Socio‐functional foundations in science: The case of measurement

We present a novel kind of “socio‐functional” foundationalism rooted in the division of scientific labor. Our foundationalism is social in that it involves a socio‐epistemic phenomenon we dub epistemic outsourcing , whereby claims from one group of scientists provide epistemological foundations for another group of scientists. We argue that: (1) epistemic outsourcing results in a legitimate form of epistemic foundationalism, (2) this sort of foundationalism can be used to shed light on the epistemology of measurement; and (3) epistemic outsourcing is a distinctively collective epistemic phenomenon.