic concepts and principles of social epistemology

are developed and justified in a "pure" philosophical setting, that is, by a
combination of intuition, logic, and some stylized examples that acquire
rhetorical force from their basis in empirical settings, but which fonction
philosophically as paradigm cases for a very broad class of phenomena. In
this context, "applied" social epistemology is the art of finding or imposing
the salient concepts and principles in concrete cases. Aspects of the cases
that escape these strictures are treated as inconsequential or subject to ad
hoc explanation.

(2) Dialectical: The basic concepts and principles of social epistemology

are developed and justified in the actual contexts of knowledge production
that concem the social epistemologist. Thus, one starts in medias res, treat-
xvi Introduction to the Second Edition

ing current knowledge production practices as empirical constraints on the

possible directions that future knowledge production can take. There is no
clear distinction here between pure and applied because it is not presumed
that knowledge has an essence that can be accessed independently of recog­
nized cases of knowledge. Instead, the relevant questions are whether we
wish the future to continue certain tendencies of the past and, if so, which
ones. The answers to these questions are to be found by deciding what we
want (a political issue centering on the definition of "we") and evaluating
the consequences of those practices accordingly.

In terms of normative theory (or meta-theory, more precisely), I am a "rule

utilitarian." If the people subjected to an epistemic regime can live well with its
consequences, then that is success enough. The difficult question is how long and
widely should such a regime be in effect before its consequences are evaluated
and its continuation questioned. Although little more than Kuhnian superstition
allows a paradigm to continue indefinitely until it self-destructs, track records are
a prerequisite to the rational comparison of alternative research trajectories. This
is the old Lakatosian question of when a "problemshift" is "progressive," but now
rephrased to give it more political bite. Thus, for me, knowledge policy improves
over time by removing obstacles to both the expression of epistemic interests and
knowledge of the results of actions taken on those interests. In democratic politi­
cal theory, such matters are normally discussed in the context of voting, a topic
conspicuous by its absence from treatments of "theory choice" in the philosophy
of science. Nevertheless, whatever progress there is in science occurs at this meta­
level of the increasing inclusiveness and transparency of decision-making pro­
cesses-not at the object level of approximating some transcendental goal of in­
quiry, be it "truth" or "welfare," that remains fixed over time.
My normative orientation is generally that of the interested non-participant in
the knowledge system, which is diametrically opposed to the disinterested par­
ticipant of analytic epistemology, who wishes to acquire knowledge first-hand
above ail else. (As a point of reference, post-classical, postrnodem epistemology
tends to adopt the standpoint of the interested-a.k.a. situated-participant.) I
generally regard knowledge as a means to other human ends (which themselves
may be epistemic), but one's participation in the knowledge process is usually
confined to the meta-level of inquiry, that is, the design and evaluation of knowl­
edge production regimes that others carry out. These regimes encompass issues of
fiscal and employee management, social responsibility, as well as specifically
process- and product-based forms of quality control. Thus, my long-standing in­
terest in presenting social epistemology as tantamount to "knowledge policy" and
"knowledge management" is grounded in the idea that, generally speaking, the
prescribers and evaluators ("policy makers" and "managers") of knowledge pro­
duction are not the same-in terms of identities or interests-as the first-order
knowledge producers ("workers").
There have been two historical models of interested non-participation in a col­
lective endeavor: one ancient and elitist, the other modem and populist. The first
mode!, drawn from ancient Athens, is based on the client whose praxis lies in the
Introduction to the Second Edition xvii

guidance he provides the craftsman, who possesses the techne needed to actualize
the client's ideas. The client is credited with the product's success, the craftsman
with its failure. The second model, drawn from modem democratic elections, is
based on citizens selecting on a regular basis the politicians most likely to provide
a coherent policy orientation for their diverse interests. Here the distribution of
credit and blame is less clear-cut, except for a tendency to credit success to the
overall constitution of the polity (often the original social contract, in the case of
the United States) and failure to particular individuals (either citizens or politi­
cians).
The most popular general strategy in analytic philosophy for doing social epis­
temology subjects fairly traditional truth-oriented ("veritistic") epistemological
considerations to a smattering of recent insights from more relativistic trends in
the sociology of science, feminism, or multiculturalism. As in the constrained
optimization mode! in neo-classical economics, these trends constrain the knower
without fundamentally altering her basic epistemic orientation. The result typi­
cally smacks of syncretism, in which the philosophical and sociological parts of
social epistemology are never properly integrated, let alone resolved in some higher
synthesis. Rather, they sit uneasily in adjoining paragraphs or chapters, much as
Tycho Brahe's world-system appeared to followers of Copemicus (cf.Fuller 1993b,
pp. 70-84). Sorne influential members of this species include Longino (1990),
Kitcher (1993), and Goldman (1999). Perhaps the most methodologically suspect
feature of this tendency is that the sociological elements are introduced only on a
"need-to-know" basis, namely, when the ideal epistemological conditions have
failed to be met in concrete cases that happen to concem the social epistemologist.
I have dubbed this feature "phlogistemic," recalling the eighteenth-century sub­
stance, phlogiston, whose existence could only be proved by its absence (Fuller
1996). Phlogistemics is usually afoot whenever the analytic social epistemologist
invokes Quine's "underdetermination thesis."
To illustrate the difference from my own position, consider a recent well-placed
analytic piece that claims to point to a "truly social epistemology" (Fricker 1998).
Fricker proceeds by what she calls a "philosophical genealogy," which in reality
is little more than the "original position" that bas characterized social contract
theories from Hobbes to Rawls. Whatever the value of such thought experiments,
they are most definitely not genealogies. In calling his distinctive explanation of
morals "genealogical," Nietzsche grasped the salient implication, namely, that
current forms could trace their lineage back to earlier forms that may be surpris­
ingly different, and indeed perhaps a bit embarrassing, as in an ancestor who
founded the family fortune on piracy. Although Nietzsche lacked a Neo-Darwin­
ian sense of the distinction between genotype and phenotype, he knew enough
about the potential differences in the properties of parents and offspring to em­
ploy a biological rather than a strictly mechanical metaphor when discussing in­
heritance. In contrast, most philosophical thought experiments postulate causes to
track effects, not trace causes from known effects. Thus, Fricker treats the effects
of her thought experiment as mechanically either enhancing or impeding their
putative causes, not radically transforming them.
According to Fricker, survival in her pseudo-genealogical state of nature
xviii Introduction to the Second Edition

requires an ability to distinguish between true and false beliefs on a reliable basis.
She immediately infers the need for distinct epistemic institutions whose reliabil­
ity is measurable by publicly available means. Historically speaking, the emer­
gence of institutions explicitly devoted to the pursuit of knowledge is roughly
equivalent to the history of universities, academies, and related bodies. But the
knowledge produced in these institutions has been rarely subject to the "real world"
reliability judgments that Fricker's "original position" requires. Indeed, histori­
cally most of the suspicion surrounding "scientific" approaches to practical mat­
ters has been due not to popular ignorance, but precisely to science's failure to
demonstrate its reliability in the relevant practical contexts. For example, do re­
sults from the artificial conditions of the medical laboratory improve on the gen­
eral practitioner's knowledge? Usually, the state has had to intervene to resolve
this problem, motivated partly by wanting to increase its own power (vis-à-vis
that of local practitioners) and partly by envisaging what science might accom­
plish with enough resources and discretion.
In any case, Fricker is mistaken in thinking that the capacity for distinguishing
true and false beliefs for survival purposes naturally leads to the establishment of
autonomous knowledge-producing bodies. On the contràry, we need to justify the
promotion of autonomous inquiry in terms of specific goals it might serve. One
such goal, which I support, has figured prominently in the rhetoric behind govem­
ment support for science: adequate welfare for all humans, especially those whose
interests are unlikely to be served by more egocentric inquiries. In this context, I
introduced the concept of "epistemic justice" (Fuller 1992; Fuller 1993b, pp. 315-
316). Fricker tries to deal with this problem in terms of her own notion of epistemic
justice, which arises from the observation that some knowledge claims seem to
carry more authority than epistemically warranted because they are backed by
political power. To correct this injustice, Fricker would have knowledge claims
evaluated by means that are independent of formai political structures, yet the
resulting evaluations would structure the flow of power in society.
In marked contrast to Fricker's Platonic strategy, I hold that an epistemically
just regime would be in the perpetual project of preventing any form of knowl­
edge from becoming a vehicle of power. To be sure, at any given point in history,
certain forms of knowledge privilege certain sectors of society. But then the state
needs to regularly redistribute the advantage that these forms of knowledge have
accumulated over time-what I have called (with the universities in mind)
"epistemic trust-busting" (Fuller 2001, ch. 1). In other words, "affirmative ac­
tion" is not simply a temporary strategy for getting the balance between knowl­
edge and power right once and for ail. Rather, it is a long-term policy for disinte­
grating the power-effects of knowledge.
I have two models in mind here, one from economics and the other from poli­
tics. From economics cornes the idea of knowledge as a "public good." Unfortu­
nately, economists seem to think that public goods are a reality rather than a regu­
lative ideal of economic action. In contrast, I would say that in reality knowledge
is a positional good, the value of which is directly related to restrictions on its
access, be it through intellectual property rights or academic credentials (Fuller
2001, ch. 2). From politics cornes the civic republican tradition of democracy,
Introduction to the Second Edition xix

which is founded on an ideal of liberty as non-domination (Fuller 2000a, ch. 1).

Thus, in terms of epistemic justice, the only power worth acquiring from knowl­
edge is the power not to be dominated by others.
I never cease to be amazed by the wil!ingness of analytic social epistemolo­
gists to turn such knowledge-bearing properties as "competence" and "expertise"
("intelligence" would also be used, were it not so politically charged) into covert
principles of social structure. The implied social order is sometimes akin to the
mafia (i.e., the costs of not trusting the experts are likely to be higher than trusting
them), other times to a royal dynasty (i.e., there are no legitimate grounds for a
major change in perspective unless the current regime fails). Together they point
to a political perspective that is relatively primitive, or at least pre-constitutional.
The focus is on science as a self-organizing system whose differences are inter­
nally resolved and externally applied to the larger society. The conflict of scien­
tific paradigms popularized by Kuhn is no more politically advanced than a feud
between dynastie families that occurs (ideally) out of range from "ordinary folks."
But there is also probably wishful thinking at work here. My guess is that Fricker
and other analytic social epistemologists adhere to Rawls' "difference principle"
of justice, whereby power asymmetries are justified as long as the worst-off ben­
efit more than they would under a more egalitarian regime. The wishful thinking
lies in believing that the difference principle would roughly track the asymmetries
that would result by apportioning political power according to epistemic merit.
My own position aims to be more politically sophisticated by leaving less to
chance and wishful thinking. Indeed, a "truly social epistemology" would be an
exercise in constitution-making. Specifically, how does one set up the forums for
deciding science's research and teaching agenda, given the patently biased and
otherwise limited nature of the participants? Unfortunately, the constitutionalist
project has been mystified in recent times by its most ardent defender, Juergen
Habermas, who has saddled it with transcendental appeals to the nature of the
good society. I have found it more instructive to look at the conditions under
which constitutionalism has historically flourished, namely, when a society's ideo­
logical differences have been sublimated in common projects that benefit the vari­
ous sides differently. Such polities are the civic republican ones mentioned above,
a far cry from more consensualist democracies that require a common mindset
from those who agree to a common policy. Rhetoric plays a crucial role here in
enabling many people to move in one direction, in spite of deep (even "incom­
mensurable") disagreements. In modern societies, universities have played a vital
role in the promulgation of rhetoric in this sense, a point I have increasingly pur­
sued (Fuller 2000a, chs. 3-5; Fuller 2000b, ch. 8; Fuller 2001, ch. 4).
Put another way, there are two ways of understanding the knowledge = power
equation. One supposes that more knowledge helps concentrate power, the other
that it helps distribute power. Analytic social epistemologists adopt the former
perspective, I the latter. Indeed, the best examples of "knowledge = power" in this
dual sense may be found in the feats of civil engineering in the ancient empires
(Egyptian, Incan, Indian, Roman, Chinese) that are normally seen as having lacked
a proper respect for scientific inquiry. But even in our own time, civil engineering
may be a good benchmark, since roads and bridges are usually criticized for the
XX Introduction to the Second Edition

differential access they provide to the population on whose behalf (and with whose
funds) they are built. Analogously, if a scientific research program benefits only a
fraction of those who paid for it, then it is "epistemically unjust," regardless of the
program's ability to meet standard reliability and validity criteria. ln this context,
I have introduced the concept of epistemicfungibility (Fuller 1993b, pp. 295-300;
Fuller 2000a, pp. 141-145).
In one last attempt to drive home my position, I shall end by providing a de­
tailed response to a kind of claim that I have periodically encountered from realist
philosophers and natural scientists in the ongoing "science wars":

Contrary to your social epistemology, social interests are not always necessa,y for evaluating
knowledge claims. After ail, the round-earth theory is an improvement on the flat-earth theory.
regardless of our interests in wanting ta know about the shape of the earth. More specifically,
the European scientific community came ta be convinced of the truth of Newtonian mechanics
because the planets really do move as predicted by Newtonian mechanics.

