Social Coordination in - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Coordinación Social en
Scientific Communities

David Eck
Cañada College

Kuhnian philosophy of science has established the existence of a social dimension
within epistemology, but neo-Kuhnian accounts remain limited by linguis-
tically centered conceptions of rationality and normativity. As an alternative,
I use an embodied epistemology to reframe two neo-Kuhnian concepts: fred
D’Agostino’s (2010) federal model of enquiry and William Rehg’s (2009)
immanent cogency. Both concepts are concerned, en parte, with how scientiﬁc
communities balance conservative and innovative impulses. By treating inter-
action as a fundamental frame of analysis, embodied epistemology offers a more
nuanced perspective on this “essential tension,” while also blunting realist re-
interpretations of each concept.

Introducción

1.
The social epistemology of science to date has not adequately accounted for
the embodied nature of cognition. This lacuna is evidenced in part by what
Fred D’Agostino (2014) refers to as an “undertow” in the philosophy of
ciencia, which has pulled some of Kuhn’s revolutionary conceptual inno-
vaciones (such as his conceptions of reason and argumentation) back towards
the traditional notions they are meant to replace. My primary concern in
the following is to show how framing neo-Kuhnian social epistemology
within the embodiment movement in cognitive science blunts such reaction-
ary re-interpretations. In §1, I argue that linguistically centered conceptions
of rationality and normativity leave neo-Kuhnian accounts vulnerable to re-
alist undertow and, as an alternative, sketch the rudiments of an embodied
epistemology. Towards the latter end, I draw upon Mark Bickhard’s inter-
active model of representation (1996, 2002) and Hanne De Jaegher and
Ezequiel Di Paolo’s concept of participatory sense-making (2007).

Perspectives on Science 2016, volumen. 24, No. 6
©2016 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00232

770

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In order to give some context to the undertow issue, in §2 I chart the
development of social epistemology using K. Brad Wray’s explication of
Kuhnian epistemology (2011). This sets up my analysis of two major works
in neo-Kuhnian social epistemology: Fred D’Agostino’s (2010) Natural-
izing Epistemology (§3) and William Rehg’s (2009) Cogent Science in Context
(§5). Beginning with the former, the central theme of D’Agostino (2010) es
how communities of enquiry balance conservative and innovative impulses,
which Kuhn (1977) refers to as the “essential tension.” D’Agostino’s federal
model of enquiry broadens Kuhn’s account beyond science, modeling all
epistemic divisions of labor in terms vertical and horizontal axes of enquiry.
The federal model shares important afﬁnities with participatory sense-
making’s notion of coordination mechanisms, but D’Agostino’s account
stands at a crossroads between embodied and disembodied epistemologies.
To highlight this tension, I turn to Steve Fuller’s conception of social epis-
temology, which has heavily inﬂuenced D’Agostino.

Fuller’s account is one of two varieties of disembodied social epistemology
that I examine in §4. Articulating the connection between Fuller (2002,
2011, 2012) and D’Agostino clariﬁes the obstacles to linking the federal
model of enquiry to participatory sense-making and the larger embodied cog-
nition framework. My critique of Fuller thus serves two purposes: primero, a
show that an embodied epistemology provides a more nuanced perspective
on D’Agostino’s mapping of epistemic communities and, segundo, to lay
the groundwork for revising another disembodied social epistemology—
a saber, Martin Kusch’s communitarian epistemology (2002a, 2002b,
2013). Among the many merits of Kusch’s communitarian epistemology is
linking the social epistemology of science—in particular, Barry Barnes
(1983) and the associated strong program in the sociology of knowledge—
to a broader notion of epistemic communities. Yet communitarian epistemol-
ogia, as with Fuller, is limited by an overly narrow, linguistically centered
understanding of normativity. To buttress my reframing of Kusch’s com-
munitarian epistemology and D’Agostino’s federal model, I turn to Rehg’s
concept of cogency.

In §5, I consider Rehg’s argumentation theory (2009), which details
“microsocial” dynamics within communities of enquiry. This helps to clar-
ify the relationship between the institutional mechanisms described by
D’Agostino and participatory sense-making’s more ﬁne-grained focus on
two-person interaction. The key concept of Rehg’s theory is cogency,
which entails that argumentation is a context-speciﬁc process that involves
an indeﬁnite range of potential factors. The immanent nature of argumen-
tation facilitates the balancing of innovation and stability within scientiﬁc
communities. Para concluir, I review the advantages of an embodied account
of the essential tension as compared to a linguistically centered one.

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Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

2. Battling the Undertow of Realism: The Need for “Embodied”
Social Epistemology
Anti-realist positions that endorse a linguistic notion of rationality and
normativity—that is, accounts in which the primitive nature of reason and
norms are understood in propositional terms—are inherently vulnerable to
realist re-interpretations. D’Agostino (2010, pag. 2) endorses such a variety
of anti-realism—citing Kusch (2002a) and Rorty (1989) as support—though
he refrains from defending anti-realism in Naturalizing Epistemology in order
to focus instead on its “collectivist” implications for social epistemology.
D’Agostino positions his anti-realism as an extension of the so-called “lin-
guistic turn” (Rorty 1992) in philosophy. In §3, I use James Ladyman’s cri-
tique of Naturalizing Epistemology (2012) to detail how D’Agostino’s account
remains vulnerable to realist undertow. In the present section, I focus on
identifying the basic features of D’Agostino’s anti-realism in connection with
Kusch’s communitarian epistemology (2002a); Kusch’s account is especially
relevant given its aforementioned link to the sociology of science.

The cornerstone of Kusch’s communitarian epistemology is his concept
of social identity. Kusch understands social identities as a “social kind”
(2002a, 2013); other social kinds include money and marriage. For Kusch,
dinero, marriage, and social identities are all constructed via the medium
of language. Drawing upon Edward Craig (1999), Kusch (2013) argues
that the concept of knowledge originated due to the need to mark a spe-
ciﬁc type of social identity—namely, being a reliable informant. As a re-
sultado, the concept of knowledge, like money and marriage, is itself a social
kind. In contrast to natural or artiﬁcial kinds, social kinds depend on lan-
guage speakers for their continued existence: if all language speakers dis-
appeared, so too would all social kinds. On this view, the performative and
constructive dimensions of language take on a greater signiﬁcance than the
ability to refer to mind-independent material objects. The anti-realist charac-
ter of communitarian epistemology is clear: knowledge is anchored primarily
to its role within social communities rather than to a mind-independent
objective reality. Yet Kusch’s position, yo discuto, still entails an attenuated real-
ism that leaves the door open to realist reconstructions.

Although the shift to a pragmatically oriented notion of language is
salutary, Kusch retains a key aspect of the realist picture. On both views,
the medium of language enables different cognitive subjects to possess
mutually shared truths: on the classic realist picture, the shared truth is a
physical aspect of the world; for Kusch, subjects recognize the same lin-
guistically stipulated social roles. Respectivamente, on Kusch’s account, hay
a social normativity that is functionally analogous to the notion of mind-
independent material objectivity. To illustrate the nature of social norms,
consider the example of money: money’s existence requires people to

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Perspectives on Science

773

recognize it as essentially the same thing, as a means for exchanging
goods. Likewise with regard to knowledge, members of a community must
effectively recognize its meaning as designating a reliable informant. El
proviso of reliability entails that Kusch’s anti-realism is not radically volun-
tarist, since the reliability of informants is determined in no small part by
their understanding of and ability to manipulate natural and artiﬁcial
kinds. Kusch’s communitarian epistemology thus displaces but does not
eliminate the role of material determination, with the latter’s role being
mediated by socially constructed identities and other social kinds. Given
this linguistic conception of normativity, I turn now to the rudiments of an
embodied conception. My primary goal for the remaining portion of §1 is
to use the following sketch to highlight some problematic features of the
linguistic conception that would otherwise go unnoticed, contrasting
them with an embodied interactivist model.

The decisive difference between embodied and disembodied epistemol-
ogies hinges upon a distinction between external contact and external semantic
contenido. On an embodied epistemology, the former supplants the latter, a con-
ceptual innovation that ultimately undermines the very notion of mutually
shared semantic truths. This is the respect in which an embodied epistemol-
ogy provides a stronger foundation for anti-realism, thwarting realist recon-
structions. But with regard to human cognition, my critique of mutually
shared truths will not be fully articulated until §4, when I reconstruct
Kusch’s conception of social identity; for the moment, I focus on how
the concept of external contact entails a different picture of epistemic
agency—a shift from epistemic agency as a passive content-receiver in favor
of an anticipatory agent in continuous contact with his or her environment.
To establish the basic difference between contact and content, I begin with
Bickhard’s account of minimal forms of epistemic agency.

