Social Epistemology: A Philosophy for Sociology or a Sociology of Philosophy?

Abstract

Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, £30.95, xxi+1098 pp. (ISBN 0-674-81647-1)

Alvin I. Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, £16.99 paperback, xiii+407 pp. (ISBN 0-19-823820-7)

Social epistemology versus social ontology

About a dozen years ago I started a journal and wrote a book, both with the name social epistemology (Fuller 1988; Fuller 1996). In the intervening years a few intrepid philosophers and sociologists have tried to map this area, and the two books under review represent two very important, yet very different, efforts from both sides of the disciplinary divide. But before proceeding further, I should say that ‘social epistemology’ is not the only rubric that philosophers and sociologists have used to map a common conceptual space. To be sure, in the days when Popper and Wittgenstein aroused passions, ‘philosophy of the social sciences’ could lay fair claim to that goal. Much of the work of Gouldner, Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieu is also easily interpreted as exercises in social epistemology, as each in its own way theorises the place of the knower in the production of social knowledge. However, at the same time, there has been considerable resistance to social epistemology amongst both philosophers and sociologists in Britain. (It is no coincidence that Collins and Goldman are American.) Instead, what may be called social ontology turns out to be the terms in which philosophy and sociology have sought common ground, and much of what today passes for ‘social theory’ – especially that which takes Anthony Giddens as a significant presence – falls under this rubric (Fuller 1995).