We are justified in believing that the round-earth theory is an improvement on

the flat-earth theory because our theory turns out to be better by standards that
have themselves changed, so as to render the flat-earth theory a non-starter. By
"standards," I mean the contexts in which we are most likely to want to know the
shape of the earth. In this sense, interest is integral to the nature of knowledge
claims. The people who found the flat-earth theory persuasive were generally not
interested in the earth's shape for the same reasons that now persuades us that the
round-earth theory is true. ln particular, they did not wish to embed the earth's
shape in a unified theory of physical reality, à la Newtonian mechanics. In any
case, one need not be a skeptic or even a relativist to say that the standards for
evaluating knowledge claims must be made explicit at the outset in order to argue
sensibly about which claims are better than others. Moreover, if these standards
are not to appear arbitrary, they must make reference to the reasons why one wishes
to acquire knowledge, so that the knowledge so acquired turns out to be of the
appropriate kind. "Justified true beliefs"-the classical definition of knowledge­
are all too easy to accumulate, as long as we are not too fussy about the relevance
of what is accumulated to what we care about. Indeed, the classical definition of
knowledge seems to have been designed more for conservers than stakeholders or
even funders of knowledge.
Admittedly, the reasons for wanting knowledge are not normally made explicit
in the conduct of science. Unless that time-honored epistemic device-the bud­
getary constraint-intervenes, we do not normally worry much about the relative
value of pursuing physics vis-à-vis biology. Both disciplines are simply taken to
be worth pursuing as well as possible. That is because it is presumed that, at a
certain level, we all have the same reasons for wanting to engage in scientific
inquiry. Thus, positivist appeals to the "unity of science" presume a unified con­
ception of both reality and the community of inquirers. And as an observation of
our current epistemic condition, it is true that, in many contexts, the standards for
adequate knowledge are common to most of those who would want such knowl­
edge, regardless of their other persona! and social differences. However, this con­
vergence on epistemic standards is not, strictly speaking, the result of some con-
Introduction to the Second Edition xxi

vergence of independently reasoned judgments. That members of a well-defined

scientific community can usually agree on which theories to accept or reject is
largely explainable by their common training and their desire to follow wherever
the pack seems likely to go.
However, as I originally argued in chapters 9 and 10 of this book, only an
Orwellian sense of history would have us believe that the scientists behind the
acceptance of Newtonianism in the eighteenth century constituted a relatively
unified, consensus-seeking community. lndeed, before disciplinary boundaries
hardened in the second half of the twentieth century, a scientist would normally
pursue multiple research agendas with varying degrees of enthusiasm, resources,
and results. A formai vote would never be taken to ratify a paradigm. Rather,
something closer to a statistical drift in scientific allegiances occurred over time,
the phenomenon that Kuhn perhaps overdramatized as the "invisibility of scien­
tific revolutions." ln such a diffuse field of play, in which many different parties
pursue a variety of theories for only partially overlapping reasons, it is unclear a
priori what might count as epistemic success. Each theory has its own way of
prioritizing evidence and arguments, suited to its own particular strengths. Conse­
quently, a successful scientific research program has typically had to score on two
fronts at once: It has not only had to overcome rivais, but to do so according to
mies that are biased to its strengths. These mies then become the basis for evalu­
ating new players and are retrospectively used to explain the failure of old rivais.
ln short, any major success in science is simultaneously a meta-success. lndeed,
the part of Newton's success that is usually explained by appealing to "nature" or
"reality" is nothing more than this meta-success.
Thus, once Newtonian mechanics had been widely accepted, textbooks gave
the impression that everyone accepted it for the same set of "good reasons" that
now allow the theory to be integrated into the larger body of scientific knowledge,
on which the next generation of inquirers may build. Somewhat more credible
cases of independent individuals converging on the same scientific judgments
may be found in the widespread lay acceptance of the professional standards of
engineers and medical doctors. But these cases usually presuppose that it is ratio­
nal for individuals to defer to those who have been certified by the relevant disci­
plinary community, who in turn typically consist of those who have been subject
to common training-which brings us back to the textbooks and what amounts to
a blind trust in their Orwellian view of history.
This last point is related to two features of our epistemic predicament that phi­
losophers often seem to regard as desirable but I treat as problematic. The first
concerns what Aant Elzinga, the first Swedish social epistemologist, calls
"epistemic drift," that is, the tendency for epistemic criteria to drift from ones that
are likely to push back the frontiers of knowledge to ones that are likely to serve
some socially desirable ends. Elzinga introduced "epistemic drift" to highlight
potential perversions of the research agenda that result from the existence of a
state monopoly on research funding. However, the legacy of epistemic drift is far
subtler, namely, the tendency for measures of reliability to be used as surrogates
for measures of validity in the evaluation of knowledge claims. In other words,
while scientists are officially concerned with whether their theories get closer to
xxii Introduction to the Second Edition

their target realities, they nevertheless measure success in terms of the regularity
with which they can achieve more limited goals that are said to "model" the target
realities. This epistemic "bait and switch" is most familiar from biomedical re­
search, in which laboratory experiments on rats provide the basis for daims about
how to treat disease in humans. But the same also applies to particle accelerator
experiments that are alleged to offer insight into the "Big Bang," or to public
opinion surveys that supposedly capture the "mood" of a nation.
Moreover, the most popular versions of analytic social epistemology (e.g.,
Goldman 1999) are based precisely on this overestimation of reliability. The over­
estimation lies in supposing that doing something well can trump whether it is
what we want to do. In other words, validity can drift into reliability by shifting
the goalpost for adequate knowledge over time. Such drifts and shifts are very
much the stuff of politics and perhaps even essential for maintaining a stable so­
cial order. Social psychologists have coined the expression "adaptive preference
formation" to capture this pervasive phenomenon, which enables people to mini­
mize cognitive dissonance by coming over time to want what they are most likely
to get. This applies to scientists no less than politicians. Moreover, a demonstra­
bly reliable process has precisely the sorts of virtues that policymakers like. Thus,
the hypodermic injection that alleviates the lab rat of an experimentally induced
illness in most cases suggests the presence of a closed system that can be in­
serted-as one might a machine-into some larger healthcare system. Of course,
there are complications but it is important in such matters to return periodically to
the core intuitions that anchor the epistemological discussions.
The second problematic feature of our epistemic predicament is a generaliza­
tion of the first. The drift from validity to reliability is part of a more global ten­
dency toward what economists call "screening" and "signaling" criteria, whereby
a readily accessed indicator is made to stand for the thing we really care about
(Fuller 1996). The relevant euphemisms, "bounded rationality" and "heuristics,"
popularized by the late Herbert Simon, were the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation
(Fuller 1985). The classic example is letting academic credentials determine judg­
ments of job suitability. In these cases, we imagine that credentials stand for some
unknown track record; e.g., Harvard graduates who perform well at their jobs.
Yet, this is no more than an endless cycle of hearsay, anecdote, and folklore. De­
spite ail the talk of "reliability" in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of
science, there really is nowhere to turn to learn the actual track records of compet­
ing research programs. In this respect, we continue to live in a "Baconian fan­
tasy."
However, Francis Bacon realized that if the state were to be in the business of
commissioning scientific projects, then it would need to create public agencies for
tracking the projects' success rates-Consumer Reports of knowledge, so to speak.
The sociology of scientific knowledge acquires much of its sting from taking the
rhetoric of reliability seriously and then looking for the evidence-and finding
that it is either lacking or ambiguous. Of course, some rather sophisticated, prob­
ability-based definitions of reliability have been advanced by philosophers, so
that we now probably have a much better understanding of what reliability means.
Nevertheless, these wonderful definitions have yet to be systematically impie-
Introduction to the Second Edition XXlll

mented in the record-keeping practices of scientific disciplines and liberal profes­

sions. In short, my anti-reliabilism is motivated less by a tedious skepticism than
the simple failure of reliabilists to develop the appropriate institutions for assess­
ing the reliability of knowledge daims.
In most general terms, we too easily allow matters of efficiency to override
larger concerns about how, why, and for whom knowledge is produced. A failure
to check the work of others because of a lack of resources to do so has metamor­
phosed into a transcendental justification of "trust" as the ultimate social bond
(Fuller 1993b, p. 292ff). Never before has the "two wrongs make a right" prin­
ciple insinuated itself so insidiously in social life. Perhaps the public is risk-averse
not because it places such a high value on reliable knowledge (so as to want to
avoid anything that smacks of unreliability), but because it is currently peripheral
to the knowledge-policy process. Public caution then is more an expression of
political disaffection than brute ignorance. Were the public more directly involved,
and hence forced to find out more about what's going on, they would probably be
willing to take more risks, thereby dispelling the Baconian fantasy.
Steve Fuller
Warwick University
June 2001

Acknowledgments
Thanks toAlvin Goldman, Philip Mirowski, Francis Remedios, and Stephen Miles
Sacks for providing me with opportunities to clarify my views on the foundations
of social epistemology.

References
Bullock, Alan & Stephen Trombley (eds.): 1999, The Norton Dictionary of Mod­
ern Thought (also Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought), 3rd edition,
(orig. 1977), W.W. Norton, New York.
Fricker, Miranda: 1998, "Rational Authority and Social Power: Towards a Truly
Social Epistemology," Aristotelian Society Proceedings, New Series, vol.
XCVIII, pp. 159-177.
Fuller, Steve: 1985, Bounded Rationality in Law and Science, Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Pittsburgh.
Fuller, Steve: 1992, "Social Epistemology and the Research Agenda of Science
Studies," in A. Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture, University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 390-428.
Fuller, Steve: 1993a, Philosophy of Science and lts Discontents, 2nd edition (orig.
1989), Guilford Press, New York.
Fuller, Steve: 1993b, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge, University
of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Fuller, Steve: 1996, "Recent Work in Social Epistemology," American Philosophi­
cal Quarter/y, 33, pp. 149-166.
XXIV Introduction to the Second Edition

Fuller, Steve: 1997, Science, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, U.K.
Fuller, Steve: 1999, "Making the University Fit for Critical Intellectuals: Recov­
ering from the Ravages of the Postmodem Condition," British Educational
Research Journal, 25, pp. 583-595.
Fuller, Steve: 2000a, The Governance of Science, Open University Press, Milton
Keynes, U.K.
Fuller, Steve: 2000b, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, Uni­
versity of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Fuller, Steve: 2001, Knowledge Management Foundations, Butterworth­
Heinemann, Wobum, Mass.
Goldman, Alvin: 1999, Knowledge in a Social World, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
Kitcher, Philip: 1993, The Advancement of Science, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
Kuhn, Thomas: 1970, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition (orig.
1962), University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Lakatos, Imre & Alan Musgrave (eds.): 1970, Criticism and the Growth of Knowl­
edge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Longino, Helen: 1990, Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton University Press,
Princeton.
Remedios, Francis: 2000, A Critical Examination of Steve Fuller s Social Episte­
mology, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Louvain, Belgium.
 FOREWORD

In this provocative book we see the future of epistemology, or at least one

future. This is reassuring, for Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature, argued that epistemology has no future; and too many of the
dozens of replies to Rorty have defended the honor of the same old questions
and answers that we studied at school a decade ago, and five or ten decades
ago. To say that the glorious past of epistemology is future enough is really
to acknowledge its death as a discipline. Both Rorty and Steve Fuller are
intellectually at home on both sides of the Atlantic and even on both sides
of the Channel, not to mention both sides of the divide between the two
cultures; so this alone will not explain why one asserts what the other
denies--the relevance of wider issues to epistemology of science, and hence
the relevance of the latter to those wider issues. Although no one would
mistake him for a quantum logician, Fuller is less poetic than Rorty, and he
looks with more favor upon science and upon science policy and science-based
public policy.
Disciplines are what Fuller's book is about. His social tum will "turn
off' many philosophers, and the manner in which he negotiates his turn will
appear reckless to many in the (other) science studies professions--history,
sociology, and psychology of science and technology. But the book stands
virtually atone in its detailed argument for a social epistemology. It is a
rarity among philosophical works in that it uses a social conception of
inquiry rather than abusing it or at best only "mentioning" it. Happily, the
days are past in which philosophers and sociologists spent most of their time
together beating up on one another. That is social progress of a modest sort.
However, the present book goes well beyond those recent works which
favorably mention sociological work and argue that cooperation is possible.
A more important "possibility" question is, to what extent are
methodological proposais of philosophers socially (and psychologically)
possible? Inquiry is a socio-historical process conducted by human beings
with the aid of various tools. Many philosophers of science now grant that
historical evidence can refute methodological claims. Only a few have
seriously asked whether even the leading methodologies are compatible with
what we know of the social organization of inquiry. For the majority, it
does not really malter. For them methodology may be historically
descriptive, to some extent, but it is socially normative in a preemptive
way. As for the minority: compatibilism is fine, as far as it goes, but we
need specific accounts of how some "causes" can also be "reasons," and vice
versa. Fuller appreciates that we need to understand in detail the social
realization of the "logic" of inquiry, and the logical upshot of the social
organization of inquiry and its products.
In short, Social Epistemology lays some of the groundwork, or at least
breaks the ground, for a new field of study (or the transformation of an old
field). Fuller's endless remarks on disciplinary autonomy, demarcation, the

XXV
xxvi Foreword

organization of knowledge and of its institutional vehicles, consensus, the

locality of research, expertise, tacit knowledge, authority, and so on, are
endlessly suggestive. It seems to me that anyone of epistemological bent
looking for relevant, new problems to tackle and new fields to explore need
look no further.

