Social Epistemology and Relativism

Natalie Alana Ashton is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Stirling. Before this she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, and before that completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Her research concerns the political and social aspects of epistemology - specifically the effects of oppression and power on epistemic justification. She has published papers on feminist standpoint theory, hinge epistemology, and epistemic relativism, and on the connections between all of these. Her latest work investigates what these topics can tell us about online epistemic environments.Martin Kusch has been Professor for Philosophy of Science and Epistemology at the University of Vienna since 2009. He has published research monographs with OUP, Routledge, MIT Press and Acumen. His main current area of research is epistemic relativism, past and present. He is currently writing two monographs: a defence of epistemic relativism, and a study of the first 20th-century defender of relativism, Georg Simmel.Robin McKenna is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Before coming to Liverpool he worked in Austria (at the University of Vienna) and Switzerland (at the University of Geneva). He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Most of his work is in epistemology, but he is also interested in philosophy of language, philosophy of science and ethics. Within epistemology, he works on various topics in applied epistemology, feminist epistemology and social epistemology more broadly. Current topics of interest include the epistemology of persuasion, the epistemology of climate change denial (and of "dysfunctional epistemologies" more broadly), epistemic injustice and social constructivism.Katharina Anna Sodoma is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna. She wrote her dissertation on moral relativism and the possibility of moral progress as part of the ERC project "The Emergence of Relativism" and has published on this topic.

• 1. IntroductionNatalie Alana Ashton, Martin Kusch, Robin McKenna and Katharina Anna SodomaPart I: Foundational Issues in Social Epistemology2. Hinge DisagreementAnnalisa Coliva and Michele Palmira3. Norms of Inquiry in the Theory of Justified BeliefSanford C. Goldberg4. Relativism: The Most Ecumenical View?Alexandra Plakias5. Naturalism, Psychologism, RelativismHilary KornblithPart II: Feminist Epistemology and Social Epistemology6. Relativism in Feminist EpistemologiesNatalie Alana Ashton7. Feminist Epistemology and Pragmatic EncroachmentRobin McKenna8. Charity, Peace, and the Social Epistemology of Science ControversiesSharyn Clough9. Epistemic Responsibility and RelativismKristina RolinPart III: Social Epistemology and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge10. Sociologism and RelativismDavid Bloor11. Sociologistic Accounts of NormativityPaul Boghossian12. Relativism in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge RevisitedMartin Kusch