ABSTRACT
Social epistemology (Fuller, 1988) is epitomized by a pair of questions: Is knowledge well governed? How would we know? The main difficulty in addressing these questions is not how to identify the best regime for “science,” understood in broad (Germanic wissenschaftlich) terms as the organized search for knowledge. The norms governing such a regime enjoy a wide consensus, from which I myself do not dissent (Fuller, 2000a). The regime is a kind of a civic republicanism, what Popper called the “open society,” whereby scientists constitute the universe of mutually accountable individuals pursuing divergent means in support of a common end, in which the “common weal” is replaced by “truth.” (These individuals may be doing other things as well, but they must be doing at least this in order to comprise a republic of science.) But agreement on the normatively preferred regime leaves open two other matters: the ultimate ends served by such a regime and the degree to which current scientific practices approximate the best regime. The former concerns the external, the latter the internal, social epistemology of science.
