Papers presented at a meeting of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science, held Sept. 22-25, 2005, in Tenerife, Canary Islands.

Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary material / Editors Epistemology and the Social -- INTRODUCTION: EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL / Evandro Agazzi , Javier Echeverría and Amparo Gómez Rodríguez -- EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL: A FEEDBACK LOOP / Evandro Agazzi -- HISTORICAL AND TRANSCENDENTAL FACTORS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SCIENCES / Hervé Barreau -- PUZZLES AND PROBLEMS / Juan Urrutia Elejalde -- NORMATIVITY AND SELF-INTEREST IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH / Jesús P. Zamora Bonilla -- ECONOMIC VALUES IN THE CONFIGURATION OF SCIENCE / Wenceslao J. González -- THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPACT OF TECHNOSCIENCE OR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PRAGMATIC PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE / Ramón Queraltó -- EPISTEMOLOGY AND “THE SOCIAL” IN CONTEMPORARY NATURAL SCIENCE / Alberto Cordero -- SOCIAL FACTORS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENETICS AND THE LYSENKO AFFAIR / Jesús Mosterín -- SOCIAL MILIEU AND EVOLUTION OF LOGIC, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: THE CASE OF MARXISM / Valentín A. Bazhanov -- BOUNDED RATIONALITY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES / Juan Fco. Álvarez and Javier Echeverría -- RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY AND ECONOMIC LAWS: THE ROLE OF SHARED VALUES / Amparo Gómez Rodríguez -- THE INVISIBLE HAND: WHAT DO WE KNOW? / Brigitte Falkenburg -- THE COSMOPOLITAN VISION / Peter Kemp.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

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, in a certain sense, the old position and promoted social inquiry to the role of a criterion for evaluating the purport of cognitive (including scientific) statements. But this has undermined the traditional characteristics of objectivity and rigor that seem constitutive of science. Moreover, in order to establish the real extent to which social conditionings have an impact on scientific knowledge one must credit sociology with a sound ground of reliability, and this is not possible without a preliminary “epistemological” assessment. These are some of the topics discussed in this book, both theoretically and with reference to concrete cases.