Thomas Nickles
University of Nevada at Reno
 PREFACE

This book is written by a philosopher of science on behalf of the sociology

of knowledge. Since I believe that philosophy is primarily a normative
discipline and that sociology is primarily an empirical one, my most basic
claim is twofold: (1) If philosophers are interested in arriving at rational
knowledge policy (roughly, some design for the ends and means of producing
knowledge), then they had better study the range of options that have been
provided by the actual social history of knowledge production--a field of
study that I assume had originally been explored by rhetoricians and
philologists, and more recently, of course, by social scientists. Moreover, if
philosophers scrutinize this history fairly, they will then be forced to
reconceptualize both the substance and fonction of their normative theories
of knowledge. (2) If sociologists and other students of actual knowledge
production wish their work to have the more general significance that it
deserves, then they should practice some "naturalistic epistemology" and
welcome the opportunity to extrapolate from is to ought. If these
empiricists realized, following Max Weber, that the inferential leap from
facts to values is no greater than the leap from our knowledge of the present
to our knowledge of the future (a leap that the empiricists would risk in the
normal course of their inquiries), they would be relieved of the peculiar
combination of fear and loathing which normally prevents them from
encroaching on the philosopher's traditional terrain. (A healthy step in the
right direction has recently been made in Barnes [1986].) In any case, the
alternative is the current state of affairs, whereby science administrators too
often justify rather hapless decisions on the basis of some half-digested
philosophy of science leamed at university.
On the face of it, these claims seem rather reasonable, perhaps even
harmless. Yet, the interaction between epistemology and the sociology of
knowledge has, in fact, been largely antagonistic. From the standpoint of
what I call social epistemology, the reasons for this antagonism are
themselves quite interesting, since they raise a whole host of questions having
to do with the resolution of disciplinary boundary disputes. And not
surprisingly, a good portion of this book is devoted to developing some
ways of thinking about these questions. For an important decision that the
knowledge policymaker will need to make is whether it is better to have one
integrated study of our knowledge enterprises (a "Science of Science," so to
speak) or the current state of affairs, namely, several mildly affiliated but
generally independent fields of inquiry.
The reader should be wamed at the outset that, generally speaking, I am
not _interested in "the problem of knowledge" as classically posed by
epistemologists. In other words, the reader will find little in this book that
considers whether our beliefs in an external world are veridical or justified.
Rather, the key issues for me concern a fairly literai sense of "knowledge
production," which includes how certain linguistic artifacts ("texts") become

xxvll
xxviii Preface

certified as knowledge; the possible circulation patterns of these artifacts

(especially how they are used to produce other such artifacts, as well as
artifacts that have political and other cultural consequences); and the
production of certain attitudes on the part of producers about the nature of
the entire knowledge enterprise (such as the belief that it "progresses"). In
fact, to draw the contrast with the classical epistemologist as starkly as
possible, I would say that most of the issues that I consider would be
exactly the sort of thing that a Cartesian demon would need to know in
order to construct an illusory world of knowledge for some unwitting res
cogitans.
No doubt, the classical epistemologist will cringe at the last sentence,
concluding that there is nothing more to my theory of knowledge than an
empirical account of what people in various communities call knowledge. In
response, I would first note that our cringing epistemologist usually turns
out to be a closet skeptic, for whom my theory of knowledge is inadequate
only for the same reasons that everyone else's is, namely, that it cannot
reliably demarcate "real" knowledge from mere opinion. But this global
negative judgment alone is cause for suspecting that the classical
epistemologist has missed the point of inquiring into the nature of
knowledge--which is to define, extend, but surely not to deny, humanly
possible epistemic practices. This must seem a rather obvious point to the
nonphilosopher, yet the classical epistemologist's blindness to it may be
excused by recalling that the superhuman (in a word, God) has traditionally
set the standard of epistemic excellence. Still, I hope that after reading this
book, the classical epistemologist will appreciate that I am sensitive to a
basic fact that has often animated a skeptical tum of mind: to wit, that our
knowledge claims caver less ground with less certainty than we ordinarily
realize.
As currently practiced, the branches of philosophy devoted to the nature
of knowledge--epistemology and the philosophy of science--rest on a couple
of elementary fallacies. On the one hand, philosophers treat the various
knowledge states and processes as properties of individuals operating in a
social vacuum. They often seem to think that any correct account of
individual knowledge can be, ipso facto, generalized as the correct account of
social knowledge. For example, the assertibility conditions for a scientific
claim are typically defined in terms of the evidential relation that the
knower stands to the known, without taking into account the epistemic
states of other knowers whose relations to one another and the known
would greatly influence the assertibility of the scientific claim. And insofar
as this slide from the individual to the social has been implicit instead of
argued, philosophers have committed the fallacy of composition.
On the other hand, philosophical accounts of the individual knower are
sometimes quite perspicuous, but not because they have isolated real features
of individual cognition. Rather, these accounts have identified inference
schemas, so-called logics of justification, and scripts that have persuasive
force in the public exchange of information. Whether these schemas and
Preface XXIX

scripts constitute the structure of belief formation in all rational

individuals is immaterial to their social import, which rests solely on
members of the relevant cognitive community recognizing that such
rationally displayed information commands their consideration.
Consequently, philosophers can frequently slip into committing the fallacy
of division by assuming that a feature of the knowledge enterprise that
appears primarily at the level of social interaction is, ipso facto, reproduced
(by some means or other) as a feature of the minds of the individuals
engaged in that interaction.
Why do philosophers tend to commit these two fallacies when discussing
the natur,e of knowledge? My own diagnosis points to a confusion between
what is intended and what is effected in the course of producing knowledge.
When epistemologists commit the fallacy of composition, they suppose that
one can predict whether a claim is likely to pass as knowledge in a particular
cognitive community on the basis of what most of the community's members
believe. Likewise, when epistemologists commit the fallacy of division,
they assume that the best explanation for why a cognitive community
officially treats a given claim as knowledge is that most of the community's
members believe the claim. However, both inferences greatly underestimate
the influence exercised by each member's expectations about what is
appropriate to assert in his cognitive community, as well as each member's
willingness to discount his own persona} beliefs and conform to these
canonicat expectations--if only as a means of maintaining his good standing
in the cognitive community. In short, then, in my view epistemic judgment
has much of the character of identifying and anticipating trends in the stock
market.
Lest the reader think that I have an entirely consensualist approach to
social epistemology, I should emphasize that what matters, from the
standpoint of the smooth operation of the knowledge process, is that there
app ears to be a conformity in epistemic judgments. However, this
appearance need not run any deeper than a similarity in the style in which
those judgments are delivered, which can, in turn, be easily monitored by the
various gatekeepers of the cognitive community. Not surprisingly, then, as
cognitive communities such as disciplines expand in time and space, it
becomes more likely that several teams of researchers will assent to the
same set of sentences but apply them in ways that suggest that those
sentences have quite different meanings. This leaves us with a picture of
the knowledge enterprise which, on the textual surface, seems rather
uniform and systematically regulated, but which, at the microlevel of actual
usage, is revealed to be only locally constrained. The radical duality
suggested here may be encapsulated by the thesis that, because of the ease
with which it can conceal epistemic differences, the communicative process
itself is the main source of cognitive change. When writing in a more
"humanistic" idiom, I refer to the consequences of this picture as the problem
of incommensurability, whereas I refer to it as the elusiveness of consensus
when writing in a more "social scientific" vein.
XXX Preface

The book has been organized in the interest of "today's reader," someone
who rarely reads a book caver to caver in one sitting but dips into a chapter
here and there (though, of course, the book should be read in order of
presentation). Consequently, each chapter can be read by itself without too
much loss of context, and there are periodic references to earlier and later
chapters of relevance. Since particular audiences have particular needs, I also
recommend the following reading plans. Everyone should read at least
chapter 1, and preferably ail of part one. Humanists should also read the
chapters in part two and Appendix B in part three, while social scientists
should read ail of part three, and administrators should read the chapters in
part four. Philosophers of science will, with some luck, find something of
interest everywhere, though epistemologists and philosophers of language
might confine themselves to part two, while social and political theorists
might prefer parts three and four.
To make the most use out of this text, the reader should regard it, not as
the usual monolithic monograph, but as a parcel of provocations, a
sourcebook of ideas, and directions for further research. Needless to say, I
welcome criticism so as to afford me the opportunity of getting it right in
the next book, tentatively titled Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents
(Westview Press, 1988/9). Footnotes have been eliminated to facilitate
reading, though readers will hopefully find the references cited an aid to
their own research, especially in suggesting conceptual links between fields
of inquiry not normally drawn together. Finally, references to "he," "him,"
and the like are also a matter of convenience and should thus be understood
in a gender-neutral manner.
This book began to emerge in 1983 and was largely completed by 1986. A
version of chapter 1 appears in a special issue of Synthese devoted to social
epistemology, edited by Fred Schmitt, who is undoubtedly the most careful
and stimulating philosophical reader that I have yet run across. A portion of
chapter 2 was a response to a paper by Margaret Gilbert, delivered at the
American Philosophical Association meetings. Chapter 3 is an expanded
version of a talk given in the Harvard History of Science colloquium series.
Everett Mendelsohn is to be thanked for his generous invitation. (A note of
thanks, also, to Hilary Putnam and the Harvard philosophy graduate
students, for their challenging and illuminating remarks.) Chapters 5 and 11
were originally delivered at the University of Colorado History and
Philosophy of Science Colloquium series. Parts of these two chapters have
appeared in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Explorations in Knowledge,
and EASST Newsletter. Here I would like to thank Patrick Heelan, Gonzalo
Munevar, Arie Rip, and Howard Smokler for their informative, encouraging,
and sometimes critical, remarks. Part of chapter 6 was delivered at the
annual meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and
Literature. Appendix B was originally given at the annual convention of the
Speech Communication Association. Foremost among my friends in this
field has been Charles Willard. A version of chapter 7 has appeared in a
special issue of Pacifie Philosophical Quarter/y, while a version of chapter 8
Preface xxxi

has appeared in 4S Review. Here I have found Steve Woolgar's writings

invaluable. Chapter 9, the only one based on a chapter of my doctoral
dissertation, has, in turn, been the basis of a symposium paper given at the
Philosophy of Science Association. Ted McGuire and Ken Schaffner are to be
thanked for much of the scholarship which graces that chapter.
More general thanks go to my long-standing cronies, David Gorman,
editor of Annals of Scholarship, and James O'Brien, notes and reviews editor
of The Yale Law Journal, both for their fierce independence and loyalty in
many matters. Ron Giere and Tom Nickles did the most to get this book
accepted for publication, while Bob Sloan and the editorial staff at Indiana
University Press have since facilitated matters, in conjunction with Jim
Roberts of Publishing Resources Incorporated, Boulder. Richard Steele,
managing editor for Taylor & Francis Ltd., has indirectly promoted the
writing of this book as diligent midwife to a journal I have recently started,
also called Social Epistemology. The philosophy department at the
University of Colorado has been the most pleasant academic environment in
which I have so far worked. However, I could always count on Georges Rey
to make sure that the pleasant atmosphere did not slip into a dogmatic
slumber. In fact, I must confess that Georges bas been the only person to
make me doubt (albeit, for a few fleeting moments) the fondamental
notions in this book. My students have also been a constant source of various
forms of stimulation, though a special place must be accorded to my research
assistant, Stephen Downes. Finally, my biggest debt is to my mother, who
knew ail along that this was going to happen.

Steve Fuller
University of Colorado
 PART ONE

ISSUES IN DEFINING THE FIELD OF SOCIAL

EPISTEMOLOGY
 CHAPTER ONE

AN OVERVIEW OF SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY

The fondamental question of the field of study I call social epistemology

is: How should the pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under
normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each
working on a more or less well-defined body of knowledge and each
equipped with roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with
varying degrees of access to one another's activities?
Without knowing anything else about the nature of social epistemology,
you can already tell that it has a normative interest, namely, in arriving at a
kind of optimal division of cognitive labor. In other words, in words that
only a Marxist or a positivist could truly love, the social epistemologist
would like to be able to show how the products of our cognitive pursuits
are affected by changing the social relations in which the knowledge
producers stand to one another. As a result, the social epistemologist
would be the ideal epistemic policy maker: if a certain kind of knowledge
product is desired, then he could design a scheme for dividing up the labor
that would likely (or efficiently) bring it about; or, if the society is already
committed to a certain scheme for dividing up the cognitive labor, the social
epistemologist could then indicate the knowledge products that are likely to
flow from that scheme. I thus follow the lead of Plato's Republic and
Francis Bacon's New Atlantis in conceiving of the "epistemology" in social
epistemology as having an interest in describing our cognitive pursuits
primarily as a means of prescribing for them.
Yet at the same time, social epistemology is not "utopian" in the
pejorative sense that Marx used to distinguish his own "scientific" brand of
socialism from those, such as Saint-Simon's and Fourier's, which were based
on philosophical ideals that could never be implemented on a mass scale. I
take the "normal circumstances" cited in the question to be universal, bath
historically and cross-culturally, a "brute fact" about the nature of our
cognitive pursuits to which any normative epistemology must be held
accountable. Moreover, I take this brute fact to be responsible not only for
the variety of ways in which knowledge has been pursued, but also for the
variety of products that have passed for knowledge itself. Consequently, in
so aligning myself with naturalistic approaches to knowledge, I reject the
Cartesian gesture of withdrawing from ail social intercourse as a means of
getting into the right frame of mind for posing foundational questions about
the nature of knowledge. For even though the social world may appear to be
a confusing place from which to deliver epistemic judgments--certainly
more confusing than the privacy of one's own study--it is nevertheless the
normal (and probably the only) place in which such judgments are delivered.
If you still doubt the wisdom of this move, just recall that only an old
rationalist prejudice, one popularized by Descartes himself, ties the adequacy
of knowing to the clarity and certainty of thinking.

3
4 Issues in Defining Social Epistemology

Later in this book (ch. 7) I will argue that a crucial way in which a
discipline maintains its status as "science" is by manipulating the historical
record so that it appears to be the inevitable outcome of the course of
inquiry up to that point. In the first part of this chapter, I attempt a similar
legitimating move by showing that social epistemology is a natural
development from the history of philosophy since Kant. However, since
social epistemology as I conceive it will probably strike many readers as an
offspring of rather dubious lineage, I shall then proceed, in the second part
of the chapter, to write a different revisionist history of modem philosophy.
Here social epistemology, in its incarnation as "the sociology of knowledge,"
constitutes a radical, if not wholly successful, break with all previous
theories of knowledge. But an unwitting combination of philosophers and
sociologists nowadays threatens to smother the revolutionary impulse in a
spirit of accommodation. Finally, I offer some suggestions as to how the
social epistemologist can remain bath exciting and relevant to contemporary
issues in the theory of knowledge.

