SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AS A SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE: Helen Longino's Critical Contextual Empiricism
The American philosopher Helen Longino defended the thesis of the sociability of knowledge in which social interactions play a relevant role in the production of knowledge. In this academic research we examine the Critical Contextual Empiricism proposed by Longino, in order to deepen the theoretical debate about the conception of knowledge. In her perspective, the sociability of knowledge is necessary to achieve an objectivity capable of controlling, to some extent, the subjective preferences of individuals. Furthermore, she defends a conception of plural, provisional, partial and local knowledge that takes into account its specific material, intellectual and social context. For that, the concepts of objectivity, reasoning, observation and interaction are discussed and analyzed to justify the pertinence of a social and complex knowledge. All these issues are deepened in the debates on social epistemology that took place in the 1990s, in which social factors (political, economic, cultural) influence conceptions of knowledge, and by extension, scientific knowledge. This is because philosophers and other theorists consider science to be the best model we have for producing knowledge.