Bickhard’s interactivist model of representation shifts the question of
representation away from the usual one of content to the act of represent-
ing itself (1996, 2002). This shift is made on the grounds that semantic
content is derivative of an organism’s embodied engagement with its
ambiente. Representaciones, on this view, primarily serve to differentiate
between different interactive contacts. Bickhard writes, “differing environ-
ments may leave that (sub)sistema [whatever initiates an interaction] in dif-
fering ﬁnal internal states or conditions when the interaction is ‘completed’.
Such possible internal ﬁnal states, entonces, will serve to differentiate possible
environments” (1996, pag. 60). The term “differentiation” expresses the seman-
tic opaqueness between environment and interacting system. The ﬁnal state
reached does not bear informational content from environment to organism;
en cambio, the only information that perceptual differentiators contain about
the environment is that it caused the given ﬁnal internal state within the

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Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

organism to be reached. The internal state thus only implicitly deﬁnes the
ambiente (1996, pag. 61). Differentiation and implicit deﬁnition are in
this manner the two foundations of interactive representation.

Since Bickhard (1996) treats the act of representing as a precondition
for representational content, all perception presupposes goal-directedness.
Detailing a minimal form of epistemic agency is, in this regard, essential
for illustrating how primitive goal-directedness is nonrepresentational.
Rather than representations, at the most primitive level, goals are func-
tional switches with a success result (p.ej., further processing/anticipation of
another interaction) and a failure result (p.ej., a trial and error interactive pro-
impuesto) (1996, pag. 62).1 This dovetails with treating viable self-maintenance as
the most basic epistemic norm. En suma, perception consists of an opaque sig-
nal contemporaneous with an organism’s engagement with its environment
rather than an informational channel in which perception is the reception of
external content. In the context of scientiﬁc argumentation, the opaqueness
of perception has a number of implications; in §5, I consider the phenomenon
of cross-talk between scientists as one consequence of this opaqueness and
note some of the epistemic beneﬁts of cross-talk within scientiﬁc communi-
ties in relation to Kuhn’s essential tension. A more immediate implication of
perceptual opaqueness is the intrinsic signiﬁcance of interaction—interaction
isn’t merely an incidental or replaceable means for acquiring external content.
To illustrate the difference between interactive contact and external content,
Bickhard (1996) reinterprets Fodor’s (1990) frog example. For it to eat,
according to the interactivist model, a frog does not represent, decir, a ﬂy or
a worm. En cambio, the ﬂy and worm appear as two potential types of inter-
acción: “tongue-ﬂick-at-a-point” and “tongue-ﬂick-between-two-points,” re-
spectively (1996, pag. 64). The frog anticipates speciﬁc kinds of eating
opportunities, the salient issue being how to ﬂick its tongue rather than
what the tongue ﬂicks at. Frogs ﬂick their tongues rather indiscriminately;
fortunately, they live in a world where many of those ﬂicking opportunities
bear edible fruit. If philosophers took it upon themselves to shoot BBs across
their fronts, this would change their world dramatically. Ingestion of metal
spheres would constitute error and could trigger learning new behavioral
patrones, but for the vast majority of frogs who have been spared the machi-
nations of philosophers, BBs don’t count as errors. The crucial point is that an
organism anticipates its interactions and, al hacerlo, perceives its environ-
mento. Perceptual salience is a function of what surprises an organism, surprise
only being possible given prior anticipations. Respectivamente, learning is based
on an error-guided relationship in which organisms cope with their mistaken

1. For two crucial discussions and defenses of intrinsic (nonrepresentational) intention-
ality, see Weber and Varela (2002) and Di Paolo (2005). I brieﬂy consider the former in §4.

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Perspectives on Science

775

anticipations. One immediate upshot of this account of salience is that it
addresses the “Frame Problem” in psychology and Artiﬁcial Intelligence.2
This insight is made all the more compelling given the model of learning
and higher-order abstraction that follows, which I turn now to explicating.
Bickhard (2002, pag. 1) develops his model of learning by identifying two
basic ways in which an organism can cope with error: (i) the regulation of
the interactive processes between a rational system and its environment
y (ii) the construction of new interactive “(sub)systems” that act as a
“kind of metaregulation.” That is to say, upon encountering error, el
two non-exclusive options for an organism are to (i) modify how it interacts
with its environment or (ii)—to use mentalistic vocabulary weighted toward
persons—reﬁne its understanding of the interactive environment. el primero
and most basic type of error regulation, which most organisms are limited
a, corresponds to the ﬁrst level of Bickhard’s “levels of knowing” model
(Bickhard 2002, pag. 8). Rational systems such as humans can abstract from
(i) and thereby represent aspects of the environment in terms of interactive
possibilities. En tono rimbombante, this new level—which is the ﬁrst instance of (ii)—is
itself open to abstraction. Abstracting from (ii) would in turn create a new
higher level of knowing that is also open to abstraction and so on, con
no determinate upper bound on the levels of abstraction.

The parallel development of (i) y (ii) is reciprocally enabling. el ab-
stractions of (ii) enable the creation of more specialized environmental
niches that dramatically reshape (i). One notable example of an epistemic
niche—thanks in large part to the efforts of Kuhnian epistemology—is the
scientiﬁc research institution. Such communities facilitate novel forms of
cognitive activity and levels of abstraction. This latter implication thus
designates a way in which (i) reshapes (ii). Eso es, the construction of ep-
istemic niches, such as research institutions, play an integral role in new
levels of abstraction that fall under the direct purview of cognitive science.
The development of (i) y (ii) thus run in parallel in the sense that there is
no isomorphic correspondence between them—that is, (ii) doesn’t internal-
ize (i)—even though the two mutually inﬂuence and enable developments
within each other.3 De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s concept of participatory

2. Regarding the Frame Problem in AI, see Zenon Pylyshyn (1987). Interactivism’s
ability to address this problem is indicative, I believe, of the general advantages of a
non-exceptionalist approach to human cognition, in which embodiment and the details
of engagement are not treated as incidental details. My main task in the present paper is
to show the ramiﬁcations this has for the social epistemology of science.

3. The reciprocal relationship I have in mind corresponds to the notion of reﬂective
equilibrium, as ﬁrst conceived by Goodman (1983) and whose normative signiﬁcance was
highlighted by Rawls (1999).

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776

Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

sense-making (2007, 2008) occupies a special place with regard to this
parallel development, since participatory sense-making relates directly to
ambos (i) y (ii).

Participatory sense-making is Janus-faced. As developed from within
cognitive science, it is concerned with the cognitive subject as such; mientras
as a model of face-to-face interaction, participatory sense-making is con-
cerned with an especially important type of epistemic niche. It should be
noted, sin embargo, that one of the concept’s most important insights—in
concert with Bickhard’s interactive model of representation—is that the
cognitive subject cannot be modeled in a vacuum. Por eso, participatory
sense-making’s concern with two-person interaction is not simply an
add-on to a core subject but rather the articulation of a particular interactive
mode. Separated from all modes of interaction, the cognitive subject is a
meaningless abstraction. En el siguiente, I show how participatory
sense-making’s insights with regard to two-person interaction shade into
the larger-scale domain of scientiﬁc communities.

Participatory sense-making affords a valuable perspective on the mutu-
ally constraining relationship between cognitive science and social epis-
temology. The preceding sketch of an embodied epistemology provides
some key considerations in articulating the relationship between the two
ﬁelds: given an active anticipatory agent, the interactive context is of prim-
itive signiﬁcance rather than external content, and it is for this reason that
the dynamics of interaction are not merely incidental details. Edificio
upon these two points, in §4 I argue that the phenomenon of endogenous
coordination dynamics explains how social interaction is epistemically
productive without presupposing shared truths or a shared understand-
ing between interactants. En efecto, the lack of understanding (p.ej., cross-
talk) is crucial to maintaining the essential tension within scientiﬁc
communities. In §2, I sketch Thomas Kuhn’s original account of the social
dimension of scientiﬁc communities, which will help establish what is miss-
ing from neo-Kuhnian social epistemology that participatory sense-making
direcciones.

3. Kuhn’s Narrow Conception of Social Epistemology
Por un lado, Thomas Kuhn (1962, 1977, 1992) sets the explanatory
targets for much of the social epistemology of science while, en el otro,
suffering from some major lacunae that have been forcefully highlighted in
the contemporary ﬁeld. In Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology, Wray
(2011) explicates Kuhn’s philosophy of science with an eye towards the
contemporary ﬁeld of social epistemology. To understand Kuhn’s uneven
contribución, it is helpful to start with his formative interest in the psy-
chology of discovery. En particular, Bruner and Postman (1949) inﬂuenced

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Perspectives on Science

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Kuhn greatly.4 The key lesson that Kuhn drew from the study is that “per-
ceptual organization is powerfully determined by expectations built upon
past commerce with the environment” (Bruner and Postman 1949, pag. 222;
Wray 2011, pag. 51). The study’s ﬁnding bears on the process of discovery in
ciencia. But despite Kuhn’s initial interest, Kuhnian epistemology is ulti-
mately far more indebted to the philosophy of language than to psycholog-
ical accounts of perception or any other details of embodiment.