1. Social Epistemology as the Goal of Ali Epistemology

You should now have a rough sense of the conceptual location of social
epistemology. But let us proceed somewhat more systematically. First, in
calling my field of study social epistemology I have identified it as a branch
of philosophy, indeed perhaps the main branch of that discipline. Yet a
common response that philosophers have made to sociology over the past
two centuries is to invoke what Larry Laudan (1977) has called "the
arationality assumption," namely, that sociological accounts of our cognitive
pursuits are appropriate only when those pursuits fail by universally
acceptable standards of rationality. Even Karl Mannheim (1936), who
established the sociology of knowledge as a separate discipline in the
twentieth century, invoked this assumption when he exempted mathematics
and the natural sciences from his field of inquiry. For all their ideological
differences, bath Laudan and Mannheim portray the sociologist of
knowledge as wanting to show that !he domain for which a knowledge claim
is valid is restricted by the social conditions under which that claim was
first made. Thus, unlike the founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1961),
who, in Kantian fashion, saw the universal features of cognition--space,
time, number, cause--grounded in features shared by all societies, Laudan and
Mannheim assume that sociological accounts of knowledge, if they have any
grounding at all, are grounded in the features of particular societies, and
hence are, in principle opposed to the philosophical accounts, which are based
on appeals to universal rationality. Given the uneasy complementarity that
has thus developed between philosophy as the study of the universal and
sociology as the study of the particular in our cognitive pursuits, it would
seem that "social epistemology" has become an oxymoron, a contradiction in
terms.
An Overview of Social Epistem ology 5

Still, it is curious that for ail its current centrality to philosophy, the
discipline of epistemology has a distinctly post-Kantian origin. Before Kant
philosophers typically understood the nature of knowledge and the nature of
reality as two sides of the same coin. The generic philosophical question may
thus have been posed: How is reality constituted such that we can know it
(insofar as we do), and how are we constituted such that reality can manifest
itself to us (insofar as it does)? The point of the Kantian critique--at least
as it was taken by Kant's successors--was to detach the question about
knowledge from the question about reality, largely by arguing that the
question about reality makes sense only as a disguised version of the question
about knowledge, and that the answer to the question about knowledge
places no discemible constraints on what the answer to the question about
reality might be. In this way, it became conceptually possible in the
nineteenth century to practice epistemology as something distinct from
metaphysics (Habermas 1971, Hacking 1975a).
However, Kant's critique alone was not sufficient to establish
epistemology as a leg itimate philosophical enterprise. After all, if Kant's
predecessors had been convinced that knowing about the nature of knowledge
told them nothing about the nature of reality, then what would be their
motivation for studying knowledge? The nineteenth century provided an
answer that was suited to the post-Kantian philosophical sensibility. For
once disciplines started to proliferate, daims to knowledge began to be made
which were justified solely on intradisciplinary grounds but which were
dearly meant to have interdisciplinary cognitive import. This gave the
interna! structure of knowledge--quite independent of any link to reality--a
new complexity that required study in its own right. The general term
coined for these daims was "reductionist," the two most notable cases of
which were the attempts to reduce chemical phenomena to atomic physics
and the attempts to reduce mental phenomena to a kind of physiological
mechanics. The point of studying knowledge, then, would be to arrive at
rules for adjudicating the various reductionist daims, which would involve
devising a metalanguage for rewriting all such daims so as to display the
exact extent of their cognitive authority, often known as their evidential
warrant. The normative import of this exercise may be seen in that once the
atomic hypothesis was granted cognitive authority in the explanation of
chemical phenomena, it was possible to judge the relative "progressiveness"
of a research program in chemistry, either past or present, by the likelihood
with which it. would facilitate the reduction to atomic physics. The
ultimate goal of the epistemologist would thus be to map out the structure
of cognitive authority among all the disciplines as a means of providing
direction for their research--which is precisely the goal of s o ci a l
epistemology.
And so, my short answer to the alleged self-contradictoriness of "social
epistemology" is that epistemology has been a well-motivated, autonomous
field of inquiry only insofar as it has been concerned with the social
organization of knowledge. Such had clearly been the case with the first
6 Issues in Defining Social Epistemology

epistemologists, Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, and it continued to

be the case in the twentieth century with the logical positivists. The
continuity of this concern is nowadays lost, however, mainly because logical
positivism's legacy has been greater in the techniques it introduced for doing
epistemology than in the actual project for which those techniques were
introduced.
Consider the ease with which Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Hanson were able to
show, in the late 1950s, that the positivist panoply of correspondence mies,
equivalence relations, and subsumption strategies could not adequately
account for the structure of cognitive authority in the sciences. Indeed,
many positivists even granted the more radical critique that these creatures
of formai logic had no place whatsoever in the epistemological project.
Why? Because the offspring of logical positivism, the analytic philosophers,
were coming to the ironie realization that the formai techniques which they
had inherited were better suited for the very problems in metaphysics whose
intelligibility the logical positi vists had questioned. The focus of these
problems was the nature of material and logical necessity, in which the
work of Georg von Wright, Jaakko Hintikka, Nicholas Rescher, Saul Kripke,
and David Lewis has figured prominently. In short, then, contemporary
analytic philosophy has let its inquiries be dictated by the available means
rather than the original ends.
ln spite of the positivists' errant ways, Kuhn and the Popperians have
managed to pick up the historical thread and continue the epistemological
project into the present day. Although many Popperians would deny it, a
constant reminder that this project is still about the social organization of
knowledge is the frequent allusions to political theory that one finds in
contemporary philosophy of science: Popper's self-styled "open society"
vision of the scientific community marks him as a classical Iiberal, while
Feyerabend's emphasis on the "open" and Lakatos' on the "society" aspects of
the Popperian vision marks them as, respectively, an anarchist (or
libertarian) and a social democrat. And Kuhn, with his talk of normal
science being dominated by a single paradigm which can be replaced only by
"revolution," is, by ail accounts, a totalitarian. These ideological labels
should not be taken as merely suggestive metaphors, but rather as literai
statements of what the various "methodologies" become, once the
epistemologist is transferred from the context of appraising already existent
products of knowledge to the context of recommending the scheme by which
knowledge ought to be produced (Krige 1980). Indeed, it would not be
farfetched to say that, when done properly (that is, when done self­
consciously as social epistemology), the philosophy of science is nothing
other than the application of political philosophy to a segment of society,
the class of scientists, who have special capacities and special status but also
make special demands on each other and the rest of society in the course of
conducting their activities.
Returning to the positivists, it is well known that their chief ideologue,
Otto Neurath (1962), saw the Unified Science movement as, in part, a way
An Overview of Social Epistemology 7

of driving out the politically conservative and elitist tendencies of

hermeneutical thinking in the "human sciences" (which defined the task of
interpretation to be the situating of texts in a clearly defined tradition of
readers and writers who saw themselves largely as communicating only with
one another) and driving in the more radical and egalitarian, specifically
Marxist, politics associated with a naturalistic approach of the "social
sciences." Less well known is how Neurath's preoccupation with the status
of "protocol statements," those fundamental building blocks of evidential
warrant in the natural sciences, contributed to his overall project.
In light of what I have so far said about social epistemology, a clue to the
desired link may be found in the work of the historian in residence at the
Vienna Circle, Edgar Zilsel (1945), another Marxist who proposed that the
decisive factor in the rise of the Scientific Revolution was a shift in the
structure of cognitive authority, such that the pronouncements of the scholar
class were now held accountable to experimental standards which
throughout the Middle Ages had certified expertise in the artisan class.
Being experimental standards, they were indexed for such publicly
observable features as time and place, which served to open up the
knowledge production process to people from all walks of life, even to
those who were not trained in the reading of esoteric texts. This change had
the effect of not only democratizing the very act of observation, but also of
creating a system for efficiently sorting through the various speculations
that had been advanced in the past. Neurath's concern with protocol
statements, along with other positivist attempts at formulating a principle
of verification, may perhaps be seen as raising to self-consciousness the
values of equal i t y (of the individual knowers) and pro gress (of the
collective body of knowers) which were first asserted in the Scientific
Revolution.
If, as I have been maintaining, all epistemology worthy of the name has
been motivated by essentially sociological considerations, then my thesis
should equally apply to the very attempts by epistemologists, such as
Laudan, to dispense with the social character of knowledge. Our first
exposure to these attempts was in terms of the arationality assumption.
Underlying it is a distinction, popularized by the positivist Hans
Reichenbach (1938), between a knowledge claim's "context of discovery" and
its "context of justification" (sometimes called "context of validation"). By
distinguishing these two contexts, epistemologists can dissolve the apparent
paradox in saying, for instance, that given the appropriate tests, a belief in
Newton's Laws could have been justified at any point in history, even though
that fact could not itself have been known before Newton's time. On the
other hand, by conflating these two contexts, sociologists fall victim to
"the genetic fallacy," which leads them to say that the validity of Newton's
Laws is, in some way, affected by their origins in seventeenth-century
England. It is nowadays popular to soften the blow just dealt to the
sociologist by arguing that the nature of the discovery/justification
distinction is little more than verbal. Thus, "discovery" captures the
8 Issues in Defining Social Epistemology

novelty normally felt about the most recently justified claim in one's
research program, white "justification" describes the logical status of the
discovery, once divested of its psychological trappings (Nickles 1980). No
doubt this is an astute observation, but it merely neutralizes the distinction
without explaining how it too is sociologically motivated. Let us now turn
to one such explanation.
As the above examples indicated, the discovery/justification distinction is
normally invoked by epistemologists in order to prevent the sociologist
from unduly restricting a knowledge claim's domain of validity: Newton's
Laws were just as valid before Newton discovered them as afterward, and
the fact that we are three centuries beyond Newton does not, in any way,
diminish our justification for believing in his laws. The intuitive soundness
of these claims rests on conceiving of justification as an idealized discovery
procedure--in other words, as a sort of scientific competence that can be
abstracted from historical performances of scientific reasoning. Once
Newton's Laws are stripped of the socio-historical baggage that might make
him hostile to them, even Aristotle could corne to have a justified belief in
them.
Now consider the epistemologist's strategy itself from a sociological
viewpoint: How does it make a difference to the domain of people who are
eligible to validate Newton's Laws? Taking our eue from Zilsel, the
strategy clearly opens up the domain of eligible people by reducing the
amount of esoteric knowledge required of the potential validator. In
particular, he need not have participated in the cultural milieu of
seventeenth-century England, which implies, among other things, that he
need not bring to his observations the specialized training that only
scientists living at that time would have. Instead, the potential validator
would require skills--for example, the ability to perform certain
calculations and to focus attention on certain phenomena--that any
intelligent and interested human being could be taught at any lime or place.
Thus, one of the ways in which epistemologists have argued for the universal
nature of validity claims is by appealing to the intuition that Galileo, say,
could have convinced Aristotle that his account of local motion was in error
by conducting free-fall experiments in his presence.
One consequence of regarding the discovery/justification distinction in this
manner is that it turns out not to be as ideologically pernicious as
philosophers and sociologists have often suggested. A source of the
distinction's p�rniciousness was thought to be that the concept of
justification presupposes a Whiggish, or absolutist, conception of epistemic
change. After ail, white it is clear that Galileo could convince Aristotle of
some things, could Aristotle convince Galileo of anything? However, as we
have seen, even if Aristotle's and Galileo's persuasive powers turn out to be
asymmetrical, that has happened only after both have been limited to
justification procedures that are, in principle, equally accessible to all
intelligent individuals. In other words, this apparently absolutist end has
been reached by strictly egalitarian means.
An Overview of Social Epistemology 9

Even if all the preceding considerations have been enough to persuade you
that epistemology is an inherently sociological activity, you may still
wonder why epistemologists have been so hostile to the idea. My own
diagnosis of the situation points to a rhetorical strategy that epistemologists
regularly deploy--and sociologists unfortunately fall for. It involves
treating cognitive pursuits and their social organization as if they were two
independent entities and then asking how does knowing about the social
organization of a particular cognitive pursuit add to our knowledge of the
pursuit as a cognitive pursuit. Of course, the typical answer to this question
is that it adds nothing to our knowledge of the pursuit as a cognitive pursuit,
which leads the epistemologist to conclude that sociology is irrelevant to
questions of epistemic status. The sociologist tacitly assents to this
conclusion by concentrating his efforts on those features of cognitive
pursuits which he himself recognizes as noncognitive. To get a clear sense of
the fallaciousness of this strategy, compare the analogous, and historically
more familiar, case of someone (perhaps a medieval scholastic) maintaining
that knowledge of physiology is irrelevant for knowing about the human
being as a human being. How would he show this? By arguing that since
every creature has a physiology, there is nothing distinctively human about
having a physiology, and, therefore, nothing about the humanness of human
beings can be learned by studying their physiology.
What the arguments against sociology and physiology have in common
may be described as either a logical fallacy or a rhetorical strategy. The
logical fallacy they jointly commit is to confuse the essential features of an
object with the features that distinguish it /rom other abjects. As Duns
Scotus would put it, the arguers have mixed matters of quidditas with
matters of haecceitas. Most pointedly: several essentially different abjects
can share some of the same essential properties. The "essential differences"
refer to distinctions in species of the shared essential properties. And so,
just because human beings are not the only creatures with a physiology, it
does not follow that human beings would be what they are without their
physiology. Indeed, the science of taxonomy was founded on the idea that a
sufficiently fine-grained understanding of physiology would enable one to
make distinctions amongst the animal species so as to show that human
beings have a unique physiology. Thus, rather than disqualifying them from
being distinguishing properties, shared essential properties may provide the
basis for making the relevant species distinctions. Likewise, just because
cognitive pursuits are not the only activities that are socially organized, it
does not follow that cognitive pursuits would be what they are without
their social organization. Indeed, the sociology of knowledge was founded
on the idea that a sufficiently fine-grained understanding of social
organization would enable one to make distinctions among the various
human pursuits so as to show that particular cognitive pursuits have unique
patterns of organization.
As for the rhetorical strategy deployed by the opponents of sociology and
physiology, I will call it, for lack of a better name, negative reification. lt
10 Issues in Defining Social Epistemology

consists of a two-step move: (1) Q, the defining structural property of P, is

distinguished from P and made into a separate entity; hence, the social
organization of knowledge is distinguished from knowledge "as such," and
the human physiology is distinguished from the human being "as such." This
is the reifying move. (2) Even though Q has now been formally distinguished
from P, the content of Q remains in P, thereby rendering Q devoid of
content. This is the negative move. It leaves the impression that one can give
an adequate account of knowledge or the human being without referring,
respectively, to its social organization or its physiology. However, upon
closer scrutiny, it can be shown that the allegedly unnecessary entity is
covertly presupposed in the adequate account. Thus, in dualist accounts of
the human being, the mind, which supposedly defines the human being as
such, is characterized as having a paraphysiology of its own, namely, a
system of interdependent fonctions which regulates the body. Likewise, as
we saw when examining the context of justification which supposedly
defines a cognitive pursuit as such, a parasociology is presupposed, namely, a
normative account of the terms under which one is eligible to participate in
the cognitive pursuit. Why hasn't negative reification been more often
recognized for what it is? Largely because accounts of both the mind and the
context of justification are never discussed with enough specificity to broach
the issue of instantiation: When has one identified instances of mental
activity? Of a justificatory context? Once these questions are raised, one is
forced to introduce considerations of, respectively, physiology and
sociology.

