A Brief Exposition of Miriam Solomon’s Social Empiricism

Abstract

Nearly for the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change - that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. Mostly discussions got polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress; and sociologists, who talked about relativism and constructivism. However, recently new ideas have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science etc., which goes beyond the polarized positions. Addressing the traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science named Social Empiricism. She holds that to develop an adequate theory regarding the sociality of knowledge, the insights and claims coming from the sociology of scientific knowledge, feminist studies as well as various historical, ethnographical or psychological accounts of science have to be taken seriously. Solomon argues that in spite of many differences, philosophers and sociologists of science share not only standards for the evaluation of scientific practices, but also many underlying assumptions about science due to a shared background in Enlightenment epistemology. These shared premises include individualism, i.e. the focus on the individual thinker, the demand that science should be free of motivational or ideological bias, the appreciation of consensus and the all-or-nothing quality of rationality, that is, rationality does not come in degrees. Solomon argues that these shared assumptions about the nature of rationality and progress lead to mirror image views of the nature of scientific change and that they need to be overcome for a new social epistemology.