Kuhn’s shift towards the philosophy of language was partly a response
to criticism of The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions. Given the criticism,
Kuhn modiﬁed his understanding of scientiﬁc revolutions, no longer char-
acterizing them as paradigm changes, which—akin to the Bruner and
Postman study—he had described as gestalt shifts in perception (Kuhn
1962, pag. 85; Wray 2011, pag. 15). In place of gestalt shifts, scientiﬁc revo-
lutions came to be understood as lexical or taxonomic changes within a
particular discipline. This shift dovetailed with Kuhn’s emphasis on theory
choice and the overarching role of the philosophy of language. Uno de los
motivations behind Rehg’s (2009, pag. 44) concept of cogency, as discussed
in §5, is a dissatisfaction with Kuhn’s dependence on the philosophy of
idioma.

Kuhn also viewed his taxonomic conception of scientiﬁc revolutions as a
way to avoid the excesses of both realism and relativism. In consonance
with the latter, Kuhn (1992, pag. 115) held that science is not converging
on a uniﬁed account of a theory-independent reality, as evidenced by the
“evolution” and proliferation of new scientiﬁc disciplines. Yet contrary to
relativism, Kuhn is an internalist with regard to theory change ( Wray
2011, pag. 160). In this context, internalism entails the claim that scientiﬁc
disputes are settled on the basis of evidence rather than factors putatively
“external” to science, such as political concerns or other such interests.
Political concerns and the like are of no epistemic signiﬁcance, according
to Kuhn. The internalist position is directed especially against the strong
program in the sociology of knowledge, which Kuhn invested a great deal
of effort in criticizing, such as in his 1992 essay.5

4. In Bruner and Postman’s study, subjects were asked to successively identify playing
cards, some of which were painted in the opposite color (p.ej., a black three of hearts); él
took on average four times longer for test subjects to identify these “trick” cards (1949,
páginas. 209–10).

5. Kuhn took particular issue with the strong program’s “symmetry principle”—in
which the same types of explanations should be employed for successful and unsuccessful
knowledge claims. Kuhn believes that the principle obscures the distinctive role that nature
plays in scientists’ formation of beliefs. See Bloor ([1976] 1991) for the ﬁrst and most
famous defense of the symmetry principle; for an overview of the strong program, see Barnes,
Bloor, and Henry (1996).

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Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

As evidenced by his critique of the strong program, Kuhn construes the
social dimension of epistemology narrowly. The essential feature of sci-
ence’s social dimension is, on Kuhn’s view, how individuals weigh objective
criteria differently (Wray 2011, pag. 161). Given the domain-general values
of accuracy, simplicity, consistencia, alcance, and fruitfulness, Por ejemplo,
individual scientists will prioritize each differently, differences that impact
the evaluation of competing theories. This subjective dynamic causes risk
spreading within scientiﬁc communities and also offers another explana-
tion for why scientiﬁc disputes can be protracted. Todavía, insofar as it is epis-
temically signiﬁcant, the subjective weighting of criteria acts only to spread
risk within a community by ensuring that scientists will work on competing
teorías (Kuhn 1977, pag. 332). The subjective factors ultimately do not play a
role in theory choice: after some period of time, the community’s efforts either
produce a clear winner (one that everyone endorses) or the community
branches into different specialties.

Philip Kitcher challenges Kuhn’s exclusion of political interests for very
different reasons than those of the strong program. Taking up the theme of
risk spreading, Kitcher (1990) argues that a broad range of interests are in
play. In a scenario reminiscent of James Watson and Francis Crick’s dis-
covery of DNA’s structure, Kitcher imagines a community of scientists
pursuing the structure of a very important molecule (“VIM”). In a situa-
tion where the discovery would earn a coveted prize (p.ej., a Nobel Prize),
Kitcher argues that a community composed of ruthless egoists would
achieve a better spread of effort and risk than if all of the scientists were
pursuing high-minded ideals (p.ej., acquiring truths) (1990, pag. 16).6
Additional and less sordid interests—such as national or personal loyalties,
personal investment, and so on—also ensure a diverse distribution of effort.
It is important to note that Kitcher’s incorporation of these diverse interests
rests on the same justiﬁcation as Kuhn’s own understanding of the social
dimension of science: for both, these social factors are instrumentally valu-
able for furthering research. Kitcher thus shows that one of Kuhn’s most
important themes—the distribution of risk within a community—involves
a diverse range of interests that promote rather than detract from scientiﬁc
enquiry and thereby should not be counted as external to science. Speciﬁ-
cally, Kitcher makes the compelling (y, in retrospect, somewhat obvious)
point that the credit mechanisms of science are not incidental to its progress
and growth; indeed they are more than incidental to its very subject matter.

6. D’Agostino’s discussion of communication inhibitors, such as ﬁrst-mover bias and
social comparison pressures, bolsters Kitcher’s point by suggesting that there are common
social factors that can overwhelm the differential weighting of objective criteria (2010,
páginas. 53–54).

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Perspectives on Science

779

Treating the social dimension of science as strictly an instrumental re-
source is one limitation of Kuhn’s epistemology. Kitcher’s immanent cri-
tique broadens the range of relevant factors but, importantly, still retains
the basic presupposition that the social dimension is just an instrumental
medio. This type of instrumentalism in social epistemology is a crucial
source of vulnerability to realist undertow: it appears as though the social
dimension is just a means for acquiring objective truths. Further broaden-
ing Kuhnian epistemology by shifting away from Kuhn and Kitcher’s focus
on risk distribution in favor of examining epistemic divisions of labor, fred
D’Agostino mitigates this vulnerability to realist reconstructions.

4. D’Agostino’s Federal Model of Enquiry and the Inexhaustibility
of Descriptions
D’Agostino (2010) is interested in the actual process of breaking complex,
multifaceted problems down into manageable parts that individuals can work
en. One of the central difﬁculties is that properly dividing up a problem often
presupposes the very knowledge that a community is pursuing. el federal
model of enquiry is both a description of and a normative prescription for how
scientiﬁc communities cope with this ineliminable difﬁculty. Respectivamente, el
inseparable relationship between description and prescription is one of the key
insights of D’Agostino’s account, which I will argue in §4 is best understood
within an embodied epistemology. D’Agostino’s account falls short of adopt-
ing an embodied framework, which I think explains its remaining vulnera-
bility to realist re-interpretations as detailed later in the present section.

D’Agostino organizes his account of epistemic divisions of labor around
the concept of an “assembly bonus,” a concept adopted from social psychol-
ogy and management science. The concept of an assembly bonus refers to a
beneﬁt wrought from pooling the cognitive efforts of different individuals
without specifying any particular type of task or activity (Collins and
Guetzkow 1964). One reason for drawing upon ﬁelds such as management
science is a lack of substantive analyses of epistemic divisions of labor
within social epistemology, despite being a familiar theme. Kitcher (1990),
por ejemplo, only addresses its “subjective” dimension—that is, how indi-
vidual attitudes to a problem differ (D’Agostino 2010, pag. 113). The subjective
dimension, as D’Agostino understands it, consists of interpersonal com-
munication issues, such as the previously noted issues of ﬁrst-mover bias
and social comparison pressures. And Kitcher’s egoistic pursuit of prizes rep-
resents one means of overcoming such obstacles.7

7. D’Agostino notes other “disinhibitors” that help to overcome communication issues,
such as “multiple accountabilities,” “novelty premiums,” and “asset ownership” (2010, pag. 64).

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780

Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

The “objective” dimension of epistemic divisions of labor refers to
the process of breaking down problems for collaboration. Given this task,
D’Agostino considers how four types of enquiry fare: exhaustive, myopic,
parallel, and modular enquiry (2010, páginas. 119–27). To illustrate these four
types of enquiry, I turn now to amplifying one of D’Agostino’s own exam-
ples involving the design of a computer, speciﬁcally its motherboard and
hard drive systems (2010, páginas. 122–25). Beginning with the ﬁrst type: en
an exhaustive enquiry, every conceivable technical design of the mother-
board and hard drive systems would be attempted. Once every possibility
has been evaluated, the optimal combination is selected (2010, pag. 119).
Exhaustive enquiry guarantees ﬁnding a global optimal solution—the best
available design for the motherboard and hard drive—but is inefﬁcient
given its time and resource demands.

A myopic enquiry, the second type, randomly selects a single trait of
either system and tinkers with it, searching for any added value. Tinkering
with a trait stops when it results in neutral or negative value. With regard
to the computer example, myopic enquiry fosters iterative improvements
on the motherboard and hard drive systems in a timely manner (2010,
pag. 120). Myopic enquiry is thus efﬁcient but ineffective for ﬁnding an
optimal solution.

The other two types of enquiry—parallel and modular—are more
sophisticated approaches. D’Agostino ﬁrst introduces the computer design
problem to highlight the potential yet ultimate weakness of parallel enquiry.
Rather than treating the design space as one undifferentiated whole, parallel
enquiry proceeds by breaking the space down into independent tasks, en esto
case the motherboard and hard drive problems. This enables separate teams to
survey more designs for each component in a timely manner but presupposes
that the problem space is decomposable. Any residual interdependencies
between tasks renders a parallel enquiry inconclusive, potentially pitting
teams at cross purposes; en este caso particular, there were as many conﬂicting
design possibilities as compatible ones between the motherboard and hard
drive systems.

