Science, philosophy, and other social epistemic processes
Most of your knowledge you receive from others via testimony, often from sources for which you couldn’t check their reliability. We all nevertheless trust such sources, based on certain heuristic rules. But how do these mechanisms of reinforcing trust-relations exactly work? What level of trust is appropriate? Should we always trust experts? What happens if we lose our generalized trust in our institutions?
Science is a particularly organized and successful social epistemic process. What makes scientific reasoning processes so special? Are they unified at all, or is a pluralist account of science more appropriate? How does philosophy relate to the sciences? What is the role of intuitions and thought experiments in science and philosophy? How can philosophers learn from interdisciplinary collaboration with empirical research in psychology, sociology or psycholinguistics?
