Social epistemology straddles the philosophy/sociology disciplinary boundary, one of the most heavily policed zones of academia of the past century. Historically this is rather puzzling. Émile Durkheim and Max Weber had grounded the discipline of sociology in matters of ontology and epistemology, respectively, by developing possibilities left open by the leading philosophies of their day. Moreover, psychology, a discipline of the same late-nineteenth-century vintage founded on similar considerations, has managed to make its peace with philosophy after a half-century of charges and counter-charges of “psychologism”. In the past generation, the mutual respect between these two fields has evolved into several joint teaching and research programmes in cognitive science, where the empirical and normative dimensions of thought are once again fruitfully studied together. No such similar trend characterizes the current relationship between sociology and philosophy. “Sociologism” is still something that most philosophers and even some sociologists wish to avoid.

The troubled relationship between philosophy and sociology is most clearly marked in introductory logic textbooks. It is epitomized in the informal fallacies, popularly called red herrings, that purport to establish a conclusion on the basis of logically irrelevant premises. On closer inspection, these fallacies consist of explanatory strategies frequently found in sociology. Cognitive scientists would call them “heuristics”, namely, conceptual frameworks whose prima facie informativeness trades off against hasty generalization. Below is a list of these argumenta in their canonical Latin guises, alongside an explication that brings out their latent sociological content:

• Ad origines: The origins of a claim are relevant to determining its validity.