The ﬁnal type of enquiry is a response to the fact that problem spaces
often cannot be decomposed without residual interdependencies, especially
not without the very knowledge of the domain that is sought after. Mod-
ularity is a design that creates a “high degree of independence or ‘loose
coupling’ between component designs by standardizing component inter-
face speciﬁcations” (D’Agostino 2010, pag. 128). Modularity thus reﬂects the
fact that standards must be constructed for how decomposed components
should relate to each other. The construction of standards, which ensures
consistency between individual tasks, comes at a cost. The modularized
interface between tasks minimizes the possibility of conﬂict but, in doing

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Perspectives on Science

781

entonces, constrains the ability of individuals to explore possible solutions. Este
is the basic sense in which ﬁxing parameters imposes a path dependency on
the eventual solution. In terms of the computer design example, param-
eters were placed on which potential motherboard and hard drive designs
could be explored by each separate team. Only an exhaustive enquiry can
guarantee that there’s not a more effective global solution outside of any
such standardized parameters, but using an exhaustive enquiry to validate
a modular one would undercut the latter’s efﬁciency. Modularity thus
mitigates though does not eliminate the trade-offs between efﬁciency,
eficacia, and conclusiveness found in exhaustive, myopic, and parallel
enquiry, respectivamente. Modularization is not by itself a methodological
blueprint for enquiry but depends on broader dynamics within epistemic
communities.

Given the limitations of modularity, D’Agostino notes the need for
“both division and diversity to pursue enquiry in complex situations” [emphasis
in original] (2010, pag. 134). Eso es, it is necessary to have different teams
create different design rules and then compete, producing knowledge that
is less myopic than a single modularization but still much more efﬁcient
than an exhaustive enquiry. Having competing teams thereby mitigates
but does not eliminate the myopia that results from modularity’s path
dependency. D’Agostino writes, “we are stuck with history … ‘the expla-
nation of why something [such as a problem-solution] exists rests on how
it became what it is’” (2010, pag. 135). Solutions to complex problems must
be understood in terms of historical paths. The arbitrariness that results
from path dependency is independent of the arbitrariness produced by
the sordid motives of individual researchers (pag. 136). That enquiry should
be understood in terms of where it has come from rather than as ap-
proaching a determinate endpoint is not merely an artifact of the rhetorical
demands of winning arguments—or the sordid motives of enquirers—but
is intrinsic to the very posing of problems and tasks. A este respecto,
D’Agostino highlights a more profound social dimension of science than
recognized by Kuhn or Kitcher.

Building upon the generic notion of an epistemic division of labor,
D’Agostino proposes a “federalist model” of enquiry. The basic purpose
of the model is to conceptualize how intra-research team dynamics relate
to the community-level competition of different teams. The federal model
demarcates a community of enquiry along a horizontal and a vertical axis
consisting of “jurisdictions” and “levels,” respectively (2010, pag. 147). A
jurisdiction consists of a deliberative body that partitions a research
domain. Some jurisdictions run in parallel to each other, some overlap,
while some subsume others. Levels correspond to hierarchies between var-
ious jurisdictions, the highest level possessing only one deliberative body.

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782

Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

At lower levels, the deliberative bodies are research teams that work
roughly in parallel and compete with each other. Higher levels act as
“adjudicators” for lower ones, with the highest level being the ﬁnal adju-
dicator. An adjudicator has a privileged perspective on the competition
between two teams, possessing more information than either team had
when each began and being less attached to either solution than the respec-
tive teams (2010, pag. 149). The federal model, with its horizontal and ver-
tical axes of enquiry, to some extent idealizes the structure of actual
epistemic communities.8 In a particular community of enquiry, the roles
of team member and adjudicator are often mixed up, with individuals
serving multiple functions and working on multiple teams.9

The two-axis model of epistemic communities identiﬁes in abstract
terms cognitive processes that are endogenous to particular communities.
Within a research team, individual cognitive tasks are structured by mod-
ular interfaces in order to coordinate with other individual efforts. Eso es
to say, individual efforts are not isolated activities that are aggregated to
form a group product. The signiﬁcance of modularization is evident from
the need for competition between different groups, a result of the myopia
induced by modularization’s path dependency. Además, the crucial
role of adjudication can only occur within such a community. En suma,
the efforts of individuals can be properly understood only in relation to
how they complement and compete with each other’s’ efforts. Más-
más, the risk spreading emphasized by Kuhn and Kitcher suggests that,
in such communities, individuals themselves understand their efforts in
relation to others.

The emergent patterns identiﬁed by the federal model of enquiry are, I
argue, general types of coordination. On my reading, the federal model iden-
tiﬁes patterns of joint sense-making—which De Jaegher and Di Paolo
(2008, pag. 42) deﬁne as a cognitive activity whose meaning cannot be ex-
plicated in terms of discrete individuals. In this way, the federal model
extends the insights of participatory sense-making to larger social contexts.
Yet even though his account complements participatory sense-making,
D’Agostino himself falls short of endorsing an enactivist or any other em-
bodied framework. This is in part because, as noted above with regard to
his anti-realist position, D’Agostino brackets the issue of the fundamental

8. Kitcher and Wray both allude to the federal model’s two axes. Of most direct rele-
vance, Kitcher notes that a purely self-interested community of individuals only excels if it
is divided up into “ﬁefdoms” (1990, pag. 17). Yet Wray nor Kitcher explore the general
dynamics between these two axes.

9. As I detail in §5, Rehg’s (2009) Fermilab case study substantiates and also compli-

cates D’Agostino’s model of parallel and vertical axes of enquiry.

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Perspectives on Science

783

nature of knowledge in order to focus on describing epistemic commu-
niidades. The upshot of this argumentative strategy is that D’Agostino’s
account stands on its descriptive merits, which makes the account relevant
for a wide range of theorists. The downside, sin embargo, is that the account
remains open to realist undertow.

Ladyman (2012, pag. 605), Por ejemplo, faults D’Agostino (2010) for not
addressing the question of what knowledge and justiﬁcation are. Semejante
questions must be addressed, Ladyman thinks, in order to naturalize epis-
temology, which the title of D’Agostino’s book promises to do. Ladyman
thus proposes that a more appropriate title would have been “socializing
knowledge” (2012, pag. 605). Respectivamente, Ladyman suggests an individu-
alistic reconstruction, with Kuhn’s essential tension existing at the indi-
vidual level. D’Agostino’s description of community dynamics would thus
explain how a larger social group balances out the more fundamental blend
of conservative and innovative impulses that co-exist in each individual
(Ladyman 2012, pag. 606). While Ladyman doesn’t himself pursue the follow-
ing line of reasoning in his brief review, his proposal can cite D’Agostino’s
own distinction between the objective and subjective dimensions of the
division of labor and claim that the former is more fundamental.

It is clear from D’Agostino’s own account how the objective dimension
shapes and supports the subjective one. D’Agostino writes, “the very exis-
tence of the objective impediments may serve to ‘tune’ our communities of
enquiry to work effectively in overcoming the subjective impediments”
(2010, pag. 143). It is important that the environment is a complex problem
space because this complexity is what elicits and fosters a division of labor
and a diversity of approaches. Yet the reciprocity of the relationship—how
the subjective dimension shapes and supports the objective one—is not as
apparent. D’Agostino (2010, pag. 89) details the signiﬁcance of having an
appropriate culture of enquiry, such as a culture that includes shallow
consensus.10 But such considerations are easily re-situated within Ladyman’s
individualistic epistemology as mere exigencies and, tal como, lo harían
be incidental to the nature of objective knowledge.

Ladyman’s reconstruction could even grant that human understanding
of objective reality is always tied to and constrained by the historical tra-
jectories of our epistemic communities. On this Ladyman-inspired read-
En g, enquirers compete with each other to better approximate aspects of
the objective world, despite being stuck with inherent arbitrariness. Este

10. The term ‘shallow consensus’ refers to communicative patterns within epistemic
communities in which agreements provisionally conceal underlying disagreements. In §5,
I relate this communicative pattern to the opaqueness of perception using Rehg’s account of
scientiﬁc argumentation as an intermediate link.

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784

Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

interpretation is consistent with Kuhn’s evolutionary epistemology so long
as it is not claimed that all of science’s disciplines approximate the objec-
tive world in a uniﬁed manner. Por eso, this interpretation reads Kuhn’s
evolutionary epistemology as essentially a contemporary version of the
Tower of Babel story. En suma, while D’Agostino shows how the social
epistemology of science informs cognitive science—counteracting the
latter’s tendency to treat interactive environments as merely input for
cognitive processing—it is also important to recognize how cognitive sci-
ence informs social epistemology. To identify the sense in which the sub-
jective dimension shapes objectivity—and to show how cognitive science
informs social epistemology—I return to Bickhard’s account of nonrepre-
sentational embodied directedness.

