The dichotomy between individualist and collectivist/communitarian social theories, while of some value, ultimately confuses the issues it is meant to address. This is seen, for instance, in comparing Turner and Kusch’s respective uses of the dichotomy. While the former’s critique of collectivist concepts and the latter’s critique of individualist testimony appear to pit each in diametric opposition to the other, I think a closer look paints a much more complex picture, one that transcends the individualist-collectivist dichotomy. Assessing the translation view in terms of Kusch’s four point critique of individualist testimony is a helpful starting point.
Turner’s individualist social theory raises many of the same concerns with the testimony view as Kusch’s communitarian epistemology. Of Kusch’s four main criticisms, Turner agrees on three. For both, testimony is wrong to posit social interaction as a merely derivative source of knowledge since, leading to the second point, interaction does not consist of the transmission of complete items of knowledge. The translation view also corroborates Kusch’s third criticism— that items of knowledge are delivered solely by perception, memory, and inference—but for different reasons. The weak empathy model grounds all knowledge in perception (i.e., the input- receiver picture) but undermines the notion of itemized knowledge in favor of the continuous refinement of skills. Since I scrutinized the input-receiver picture in the previous section, I will focus on the translation view in relation to Kusch’s fourth criticism of testimony, namely that the “testifier” and “recipient” need possess only minimal social knowledge of each other.
By emphasizing the individual differences and the noisiness of social interaction, the translation view claims that people, in fact, only possess minimal knowledge of each other, social or otherwise. For Turner, Kusch’s first three criticisms reflect the misguided belief that epistemic interaction depends on a shared foundation. This shared foundation takes the form of either a shared currency (e.g., Searle’s rational normativity) or the basis for a shared currency (e.g., Goldman’s view that objective facts are the basis for sharing propositional beliefs). Turner’s attack on collectivist concepts aims to counteract the glossing over of individual difference and the whitewashing of social interaction wrought by the appeal to a shared foundation. For Kusch, of course, the three criticisms point in the opposite direction—to the neglect of epistemic communities.
The basic problem with the testimony view, for Kusch, is the conviction that all cognition occurs within a discrete isolable individual. The fourth point regarding the importance of social
knowledge serves as a jumping off point for Kusch’s communitarian epistemology. Two
interacting cognitive subjects are, Kusch thinks, often members of a shared epistemic community and this shared membership directly affects the epistemic interaction. While I noted some issues with Kusch’s proposal in §1.7, I think the basic idea that community membership and social identities play a direct role in epistemic interaction is a valuable insight worth retaining. Towards this end, Turner’s critique of collectivist concepts is a useful standard for refining Kusch’s understanding of community. By way of introducing this revision, it is first worth noting an underlying connection between the collectivist and individualist critiques.
Vacuous collectivism goes hand-in-glove with the disconnected individualism that Kusch diagnoses. As touched on in relation to testimony’s motivation problem, picturing epistemic agents as isolated units creates spurious gaps. In order to present something that resembles a social theory, it is necessary to suture over these gaps, creating the need for vacuous collectivist concepts. In short, if you carve epistemic agents up into self-contained units, then you have to somehow explain the stickiness of other people. This is true even if it’s a very weak adhesive, such as an innate disposition to mirror others. The fundamental issue—what I think is antithetical to a properly social epistemology—is the conviction that there must either be an individual mechanism or perceived instrumental benefit that steers an individual towards interacting with other individuals. D’Agostino’s portrait of epistemic communities is an example of an account that transcends this understanding of the individualist-collectivist dichotomy.
D’Agostino’s concept of shallow consensus—mentioned previously in Ch. 1—depicts a form of community membership that shuns the collectivist notion of a shared foundation. Shallow consensus refers to D’Agostino’s (2010) claim that agreements within epistemic
community—from values of deliberation and evaluative standards to, in the case of scientific communities, the particular judgments relating to theory choice. Shallow consensus is essential for reconciling an epistemic community’s dual need for solidarity and diversity (89). With regard to solidarity, research teams and individuals within a research team are able to reach consensus despite important disagreements, many of which they are not even aware of, which is necessary when dealing with extremely complex and multifaceted problems. This fragile solidarity
simultaneously ensures that consensual judgments do not preclude diverse approaches to and explorations of a problem space (91). Unlike Kusch and Turner, D’Agostino sees the
individualist and collectivist poles in terms of a productive tension.
Social epistemology is itself a noisy and multifaceted problem space. In terms of this picture, I see Turner and Kusch as exploring different patches of the problem space—imitative learning and performative language-use, respectively—and D’Agostino mapping the problem space itself. By themselves, Turner and Kusch’s models are only one-factor accounts of social interaction but when assembled together as part of D’Agostino’s heterogeneous map, each offers a valuable perspective on what are in fact thoroughly heterogeneous phenomena. But in order to motivate this motley assemblage—which I detail in Ch. 4—it is first necessary to displace the input-receiver picture noted above, since it is this picture that implies that it is possible to isolate and dissect a fundamental nature at the root of the cognitive subject. In the following chapter, I draw upon enactivism in order to reconceptualize the cognitive subject in terms of an essentially active agent who cannot be examined apart from interactions with his or her contingent