Folk Epistemology as Normative Social Cognition - 0 views
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Wildcat2030 wildcat on 06 Jan 10"Epistemology tout court is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of knowledge (as a product) and knowing (as a process that produces knowledge). One of the epistemologist's goals is to separate the epistemic wheat from the doxastic chaff, knowledge from mere beliefs; another is to describe the very nature of knowledge: its features, conditions, sources, justification and limits. Folk epistemology, by contrast, refers to our ordinary, commonsensical, everyday, naïve and intuitive conceptions of knowledge. As Kitchener puts it, folk epistemology consists of "our 'untutored' views about the nature of knowledge" (R. F. Kitchener 2002, p. 89). Research on folk epistemology falls into two broad, sometimes overlapping, paradigms. One concerns what we might call epistemic theories and the other epistemic intuitions. Research on the former seeks to elucidate how people think, reason and represent knowledge (a field often referred to as "personal epistemology") (Hofer and Pintrich 2002). Subjects are asked to explicate their beliefs about knowledge, its source or its justification. By contrast, research on the latter seeks to probe folk intuitions in particular cases. Instead of being asked about their beliefs as to what knowledge is in general, subjects are asked to decide whether a character in a scenario knows or merely believes something (Nagel 2007). In this paper, we argue that research on folk epistemology must take place within the broader context of research on normative social cognition. By this, we mean that folk epistemology must be conceived as a phenomenon that is produced by the cognitive machinery that underlies the more general capacities to understand intentional norm following, as well as to follow norms of action and reasoning in the context of everyday social interactions. Section 1 presents the two main research paradigms on folk epistemology, the first focused on epistemic intuitions and the second on epistemic theories. Section 2 s