Epistemology concerns itself with questions regarding the nature of knowledge. Is knowledge objective or subjective? How does one articulate knowledge? Is it possible to acquire knowledge? All these of these questions are concerns of epistemology.
Different fields have different epistemic foundations. Islamic theology assumes that everything said in the Qur’an is true, and therefore nothing contradicting it can be true. But the foundation on which Islamic theology articulates knowledge from, is extremely shaky, due to the nature of God being unfalsifiable. We can’t prove its existence. Therefore, trying to understand the world through the Qur’an would be stupid, since the odds of the Qur’an being true is extremely low. And the Qur’an isn’t the only source which rests its’ epistemic foundation on something unfalsifiable, making it only one source out of many.
The epistemic foundation of social psychology rests on the assumption that an individual human’s psychology can be affected by its environment. So far so good, but that assumption itself rests on the existence of the category “humans”. And that is exactly what makes the epistemic foundation of social psychology rubbish.
Evolutionary change happens gradually, not categorically. Therefore, categories does not exist in reality. The difference between a wolf and a dog is purely decided by humans. Even if we had all the data, it wouldn’t be evident which exact progeny of the wolf was the first dog. The criteria we use to differentiate a wolf from a dog is in the end purely subjective. This means that the “dog” does not exist independent of us humans, and therefore, not independent of evolutionary trajectory.
But does anything exist independent of the evolutionary trajectory? Yes. The fields of physics and chemistry can without a doubt be articulated by other organisms, because they are always the same. The same theories can, and most probably would, be constructed independent of evolutionary trajectory.
However, social psychology is weak. The category human is a social construct, not something that we can observe independent of us humans. And it is a good to remember that the category “human” precedes evolutionary theory itself. It wasn’t Darwin, Lamarck or Mendel who laid the ground for the category “Human”. Rather the “human” is a construct of Christian-western civilization.
Now, evolutionary psychology is a whole other story. You don’t need the existence of any category to articulate knowledge about a certain population. It works on dogs, humans and sharks equally. Evolutionary psychology, just like physics and chemistry, can exist independent of evolutionary trajectory. Even an alien can articulate evolutionary psychology and use it to understand its own kind without any trouble, while the same can not in any way be said of social psychology.
The funny thing is that, we can’t falsify God, but we can falsify the existence of the Human. This means that the epistemic foundation of social psychology is weaker than the Qur’an and the Bible. And what is funnier is that, the same side which accuses everyone of Ethnocentricity and whatever, are actually the ones defending the remnants of Christian lies in academia. A mad world indeed
hedging oc philosophy by atalay oral 