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Advocates or Unencumbered Selves? On the Role of Mill's Political Liberalism in Longino's Contextual Empiricism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Justin B. Biddle
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Abstract

Helen Longino's “contextual empiricism” is one of the most sophisticated recent attempts to defend a social theory of science. On this view, objectivity and epistemic acceptability require that research be produced within communities that approximate a Millian marketplace of ideas. I argue, however, that Longino's embedding of her epistemology within the framework of Mill's political liberalism implies a conception of individual epistemic agents that is incompatible with her view that scientific knowledge is necessarily social, and I begin to articulate an alternative conception that is better suited to a truly social theory of science.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 76 , Issue 5 , December 2009 , pp. 612 - 623
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

In the course of writing this paper, the author has benefited from the comments of numerous individuals, including Martin Carrier, Kevin Elliott, Carla Fehr, Don Howard, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Janet Kourany, Kathleen Okruhlik, Daniel Sirtes, Miriam Solomon, Marcel Weber, Torsten Wilholt, and Eric Winsberg. Thanks are due also to the members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and to the audiences of the 2007 EPSA, the Workshop on Collective Epistemology at the University of Basel, and the 2008 PSA.

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