In this interesting installment of the always wonderful PhilosophyTV, Alvin Goldman and Jennifer Lackey discuss the up-and-coming subfield of social epistemology. Their discussion ranges from the history of the subfield to some of its current topics. It is worth watching for argumentation theorists–especially those based in philosophy–because it represents what amounts to a completely different way of thinking about the epistemic import of human interaction–especially disagreement–than one typically finds in argumentation theory. Whereas there might have been a time when those in the informal logic movement could have rightly claimed to be the only group of philosophers working on these sorts of issues, things have changed dramatically in the last 10 years. This, I think, is something those of us who know, love, and believe in informal logic should consider fairly seriously. The growing philosophical consciousness of subfields like social epistemology, the logic of belief revision, and non-monotonic logics in general over the past decade or so has definite methodological implications for the work that we do. At the very least it is a substantial change in a key subset of the audience to which we often address our claims. Might a change in the rhetoric of informal logic be in the offing?
The video is roughly an hour and fifteen minutes long. Enjoy!
RAIL 
I can’t wait to watch this! And use it for my social epistemology class. However, I must correct you in one matter: argumentation theorists were not the only ones previously doing social epistemology. Feminists have been doing it just as long. Some early pieces in feminist epistemology date back to the late 70s and the 1983 collection “Discovering Reality” is now a classic.
One of the pieces from “Discovering Reality”, by Janice Moulton, concerns the standards and epistemic purposes of argumentation in philosophy, but has been largely neglected by argumentation theorists. Her account of the Adversary Method predates Gilbert’s concern with the “Critical-Logical model” by ten years.
Hi Cate!
You’re quite right. I Did not mean to give the impression that only argumentation theorists were doing SE. Rather, I was trying to highlight the special relevance I think it has to argumentation theory.
Actually my first exposure to feminist philosophy as an undergrad many (many…sigh) years ago was through SE. I won our undergrad essay contest with a paper on it that year. 🙂
Point taken Steve! There is a great deal of common territory here. I’m using Goldman and Whitcomb’s “Social Epistemology: Essential Readings” for my class, and it has all sorts of relevance to argumentation. I’m just a little sensitive from Goldman’s regular dismissal of feminist epistemology. Miranda Fricker gets an appearance in the book, but it’s damn close to tokenism. I also find Goldman’s treatment of “social epistemology” as a creature of his own making rather obnoxious.
Cheers!