The Social Epistemology of Reasoning and Argumentation

In recent years, the idea that the individual, mental realm is the primary locus for reasoning became increasingly contested; according to a number of authors, reasoning is best viewed primarily as a social competence, corresponding to the public exchange of reasons. Thus seen, reasoning is in fact a variation of what is arguably a quintessentially social phenomenon, namely argumentation. This chapter discusses different social conceptions of reasoning understood as argumentative reasoning. It starts with some classical analyses of the social epistemology of argumentation, focusing in particular on Mill and Goldman. These approaches have much to be commended for, but they rely on a number of idealized assumptions that limit their applicability to real-life situations. The chapter then turns to two alternative accounts of reasoning as a social competence that do not take the attainment of truths to be the ultimate goal of reasoning: Mercier and Sperber’s interactionist account of reasoning, and Tomasello’s account focusing on coordination. Finally, the author presents an alternative account of the social epistemology of reasoning and argumentation, which brings together insights from the different proposals previously discussed. This account is based on the idea that argumentation is a form of exchange, and draws substantively on a well-known framework in sociology and social psychology known as social exchange theory. The epistemic exchange conception of reasoning and argumentation is then applied to a number of issues recently discussed in the literature on social epistemology.