Alvin I. Goldman

I've seldom been more disappointed with the structure of a philosophical book than with this one. The author attempts to put together very general analyses of broad social systems. I think he misapplies his method and fails to find the right vantage points. His analyses don't yield any interesting insights.

After a couple of introductory chapters the author presents his theoretical framework for social epistemology in chapter 3. He understands social epistemology as "a discipline that evaluates social practices along truth-linked dimensions" (p.69). I thought he explained his plan well in general terms, but when he puts the plan in action he underestimates the difficulty in "evaluating social practices". Many of the "practices" he investigates are so broad that it would be a lifetime's work to analyze them epistemologically. Instead of thinking the matter through, he seems more than happy to settle for a general review of earlier literature and a tentative, unspecific argument. The few conclusions he manages to eke out are uninteresting and obvious.

This applies particularly to chapters 8-10, where the practices under study are science, law and democracy, respectively. In the chapter on science he presents the standard literature for undergraduate studies in the philosophy of science, but I don't see how it is relevant for social epistemology. The only conclusion he can muster is that science is better than non-science in answering the sorts of questions that science seeks to answer! In chapter 9 he tries to act as the epistemological referee between the common law and civil law traditions. This hopelessly difficult task doesn't move a single step towards resolution in his weak analysis, which simply cites a few earlier studies and laments the difficulty of studying this problem in practice.

He then pulls a peculiar trick in chapter 10 on democracy. He begins by defining voter knowledge as true belief (voters have knowledge only if they correctly anticipate future policies) and then proceeds to an obvious conclusion: the more voters know, the better democratic systems will work. But the purpose of this circular argument was lost on me. The true epistemological problem would seem to lie in the initial presupposition: how could voters ever hope to acquire true beliefs about how their vote will impact policy? How can democracy work if they don't? The author reviews some concrete proposals from political science for improving voter knowledge, but the philosophical questions lie elsewhere.

In conclusion, the author's method for "evaluating social practices" amounts to little more than a few offhand guesses on how practices might be improved, with no real argument to back them up. He leans heavily on previous work and struggles to say anything that hasn't been said before. I was quite disappointed and I would think there are better avenues for epistemological investigations of social phenomena. The vague conclusions that pass for social epistemology in this book will only give it a bad name.… (mere)