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1. Digging deep in the sociality of interaction: lessons from knowledge-making in potato science

   Kendig, Catherine; Bursten, Julia (May 2024, International Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice)

   In her recent "What's Social About Social Epistemology?" (Longino 2022, JFP 109(4)) Helen Longino turns her attention to a particular aspect of the sociality of science, which she terms “the sociality of interaction.” (171) In her account, social interaction among scientific groups is essential to the production of scientific knowledge. She discusses many activities that exemplify the sociality of interaction in the sciences — from the uses of testimony and shared categories for representing phenomena to collecting, sharing, and disagreeing about data — and argues that these activities produce scientific knowledge through social interaction. We are broadly sympathetic to this view. However, in her analysis, Longino argues that “concern with practices that are productive of knowledge, rather than with the content and subject of knowledge” should be the focus. (173, emphasis added) This suggests that it is both possible and desirable to analyze practices without analyzing the content and subject of knowledge, and further that analysis of content-knowledge in a given scientific domain should not be the focus of attention if the goal of a philosophical investigation is understanding scientific knowledge production. We disagree. Consider the agricultural-scientific practice of extension, a type of knowledge-producing work in agricultural science. Extension is a legally and institutionally defined social system that produces interactions between scientists and the public in contemporary U.S. agricultural science. The success conditions of producing extension knowledge are inherently, deeply, and interactively social. In this talk, we show that the sociality of successful knowledge production in extension is inextricable from the “content and subject” of new scientific knowledge produced through extension. We illustrate our point through a discussion of agricultural-scientific research on potatoes. Such research is often carried out via extension. We argue that what potatoes are is intertwined with human interaction. The significance of potatoes as a food crop impacts how research on potatoes occurs, from what questions are asked to what scientific practices are able to be carried out to answer those questions. Most field trials on potatoes occur on privately-held farms that partner with researchers, and commercial farm workers rather than principal investigators grow the crops that produce the objects of study. Extension often mediates these partnerships, and from historical and present-day farmers and extension workers to commercial and academic agricultural scientists, networks of interactively social partnerships remain intertwined with the production of potatoes — and knowledge about them. We show how extension generates content-knowledge that is inseparable from the practices productive of that knowledge. Our analysis is ultimately a friendly amendment to Longino’s view. We take seriously the centrality of the sociality of interaction in producing scientific knowledge. We contend that knowledge co-production practices in agricultural science illustrate (1) how knowledge about agricultural experiment is made through social interaction and (2) why such interaction is essential for epistemic content. What we propose is an admittedly strong form of sociality in which sociality is constitutive of knowledge in a way that without it, that which is being discussed ceases to be knowledge if it is not social. 

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2. Research at Predominately Undergraduate Institutions Published Recently in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, B, and C

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpca.5c00977  

   Shields, George C (March 2025, The Journal of Physical Chemistry A)

   The United States has a wide range of institutions of higher education, from two-year community colleges that focus primarily on job training to the research universities that train the next generation of Ph.D. scientists and produce a large share of knowledge. Some research universities are private, and others are public. Most states have a public flagship university or two, along with many more regional colleges where research has less emphasis and a slew of two-year community or technical colleges as well. The U.S. is also home to liberal arts colleges, which have no Ph.D. programs but where under- graduates benefit from small classes and intensive hands-on research experiences with the faculty. Most liberal arts colleges in the United States are private, although some states support a public liberal arts college as well. The nonflagship state and other private universities that do not have Ph.D. programs in chemistry and liberal arts colleges are collectively known as predominately undergraduate institutions or PUIs. PUIs play an important part in the United States scientific infrastructure, as they excel at providing the initial training of undergraduates, who learn the scientific method by hands-on research with their faculty mentors. 

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3. Epistemic advantage on the margin: A network standpoint Epistemology

   https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12895  

   Wu, Jingyi (June 2022, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)

   Abstract I use network models to simulate social learning situations in which the dominant group ignores or devalues testimony from the marginalized group. I find that the marginalized group ends up with several epistemic advantages due to testimonial ignoration and devaluation. The results provide one possible explanation for a key claim of standpoint epistemology, the inversion thesis, by casting it as a consequence of another key claim of the theory, the unidirectional failure of testimonial reciprocity. Moreover, the results complicate the understanding and application of previously discovered network epistemology effects, notably the Zollman effect (Zollman, 2007, 2010). 

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4. “Can biotech solve the nitrogen dilemma? Reengineering soil ecologies and reconceptualizing soil health.”

   Kendig, Catherine (September 2024, European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EurSafe) Congress.)

   Part of symposium organized by Kendig and Thompson on The social epistemology of engineered agricultural ecosystems (with Paul Thompson, Per Sandin and Rachel Ankeny). European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EurSafe) Congress. 

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5. Is Liberalism a Defensible Framework for Pandemic Policymaking?

   https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2025.a956285  

   Barnhill, Anne; Hutler, Brian (March 2025, Social Research: An International Quarterly)

   Liberal commitments to upholding civil liberties and relying on representative democratic procedures may seem incompatible with an effective response to an emergency like a pandemic. At the same time, the high stakes of pandemic policy-making and disagreement about the best way to respond arguably highlight the importance of other liberal commitments—for example, commitments to incorporating experts, data, and scientific knowledge, and to deliberatively engaging with divergent views about policy. Is the streamlined decision-making that enables an effective emergency response consistent with upholding these liberal commitments? An examination of that question in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic response suggests that a streamlined policymaking process in which states are given pandemic response power can be consistent with upholding these commitments. 

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