Responsibilism and the Analytic-Sociological Debate in Social Epistemology

• Main Author: Susan Dieleman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Western Ontario 2016-10-01
• Series: Feminist Philosophy Quarterly
• Online Access: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/3044

This is the second paper in the invited collection. Dieleman provides an overview of the “state-of-the-field” debate between Analytic Social Epistemology (ASE), represented by Alvin Goldman, and what Dieleman calls the Sociological Social Epistemology (SSE), represented by Steve Fuller. In response to this ongoing debate, this paper has two related and complementary objectives. The first is to show that the debate between analytic and sociological versions of social epistemology is overly simplistic and doesn’t take into account additional positions that are available and, indeed, have been available since social epistemology was (re)introduced in the mid to late 1980s. The second is to uncover and tell a story of how Lorraine Code’s Epistemic Responsibility is one such additional position. Looking to Code's Epistemic Responsibility reveals the artificiality of the debate between analytic and sociological social epistemologists.