Bickhard’s frog example (§1) explains how the subjective dimension
shapes and constrains objectivity, thereby blunting realist reconstructions
of D’Agostino. The lesson of the example is that a frog perceives tongue-
ﬂicking opportunities (p.ej., a ﬂick-at-one-point, a ﬂick-between-two-
puntos, etcétera)—as opposed to ﬁrst identifying an object (p.ej., a ﬂy
or worm), then determining whether it is edible and, if so, what tongue
ﬂick the object demands, y, ﬁnally, acting on a desire to eat by actually
ﬂicking its tongue. Rather than referring to a mind-independent material
entidad, objectivity is a function of how an organism partitions its world
into interactive possibilities: eso es, how an organism anticipates, acts,
and then differentially responds to the feedback from its actions. Only if
there were a dramatic change in a frog’s environment—such as people
ﬂicking BBs in the frog’s visual ﬁeld—would a frog need to reﬁne its dis-
crimination of tongue-ﬂicking opportunities. But even given such a reﬁne-
mento, perception would still consist of differential contact rather than the
reception and subsequent processing of external content.

An embodied epistemology, as articulated by Bickhard’s model of error-
guided learning, is thus one way of responding to Ladyman. If knowledge
is in its most primitive form skillful interaction with the world—not a con-
tentful mental state—then providing a “how” as opposed to a “what” account
does, En realidad, help to naturalize epistemology. Yet it is not entirely clear how
sympathetic D’Agostino is to an embodied epistemology. As noted above,
D’Agostino’s anti-realism is aligned with the linguistic turn of Rorty and
Kusch. The closest that D’Agostino (2010, pag. 20) comes to endorsing an em-
bodied epistemology is in his discussion of “bounded rationality.” Bounded
rationality is a formal description of some cognitive limits inherent to ﬁnite
beings. With the concept, D’Agostino shows that the collectivization of
inquiry is a response to “in principle” considerations as opposed to merely
practical exigencies. Eso es, epistemic communities are more than the aggre-
gate effort of what would happen if a single individual had more time.

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Perspectives on Science

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Of the seven factors that D’Agostino notes in connection with bounded
rationality, the ﬁrst and most important one is inexhaustibility. Echoing
the familiar Kuhnian theme of nominalism, inexhaustibility refers to the
endless ways in which any material state of affairs can be described (2010,
pag. 21). In this respect, D’Agostino’s anti-realism, like Kusch’s own (§1,
§4), is closely tied to the philosophy of language. This focus is borne
out by the rest of the factors that D’Agostino discusses. Reﬂexivity, para
ejemplo, is even more closely related to Kusch: when a claim is made re-
garding agents and those agents subsequently become aware of it, el
claim may be either reﬂexively undermined or conﬁrmed. Reﬂexivity thus
highlights the performative dimensions of language use, which is central
to Kusch’s account. Rather than linking these factors to the embodied
nature of cognition, D’Agostino moves towards more abstract matters.
The other factors of bounded rationality explicate the nominalist implica-
tions for human deliberation.

In an earlier article, D’Agostino (2006) gives a more extensive analysis
of bounded rationality. In the article, D’Agostino contrasts a planning
conception of reason with the emergence in a number of ﬁelds (p.ej.,
economics, political theory, and management science) of an improvisa-
tional conception of reason. D’Agostino argues that not only is the plan-
ning conception a woefully inadequate description of human problem
solving, it can also “stupefy” those who promulgate it. Acting in accord
with the planning conception can hinder an agent’s attentiveness to her
environment—exempliﬁed, por ejemplo, in scrutinizing a pre-established
plan in the face of an unexpected eventuality rather than improvising
based on the particular situation (2006, pag. 11). D’Agostino thus emphati-
cally treats reasoning as a context-speciﬁc process. But even given the pri-
ority of interactive contexts, without an embodied epistemology, it’s still
possible to posit an underlying and more fundamental cognitive core. Eso
is to say, precisely delineating the improvisational conception of reason
from the traditional one requires showing how embodied cognition entails
that rationality is in its most primitive form a reﬁnement of an organism’s
interactions.

Hasta ahora, I have only illustrated embodied rationality in terms of frog
tongue-ﬂicking, a case of minimal epistemic agency far removed from the
concerns of social epistemology. In §4, I present a second illustration, uno
that falls squarely within the domain of social epistemology, when I re-
construct Kusch’s conception of social identity. One of the chief obstacles
to making this connection, sin embargo, comes from neo-Kuhnian social epis-
temology itself; in the next section, I link the previously discussed notion
of inexhaustible descriptions to broader movements within social episte-
mology. I will use Steve Fuller, one of the ﬁeld’s most inﬂuential theorists,

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as an exemplar in this regard since he explicitly endorses a disembodied
rationality. This critical discussion provides the resources for then re-
constructing Kusch’s communitarian epistemology.

5. Disembodied Social Epistemologies
In the present section, I contrast my proposed synthesis of social epistemol-
ogy and cognitive science with disembodied varieties of social epistemol-
ogia. The hallmark of the latter is the belief that social interaction rests
upon mutually recognized (es decir., socially objective) truths. The two ﬁgures
that I focus on in the present section—Steve Fuller (2002, 2011, 2012)
and Martin Kusch (2002a, 2002b)—each endorses such a view, with dif-
fering emphases and aims. Concerning the former, despite my discussion of
Fuller’s social epistemology being necessarily abbreviated, I address it for
tres razones: primero, Fuller has directly inﬂuenced D’Agostino’s federalist
modelo; segundo, his inﬂuence on social epistemology as a whole offers a
more general perspective on the anti-realism prevalent within the ﬁeld;
and ﬁnally, Fuller explicitly endorses a disembodied conception of ratio-
nality. Fuller’s explicit avowal further highlights what is at stake between
embodied and disembodied conceptions of social epistemology. En el
present section, I focus on the differing accounts of normativity that each
entails; I argue that the embodied conception provides a more nuanced and
heterogeneous account of normativity, one that strengthens the Kuhnian
notion of an essential tension. My discussion of Fuller is, in this context,
not intended to be the ﬁnal word on his social epistemology but rather
only clariﬁes the tensions between embodied and disembodied accounts.
Fuller’s inﬂuence on D’Agostino is direct and, in a number of ways,
salutary. D’Agostino’s federalist model of enquiry builds in part on Fuller’s
claim that epistemology is nothing other than political philosophy applied to
the community of enquiry (Batán 2002, pag. 6; D’Agostino 2010, pag. 151). El
political nature of epistemology stems from the same basic issue raised by
Kitcher (2001, 2011)—namely, scarcity of resources. Batán (2012) writes:

Much of the ongoing discussion, especially among analytic
epistemologists, about whether science “aims for the truth” has been
misdirected because, in my view, the interesting disagreements arise
less over that question than which truths are worth pursuing and the
means by which they are pursued (pag. 269).

The problem of how resources should be allocated in scientific research,
which analytic epistemology has neglected, stems in part from the
inexhaustibility of descriptions. Any given material state of affairs can be
described in an indefinite number of ways, each description expressing a
different truth. A truth thereby fails to indicate whether it is more salient

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Perspectives on Science

787

than other truths. Fuller adds another dimension to inexhaustibility, de-
scribing himself as a “realizationist”: “my position would be more accu-
rately described as ‘realizationist’ (en vez de, decir, ‘relativist’). I believe
that we increasingly come to turn into reality whatever we conceive”
(2012, pag. 272). Material states of affairs are themselves pliable—not just
descriptions of them. In this way, Fuller underlines the inherently political
character of scientiﬁc research: researchers’ use of limited resources shapes
the physical reality of humanity’s future in accord with particular priori-
ties and values. D’Agostino’s federalist model conceptualizes some of the
social structures that enable scientiﬁc communities to negotiate these
asuntos. But unlike the federalist model—which is compatible with (incluso
if lacking) an embodied epistemology—Fuller embraces a disembodied
conception of rationality, as evidenced in his model of how the public
via social epistemology can inform scientiﬁc research.

