Bimal K. Matilal's Philosophy: Language, Realism, Dharma, and Ineffability

The article considers the theoretical and practical consequences of the so-called "soft" version of epistemological realism in Bimal K. Matilal's philosophical project. The author offers an analytical view on Matilal's philosophy, which helps to understand it in a broader prospective, comparing his arguments on perception and objectivity with contemporary arguments in Western analytical philosophy; in fact, it is possible to view Matilal not only as the proponent of revised Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika approach, but also as the follower of realistic view on language, following L. Wittgenstein, W. Quine, H. Putnam and M. Dummett. Despite the fact that such interpretation may sound diverse or multivocal, it nevertheless helps to better understand both lineages of argumentation: the critical review of the impossibility of private language can be compared in both Western and Indian philosophical discourses, which leads into the domain of social epistemology. The second part of the article discusses the ethical arguments on the vulnerability of moral virtues, and the place of Dharma as a term in moral philosophy. Poetical and metaphorical language appears to be a fruitful strategy to discover the ineffable - and also via negativa and catuṣkoṭi - which is shown by Matilal on the example of the unacceptability of lying. The ethical ineffability and its interconnection with Matilal's commentaries on practical wisdom play the crucial part in the interpretations of Dharmaśāstra texts.

Religious Disagreement and Pluralism

This volume explores many issues at the intersection of the epistemology of disagreement and religious epistemology. Epistemological questions about the significance of disagreement have advanced in concert with broader developments in social epistemology concerning testimony, the nature of expertise and epistemic authority, the role of institutions, group belief, and epistemic injustice, among others. During this period, related issues in the epistemology of religion have re-emerged as worthy of new consideration, and available to be situated with new conceptual tools. Does disagreement between, and within, religions, challenge the rationality of religious commitment? How should religious adherents think about exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist frameworks as applied to religious truth, or to matters of salvation or redemption? This volume engages in careful reflection on religious diversity and disagreement, offering ways to balance epistemic humility with personal conviction. Recognizing the place of religious differences in our social lives, it provides renewed efforts at how best to think about truths concerning religion.

Symmetry as a Guide to Post-truth Times: A Response to Lynch

William Lynch has provided an informed and probing critique of my embrace of the post-truth condition, which he understands correctly as an extension of the normative project of social epistemology. This article roughly tracks the order of Lynch’s paper, beginning with the vexed role of the ‘normative’ in Science and Technology Studies, which originally triggered my version of social epistemology 35 years ago and has been guided by the field’s ‘symmetry principle’. Here the pejorative use of ‘populism’ to mean democracy is highlighted as a failure of symmetry. Finally, after rejecting Lynch’s appeal to a hybrid Marxian–Darwinism, Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes are contrasted en route to what I have called ‘quantum epistemology’.

The structure of scientific controversies: Thomas Kuhn’s social epistemology

Changes of theories are major events in science. Two main types of questions may be asked about them: i) how do scientists choose new theories?, and ii) how is consensus formed? Generally, philosophers do not distinguish these two questions. Kuhn, on the contrary, offers very different answers to each of these questions. Theory-choice, on the one hand, is explained through the application of epistemic criteria, such as accuracy and consistency; nonetheless, because these values do not prescribe a single choice, consensus formation, on the other hand, is explained through a series of socio-epistemic mechanisms, namely: scientific pedagogy, diffusion and production of knowledge within the community (the “wave motion”), and restructuring of the scientific field. These mechanisms are the basis of Kuhn’s social epistemology, in that they are not restricted to sociology nor epistemology, encompassing both social interactions and epistemic evaluations of theories. Keywords: Thomas Kuhn, consensus formation, social epistemology.

Social Epistemology, Descriptive and Normative

Social epistemology ought to incorporate both a descriptive element (understanding our actual knowledge practices) and a normative element (assessing and evaluating those practices). While the two dominant traditions of social epistemology research in the last three decades tend to privilege one of these elements over the other, this chapter aims to articulate and defend an approach that can accommodate both and avoid the distortions.

The Division of Epistemic Labor

This chapter builds on the author’s programmatic approach to research in social epistemology, according to which such research involves the systematic investigation of the epistemic significance of other minds. This research program is developed by appeal to the thesis of the Division of Epistemic Labor. After formulating this thesis as a thesis of epistemic dependence, the chapter illustrates several ways in which individual subjects are epistemically dependent on one or more of the members of their community in the process of knowledge acquisition. Such an account supports various conclusions about the cognitively distributed nature of some knowledge acquisition, and the chapter ends with these.

Foundations and Applications of Social Epistemology

This book collects twelve recent papers by the author on social epistemology. Roughly half of them propose a research program for social epistemology—including an animating vision, foundational questions, and core concepts—and the other half are applications of this vision to particular topics. The author characterizes the research program itself as the exploration of the epistemic significance of other minds. Such a program will enumerate the various ways in which we depend epistemically on others, it will describe the proper way to evaluate beliefs according to the sort of dependence they exhibit, and it will provide the basis for identifying and characterizing various dysfunctions of our epistemic communities. The book suggests that several core concepts will be helpful as part of this exploration: epistemic dependence (direct and diffuse); entitlements (epistemic as well as those deriving from our social practices); the normative expectations we have of one another as epistemic subjects; and the socio-epistemic practices in which we participate. It goes on to put this program and these concepts into practice by exploring such topics as the epistemic agency exhibited in inquiry, the practices that constitute news coverage, the basis for allegations of what we or others should have known, how reliance on another’s testimony contrasts with reliance on an instrument, our reliance on others as consumers of testimony, and the epistemic upshot of non-epistemic social norms (whether these are moral, political, professional, or relationship-based).

Conceptualization of user activities in the social network in the conditions of distance education

In the article, social media is analyzed through the focus of understanding the latter as a virtual space of the media, which reflects such identifying indicators of users as: interest, desire, enthusiasm and direction of integration processes. The relevance of the study is determined by the insufficient development and inconsistency of the concepts and empirical results of research on the processes of differentiation of the community of social networks and their role in the conditions of distance education. The methods of philosophical, analysis and hermeneutics were used: interpretation, conceptualization, comparative analysis. As a theoretical and methodological base, we used the categorical apparatus of social philosophy, mathematics, theory of practice, pragmatism, social epistemology. We used approaches to extracting the activity of user groups in a multi-layer social network: 1) extracting groups in each layer separately, and then combining communities throughout the layers; 2) first transforming the social network into one layer, and then searching for different groups within.