An Overview of Social Epistemology

Steve Fuller

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that there is little consensus of what social epistemology would comprehend, but one some believe that it should be a radical departure from classical epistemology. An African-American is indeed radical and social. Social epistemology, according to Steve Fuller is defined by three criteria (1) under normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by normal human beings, (2) each person or group is working on a more or less well-defined body of knowledge and (3) each person or group is equipped with roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities. With respect to an African-American epistemology, not recognized by traditional epistemologist, satisfy the three criteria.  An African-American may very well be “one” of many African-American epistemologies because African-Americans are not a monolithic group of persons. One distinct AAE would be possible as a result conservative thinking, such as the ideals that of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his followings. They assert that the Civil Rights Movement had no direct bearing on their success, but rather a “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”.

An AAE is social and comes because of post-modern thought. The social theories that would be considered are race theory, culture, social positions, particularities, skepticism, subjectivity, discourse, and our embededness in the discourse, interpreted realities and relationships of power. African-Americans have internalized these variables in a way that White America has not; and in some ways, White America has not had the conscious need to think about them. This is a normal paradigm of how African-Americans exist in a racist society. A modern approach is discounted because of its correlation with a dualism from which racism derives a concept of blackness and whiteness, superiority and inferiority, etc.

In the first criteria, even though Fuller uses the world normal, there is embedded in this descriptor, the concept of normative. An African-American Epistemology is definitely not normative; but, in fact, normal human beings pursue this typology of knowledge.

Fuller takes the “normal circumstances cited in the question to be universal, both historically and trans-culturally, “a brute fact to be responsible not only for the variety of products that have passed for knowledge itself”. Much of the information does not appear to be trans-cultural and under normal circumstances, as Fuller has described. Many historical facts have not been reported accurately about African-Americans, especially in history books.  Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, little mention was made of the contributions of African-Americans to American Culture. The point of distinction made here is that much information researched by African-Americans is often rejected by White America, when considering what knowledge is.  The second criteria of more or less well-defined bodies of knowledge are exactly what AAE is.. Racism is not well defined and not an ideology in political philosophy. The third criterion that recognizes “imperfect cognitive capacities” permits one to begin thinking of how to construct an AAE and what needs to be included. If one acknowledges that we have imperfect cognitive capacities, there should not be a problem in recognizing that there is a need to depart from classical epistemology and begin to accept that sources and theories of knowledge need to be more comprehensive in including diverse social, cultural and race groups