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

Kendig, Catherine; Bursten, Julia

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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