Social epistemology is a sub-branch of Epistemology which is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge. It can be roughly characterised as the study of the social dimentions of knowledge. However as pointed out by the philosper Alvin Goldman "Many individual writers and groups of writers have sharply divergent views on what social epistemology is or should be"¹. Part of this can be attributed to the relative newness of the disipline. Much depends on the authors veiws on what constitutes.

It is possible to split Social epistemologists into two broad camps: the radical and the non-radical.

1) The non-radical are essentially the study of what significant contributions are made by various social mechanisms to our gaining of knowledge or other epistemically valuable qualities (e.g., justified or rational belief). It assumes a tradditional veiw of knowledge as the justified true belief of individuals.

One central topic in social epistemology is "testimony," construed broadly i.e. the habit we have of learning from other people. One central question in social epistemology is: assuming that we are very often justified in believing something based on the testimony of other people, where does this justification come from, and in particular, does it necessarily come from observations we have made regarding other people's reliability?

2) The radical aims at a new conception of knowledge: knowledge as a "collectively accepted system of belief"². Many followers of this radical conception see the real role of epistemology as providing a sociological account of how actual communities knowledge-production systems work, rather then providing a normative account. They advocate the study of knowledge generating groups, e.g. scientists, using the methods of sociology. A noted example is Lactour and Woolgar 's "Laboritory Life:The Construction of Scientific Facts"³

Notes

1. What Is Social Epistemology? A Smorgasbord of projects Pathways to Knowledge:Private and Public, Oxford Univercity Press, Pg:182-204, ISBN 0195173678
2. Relativism, Rationality and Sociality of Knowledge, Barry Barnes and David Bloor, in Rationality and Relativism, Pg:22 ISBN 0262580616
3. Laboritory Life:The Construction of Scientific Facts, Lactour, B. and Woolgar, S., Prinston University Press ISBN 069102832X

Also See

• Wikipedia approval mechanism
• Social constructionism