Optimism permeates Fuller’s discussion of how the public can inform
scientiﬁc research, an optimism concerning science’s potential for shaping
reality to suit our desires. Fuller’s vision of humanity’s future—while driven
by the rhetorical aim of highlighting the politics of science—betrays a dis-
embodied conception of rationality and normativity. Given the wide range of
research possibilities to pursue, Fuller beckons to trans- and post-humanist
possibilities. Trans-humanism is founded on the idea that humans are
“intellects that happen for now to possess animal bodies” (Batán 2011,
pag. 63). That Fuller even considers trans-humanism a possibility implies that
the body does not play any intrinsic role in cognition. The body, en cambio,
appears as an aggregate of material needs that the mind takes care of as if
they were menial chores. The body’s physical needs are thus considered inci-
dental to the mind’s powers—as if the body were just another aspect of the
material world that biologically dependent minds wisely choose to maintain.
According to this picture, a human mind could just as easily perceive poten-
tial food as the color of tree bark—if, eso es, the mind were freed from the
chore of feeding a body. It is with regard to this point—detaching cognitive
abilities from the body—that Fuller endorses a disembodied epistemology.
Given a disembodied epistemology, values like political equality and
liberty appear as objective normative standards. Fuller believes that
trans-humanism, por ejemplo, fosters equality by freeing people’s minds
from bodies that exist within inherently unequal material circumstances.
Respectivamente, liberty consists of a mutually shared freedom from material
inequality; it is an objective goal for science to pursue, providing a blue-
print for scientists to engineer humanity’s future. On this view, Batán
(2002, pag. xvi) sees social epistemology as a shared foundation for our
epistemic undertakings: Por un lado, it informs the public of the
competing values at stake in different lines of enquiry and, en el otro,

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Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

informs scientiﬁc communities of the public’s preferences. Fuller thus
offers a compelling vision of social epistemology’s role in science and
sociedad, one that is a major advance over Kuhn’s narrow social epistemology
(§2). But treating norms as mutually shared objective standards obscures
social normativities that endogenously emerge in actual social encounters
within epistemic communities. To provide an alternative to the notion of
objective norms, as well as a revised picture of social epistemology’s role, I
now revisit Bickhard’s concept of intrinsic intentionality and error-guided
aprendiendo (§1, §3).

Intrinsic intentionality is the basis for but does not itself consist of
conscious intentions or representational aboutness. This distinction cor-
responds to Weber and Varela’s (2002, pag. 100) distinction between two
senses of teleology: the most common sense of “external seemingly pur-
poseful design” corresponds to representational aboutness while the second
sense—“internal purposes immanent to the living”—denotes the biologi-
cal nature of intrinsic intentionality. While Fuller thinks that the norma-
tive dimension of social epistemology is exhausted by conscious design
(es decir., engineering the future to suit our desires), on the embodied view,
values emerge from and remain intimately linked to the immanent pur-
posiveness of living beings. Cognición, on this latter view, consists of an
inherently value-laden perspective on the world; as opposed to being an
incidental chore, metabolic constraints are the originary source of meaning
and serve as the most basic normative standards for learning. Given this
concept of intrinsic intentionality and immanent normativity, I turn now
to their implications for the domain of science, a context thoroughly awash
in representations, in contrast to the cases of minimal cognition favored by
Weber and Varela in which the role of metabolic constraints are apparent.
Bickhard’s interactivist model has already provided an important ﬁrst step
to achieving this by grounding representations in nonrepresentational
goal-directedness. To strengthen the link between, Por un lado,
Bickhard’s model of representation and error-guided learning and, en
the other, the social epistemology of science, it is helpful to ﬁrst revisit
the normative implications of D’Agostino’s federal model.

In his brief remarks on the normative implications of his federal model,
D’Agostino hints at more nuanced forms of normativity than envisioned by
Batán. Near the end of Naturalizing Epistemology, por ejemplo, D’Agostino
styles his account as possessing “a deﬁnite whiff of the normative” (2010,
pag. 178). While D’Agostino pitches his account on the basis of its descrip-
tive merits, he notes that a map of a terrain—such as his mapping of
epistemic communities—has normative implications for any user, even if the
mapmaker doesn’t tell the user where to go. D’Agostino’s point, as noted in
§3, rests on the inexhaustibility of descriptions: no single description can

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Perspectives on Science

789

be treated as the objective account and so, como resultado, the editorial decisions of
the mapmaker reﬂects certain priorities and thereby values. This is an impor-
tant insight that is consistent with—indeed highlights the role of—Fuller’s
realizationist vision of social epistemology. But the inexhaustibility of de-
scriptions—if it is taken to be the fundamental level of normativity—remains
vulnerable to realist undertow: the social dimension appears as just a prac-
tically necessary means for getting a handle on and reshaping objective
material states-of-affairs. But the inexhaustibility of descriptions fails to
capture the most basic level of normativity—embodied directedness.

On the embodied view that I have developed, descriptions are higher
level reﬁnements of nonrepresentational goal-directedness. In terms of
Bickhard’s levels of knowing model, descriptions repartition an agent’s inter-
active possibilities. To describe something is to abstract from a particular
interactive context, with the greater abstractness affording new interactive
possibilities and potential errors, creating a new level of knowing.11 Likewise,
given that rationality is primarily geared towards reﬁning interactions, allá
is an in-principle motivation for understanding reason as improvisational,
as proposed by D’Agostino (2006). The primacy of embodied interaction
indicates a fundamentally different conception of objectivity, one that
thwarts realist reconstructions, such as envisioned by Ladyman above. On
the embodied view, objectivity is constituted by an agent’s interactive poten-
tialities rather than being a material state of affairs that an agent has chosen
to attend to amongst an inﬁnite number of other possibilities. Whereas on
the latter account, the impossibility of value-neutral descriptions is only the
result of the need to exercise editorial control over one’s conscious attention,
the embodied view points to a more fundamental kind of normativity. El
normativity of nonrepresentational embodied directedness is integral to the
very constitution of objects and, as noted in §1, is responsible for what
appears as perceptually salient.

The context-speciﬁcity of rationality and normativity suggests a decid-
edly more modest role for the social epistemology of science than Fuller
envisions. Fuller’s picture is more aligned with what D’Agostino refers to
as the “planning conception” of reason than the improvisational one: social

11. Beliefs are, on this view, an especially important form of abstraction but neither an
epistemically nor normatively primitive one. In exploring the nature of perception, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2012, pag. 32) makes a related though more fundamental point. Crit-
icizing both empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception, he argues that conscious
attention to one’s experiences does not clarify “preexisting givens” but rather actively con-
stitutes new, determinate objects. Merleau-Ponty thus considers all conscious thought as
derivative upon agents’ embodied interaction with their environments. Por eso, the signif-
icance of beliefs stems from their determinacy but not primitiveness.

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epistemology is meant to identify the goals of humanity’s future (p.ej., post-
humanism), which scientists can then engineer. Contrary to Fuller’s vision
and in keeping with the improvisational conception of reason, I argue that
social epistemology’s role is more retrospective than prospective, useful for
identifying interactive patterns within epistemic communities. This type of
project is exempliﬁed by D’Agostino’s federal model. The interactive pat-
terns indicate, en parte, inchoate forms of normativity; En particular, social
epistemology’s population-level perspective can point to patterns that do
not correlate with and may even be contrary to the conscious intentions
and epistemic goals within a community, such as the communication inhib-
itors that D’Agostino discusses. To ﬂesh out more of the immanent norma-
tivity at work in such scenarios, I will reconstruct Kusch’s communitarian
epistemology within an embodiment framework.

But before reconstructing Kusch’s account, I want to consolidate some
of the terminology discussed thus far. Over the course of the paper, I have
offered a series of dichotomies; in §1, I began with two sets—an embodied
epistemology aligned with anti-realism in contrast to a disembodied realist
epistemology. Building upon this division, in §3 I argued that the former
dovetails with an improvisational conception of reason in opposition to the
planning conception. As suggested by my critique of Fuller’s social epis-
temology, the division between these three sets of dichotomies ultimately
concerns whether cognitive content is immanent (es decir., generated by partic-
ular agents acting within speciﬁc contexts) or context-independent (es decir., a
mind-independent material state of affairs). Discussions of the inexhaust-
ibility of descriptions can easily obscure this division, since inexhaustibility
offers a more circumscribed perspective on the impossibility of value-
neutral science, one that is compatible with realism. The issue with
attenuated realist accounts is that they posit a determinacy at the most funda-
mental level of normativity, which obscures inchoate forms of normativity
inherent to social interaction. In §5, I use Rehg’s concept of cogent argu-
mentation to highlight the immanent and inchoate normativity within sci-
entiﬁc communities. But ﬁrst I want to revisit Kusch’s communitarian
epistemology in order to better clarify what is problematic about the deter-
minacy of attenuated realism and also to show how an immanent embodied
framework can recapture the worthwhile insights from such accounts.

As discussed in §1, Kusch’s communitarian epistemology stresses the
performative dimension of language. The ability to use language to refer
to mind-independent aspects of reality (es decir., natural and artiﬁcial kinds) es
of secondary importance to the creation of “social kinds,” which includes
the concept of knowledge. To recap, knowledge is primarily a means for
marking the social role of being a reliable informant. On this picture,
social kinds act as a shared foundation for social interaction. With regard

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Perspectives on Science

791

to being knowledgeable, an interaction involving a person who holds the
status will be structured such that he or she will be expected and trusted to
provide information. Language provides a stability that imbues social
kinds with a meaning that supersedes the particulars of any given social
interacción. Social identities thus function as a mutually recognized or
shared foundation for interaction.12

The determinate identities posited by communitarian epistemology create
the following dilemma. Either the shared social identity is so vague as to be
vacuous, or it is so rich that it is wildly implausible that it is actually shared
by individuals. To address this dilemma, my alternative account of social
identity jettisons the notion of a shared identity in favor of a more ephemeral
and inchoate notion that is geared towards and derivative upon actual
engagement between individuals. Using my characterization of the nor-
mativity of descriptions as a guidepost, I treat social identities as opaque co-
ordinating factors that structure interaction.

