My research focuses on how our conception of reality is shaped by our social practices. Here I distinguish, as many do, between social and objective reality, though the way in which I draw this distinction is entirely novel.
The social world is the epistemic product of our coordination attempts. When we inquire into the nature of some social property, like wealth, we’re engaging in the ineluctably normative practice of negotiating what the concept of wealth should entail. We’re tracking facts—in some sense—but we don’t take these facts to be entirely metaphysically independent of our tracking them.
The idea of objective reality, on the other hand, is the invention not of coordination but of cooperation. The main difference is that the latter has us coalesce around a collective goal. This goal, I argue, is truth. Yet, I don’t take truth as an antecedently understood standard of inquiry. The standard of truth has no epistemic substance outside of the context of epistemic cooperation, and its value is wholly derived from its socio-epistemic function.
On the resulting metametaphysical view, the boundaries of social and objective reality are somewhat fuzzy and subject to change. Change the epistemic practices, and you can change how we perceive objective reality—or whether we can perceive it at all. I argue that some of the current political challenges to scientific practice and scientific expertise are aptly conceptualized as a politically motivated opting out of epistemic cooperation—as is the general attitude of skepticism toward the very possibility of independent journalism, i.e., the idea that politically relevant events allow for no objective journalistic perspective. Hence, my work shows not only how we can philosophically motivate the idea of objective reality and objective facts, but also how societal changes could prompt changes in our epistemic practices that would put such ideas out of sight.
By looking at the ways we use truth in social epistemic practices, I have developed a pragmatist version of alethic pluralism (pluralism about truth). A version of this view can be found in my article “Alethic Pluralism for Pragmatists.” While this paper adopts a fairly traditional approach to pluralism about truth, my paper “Truth and Its Uses” offers a more radical version of pragmatist alethic pluralism by arguing that truth is a dual-purpose tool. My newest article on truth, “Conceptually Engineering the Post-Truth Crisis,” uses my theory of truth to explain political threats to the concept of truth, by interpreting them as incognizant conceptual engineering attempts.
I apply my thoughts on truth and epistemic cooperation to my own inquiry: philosophy. I argue that the discipline of philosophy isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a form of epistemic cooperation, and that it therefore doesn’t aim for truth. Though controversial, this metaphilosophical move helps explain why there’s so much disagreement in philosophy, why philosophers may rationally believe their theories despite this disagreement, and how there can be a sense of philosophical progress that is more attainable but also a lot more personal than the one we get from trying to emulate science. I’ve applied some of these thoughts to the practice of peer review in my satirical “Reply to the Reviewers.”
Tom Kaspers 