2. Social Episternology as the Pursuit of Scandai and Extravagance

With the founding of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfort in the
1920s and the publication of Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia in 1936,
the sociology of knowledge was at first notorious for maintaining that the
best way to inquire into the nature of knowledge is by questioning the
motives (or "interests") of its producers. Whatever else one might want to
say about this program, it was certainly meant as a radical critique and
replacement of the epistemological enterprise, especially of its classical task
of laying down interest-invariant foundations for knowledge.
Indeed, the sociology of knowledge was conceived as an irreducibly
normative discipline, integrally tied to social policy-making (Mannheim
1940). Its central thesis was that the social acceptance of a knowledge claim
always serves to benefit certain interest groups in the society and to
disadvantage others. As a piece of knowledge policy, the implications were
clear: if granting epistemic warrant involves, among other things, social
acceptance, and a key benefit of being granted such a warrant is the power to
make authoritative pronouncements, then granting epistemic warrant is a
covert form of distributing power.
Putting aside, for the moment, the deliberateness with which this policy
An Overview of Social Epistemology 11

normally is (or even can be) carried out, the thesis appears most plausible
when considering how disciplinary specialization (in law, medicine, business,
and the sciences) has removed an increasing number of issues from public
debate to the testimony of "experts." These disciplines exercise "power," in
the sense that ail epistemically warranted opinion in their respective
domains requires their certification, which, in turn, forces the warrant­
seeker either to undergo the arduous training of becoming such an expert or
simply to conserve effort and defer to the experts already in place. Not
surprisingly, then, the normative issue of most concem to these sociologists
of knowledge, especially their most recent exemplar Habermas (1975), is
how to prevent the republican ideal of "civic culture" from totally
dissolving, in modern democracies, into a "mass culture" whose members
uncritically submit to the authority of experts.
The original scandai created by the sociology of knowledge, then, was to
claim that any answer to "What are the sources of knowledge?" presupposes
an answer to "How should society be organized?" Classical epistemology
appeared to be a viable pursuit precisely because there were thought to be
certain knowledge claims whose social acceptance had equal benefit for all-­
at least for all rational beings--and hence had no net effect on the
distribution of power. This is simply a vivid way of expressing the "value­
neutrality" of scientific knowledge: that is, while such knowledge may be
used to promote a wide variety of values (as in the different policy ends to
which economics may be applied), the knowledge itself is not biased toward
or against the realization of any particular values. The source of the equality
of benefit afforded by these privileged knowledge claims was the equality of
access alleged of them--at least when reduced to the ultimate warrants for
their assertion. Unlike such traditionally hermetic forms of knowledge as
magic and cabalistic theology, the efficacy of natural and social scientific
knowledge would seem not to rest on its access being restricted to only a
few specially trained individuals; rather, access to the natural and social
sciences has always been advertised as (in principle) open to anyone, since its
epistemic warrants ultimately rested on the sorts of logical calculations and
empirical observations that any rational individual, with a modicum of
training, could perform. Indeed, in the revamped version of the classical
position defended by Mill, Peirce, Dewey, and Popper, increasing the
accessibility to the scientific process was thought to increase the quality of
the knowledge produced, since it would increase the level of mutual
criticism of knowledge claims, which would, in turn, increase the chance
that creeping value biases would be purged from the process. And so, if a
"cuit of expertise" has developed in modern times, as the early sociologists
of knowledge were inclined to think, then the classical epistemologist
would interpret that simply as a case in which certain social interests
(perhaps of the knowledge producers themselves, in the case of experts) have
perverted for their own ends the natural development of knowledge, which
promotes equality of benefit and access.
In its first incarnation, the sociology of knowledge remained little more
12 Issues in Defining Social Epistemology

than a scandai. It failed to launch a full-scale conceptual revolution--let

alone undermine the project of classical epistemology--because of conceptual
confusions at its own foundations. These confusions made knowledge
production seem much too contrived, as if the dominant class interest could
simply dictate what passes for knowledge in the society. After all, if
granting epistemic warrant is indeed a covert form of distributing power,
does it follow either that granting epistemic warrant is identical with
distributing power or even that epistemic warrant is granted in order to
distribute power? The former possibility can be read as a semantic thesis of
the sort that emotivists typically make about ethical utterances, transferred
to epistemological ones; the latter possibility can be read as describing the
motives or intentions of those who grant epistemic warrant, which, in an
extreme form, would constitute a conspiracy theory of knowledge. Neither
of these possible conclusions necessarily follows from the premise, though
the original sociologists of knowledge certainly made it seem otherwise.
One omitted possibility is a more indirect and interesting conclusion,
namely, that granting epistemic warrant simply has the effect of
distributing power--thereby leaving open such questions as whether the
groups benefitting from this distribution of power are the ones who were
originally motivated to propose the particular knowledge claim, whether
either the motivators or the benefitters are the ones who make the most use
of the claim in proposing other knowledge claims, and so forth. 'A
persuasive defense of this conclusion would be enough to undermine the
project of classical epistemology as characterized above, since it would show
that there is no method for granting epistemic warrant, including the
methods of the natural and social sciences, which does not have an effect on
the distribution of power in a society. Yet, at the same time, such a defense
would not be forced to assume the extravagant thesis that knowledge is
nothing but a myth that the powerful concoct to maintain their power.
At the source of the conceptual confusions that undermined the Old Wave
sociology of knowledge was an equivocal reading of the claim that all
knowledge is "value-laden" or "interest-laden." Three sorts of groups may
be said to have an "interest" in the social acceptance of a knowledge claim:

(a) those who were motivated to propose the claim in the hope that
they might benefit from its acceptance;
(b) those who actually benefit from the claim's acceptance;
(c) those who make use of the claim in the course of proposing other
knowledge claims.

Let us call (a) mo tivators, (b) benefitters, and (c) users. The classical
epistemologists erred in failing to see that, given the interest-ladenness of
ail knowledge claims, such groups always exist, and therefore must be taken
into account by any normative theory of knowledge production. However,
the early sociologists of knowledge were extravagant to suppose that in
An Overview of Social Epistemology 13

many (perhaps most) cases of knowledge production, the motivators,

benefitters, and users are the same group. If that were the case, then not
only would the production of knowledge be reduced to the dissemination of
ideology, but the dissemination would prove to be incredibly effective; for
the original ideologues would then be shown to have tight enough control
over the use of their ideology that only they and their allies benefit.
This piece of extravagance has been revealed by the current crop of
empirically-minded sociologists of knowledge to be little more than a
rhetorical illusion. The New Wavers (Latour & Woolgar 1979, Knorr­
Cetina 1981, Gilbert & Mulkay 1984, Collins 1985), who describe
themselves as "social constructivists" or "anthropologists of knowledge
cultures," argue that all previous inquiries into the nature of knowledge
production--both philosophical and sociological--have erred in concluding
that there must be some sort of tight control on the use of knowledge
simply because the practitioners of a particular discipline justify their
knowledge claims in similar ways (by drawing on the same body of
knowledge, employing the same inferential techniques, and so forth). Stated
this baldly, the naivete is clear: Why should it be presumed that an account
of knowledge production, as might appear in a book or a journal article,
represents how knowledge is actual ly produced? After all, the diagnostic
tools available to manuscript referees are fairly limited and rarely extend to
a comprehensive testing of the knowledge claim under review. Not
surprisingly, then, knowledge producers tend to take care in gathering
evidence and testing claims only in proportion to the likelihood that the
referees will check them. Moreover, an essential part of what makes an
account of knowledge production something more than a report of the
author's beliefs is that it describes what ought to have happened, given the
avowed norms of the discipline. Even mistakes and accidents must be
accounted for in the right way. Thus, the process by which knowledge is
typically dissem,.'.lated and integrated serves to insure a uniformity in the
expression and justification of claims without insuring a similar uniformity
in the activities leading up to these moments of textualization.
However, one can be more or less naïve about the relation of words to
deeds in knowledge production. More naïve is the classical epistemologist,
who takes the expressed justifications literally as referring to a common
method with a track record of getting at an extrasocial reality. A little
more astute were the original sociologists of knowledge, who nevertheless
continued to think that behind similar forms of expression must lie similar
forms of constraint, even if they turn out to be nothing more than the
ideological force exerted by a discipline's dominant interest group. To
counteract this naïve spirit of determinism, the New Wave sociologists like
to say that knowledge production is "contingent" or "context-dependent" or
"open-ended." Unfortunately, these expressions mask rather than remedy the
shortcomings of the earlier accounts, especially that of the Old Wavers. In
particular, each of these expressions can imply either
14 Issues in Defining Social Epistemology

(i) that no knowledge producer can fully predict and/or control how
his research will be used by others in their research, or
(ii) that any knowledge producer is relatively free to tailor other
knowledge claims to his specific research situation.

The error that the New Wavers make is to interpret (i) as if it were
conclusive evidence for (ii), which only serves to make knowledge
production seem, once again, too much under the direct control of the
producers-the twist being that instead of knowledge production being
determined by large corporate wills such as disciplines and other interest
groups, it is now said to be determined by somewhat smaller corporate
wills such as research teams and even individuals; hence, extravagance
retums through the back door.
Sometimes the sociologists (Bloor 1983, ch. 6) try to mitigate these
extravagant claims of scientific self-determination by saying that the norms
of scientific practice fonction as a tacit civil code. In that case, the freedom
attributed to the scientist in (ii) is constrained by the fact that there are
only a certain number of legal ways in which he can appropriate knowledge
for his own research. But even this legalistic gloss does not impose quite the
right sense of "constraint" on the scientist's activities, since it continues to
allow for a charlatan to be successful at the science game. In other words, it
is still possible for someone to bring about whatever effect he wishes on the
scientific audience by couching his claims in a legally prescribed manner.
However, another feature of the legal analogy can be used to block the
charlatan's success, namely, that while a law regulates some social activities,
one activity that it does not regulate is its own application. Likewise, the
would-be charlatan may know ail the scientific norms without thereby
knowing which are the appropriate ones to apply in his case: to know the
right things to say is not necessarily to know the right times to say them.
For example, he may competently write up a (fraudulent) experiment which
purports to disconfirm some standing hypothesis, but if other members of
the scientific community are writing up (genuine) experiments which
provide support for the hypothesis, then the charlatan's ruse will probably
either be ignored or suspected (as would any other deviant claim) and
perhaps subsequently unmasked. This uncertainty about how norms are to be
applied in future cases have led followers of Wittgenstein to speak of the
"open-textured" nature of language games. It is an uncertainty that is
grounded on the inability of any given social agent to dictate the manner in
which his fellow agents will conform to the existing norms; hence, the
invalidity of inferring the benefitters from the motivators. Notice also that
throughout this discussion, the constraints and ultimate failure of the
scientific charlatan have been explained entirely in sociological terms, such
that he is undermined primarily because he is unable to track the cognitive
movements of his colleagues and only secondarily because his experiments
An Overview of Social Epistemology 15

are actually fraudulent.

