Constructivism or epistemic advantage, but not both: (not) solving the circularity problem

Article

Summary *

Can we both claim that all knowledge is relative to a certain framework (such as a socially situated ‘standpoint’) and that some such frameworks are better than others? Does this not lead us either to the circular justification that the standpoint we favour is ‘privileged’ according to that privileged standpoint, or to an inconsistent appeal to a non-situated perspective as our basis to evaluate different standpoints? Ashton and McKenna have sketched a possible way out, by claiming that achievements which presuppose one standpoint can be assessed as valuable according to criteria shared by different standpoints. They argue that the privileged standpoint of members of a group may improve scientific practice by modifying the ‘conception of evidence’ employed in a discipline and therefore allowing for better hypotheses to count as justified in it. Crucially, ‘better’ should not be understood as ‘better according to the standards of the standpoint being assessed’ but as ‘better according to shared standards’. Unfortunately, they frame this proposal in a constructivist reading of the relationship ‘evidence E justifies belief B’, in which the influence of members of a group should be read as modifying the very status of something as evidence for a belief (against ‘objectivism about justification’). The obstacle is that, if a hypothesis is supposed to be ‘better’ according to the criteria the authors appeal to (simplicity, explanatory power and predictive power), it becomes unintelligible how it was not a justified hypothesis all along. We conclude that accepting the kind of ‘Epistemic Advantage Thesis’ which the authors want to hold requires rejecting constructivism Information provided by the agent in SIGEVA