CONCEPT
Civic Epistemology
Jasanoff's framework for the culturally embedded ways societies produce and validate public knowledge — explaining why the US, EU, and China govern AI through incommensurable standards.
Civic epistemology names the implicit, culturally specific ways a society establishes what it collectively knows and how it knows it. Different political cultures have different practices for producing authoritative knowledge, different standards for what counts as evidence, different roles for experts and citizens, and different criteria for when a knowledge claim is sufficient to justify action. These differences are not merely procedural preferences but constitute different ways of knowing — different answers to the questions of how certainty is achieved, how expertise should be organized, and what makes a governance decision legitimate. Jasanoff developed the concept through comparative study of biotechnology regulation, showing that the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Commission reached different conclusions about genetically modified organisms not because they had different science but because they had different civic epistemologies.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The American civic epistemology, as Jasanoff characterized it in Designs on Nature, is adversarial and empiricist. Knowledge is produced through contestation — competing experts, cross-examination, the marketplace