What we have just attempted here is a sociological simulation of the
classical epistemic ideal of objectivity. It goes some of the way toward
answering scientific realists such as Boyd (1984) who argue that the best
explanation for the "success" of science is its access to extrasocial,
"objective" reality. In contrast, the method of sociological simulation rests
on the assumption that objectivity and the other virtues of knowledge
production can be exhaustive/y explained by sociological principles. Notice
that this position is the exact mirror image of scientific realism: on the one
hand, scientific realism typically does not deny the social rootedness of
knowledge claims, only the relevance of that fact to an explanation of the
truth or falsity of those claims; on the other hand, sociological simulation
need not deny the "real" truth or falsity of knowledge claims, only the
relevance of that fact to an explanation of the social rootedness of those
claims. The point of contention between the two sides concerns whether
claims that exemplify epistemic virtues such as objectivity are best
explained as "truth-enhancers" or as "institution-maintainers."
The relevant test case for the scientific realist and the sociological
simulator is a situation, perhaps a thought experiment, in which a culture
accepts a knowledge claim that we take to be substantially correct but for
reasons, or through a method, that we consider highly suspect. In other
words, by our lights, the culture has stumbled upon the truth "by accident."
A good example here would be the ancient atomist belief in a principle of
inertia. Needless to say, Democritus never conducted anything like Galileo's
experiments, but his metaphysical picture was conducive, in many respects,
to thinking along "proto-Galilean" lines. However, as far as we know, the
atomists did not try to verify experimentally their metaphysics, and indeed,
given their basic beliefs about the radical contingency of nature, they
probably would have balked at the very idea of conducting such experiments.
Scientific realists like to point to examples like this, where a culture gets
it right "in spite of itself," as simultaneously illustrating that our inquiries
are, in some way or other, directed at fathoming the one reality which we
all inhabit and that inquirers fathom that reality with varying degrees of
success. The sociological simulator would challenge this conclusion by
questioning whether it would be possible to convince the atomists to
conduct experiments and thereby get it right by "the appropriate means." For
if it tums out that the atomists cannot be so persuaded, then their social
practices-especially, the pursuit of pure speculation-will have been shown
essential to their belief in an inertia principle, which, in tum, casts doubt on
whether it really is like the principle that we endorse.
The realist normally is thought to have the upper hand in the debate
because the more cross-culturally and cross-temporally accepted a
knowledge claim is, the more difficulty the sociologist has in explaining it
simply in terms of the claim's rootedness in several, otherwise quite
different, social environments. However, the case of the scientific charlatan
shows that the realist's dialectical advantage can be undercut, if the
16 Issues in Defining Social Epistemology

sociologist admits that neither the motivators nor the benefitters of a

knowledge claim-nor even the two groups combined-have full contrai
over how the claim is used. ln other words, the three sorts of interest
groups identified earlier overlap much less than either the Old or New Wave
sociologists have been inclined to think. Given a wide enough expanse of
history, examples are plentiful. Consider the fate of intelligence testing
since 1895. Starting with Binet, the motivators in French pedagogy treated
the tests only as diagnostic tools for identifying students in need of
remedial education. The users have since included the whole gamut of
philosophers of science and social science methodologists who have looked to
the tests as evidence for the scientific status of psychology. And since the
tests were introduced into Anglo-American psychology through Spearman,
the benefitters have ironically been those who believe that IQ refers to an
innate intelligence capacity that can be little changed by education (Gould
1983). Therefore, the best sociological explanation for the objectivity of
intelligence testing is its versatility in contexts quite unanticipated and even
unintended by its originators.
lnterestingly, an early step in the direction toward sociological simulation
was taken when· Popper (1972) introduced World Three, the realm of
objective knowledge, whose independent existence emerged as an
unanticipated (and usually unintended) consequence of later theorizing about
cognitive instruments, such as counting systems, which were originally
designed for quite specific practical purposes. For example, the ancients may
have developed the study of mathematics in the course of trying to simplify
the many measurement tasks performed in everyday life. A general strategy
emerged to separate formally the measuring instruments from the
measurable things, which led to the invention of a system for representing
the natural numbers and, subsequently, to the discovery of properties that
the system has independently of how it is used. These properties became the
source of problems, such as the nature of irrational numbers, which were
sufficiently distant from matters of applied arithmetic to constitute an
autonomous domain of knowledge. Yet, at the same time, since this
autonomous domain was still thought to underlie all measuring tasks,
mathematical experts gained the power to certify the competence of
engineers and other professional measurers. At this point, the simulation
ends, as the sociologist of knowledge reappears to examine the specific
institutional and rhetorical means by which mathematics has maintained this
power over the years, which, as Bacon would have it, is expressed as
knowledge of the underlying structure, or "essence," of a widespread social
practice like measuring.
The above discussion suggests the following division of explanatory tabor
between the psychology and sociology of knowledge. Psychology enters to
study the cognitive limitations on one's ability to anticipate the long term
consequences following from one's own interactions and artifact
productions, as well as to backtrack those consequences once they have
occurred. These limitations are the hidden liability behind the mind's
An Overview of Social Epistemology 17

capacity to "economize," that is, to condense and stereotype information so

that less of it needs to be stored. We shall later return to this theme. The
various performance errors in memory, reasoning, and attribution identified
by cognitive psychologists in the laboratory (Nisbett & Ross 1980) can
serve as the basis for these studies, keeping in mind that outside the lab the
"errors" are rarely caught once they are committed and may be socially
rationalized through reifications, such as Popper's World Three. The
significance of such cognitive limitations will vary according to the number
of individuals and groups whose activities have causal relevance for one
another, their distance in time and space from each other, and the technology
available for circulating the relevant cognitive artifacts, especially texts.
And it is the sociologist's task to study these variables. However, this
division of labor is easier said than done, as we shall see in the next section.

3. Nonnormative Social Epistemology and Other Accommodating

Banalities

The New Wave sociology of knowledge has not only inherited the
scandalous ways of the Old Wavers, but it has also had its brush with
banality. The banality cornes from recent attempts, within both sociology
and philosophy, to divest epistemology of any normative force. Sociologists
have long suspected that philosophical talk about how knowledge "ought" to
be produced is motivated by a desire to speak with an authority that lies
beyond the check of the empirical disciplines. To safeguard against empirical
critique, philosophers since Plato and Descartes have typically supplemented
their accounts of the idealized rational knower with a story about how he is
continually undermined by his own deep-seated passions (Dawes 1976). The
same move can be detected in post-Popperian philosophy of science, with
Lakatos blaming the actual scientists of the past for being so swayed by
special interests and mob psychology that they rarely conform to his
rationally reconstructed history. As the sociologists see it, the philosophers
have cleverly turned a weakness into a strength: instead of taking the
empirical remoteness of the philosophical ideal to mean that the ideal is
false, philosophers take it to mean that real knowers are prevented from
realizing the ideal by some part of their psychology which they have yet to
discipline properly. Thus, the more remote the ideal, the greater the need
for Method (capitalized to indicate its epistemically privileged status).
And the greater the need for Method, the greater the authority of
philosophers, the experts on Method. As these remarks suggest, the banal
response to this philosophical ruse is to treat normative epistemology, at
best, as an expression of sour grapes that knowledge is not produced as the
philosopher would like or, at worst, as an excuse for the philosopher to
ignore altogether empirical inquiries into the nature of knowledge
production. In both cases, the prescription is clear: the epistemologist
should end his normative ways and thereby dissolve the boundaries that
18 Issues in Defining Social Epistemology

