Knowledge and Evidence Book

Social Empiricism is a good attempt at bringing together social scientific literature on science and philosophy of science. This, in and of itself, is a good project and one that Solomon accomplishes well. If I were to recommend a book for philosophers of science looking to branch into discussions in science and technology studies (or "SSK" as it was called when the book was written) this would certainly be on my shortlist; it doesn't really cut the other way, as the discussion is really of social scientific concepts in a philosophical vernacular, and not the other way around.

The more ambitious project, laying out the "Social Empiricist" programme Solomon has in mind, is not as successful; recognizing that it is hard to do anything truly programmatic in less than 300-or-so pages. Rarely is something truly visionary produced in a short work; there are obvious instances, and they are wonderful, but they are great partly because of their economy. With that perspective, Solomon does a good job offering a preface to her view, and situating it in a sea of complicated and extensively discussed epistemologies of science. For those who are familiar with the literature in epistemology of science (that is, the technical philosophical literature on the subject) Solomon does a good job at situating her account; for those who are in the social sciences and not really comfortable with the vernacular of analytic philosophy of science, it will be frustrating and largely useless.

For my purposes, I found Solomon's discussion incredibly useful and engaging. Solomon's approach to understanding scientific theory preference as a matter of "decision vectors" is useful, as it helps us appreciate that these sorts of theories have to be multidimensional in order to get even close to plausibility. Some of the sketches that Solomon presents are... well... sketchy. (She assigns straightforward values to social factors where there are clearly differences in magnitude along the various vectors, but if we take this as merely illustrative of the various factors that can be understood as vectors, this is fine.)

I won't get into most of the disputes that I have with Solomon, because they have to do with the substance of her ideas. The fact, though, that I've found the ideas already so engaging is a testament to how well the book resonates with my own position straddling the social science and philosophy of science. These are the sorts of truly interdisciplinary books that are well worth reading, as they are unambiguous, good-faith efforts made by philosophers to step outside of the ideological space that they are often stereotyped (rightly as often as wrongly) as constrained by.