Groups as Epistemic Communities: Social Forces and Affect as Antecedents to Knowledge

Abstract

Individuals desire a coherent worldview that both maintains personal affective states and contains functional knowledge enabling the completion of quotidian tasks. To create such a worldview, individuals seek information from both large-scale and local reference groups. Thus, group membership serves an important epistemic function. In this article, the core properties of social knowledge formation are conceptualized as the “epistemic calculus” of groups. Perceptions of low salience risks, such as global warming, are used to illustrate the social dimension of epistemic standards.

Keywords:

• Group Knowledge
• Epistemic Judgment
• Social Psychology of Knowledge

Acknowledgments

The writing of this article at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was made possible by a Fulbright ASLA graduate student grant, commissioned by the Fulbright Center in Helsinki, Finland. I would like to thank my advisors, Mark D. West at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman at the University of Helsinki, for guidance and stimulating conversations. The anonymous referees provided helpful, insightful comments.

Notes

[1] The focus on the importance of “us” in the pursuit of knowledge has enjoyed more substantial normative and veritistic accounts than the one sketched here, (Gilbert 1987; Tuomela 1995) and there are recent attempts to refine normative accounts to bridge the gap between the actual and the normative (Bergin 2001; Hakli 2007). These advances on the preconditions of group or collective knowledge recognize that what we know is always influenced by material, moral, social, and political factors. What is common to both normative and more descriptive accounts of collective knowledge is that they acknowledge that any significant or useful amount of knowledge lies beyond the powers of a single individual (Webb 1995). Thus, humans need and cannot avoid cooperative interaction in cognitive activities. It is hence unavoidable that such cooperation takes place in groups.

[2] Epistemologies of ignorance, I argue, put too little emphasis on the positive affect and well-being that comes in the form of increased group coherence and increased functionality of the group as a social entity. For Caplan (2007), the “ignorance” of the average citizen is a hindrance to the development of well-functioning society. What he fails to note, however, is the functionality that shared beliefs provide for social ends. Increasing political support for protectionist policies, say, may count as an ill-informed standpoint from Caplan’s perspective, but may strike a large subgroup of society as a functional idea that helps to maintain in-group coherence and appears as conducive to the well-being of the subgroup members. Some other recent accounts of public ignorance posit the epistemic function on the level of group, but see the social forces as harmful, as creators of oppression and inequality. Sullivan and Tuana (2007, 1), in their account of the epistemology of ignorance that “a lack of knowledge or an unlearning of something previously known often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation.” Such a viewpoint is compelling in setting an epistemic function of the level of social interaction, but dismisses the potentially epistemically positive and successful social ends as forces of mere oppression toward the outgroup. Similarly, in his essay on “White Ignorance,” Mills (2007, 20–23) posits that social epistemology should not be only an effort to bridge a knowledge gap but to understand the group-based reasons for such gaps. Yet, for Mills, as for Sullivan and Tuana, the group-based reasons for epistemic biases are ethically undesirable variables such as racism and white privilege.