Epistemology and the social

Evandro Agazzi, Javier Echeverría, Amparo Gómez Rodríguez

"Epistemology had to come to terms with "the social" on two different occasions. The first was represented by the dispute about the epistemological status of the "social" sciences, and in this case the already well established epistemology of the natural sciences seemed to have the right to dictate the conditions for a discipline to be a science. But the social sciences could successfully vindicate the legitimacy of their specific criteria for scientificity. More recently, the impact of social factors on the construction of our knowledge (including scientific knowledge) has reversed ... the old position and promoted social inquiry to the role of a criterion for evaluating the purport of cognitive (including scientific) statements"--P. 4 of cover.