Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The knowledge-like character of science is often called its cognitive content, or, more simply, content. The word “content” is based on the metaphor of container and contained, with lingering medieval connotations of body and spirit, matter and form, statement and proposition. The underlying intuition is that the universal character of scientific knowledge is tied to its capacity for being conveyed in multiple containers. (See epistemic justice.) Thus, the content of a scientific theory is what is common to its linguistic formulations and technological applications.
But suppose we take seriously the strong social epistemological thesis that science's cognitive content is coextensive with its social context. In other words, it is just as misleading to claim that science is done only by professional scientists in laboratories as it is to claim that finances are transacted exclusively by professional bankers: just as all of society can be regarded from a financial standpoint, so too from a scientific standpoint. To capture this totalizing sense of science – its socio-cognitive identity, so to speak – the various solutions to the mind–body problem offer a model for understanding the possible interrelations of cognitive and social factors, which together can provide alternative explanations for scientific knowledge.
In terms of this model, most philosophers and sociologists remain dualists of some sort. They assume that cognitive and social factors are separable entities, somewhat like experimentally manipulable variables.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Knowledge BookKey Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture, pp. 40 - 43Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2007