Collective Knowledge and Epistemic Trust - Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Social Epistemology

We are living in a knowledge society. The insights of science and the specialist knowledge of experts have increased exponentially in the last decades and become more and more important for coping with social problems and challenges. At the same time, however, because of the epistemic division of labour, the gap between the individual knowledge of the single person and the collective knowledge of the society has deepened as well. At the conference the consequences of this problem are to be discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective, following up the research programme of “social epistemology”. The starting point of social epistemology is the elementary fact that a large proportion of individual knowledge is acquired by relying on information from others: individual knowledge of the world is largely dependent on testimony. For the philosopher the normative question arises as to how a person’s beliefs can be justified which are not grounded in the person’s own experience and deductions. At the conference this normative question should be linked with studies of the social sciences that explore the empirical conditions and factual restrictions under which information transfer takes place in different contexts and which reveal the external limitations of epistemic judgments. As common ground for an interdisciplinary co-operation between philosophy and the social sciences, the analysis of epistemic trust is especially promising. From both perspectives, trust in epistemic sources plays a key role in processes of information transfer. In this field, therefore, excellent prospects open up for a mutually beneficial academic co-operation.