Khalifa, Kareem and Goldberg, Sanford (2025) Do Scientific Communities Understand? A Fictionalist Account. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Scientific understanding typically involves multiple specialists performing interdependent tasks. According to several social-epistemological accounts, this suggests that scientific communities are collective epistemic subjects. We argue instead that the data does not warrant the postulation of a collective subject. Our position, rather, is fictionalist: we argue that the use of sentences attributing understanding to scientific communities amounts to loose talk which is best construed as indicating how social environments associated with a scientific community promote individual scientists' understanding.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Khalifa, Kareem kkhalifa@ucla.edu 0000-0001-7654-7684 Goldberg, Sanford s-goldberg@northwestern.edu 0000-0001-9496-6356
Keywords:	understanding, collective epistemology, social epistemology
Subjects:	General Issues > Explanation General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science
Depositing User:	Prof Kareem Khalifa
Date Deposited:	15 Jun 2025 13:18
Last Modified:	15 Jun 2025 13:18
Item ID:	25700
DOI or Unique Handle:	10.1007/s11098-025-02356-2
Subjects:	General Issues > Explanation General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science
Date:	15 June 2025
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/25700

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