Knowledge-First Social Epistemology

Course Overview

This course introduces students to state of the art research in social epistemology. Social epistemology investigates the epistemic effects of social interactions: e.g., how we gain knowledge from social sources (others’ testimony, the media), how we should respond to disagreement, how groups (scientific teams, organisations) can know. It is among the most thriving areas in contemporary philosophy. Results in social epistemology have wide, direct impact on: (1) scientific practice (e.g. concerning academic publishing, guidelines for scientific authorship and collaboration, knowledge policy and debates over the role of the Internet in knowledge transmission and creation); (2) society at large (e.g. concerning voting, legal standards for criminal conviction, cross-cultural communication barriers, licensing mass communication policies, increasing social cohesion). ​ This course is therefore highly relevant in the​ context of a globalised society, replete with both easy-access information and misinformation, where it is more important than ever to know what separates trustworthy sources of information from untrustworthy ones. This course is part of a KnowledgeLab project that has received funding from the  European Research Council (ERC) Opens in a new tab   KnowledgeLab is a major research project in social epistemology, financed by a Euro grant from the European Research Council and hosted by the  COGITO Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK.