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, politics, and education. In addition, feminist critics have pointed out that knowledge has been an honorific term, usually given only to [Page 810]beliefs held by people in very particular, and gendered, social situations. This has been elaborated by adding class and race to the social dimensions that are relevant to something even being worthy of consideration as knowledge.

Social epistemology labels a broad array of approaches that are probably only unified by their attention to the social aspects, rather than the individual aspects, of epistemology, broadly defined as “how people come to know.” Science, of course, has been especially important to social epistemolo-gists as scientific knowledge has been—albeit problematically in some cases—seen to be the “gold standard” to which all knowledge should aspire. It is also the case that there are many anxieties about the ways in which scientific knowledge is distributed and about a lack of distribution, or even absolute secrecy, about some forms of scientific and technological knowledge.