Social Epistemology

Studying the ways in which knowledge comes about; conditions that are friendly to knowledge; how, where, and when knowledge travels among social groups; and most importantly, how social groups can get the best knowledge possible is at the heart of the interdisciplinary field of social epistemology. Questions about knowledge have long been the provenance of the branch of philosophy known as epistemology. The emphasis traditionally in this field of philosophy was to establish how and under what conditions individuals could come to have good knowledge, “good” meaning true or reliable or even compatible with other knowledge that individuals hold. Increasingly, however, these emphases have been joined with interest about the social nature of knowledge from those who study communication, sociology, social psychology, history, knowledge management, ...