Soumhya Venkatesan (University of Manchester) "Democratic Epistemology, Anyone? Approaches to and Images of Knowledge as Radically Open to All Comers"

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This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork among British Spiritualists in Edinburgh by Adam Reed and pub philosophers in Liverpool by Soumhya Venkatesan, seeks to propose an anthropologically grounded social epistemology. We draw inspiration from philosopher Alvin Goldman’s argument that rather than the highly individualistic focus of traditional epistemology, because much of human truth and knowledge seeking is collaborative and interactive, what is required is a social epistemology which focuses on social paths or routes to knowledge. Our particular interest is in social epistemological projects that are designed to be open to anybody at every point in time, what Logie Barrow calls Democratic Epistemologies (1986). We enquire into the images of knowledge (Elkana 1981) that enable such openness and the procedures and methodologies to which participants must commit in order to produce what they understand as satisfactory and meaningful knowledge. We argue that sites of democratic epistemology can inform anthropology in two important ways. Firstly, they show that knowledge, in the weak senses of true and/or sincere belief, is a product of specific methodologies and methods specific to particular knowledge-producing groups. The anthropological task, unlike the philosophical, is not to evaluate knowledge procedures for their truthfulness but to understand the what, how and why of knowledge for specific communities of knowledge producers. Secondly, by virtue of their similarities and dissimilarities with academic knowledge production, we explore the productive possibilities of using these democratic epistemological methods in anthropological pedagogy and more broadly. Soumhya Venkatesan is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.