Social Logic
Social epistemology is a field of philosophy that studies knowledge not as it is held by individuals, but as it is shared in communities. Once we consider a social perspective, questions about knowledge arise that weren’t salient for individuals. How do we come to know things from others? How can we trust others to have the right kind of justification for a belief to count as knowledge? Is group knowledge always reducible to individual knowledge? Or is it possible for new knowledge to emerge once individuals get together and pool their individual knowledge?
Social epistemology forces us to look at praxis, where theory and practice meet. In praxis, a question that quickly becomes important is when we can rely on testimony. In the community, we often have to rely on the knowledge of others. I know that right after I was born, I looked up to my mother with big brown curious eyes. How do I know that? Because my mother told me, and I fully trust her testimony. But I don’t trust the testimony of the Hill couple, a famous case of alien abduction that I go over in detail in *Logic in the Wild*. I trust the sincerity in their reports of the events, but that they believe it was an alien abduction that best explains the weird course of events they experienced doesn’t make me believe in their version of the story, let alone grant me knowledge of it.
Now, is there a corresponding way to think about logic at the social level? What might social logic look like? What happens to coherence when we pool individuals’ perspectives? One thing obvious is that all individuals could have coherent stories, but theories that clash when they are put together. How are we to resolve incoherence in such cases? And what about the logical aspect of testimony? A testimony has to be told in a coherent fashion to be communicable, but what logical standards are appropriate in receiving the testimony? Circling back to the Hill couple, I think their testimony is coherent, but of course coherence doesn’t lead to truth.
What if, however, they weren’t only retelling a weird story that happened to them overnight, but a story that involves paradoxes? Or perhaps they are expressing something in a worldview that appeals to holistic conceptualisation whose coherence cannot be recognised from an orthodox logical point of view. Can logic be influenced in such social contexts?
