Metaepistemological Analysis of Formation of Knowledge in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Imam Wahyudi ,  Rangga Kala Mahaswa
Faculty of Philosophy, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
rangga.mahaswa@gmail.com

Abstract

Post-truth plays a significant role in forming public social knowledge in the pandemic era, where the flow of information is getting convoluted. This problem is raised in line with the high number of fake news cases, distrust of an expert, massive exchange of information both in real and digital social media, including high case of misinformation, and pseudoscience. This article proposes two general frameworks over the constitution of knowledge in the pandemic era: a naturalistic and social-constructive approach. Naturalism tends to focus its analysis of formation of social knowledge in pandemic on the scientific ground, such as discussion on the ontology of virus whether virus understood as an individual microscopic entity or as a life process. Conversely, the social constructivist approaches in analyzing constitution of knowledge of the pandemics as nothing, but a social construct such as non-natural disasters and public discourse consensus. In one position, naturalism offers an objective and cognitive ground based on scientific consensus, but in another case, social-constructivism also offers an explanatory role such as explaining the human-virus interaction. In order to confront this issue, this article will discuss metaepistemological analysis of the formation of social knowledge based on those two general frameworks and initially propose position under the Epistemological Plurality. Nevertheless, this article still left difficult, especially how to apply epistemic pluralism under practical domain without falling into relativism? Therefore, this article initially opens further philosophical works and discussions to offer a critical epistemological view in forming epistemology of pandemic and maybe as a post-pandemic policy consideration. 

Keywords

Pandemic, meta-epistemology, social-constructivist, naturalism, post-truth
Volume 08, 07 Mar 2022
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