currently exist between his work and that of the historian, psychologist, and
sociologist.
The philosophical route to banality is quite different in that it portrays
the epistemologist as more deceived than deceiver. The locus classicus is
Quine's (1969, ch. 3) "Epistemology Naturalized," though Rorty's (1979)
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature has probably done the most to
popularize this picture. The basic idea is that when philosophers from
Descartes to Kant proposed a general Method for "justifying" knowledge
claims, they were confusing two rather different enterprises: on the one
hand, there is the issue of legitimating knowledge claims, which is decided by
the conventions of a particular culture and will depend on the interests that
the culture has in acquiring knowledge; on the other hand, there is the issue
of explaining knowledge claims, which involves studying their causal
origins, a task that Quine, for one, takes to be within the strict purview of
behavioral psychology and neurophysiology. By dividing the labor of
justification in this manner, the need for a special discipline of epistemology
is eliminated: legitimation is best handled by the humanistic disciplines
traditionally devoted to cultural criticism, white explanation is a task for
which the natural sciences and their emulators in the social studies are best
suited. Moreover, once justification has been so divided, the deepest
epistemological problem is conquered. This problem, according to Quine and
Rorty, is how to account for our ability to generate an indefinite number of
theories from the impoverished evidence base afforded by our senses. The
twofold way to a solution is, first, to treat how one gels from the evidence
to at least one theory as a malter of psychological explanation, and then, to
treat how one gets from many theories to only one as a malter of cultural
legitimation. In neither case is there any need for someone equipped with a
universally applicable normative theory of knowledge.
There are several problems with these retreats to banality and the spirit of
interdisciplinary accommodation that they breed. First of ail, the most that
either the sociologists or the philosophers have shown is that the methods
by which epistemologists justify knowledge claims are not uniquely theirs,
though epistemological discourse does its best to obscure any resemblance to
the methods of the special disciplines. Suppose no case for methodological
uniqueness could be made. It still would not follow that epistemologists
are not in a particularly good position to make normative judgments about
knowledge claims. After ail, to speak of "the division of cognitive labor" is
to talk not only about differences in the techniques used by the laborers but
also about differences in the materials to which they apply those techniques.
And so, even if the secret of the epistemologist's success amounts to nothing
more than an idiosyncratic application of the same deductive and inductive
canons used by scientists and humanists, the epistemologist would remain
distinctive in that he attends to the interrelations among the knowledge
claims made by the special disciplines, while scientists and humanists are
restricted to the operations of their own disciplines. Another way of
making the same point, which echoes themes raised both earlier and later in
 Another Random Document on
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scuffled, sending up clouds of alkali dust into the air for the benefit
of the riders who were behind.
Stephen rode beside Señor Hernandez, speaking only in short
sentences, to answer or ask some question. The leather of the
saddles, beneath the sun, was burning hot.
After four hours of riding, just as the sun was beginning to drop
behind the foothills, they saw before them in the desert a large
patch of green, as vivid as if painted upon the ground, fresh and
succulent, amidst the desolation of the plain.
“My alfalfa crop!” exclaimed the Señor, pointing with pride. “We
have irrigated. Much water. Big crop. He aqui la casa—there, behind
the alfalfa.”
Stephen saw rise, as if by magic, a long one-story structure of
adobe, so much the color of the earth as to have been till now
almost indistinguishable. Beside the house was a large brush corral.
So perfectly was all blended with the landscape, that not until they
were very near did Loring appreciate the great size of the building.
At the corral they dismounted and unsaddled.
“Better carry the saddles up to the house!” said Loring to the men,
who had hung them over the corral bars. So, carrying their guns and
saddles, they all walked up to the house.
Here they were received by the ranchman’s wife, a striking
Spanish beauty.
“It is Señora Hernandez,” said the Mexican, with justifiable pride.
The Señora showed the men the rooms where they were to sleep.
Stephen, as commander, was given the largest room.
Pepita was very well pleased with the appearance of the defender
whom her husband had selected, for in spite of his flannel shirt and
dusty boots, Loring was not bad to look upon.
In a few moments, Stephen re-entered the main room. The
Señora was there, leaning against one of the easements. The scarf
that was thrown over her head added to her charms, and lent a
subtlety to her dark beauty. As Stephen walked across the room
toward her, he admired her greatly.
“By George! She is a beauty,” he exclaimed under his breath. Then
answered a voice within him: “Yes, but at thirty, she will be fat, oh,
very fat.”
As the Señora turned to greet him, the first voice made answer:
“Yes, but it will be at least twelve years before she is thirty.”
 CHAPTER XI
While Stephen was talking with the Señora, a gong in an inner
room clanged.
“It is the time for our evening meal, Señor,” she said, with a pretty
little Spanish accent. After Loring had perjured his soul by swearing
that he was loath to change his occupation for the pleasure of
eating, she smiled at him mockingly, and led the way into the dining-
room.
The Hernandez ranch was the largest in the Los Andes region, and
the house was furnished and decorated in an elaborate manner. The
walls of the dining-room were hung with gay pictures, and the table,
set for supper, boasted several pieces of silver.
Señor Hernandez presided at the table with true Latin hospitality,
and Stephen, his previous protestations to the contrary
notwithstanding, did full justice to the excellent fare, at the same
time keeping up a lively conversation with the Señora. The men with
him ate vigorously, the only break in their steady eating being
caused by glances at the pretty Mexican girl who served the meal.
After supper, Stephen and the Señor went outside, and walked
about the ranch, studying the possibilities of defense in case of
trouble. At Stephen’s suggestion, they led the horses from the corral,
and picketed them behind the house, as the first thought of any
marauders would undoubtedly be to raid the corral.
Like most adobe houses, the ranch house consisted of a main
building, with two wings running at right angles, thus enclosing
three sides of a court. All the windows of the ground floor had iron
shutters, fastening on the inside. The ground about the building was
as flat as a board, and was broken only by the lines of the irrigation
ditches which ran amidst the alfalfa fields.
 “If we station a man to watch upon the roof,” said Stephen, as
they returned to the house, “it will be all the precaution that we
need to take. On a clear night such as this, a man can see far in
every direction.”
“It will be well,” answered the Señor. “And, this door here, it is a
heavy one. It will be hard to break down.”
“I don’t believe that it will come to that,” laughed Stephen. “I
don’t believe that we shall have any trouble at all.”
“I pray not,” answered Señor Hernandez. His was not a nature
which was exhilarated by prospective danger.
When they re-entered the main room, Stephen glanced quickly
from the Señora to her husband.
“It is strange,” he said to himself, “how a little swarthy man like
that could have won such a beauty for a wife. I suppose, though,
that if she really loves him, she does not care if his ears are a bit like
an elephant’s, his eyes too close together, and his nose as thin as a
razor.” The husband of a pretty woman is not likely to have his
charms exaggerated by other men.
They spent the evening smoking and talking. The Señora rolled
cigarettes with the greatest deftness, and the smile with which she
administered the final little pat did much to enhance the taste of the
tobacco.
At ten o’clock the Señora rose, and after calling the servant to
light the men to their rooms, bade them good night.
It had been agreed that Stephen should stand the first watch. He
insisted that the Señor, tired as he was from two sleepless nights of
worry, should not share his vigil.
Having exchanged his carbine for one of his host’s Winchesters,
Loring mounted the ladder that ran from the hallway of the second
story to the roof. It was a perfect night. The heavens were glittering
with stars, and all was silent. Not a breath of air came from across
the desert to cool the copings, which were still warm from the day’s
heat.
Stephen leaned his rifle against the chimney, then felt in his
pockets for a little sack of coarse “Ricorte” which some one in the
town had given to him. He filled his pipe carefully, packing the
tobacco down with his forefinger, till all was even; then striking a
match, he held it far from him, until the blue flame of the sulphur
burned to a clear yellow. He held the match to his pipe until the
bowl glowed in an even circle of fire, and the smoke drew through
the stem in rich, full clouds. Then, picking up his rifle again, he
began a careful lookout over the plain towards the pass.
A fact which greatly facilitates the building of air castles, is that,
unlike most buildings, they need no foundations. The castles which
Stephen built that night, as he paced up and down the roof, biting
hard on his pipe-stem, would have done credit to a very good school
of architecture. The general design may be imagined from the fact
that time and time again he drew from his pocket a little crumpled
envelope, and holding it close to the glow of his pipe, read and
reread it. Once he carried it to his lips, and with a feeling almost as
of sacrilege, kissed it. Then he turned sharply, for on the roof behind
him he heard light footsteps and the tinkle of a woman’s laughter.
“Oh, but Señor Loring is a faithful lover,” exclaimed Pepita,
stepping toward him.
Even in the darkness, Stephen felt himself blushing up to his hair.
He stammered, then laughed: “I plead guilty, but I am not generally
like that.”
“It does no harm,” she murmured softly. “And the Señorita, does
she also care so much?”
“Not in the least,” answered Stephen. “The Señorita does not even
know that I care.”
“Oh, you think so? Women are not so—how do you say—? so
blind,” laughed the Señora. “But you have not asked me why I am
here, Señor.”
 “No,” answered Stephen rather bluntly. In the light of his reveries
of the past hour he felt rather ashamed of the little flirtation that he
had carried on after dinner with the Señora.
“You need not be embarrassed,” she went on, laughing at his
stiffness. “It was not to see the gallant Señor that I came, though no
doubt there are many who—”
Loring silenced her with an imploring gesture.
“No, I came to see if all were well. I was afraid that I heard
noises,” she confessed.
“All right, so far,” said Stephen. “I do not think that we shall have
any trouble.”
“Then I will again go down,” she said.
Stephen walked with her over to the ladder, and bowing low over
her hand, whispered a low “Buenas noches!” As he helped her to the
ladder, he looked into her eyes rather curiously. He could not
understand their expression.
When she had her foot upon the uppermost rung, she said good
night to him. Then, as he turned, she said, half shyly: “The letter,
Señor; you will watch the carta of the Señorita well?”
Laughing softly, yet not altogether gaily, she ran down the ladder.
“My husband, he is good,” she reflected. “Ah, very good, but he is
as homely as a—monkey.”
Wiping two little tears from the corners of her eyes, she stepped
quickly back into her room.
The time passed very slowly for Stephen. The clock in the
courtyard below struck two. His rifle barrel began to feel cold in his
fingers, as he fought against sleep. The night had grown thicker, and
he could no longer see far out into the distance.
“It will be morning soon,” he thought. “I don’t believe that the
Yaquis mean business this time.”
 Even as he spoke, his ear caught a low sound. Then there was a
silence. Doubtingly, he leaned far out over the wall, and listened
intently. Again he heard the sound; again it ceased. Then once more
it arose and became continuous,—very soft, but insistent, a solid,
dull, irregular thud, as of many hoofs beating upon soft ground. The
blood in Stephen’s face boiled with quivering excitement. The hoof-
beats came nearer and nearer, then stopped. The next sound that
he heard was a grating click by the corral, as of some one slipping
down the bars. He thought with lightning rapidity: “A shot will be the
best way to awaken the men.”
Almost instantly afterwards he saw against the gray-white of the
opposite side of the court a shadow, then another and another.
Kneeling behind the coping, he covered the leader with his rifle.
The click of the action as he cocked his Winchester sounded to
him preternaturally loud. He dropped the muzzle of his rifle a
fraction of an inch until the first shadow drifted across the sights. He
fired, and the shadow dropped. The flash of his rifle was answered
from the dark by a dozen spurts of flame. All around him the bullets
whined, or clicked against the dry adobe, sending great chips flying
in all directions. Three times Loring fired, lying with the butt of his
rifle cuddled close against his cheek. Would the men below never
hear!
As the vague shapes rushed across the court for the door with a
shrill yell, five knife-like jets of flame shot from the windows, and the
reports echoed staccato in answer to the fusillade from the
courtyard. The leaders of the Yaquis had almost reached the shelter
of the doorway, but the angle windows fairly spat fire as the
defenders emptied their repeaters. Unable to face the withering fire
the raiders wavered, then fell back to the line of the irrigation
ditches, whence they sent a rain of bullets against the windows of
the houses. The tinkle of breaking glass on all sides was mingled
with the reports of the rifles. The surprise had been complete for the
Yaquis, as they had expected to find the ranch unprotected.
 As soon as this first attack was repulsed, Stephen ran to the
ladder and jumped down to join the others. His rifle barrel was
burning hot from the rapidity of his fire.
He found the men all gathered in one room. It was a strange
looking group which the flashes of the rifles revealed in the smoky
air, half dressed, kneeling by the shutters, shooting viciously out into
the darkness, at the blurred things in the ditches. A bullet whistled
by Stephen’s ear as he entered the room, and with a dull spat buried
itself in the plaster behind him.
“Easy on the cartridges, boys!” he called. “They may rush again.”
His advice was well called for, as in their excitement the men were
firing wildly.
“It is lucky that there are no windows in the back of the house,”
he exclaimed to Señor Hernandez.
The latter was engaged in trying to make himself an
inconspicuous target.
There was the sound of footsteps at the door of the room and a
blinding glare of light, as Pepita entered, carrying a large lamp.
Stephen snatched it from her and hurled it out the window through
the splintered panes. But its work had been done. One of the men
by the window sobbed, staggered to his feet, and leaned out into
the night, shaking his fist towards the ditches. Then he fell face
downward across the ledge, where for an instant he was silhouetted
by the last flicker of the lamp below. Loring flung himself upon him
and dragged him back into the room, but not before the body was
riddled with bullets. Stephen felt the sting of several as they grazed
his clothes, by some miracle leaving him unhurt.
“Dios!” gasped the woman.
“Lie down!” shouted Loring, forcing her to the floor. Then he took
the dead man’s place by the shutter, and began to fire methodically.
Encouraged by their success, the Yaquis again swarmed forward.
The whiplike crack of five Winchesters checked them before they
were within the courtyard.
The black of the night began to turn to gray-blue with the hint of
dawn. The figures in the ditches stirred, and as they began to run
for their ponies, the defenders fired into them with telling effect.
Then, in contrast to the previous rattle of shots, came the sound of
the hoofs of a hundred ponies, scampering back up the trail.
“All over!” called out Stephen. Rising from his knees, he leaned
out of the casement, and sent one more shot towards the flying
Yaquis. It brought no response.
They carried Haskins, the man who had been shot, into the next
room, and laid him on the bed. He was quite dead. The Señora
followed, sobbing. Wildly she turned to Stephen as he tried to
comfort her.
“You, Señor—you do not know what it is to kill, by madness, by
folly.”
“Not know?—I—not know?” Stephen smiled a smile that was not
good to see, as he broke off.
“Good God!” he thought, “had it left no trace on him, that
haunting vision of two corpses flung twisted and out of shape on the
wreckage of timber, those two things that had been men sent out of
life by his guilty hand? Had it not lived with him by night and refused
to be put aside by day? Had they not risen up in the dark hours and
called him by a name from which he shrank like a blow, and now
this woman told him he could not know what it meant to kill a man!”
He put his hands in his pockets, bowed his head, and walked
slowly back into the other room.
The light breaking fast in the eastern sky, showed a disheveled
scene. Mattresses were scattered on the floor, the bedding was
thrown about the room, all of the windows were smashed. By each
casement was a pile of empty brass cartridge shells. By one window
was a mess of something red. The air was stale, and filled with acid-
tasting powder smoke.
 Loring went downstairs, and slipping back the bolts on the heavy
door, stepped out into the cool of the early morning. Outside
everything seemed in strange order, compared with the scene that
he had left. He started on a tour of investigation about the ranch.
The ditches amidst the alfalfa showed no trace of the death-dealing
occupants of an hour before. As he walked around the corner of an
outbuilding, he stumbled over a body which the Yaquis had
overlooked in their flight. The Indian’s stiff, square shoes lay with
their toes unbending in the dust. The blue denim of the overalls and
the buckle of the suspenders showed the trademark of a Chicago
firm! A bullet hole was clean through the middle of the swarthy,
bronze-colored forehead. Even through the rough clothing, the flat,
rangey build of the man was evident. The hair, falling forward in the
dust, was coarse and black.
“Poor devil!” thought Stephen. “He has ridden on his last raid.”
He walked quietly away from the body, and went back to the
house. “Everything is all right,” he reported.
Soon the stove was lighted, and coffee boiling. The men were
laughing and telling stories. The Señor strode up and down, twisting
his little spikes of mustachios, and exclaiming upon the valor of the
defense.
When they sat down to breakfast, there was a seat too many at
the table. Loring thought of the silent form in the room above, and
for a moment felt weak. Then, shaking off his depression, he
entered into the general hilarity. Time after time, the servant passed
the great platter of dry tortillas. The big cakes tasted delicious to the
tired men.
As they finished breakfast, the sound of a bugle call sent every
one to the window. Outside was a troop of Mexican cavalry, hot on
the trail of the Yaquis. Señor Hernandez invited the officers to enter,
and while he pressed whisky upon them, gave a voluble account of
the fight. He spoke in such rapid Spanish that Stephen could
understand little; but from the frequent sweeping gestures, he
judged that the story lost nothing in the telling.
The officers remained but a short while, then remounted, and
rode at a sharp trot towards the hills.
“I wonder that the government does not send enough troops to
wipe out these fellows. These cavalry will only drive them back into
the hills, and in a few months they will again swoop down upon the
outlying towns and ranches, just as they have been doing for the
past ten years,” thought Stephen.
After breakfast, Loring prepared to return to Los Andes. The
others had accepted the invitation of Señor Hernandez to stay for a
few days as his guests. A spirit of restlessness pervaded Stephen,