As ambiguous descriptors, the meaning of social identities depends on
the particulars of actual interactions, including each individual’s unique
experiential history. A social identity is an abstraction, which—like other
kinds of descriptions—partitions an interactive space, thereby modifying
the perceived range of relevant interactive opportunities. The range of inter-
active opportunities is partly a function of an agent’s prior interactions, en
the basis of which she has reﬁned her expectations when confronted with
negative feedback. It is in this sense that social identities serve as coordi-
nating factors or behavioral attractors, as understood in terms of De Jaegher
and Di Paolo’s (2007, 2008) concept of participatory sense-making.13

Thinking of social identities as coordinating factors helps to explain a
social status’s relatively stable meaning without annihilating the idio-
syncratic dimensions and intrinsic signiﬁcance of social interaction. Salient
differences in individuals’ respective perceptions of a social identity can
be smoothed out (or further entrenched) via the continuous feedback
and reﬁnement of encounters. There may even be crucial differences in

12. In accordance with this picture, Kusch states that the goal of communitarian epis-
temology “is to understand, rather than change, epistemic communities” (2002a, pag. 2).
Kusch thus sees his communitarian epistemology as purely descriptive. But communitarian
epistemology’s goal wrongly presupposes that description and understanding can be value-
neutral.

13. While social identities and linguistic descriptions appear discordant with
De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s (2007, 2008) own examples of coordinating factors, this is
a result of their rhetorical context. Their main objective is to counter cognitivism within the
philosophy of mind. Además, I am treating social identities in terms of how they inﬂuence
social interaction, thus maintaining the priority that De Jaegher and Di Paolo give to the
dynamics of engagement.

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Social Coordination in Scientiﬁc Communities

individuals’ understanding of a social identity that go unnoticed because
circumstances have not yet brought them to the fore. This is the sense in
which social identities are shallow or opaque, analogous to D’Agostino’s
(2010) notion of shallow consensus (§3). Agreement conceals pervasive
underlying disagreements, but without undermining the role that social
identities play in interaction.

To illustrate how a social identity can structure interaction, I offer the
following hypothetical scenario, inspired by D’Agostino’s federal model.
Consider the effect that learning of social comparison pressures within sci-
entiﬁc communities could have on an individual researcher. The researcher
might, por ejemplo, be less likely to remain reticent when another team
member voices a point at variance with her own ﬁndings. When offering
a dissenting viewpoint, she can think of herself as searching for a “hidden
proﬁle” as opposed to making trouble or attacking her team member. Este
difference can be expressed in terms of the contrasting roles of a team helper
as compared to a trouble-maker. The difference can have a decisive inﬂuence
not only on whether the dissenter will share her divergent ﬁndings but
also inﬂuence whether the contribution is a constructive one. The per-
spective of helping one’s team is a stronger rhetorical position than chal-
lenging a team member.14

The relevant social identities in my example—“team helper” and “trouble-
maker”—are more ephemeral than an idealized status like “being knowl-
edgeable.” The hypothetical scenario thus diverges from Kusch’s discussion,
yet I think such improvised social roles draw attention to the formation of
identities and thus the dynamics that underpin more stable ones. Accord-
ingly, I propose that more stable and widely recognizable social identities
are a product of the same general dynamics—an opaque abstraction that is
continuously reﬁned and reinforced via social encounters. A linguistically
centered account, por el contrario, implies that a social role has a determinate
function or set of functions, such as knowledge reducing to being a reliable
informant. A este respecto, Kusch’s account dovetails with the problematic
instrumentalism of Kuhn and Kitcher discussed in §2.

Rehg’s (2009) concept of cogency dovetails with the embodied inter-
activist account of social identity. Cogency, for Rehg, represents the many
context-speciﬁc factors that determine whether an argument is found to be
persuasive within a scientiﬁc community. Possible factors include values
such as openness, a person’s argumentative temperament, and who receives
credit. The indeﬁnite range of possible factors is offset by the need for

14. En cambio, Rehg (2009) offers a case of a researcher who lacks sensitivity to the
rhetorical dimension of enquiry and, como resultado, is excluded from a scientiﬁc community.
I detail this case and the rhetorical dimension of enquiry in the next section.

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individuals to demonstrate a factor’s relevance to a particular situation.
Rehg thus suggests that the normativity of scientiﬁc argumentation in-
volves “microdynamics” speciﬁc to particular interactive contexts (pag. 2009,
pag. 67). In the next section, I bolster my critique of Fuller and Kusch’s dis-
embodied social epistemologies by detailing the contextual normativity of
scientiﬁc argumentation.

6. Cogency and the Immanent Normativity of Scientiﬁc Communities
Rehg’s guiding theme (2009) is “Kuhn’s Gap,” which refers to occasions
when an argument is persuasive but not logically compelling. Rehg’s concept
of cogency relates to the “microdynamics” of persuasion in comparison to
Kuhn’s focus on macro-social institutional forces. Kuhn’s merely superﬁcial
treatment of persuasion is evident from Wray’s depiction of the evolutionary
aspect of Kuhnian epistemology: when a scientiﬁc community confronts a
theoretical dispute, either there will ultimately be a clear winner or the
community splits into separate disciplines (§2). D’Agostino improves upon
Kuhn by drawing on psychology and organizational studies, as detailed in
§3, but still only considers these factors in terms of institutional dynamics
that hinder or promote communication. D’Agostino’s focus on macro-social
institutional forces is exempliﬁed by the federal model’s two-axis depiction of
epistemic communities.

With its treatment of microsocial dynamics, Rehg’s theory of argumen-
tation helps substantiate the link between Bickhard’s model of the embod-
ied cognitive subject and the institutional forces discussed by Kuhn, Wray,
and D’Agostino. Rehg begins with the common idea of cogency, a saber
cogency as the “convincing quality” of an argument (2009, pag. 6). Este
open-ended deﬁnition enables the term to cover a range of meanings, con
the disparate meanings a reﬂection of cogency’s context-dependence.

As one illustration of cogency’s context-speciﬁcity, Rehg examines the
process of collaboration and publication at Fermilab. The case study spe-
ciﬁcally deals with the research and discovery of the top quark, cual
spanned the years 1993–1995. Fermilab is an institution within which
many different research teams collaborate. In connection with the top
quark research, there were four separate teams: two teams counted lepton
decays, one counted dilepton decays, and a fourth team reconstructed the
kinematics of the decay events (Rehg 2009, pag. 169). To pool and publish
the four teams’ results, the writing process involved four social roles: estafa-
vener, godparent, escritor, and audience (2009, pag. 171). Two people acted as
conveners, whose task was to convene meetings and record their minutes.
The conveners asked each team to appoint a godparent, whose task was to
provide an independent critique of the paper drafted by the writers (el
third role). After the draft passed the godparents, it was then to be presented

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to the audience, which consisted of all the Fermilab scientists who were not
part of the four teams. The presentation to Fermilab as a whole acted as a
ﬁnal check before journal publication.

The case study exhibits the basic features of D’Agostino’s federal model
while also presenting some complications. The four teams worked in par-
allel, corresponding to the horizontal axis of the federal model, yet only
two used the same technique. The difference in methodology led to some
controversy regarding the kinematics group’s claims, which I return to
abajo. There was also a complication with respect to the vertical axis:
while the godparents were meant to provide an independent critique of
the paper draft, they ended up participating directly in its writing. El
break with agreed-upon procedure, while criticized, was justiﬁed on the
grounds that it improved the quality of the paper (Rehg 2009, pag. 172).
Por eso, procedures and institutional structures were improvised upon when
it was considered beneﬁcial to the research.

The writing procedure—that is, the four social roles and three writing
phases of draft, revisión, and presentation to Fermilab as a whole—was
adopted in the wake of having rejected a “four short papers” proposal.
The rejection of this proposal—referred to within Fermilab as the “October
massacre”—was due to the view that the papers were being rushed without
sufﬁcient vetting and motivated adopting the more rigorous writing pro-
cedure. The perceived rush in the prior proposal was due to the kinematics
equipo, who wanted to publish their evidence for the existence of the top
quark before the other teams. Complicating matters, two of the team
miembros (Garry Goldstein and Richard Dalitz) were outsiders brought
in because of their expertise in kinematics analysis.

The tense situation brought to the fore the difﬁculties involved in the
collaboration of different types of specialists. The kinematics team claimed
to have conclusive evidence for the top quark but none of the Fermilab
scientists outside of the kinematics team were fully qualiﬁed to judge
the claim’s technical details. The difﬁcult circumstance highlights the
wide range of factors involved in argumentation, including the already dis-
cussed dialectics of the writing procedure. The kinematics team’s rush to
publish conﬂicted with the values of openness and thoroughness, En cual
turn prompted Fermilab scientists to adopt the four social roles and three
phases of paper writing.

