Social Epistemology: How to Get Knowledge in Modern Society?

Dear Colleagues,

Social Epistemology concerns the social dimension of knowledge and its usages in modern and complex societies, as it is believed to be crucial to find a source for the reliability of shared beliefs and information.

From a methodological viewpoint, in most of the insights of social and political philosophy, the problem of the use and exploitation of knowledge by actors is understood in a “constructivist” way. In classical and modern political philosophy, rationalist constructivism dominated for a long time, the most exemplary formulation of which is perhaps the Hobbesian Leviathan. The same thing can be said for the political subject: if one looks at the concepts of learning, perception or cognition in the models of society described by political philosophy, one is surprised that there is practically no trace of them. Some of the relevant models of political agency do not appear to face with the features that agents should have (think about the “abstract” holder of Natural Rights). Others shift the role of the agency to polar opposite levels of explanation (the decision-maker that hides behind the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”, who is deprived of any kind of knowledge; the subject dominated by the Foucauldian “dispositive” of power). They do not refer to social epistemology; they do not show interest in individual learning processes, the formation of beliefs and the relevance of knowledge for collective decision-making processes.

In an increasingly complex and interdependent world, the interdisciplinarity of the skills that the resolution of social problems requires radically changed the modalities by which collective decisions are made, as the latter must deal with the way in which knowledge is produced in a society. For all these reasons, we would like to explore different perspectives on the objectivity of social knowledge and, in particular, the role of classical epistemology, mostly based on individual epistemic skills. We would explore the ways through which modern societies can exploit social knowledge and their capability to maximize it to enhance epistemic progress.

In the ambit of classical epistemology and political epistemology, we invite contributions on these topics:

1. The problem of justification based on testimony
2. The problem of peer disagreement
3. Network theory and the capacity of democracy to make use of dispersed knowledge
4. The potentiality of epistemic and liquid democracy and their paradigms
5. The problem of ignorance in policy design

Prof. Dr. Raffaela Giovagnoli
Dr. Jacopo Marchetti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Philosophies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• social epistemology
• political epistemology
• epistemic democracy
• social evidence
• peer disagreement