and prevented him from remaining.
The Señor was to arrange to send home Haskins’s body.
“He came from Trinidad, he always said. Guess he had folks
there,” one of the men had volunteered.
Just as Loring was mounting, Pepita ran forward, and whispered
something to him.
He shook his head in reply.
“Try and see!” was her rejoinder.
The thought which she had put into his head made the long ride
back to Los Andes pass very quickly.
The town had resumed its normal appearance. The loafers were
again stretched upon the steps of the little stores or on the
pavements. Those who were not rolling cigarettes were comfortably
asleep.
“Los Americanos vamos,” was the answer to Stephen’s inquiries.
After leaving his borrowed horse at a stable, he wandered idly
towards the plaza. Now that the reaction had come, he felt very
tired. Spying a bench beneath some palm trees, he stretched himself
upon it, and in the security of him who has nothing, dozed
peacefully.
A mosquito, buzzing vapidly about his head, caused him to exert
himself to the extent of a few useless blows. A wagon, rumbling
down the street, caused him to look up. Then after these two
exhibitions of energy, he fell soundly asleep.
 CHAPTER XII
Towards ten o’clock in the evening Stephen directed his steps to
the railroad station, and seating himself on a side-tracked flat car,
kicked his heels over the edge, and smoked his last pipeful of
tobacco. He jangled some keys in his pocket, pretending to himself
that they were money. It was bad enough, he reflected, to be
“broke” in the States, where he could talk the language; but here—
He looked disconsolately at the throng of Mexicans who were on the
platform. “Buenos dies, and que hora? although I am sure I
pronounce them well, will not take me very far in the world,” he
thought. “It does not matter much where I go; but I certainly must
go somewhere. I will board the first freight train that appears,
whether it is going north, south, east or west.”
Having come to this determination, he jumped down from the car,
and walking over to the bulletin board, ran his finger down the time-
table.
“Nine o’clock—train for La Punta. Well, that’s gone. Hello! Here we
are—eleven P. M. express for the City of Mexico. I wonder what that
asterisk means. Oh, yes, Pullmans only. That would be infinitely
more pleasant than the brake-beams of a freight,” he mused, “and
for me it would be equally cheap.”
Stephen was a novice at the art of “beating it,” but he possessed
two very valuable assets, a keen observation and a vivid
imagination. Having thus resolved to travel in state, he returned to
his flat car, and set about planning ways and means. A few minutes
of solemn thought gave him his first conclusion: that at this time of
year the southbound trains would not be running full.
“Therefore there will be many vacant berths,” he thought.
 A few more puffs upon his pipe gave him the next link in his plan.
“Whether empty, or full, the Pullman company has all the berths
down.”
Thought number three: “At night they make long runs, without
stopping. Therefore,” thought Stephen, “once on board, and safely
tucked in an upper berth, I can travel until morning without being
discovered and thrown off the train.”
“Now comes the second part of my problem: how to get on the
train and into my berth without being discovered.” He shut his eyes,
and visualized a train standing at the station. “Where would the
porters stand?” he asked himself.
He thought hard, and remembered that at night the porters
generally stand at opposite ends of their cars, so that every
alternate set of steps is unguarded.
“Now,” he reflected, “if the berths are down, the curtains will be
drawn, therefore there will be little light from the car windows, to
bring me into prominence, and the passengers will probably be
asleep. All will go well, if the vestibule doors are not locked. But
generally on hot nights they are unlocked. Anyhow, I must risk it.”
As he mused over his plan giving it the final touches, the express
for the City of Mexico thundered into the station.
With a grating of brakes, and a squish of steam, the heavy train
sobbed itself to a stop, the engine dropping from the fire-box a
stream of glowing coals between the gleaming steel rails, and
blowing forth steam from the exhaust.
“Here’s my train,” thought Loring. “It looks very comfortable.”
He slipped his pipe into his pocket, and stepping back into a
shadowy corner, awaited his opportunity.
From the platform arose an irregular murmur of voices, such as
always attends the arrival of a train at night. That murmur which, to
the passengers lying half awake, sounds so far away, and unreal! He
heard the bang and thump of trunks being thrown out of the
baggage car. A party of tourists, weighted down with hand-luggage,
hurried by him. Even as he thought, the white-jacketed porters
stood with their little steps alternately at the right and left ends of
their respective cars, so that in the long train there were three
unguarded platforms.
A man was rapidly testing and oiling the car wheels. His torch
flared yellow-red against the greasy brown of the trucks, and made
queer shadows dance on the red varnished surface of the cars.
Stephen tried to make out the name of the car nearest to him.
The first four gilt letters showed clearly in the torchlight: “ELDO”—
The man with the torch moved nearer. “ELDORADO,” spelled
Stephen. “Perhaps the name is a delicate hint to me from Fate.”
The inspector passed on up the train, hitting ringing blows on the
wheels with his short, heavy mallet. He tested the last car, then
stepped back from the train, swinging his torch around his head as a
signal to the engineer.
“It must be now or never,” thought Loring. But which platform to
try! At that instant, from the car opposite him, came a great puff of
white steam, for a moment almost obscuring the steps from view.
Loring darted forward, and jumped upon the train platform.
Anxiously he thrust his shoulder against the vestibule door. It was
unlocked. As he gained the vestibule, the car couplings tightened
with a jerk, and the train clumsily started. He took a hasty glance
down the interior of the car. At the opposite end the porter was
closing the vestibule door. The aisle was clear.
Stephen stepped quickly into the car, pulled back the curtain of
the nearest section, and stepping on the lower berth, caught hold of
the curtain bar, and with one pull swung himself up. In the process,
he inadvertently stepped on the fat man in the lower berth. Stephen
knew that he was fat, because he felt that way. The man swore
sleepily, and twitched the curtain back into place.
“I think that I won’t put my boots out to be cleaned to-night,” said
Loring to himself. “It would be tactless.” Then he pulled the blankets
up over him, rolled over close to the far side of the berth, and fell
asleep, lulled by the hum of the car wheels, pounding southward
fifty miles an hour.
Tired out by his vigil of the night before, Stephen slept until it was
late. He awoke with a start to find that it was broad daylight.
Sleepily he tried to think where he was. His eye fell on the dome of
polished mahogany above him, upon the swaying green curtain, and
the swinging bellrope. Then he recalled the situation. For a few
moments he lay back, blissfully comfortable. His weary muscles were
grateful for the rest. Then he roused himself, and peered cautiously
out from between the curtains. While he was looking up and down
the dusty stretch of carpet in the aisle, the colored porter rapped
hard on the woodwork of the lower berth, and proceeded to awake
the occupant.
“Last call for breakfast, number twelve, last call; half-past nine, sir,
half-past nine.”
Stephen curbed a childlike desire to reach over and pull the kinky
hair of the darky.
“I am sure that he would think that I was a ghost,” he laughed to
himself.
He could hear the man below him turn over heavily, then grunt,
and begin to dress.
“I think I also had better arise,” reflected Loring. He watched the
porter until the latter was at the far end of the car, then dropping his
feet over the edge of the berth he slid out onto the swaying floor,
almost into the arms of the amazed Pullman conductor, who at that
instant had entered the car.
“Where did you get on?” gasped the brass-buttoned official. “I
didn’t know that there was an ‘upper’ taken in this car.”
“At Los Andes,” answered Stephen, “I was rather tired, so I
thought I would not bother you at the time.”
 The conductor looked hard at Stephen, and took in at a glance his
ragged clothes, dirty shoes, and flannel shirt; then he grinned.
“That was mighty considerate of you, stranger; now let’s have
your ticket. We have almost reached our next stop.”
Stephen pretended to feel in his pockets, though he well knew
that it was useless. The other people in the train were beginning to
stare.
“To be put off a train would be far pleasanter in imagination than
in reality,” flashed across Stephen’s mind.
“Hurry up, now,” repeated the conductor. “Where is your ticket?”
“I haven’t any,” Loring blurted out.
“Come on, now, no nonsense! fork up!” insisted the conductor.
“I would gladly, if I had any money,” rejoined Stephen, then with
seeming irrelevancy, he added: “How far is it from here to the
‘City’?”
“It is about seven hundred miles,” answered the conductor, “but I
am sure you will find it a delightful walk.”
“Last call for breakfast in the dining-car. Last call,” again echoed
through the car.
“Better hurry, sir,” said the porter, not realizing the situation, as he
passed Stephen.
“Thank you,” said Loring, with a grim smile. “But I think I will
refrain from eating this morning.”
A rather heavy faced man, who was sitting near by, laughed
audibly. Stephen became the center of interest for the passengers.
For them, the little scene was a perfect bonanza, serving to break
the monotony of the trip. Loring was conscious of the stare of many
eyes, about as effectually concealed behind books and magazines as
is an ostrich with its head in the sand.
 “Come out into the vestibule with me!” said the conductor, rather
gruffly. Stephen followed him in silence. When they were on the
platform, the conductor turned and looked at him squarely. Loring
noticed that there could be kind lines about the close-set jaw.
“See here,” began the former, “you don’t look to me like a man
who is often working this sort of game. I guess you must be sort of
up against it, ain’t you?”
Stephen bowed his head slowly, in non-committal agreement.
“Now I don’t like to see a man down and out,” went on the
conductor, “unless he is the kind that deserves to be, and you ain’t.
Besides, you’re from the States like I am, and so, though I’d lose my
job if it were found out, the company is going to set you up to this
ride free.”
Stephen’s face lighted with gratitude, as he grasped the man’s
hand, and thanked him.
“When did you have anything to eat last?” asked the conductor
suddenly.
“Not since yesterday morning,” answered Stephen.
“Well, you go right into that car” (he pointed forward with his
thumb) “and eat. I’ll make it all right with the dining-car people.”
“That is too much,” said Loring. “I can’t”—
The conductor cut him short. “Some time when you have the
money, you can pay me back. If you don’t ever have it, don’t worry.
No, you mustn’t thank me any more. It is just that you are an
American, and I don’t like to see a fellow from the States up against
it in this Godforsaken land.”
As Loring walked through the train, his blood tingled with the
pride of race and citizenship, tingled with the glow that comes or
should come to every man, when he realizes the strength of the
great brotherhood to which he belongs: realizes that when things
are stripped to their elemental facts, and the veneer of international
courtesy and friendliness removed, he is standing shoulder to
shoulder with his countrymen against the world.
When at last the train drew into the “City,” Stephen said a warm
good-bye to his benefactor, then followed the line of passengers out
into the street. With no definite purpose in mind, he wandered up
and down the city, staring idly into the shop windows. By accident,
he found himself in a great plaza. He was pleased with the gaiety.
“If it were not for economic distress, I should be very well off,” he
thought. “I must get work somewhere, and immediately.”
He walked up one of the side streets, looking at all the signs,
hoping that one might give him a clew. For a long time he saw
nothing helpful, and he was on the brink of discouragement, when
his eye was attracted by a large gilt umbrella on the next corner,
hung out over the street. Beneath it was a Spanish sign to the effect
that umbrellas could be bought, sold, or repaired within. In the
window was a large placard: “We speak English.”
“If I were skilful with my hands,” thought Loring, “I might get a
job repairing here; but I am not skilful with my hands.”
He stood reflecting, his hands deep in his pockets. An idea soon
came to him, for he had always been more resourceful than
successful.
He walked boldly into the shop, and approached the proprietor.
The man began to assume the smile with which he welcomed
prospective buyers, noticed Loring’s clothes, and checking the smile,
waited in silence for him to speak. Stephen, unabashed, smiled in a
most friendly fashion, and a few words of comment upon the
admirable situation of the shop, and the excellence of the stock,
quite won the owner’s confidence. After a few moments of
conversation, in a guile-free manner he asked: “And do you do much
repairing here?”
“No,” the proprietor admitted, “very little. Most of my business is
to buy and sell.”
 “It seems strange that in a big city such as this there should be no
demand for repairs?”
Stephen made the statement a question by the rising inflection.
He spoke with the hesitating assurance which had made so many
people trust him.
The proprietor shook his head in answer: “No, there is no
demand.”
“Is it not that people do not think, perhaps, do not know of your
place?”
“Very likely you are right,” answered the storekeeper. He was
pleased by the stranger’s interest in his business.
Then Loring played his high card.
“Suppose that you had an active English-speaking agent, who
would go to the offices and homes of the American and English
colony, and collect umbrellas to be repaired, then would not your
business flourish?”
The shop owner grasped the plan, but not with both hands.
“Y-e-s,” he answered slowly. In dealing with an American he felt
that he must be on his guard.
“Well,” continued Stephen, “I am such a man, very efficient
(Heaven help me!) and reliable (It won’t!). For a commission, no pay
in advance, but for a commission of say ten cents for each umbrella,
I will collect for you.” The umbrella man consented half reluctantly.
The matter was soon arranged, and Loring hastened forth upon his
rounds.
By six o’clock, after many strange experiences, and rebuffs, he
had managed to collect ten umbrellas. Gaudy red, somber black, two
green ones, and one white. All were in advanced stages of
decrepitude. He had pleaded with the owners to let them be
restored, as if each umbrella had an “inalienable right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.”
 With his odd collection bundled under his arms, Loring started on
his return to the store. Greatly pleased with the success of his
scheme, he strolled along talking to himself, and not noticing where
he was going.
Walking in the opposite direction to Loring on the same sidewalk
was another man. His quick, decisive steps and the slightly
deprecating glance which he cast at any thing of beauty in the
windows of the shops that he passed proclaimed him an American.
The expression on his face varied from amusement to scorn as he
glanced at things that were different from those in the States. There
was in his whole manner that good-humored toleration of the best
achievements of another nation that marks the travelling American.
The sidewalk was narrow, and the heavy shoulders of this man
overshadowed half the distance across. He was covering a good yard
at a stride, which was all the more remarkable as the most of his
height was above the waist. Had he been a girl, his hair would have
been called auburn where it showed beneath his hat. Being a man, it
may be truthfully said that it matched the bricks of the building he
was passing. His eyes, which were as round as the portholes of a
ship, betokened a degree of honesty and kindness which matched
well with the general effect of strength and homeliness given by his
whole appearance. The energy of all his motions was a sharp
contrast to Loring’s lazy stroll. At the second that he reached Loring,
his eyes were uplifted in wondering curiosity at the bright colors of
the roof tiles. His preoccupation, combined with Loring’s absorption,
made a collision inevitable. And the inevitable, as usual, took place.
“I beg your pard—” began Stephen, raising his eyes.
“Stephen Loring!” exclaimed the stranger. “Where in the devil did
you come from?”
“Baird Radlett!” called Stephen, as if stupefied.
They shook hands warmly. Radlett was an old friend of Stephen’s,
one who had been an intimate in the days before Loring’s
misfortunes.
 “Come on, Steve, we’ll go and get a drink,” said Radlett.
Loring shook his head. “Not for me, thanks,” he answered.
“Phew!” whistled Radlett. “Since when?” he involuntarily
exclaimed. Then for the first time he took notice of the strange load
which Loring was carrying.
“What on earth, Steve?” he asked, pointing to the umbrellas.
In the old days Loring had been well off, Radlett rich, and it hurt
Stephen to explain his abject poverty. He hesitated a moment, then
unblushingly replied:
“Why you see, Baird, I am on a sort of house-party here, and the
weather being fine, I thought that I would take all the girls’
umbrellas around to be fixed.”
Radlett stared in amazement, then both broke into shouts of
laughter, as the ridiculousness of the excuse struck them
simultaneously.
“See here, Steve, I know that you are in hard luck. Come down to
my hotel with me, and we will talk things over,” said Radlett. Putting
his arm affectionately through Loring’s, he dragged him, protesting,
along with him. As they walked, Stephen explained the matter of the
umbrellas, while Radlett listened amused, but a bit saddened.
“To think of dear old Steve Loring reduced to peddling umbrellas!”
he said to himself.
On their way, they came to the gilt sign of the umbrellas.
“I must leave these here,” said Loring.
Radlett tactfully waited outside, while Stephen entered and
deposited the results of his collection. The proprietor, who, when
released from Stephen’s winning conversation, had begun to feel
rather worried, was surprised and delighted at the success of the
mission. He opened the cash drawer, and handed to Stephen a silver
dollar. Stephen wrote down the addresses of the umbrella owners,
then with his new earned dollar clinking lovingly against the keys in
his pocket, he rejoined Radlett.
They walked briskly to the hotel where Radlett was staying, and
stepping into the smoking room, were soon comfortably ensconced
in two big leather armchairs, placed in an out-of-the-way corner of
the room.
 CHAPTER XIII
Radlett pounded upon the nickel bell on the smoking table, and
ordered two cigars. Stephen bit the end of his cigar hastily, while
Radlett produced a clipper from his pocket, and carefully cut the end
of his. These unconscious actions portrayed well the differences in
their characters. Drawing a match from the white earthenware
holder, Baird scratched it on the rough surface, and then held the
light to Stephen’s cigar.
“Mine is lighted, thank you, Baird,” said Loring, and through blue
circles of smoke he watched Radlett light his own cigar.
“I had almost forgotten what a stocky old brute Baird was,” he
mused. “I do not think, though, that I could ever forget that dear old
face. Of all the faces that I ever knew his is the homeliest, and the
kindest! If he poked that long jaw of his out at me, and looked at
me with those honest eyes, he might tell me that black was white,
and I should fight the man who said that it was not true.”
Radlett also utilized those first moments of silence brought about
by a good cigar, an old friend, and a comfortable chair, to make a
few observations of his own.
“In five years, Steve has changed a great deal,” he thought. “Five
years of failure, and drifting, such as I judge these to have been,
leave their mark on any man, definitely and indefinitely. Imagine
Loring, the fastidious, in those clothes five years ago! And then the
old frank manner has become a bit hesitant. He seems always on
the defensive. Poor old chap, he must have had some pretty hard
blows. The old light in his eyes is no longer there; but after all he
has that same quality of winning appeal, of humor and of latent
strength, which nothing can obliterate, which always has made and
always will make every one who knows him hope for the best, and
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