Rhetorical considerations also played a part in assessing the kinematics
team’s proposal. Krys Sliwa—the Fermilab scientist in charge of the kine-
matics team—described Gary Goldstein as “overexcited” (Rehg 2009,
pag. 177). Goldstein’s temperament—his ethos—suggested to Sliwa and some
of his other colleagues that he lacked the capacity for responsible judgment,
and he subsequently lost access to Fermilab’s data. There was at least one

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additional major factor that inﬂuenced the assessment of the kinematics
equipo, and it corresponds to the concern for credit attribution stressed by
Kitcher (1990). If the kinematics team had published their paper ﬁrst, entonces
credit for the top quark discovery would have fallen primarily on scientists
who were not part of Fermilab. At issue are not merely the selﬁsh interests
of Fermilab scientists but the credibility of Fermilab as a whole. Maintain-
ing the credibility of the institution itself is crucial to its continued exis-
tence, a concern that also played a part in withholding data from an August
1993 conference presentation (Rehg 2009, pag. 171).

Rehg interprets the Fermilab case study as displaying an immanent
contextualism. All three of the major factors—the dialectical, rhetorical,
and credit issues—took on their particular signiﬁcance because of the
kinematics controversy. The dialectical values of openness and thorough-
ness, por ejemplo, only became relevant argumentative considerations
when the kinematics team sought to publish their ﬁndings before the three
other teams. To further conceptualize this immanent dynamic, Rehg draws
upon Habermas’s notion of transcendental standards of conversation,
which Habermas understands as universal pragmatic presuppositions.15
Rehg, sin embargo, dispenses with the notion of transcendental standards and
takes them instead as critical heuristics, thereby inverting Habermas as fol-
lows: rather than being regulative ideals for all conversations, values such as
openness must be fought for by a particular agent in order for them to be
meaningful in a particular context (p.ej., the value of openness prompting
the adoption of a more rigorous writing procedure) (Rehg 2009, pag. 160).
Rehg’s immanent contextualism complements embodied epistemology.
The above controversy, por ejemplo, can be usefully modeled using Bickhard’s
terminology. The kinematics team, from this perspective, created a situation
in which the abstract values of openness and thoroughness were recognized
by Fermilab scientists as relevant tools for restructuring the interactive space
(es decir., the adoption of the four social roles and three writing phases). En esto
sense, the values were not objective blueprints—pace Fuller—but rather a
means for differentially responding to a particular situation. A este respecto,
the values, like the temperament of the scientists, acted as coordinating
factores.

15. See Habermas (1979) for his initial formulation of a “universal pragmatics” for com-
munication. Habermas’s (1984) Theory of Communicative Action builds upon this picture by
arguing against narrow conceptions of rationality in the social sciences; one of Habermas’s
most important claims is that rationality is responsive to moral and evaluative claims, no
just empirical facts. Although Rehg’s immanent contextualism departs from Habermas’s
notion of transcendental ideals and the counterfactual mode of analysis, it still dovetails
with the pragmatic orientation of Habermas.

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Rehg’s major contribution to embodied epistemology lies in his recon-
struction of a tremendously complex form of normativity. Scientiﬁc argu-
mentation is about as far from minimal cases of cognition as one can get,
yet the contextual nature of scientiﬁc argumentation suggests that nor-
mativity retains an immanent character. Rehg’s theory of argumentation
unpacks a kind of rationality long held dear by philosophers of mind
and science and, al hacerlo, supplants the notion of objective rationality
in favor of the context-speciﬁc notion of cogency. In this respect, cogency
buttresses Bickhard’s account of rationality, suggesting that its insights
hold beyond cases of minimal epistemic agency.

With regard to D’Agostino, Rehg’s concept of cogency strengthens his
discussion of cultures of enquiry, including the aforementioned notion of
shallow consensus. The danger, as represented by Ladyman’s (2012) re-
vista, is to read shallow consensus as merely a practical exigency; eso es,
as a practical necessity that only incidentally has a beneﬁcial side-effect for
enquiry. Cogency, por el contrario, suggests that the rationality of scientiﬁc
argumentation cannot be understood apart from the various practical con-
siderations at work in any given context. One of the most important prac-
tical constraints on any argument, as discussed above, is what is considered
relevant. The point of departing from Habermas’s transcendental ideals is
to claim that relevance is earned and created by particular agents for speciﬁc
contextos, not something that was previously there and just needed to be re-
vealed. In this manner, Rehg strengthens the notion of shallow consensus
by showing that practical considerations thoroughly permeate scientiﬁc
argumentation as opposed to just being a thin veneer, whose signiﬁcance
might be limited, por ejemplo, to the rhetorical dimension of scientiﬁc
argumentation. The ineliminable signiﬁcance of context-speciﬁc practical
factors is precisely why Rehg thinks Habermas’s counterfactual mode of
analysis is a toothless abstraction. But showing that scientiﬁc argumen-
tation is permeated by practical considerations only mitigates, as opposed
to undermining, the realist undertow.

By challenging the basic tenets of cognitive realism, the embodied epis-
temology that I have presented above substantiates Rehg’s immanent con-
textualism and clariﬁes the connection between cogency and shallow
consensus. Regarding shallow consensus, embodied epistemology entails
that there is an important sense in which disagreements—especially when
understood in terms of conﬂicting beliefs—do not exist so long as the
agents involved have not attended to and articulated them. O, to use ter-
minology closer to Rehg’s concept of cogency, the disagreements are irrel-
evant to the given context until an agent articulates why they should be
taken into consideration. As previously noted in connection to Merleau-
Ponty, beliefs and conscious thought in general are not epistemic primitives

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but are rather abstractions from an agent’s interactions. It is precisely for
this reason that the context-dependence of cogency is not merely a con-
tingent matter but relates to the semantic opaqueness of perception, as de-
scribed by Bickhard’s interactive model of representation.

Buttressing the concepts of shallow consensus and cogency with an
embodied epistemology also adds another dimension to Kuhn’s essential
tension. Específicamente, the embodied framework helps link while preserving
the distinctiveness of Kuhn’s (1962) notions of normal and revolutionary
periods of science. The possible range of intermediate positions between
the two periods increases dramatically when the semantic opaqueness of
perception is recognized. Cross-talk, in which the meaning of a term im-
portantly though perhaps imperceptibly differs between individuals, re-
ﬂects, en parte, the primitive signiﬁcance of each individual’s interactive
histories and pragmatic orientations. In this manner, cross-talk can, sobre el
one hand, inhibit innovation by enabling individuals to interpret a term
conservatively but, en el otro, nurture innovation by enabling the radical
implications of a novel term come to light belatedly and perhaps more grad-
ually, after it has undergone more extensive development than would have
otherwise been the case. One example of the former is, por supuesto, the realist
undertow diagnosed by D’Agostino (2014). The semantic opaqueness of
percepción, and the nonrepresentational intentionality upon which it is
based, entails that cross-talk and the balancing of conﬂicting epistemic im-
pulses relates to the fundamental nature of cognition rather than being a case
of intellectual ﬁnitude, laziness, o peor.

7. Conclusión
The social dimension of epistemology has broadened considerably since
Kuhn’s narrow internalist construal, yet the linguistically centered account
of rationality and normativity has remained largely unquestioned. Uno
consequence, as evidenced by both Fuller and Kusch’s social epistemol-
ojos, is that the primitive level of both the epistemic and normative di-
mensions of enquiry are understood in terms of determinate conscious
intentions; this in turn has left their social epistemologies vulnerable to
realist undertow. As an alternative, I have sketched an embodied epis-
temology and applied it to two neo-Kuhnian concepts. With regard to
D’Agostino’s federal model of enquiry, embodied epistemology blunts
Ladyman’s realist critique by clarifying in what sense the subjective dimen-
sion of enquiry shapes and supports the objective dimension. This aspect
of cognition requires recognizing the role of nonrepresentational goal-
directedness, which is precisely what linguistically centered accounts ob-
scure. Nonrepresentational goal-directedness relates to the opaqueness of
perception and the resultant epistemic primacy of interaction, ambos de

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which buttress the second neo-Kuhnian concept—Rehg’s context-speciﬁc
notion of cogency.

The intrinsic importance of interaction is precisely why social contexts,
such as scientiﬁc communities, are not merely incidental to individuals’
cognitive abilities. Scientists’ skills can only be properly employed in re-
lation to the larger community within which they have developed—in
relation to and partly constitutive of dynamics such as those identiﬁed
by D’Agostino’s federal model of enquiry. En cambio, community-level
dynamics—I have focused on Kuhn’s essential tension—are distorted if
they are understood only from the perspective of institutional structures
and mechanisms. Rehg presents his concept of cogency to help address this
lacuna within the social epistemology of science, a move that I have sub-
stantiated with an embodied epistemology. The more general implication
of my efforts is that social epistemology and cognitive science both need
each other and should be employed together in order to give a more com-
prehensive and balanced perspective of individual cognitive subjects and
the communities they shape and are shaped by. The concept of social co-
ordination exempliﬁes the fruits borne by linking the two ﬁelds: coordina-
tion dynamics capture how interactive contexts can become autonomous
processes but without annihilating the distinctiveness of the particular
agents involved.

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