Socio-functional foundations in science: The case of measurement |
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Authors: | Kareem Khalifa Sanford C. Goldberg |
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Affiliation: | 1. Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, USA;2. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA |
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Abstract: | We present a novel kind of “socio-functional” foundationalism rooted in the division of scientific labor. Our foundationalism is social in that it involves a socio-epistemic phenomenon we dub epistemic outsourcing, whereby claims from one group of scientists provide epistemological foundations for another group of scientists. We argue that: (1) epistemic outsourcing results in a legitimate form of epistemic foundationalism, (2) this sort of foundationalism can be used to shed light on the epistemology of measurement; and (3) epistemic outsourcing is a distinctively collective epistemic phenomenon. |
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