Social Epistemology

Social epistemology, in the broadest sense, is concerned with the ways in which knowledge and inquiry are social.  A bit more narrowly, it is concerned with the generation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge in social contexts.  In its early incarnations, social epistemology often took the form of a critique of traditional “individualistic” epistemology, and social epistemologists continue to emphasize the mistake of ignoring social and political considerations when seeking to understand knowledge and inquiry.  However, there is no consensus among specialists in this field whether social epistemology complements or competes with traditional epistemology.  Central questions in analytic social epistemology include whether and how knowledge can be transmitted through testimony, whether mutually recognized reasonable belief is possible, and whether groups of individual people can enjoy knowledge.  Some questions in social epistemology have engaged philosophers for millennia: the Pyrrhonian skeptics argued that irresolvable disagreement ought to prompt suspension of judgment and Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers extolled the value of intellectual autonomy.  However, social epistemology as a sub-field of analytic philosophy arguably came into existence in the late 20th century, with the emergence of feminist “standpoint theories” in the philosophy of science and, within epistemology, of literatures focusing on testimony, disagreement, and the epistemology of collectives.  More recently, questions about epistemic injustice (as when someone is given deficient credibility on account of prejudice), information environments (such as those saturated with fake news or those characterized by echo chambers), and the epistemic significance of social location (as on the view that socially disadvantaged subjects enjoy an epistemic advantage over their socially advantaged counterparts) have taken center stage within analytic social epistemology, and the methods of formal epistemology have been applied in the epistemology of disagreement and standpoint epistemology, among other places.   

Goldman 1991 provides the canonical articulation and defense of the idea of social epistemology, and Schmitt 1994 was an important early collection, containing a number of important early contributions to the field.  Harding 2001 collects essential readings in feminist standpoint theory.  Coady 1992 is the first book-length treatment of the epistemology of testimony and served as the starting point for the contemporary revival of interest in testimony; other important contributions include Ross 1986, Fricker 1994, and Lackey 2008.  Feldman 2006 and Kelly 2005 set the agenda for contemporary debates with their respective defenses of the “conciliationist” and “steadfast” positions in the epistemology of disagreement.  Contemporary collective epistemology can be traced back to Gilbert 1989; Lackey 2020 constitutes the state of the art.  Fricker et al 2019 and Lackey & McGlynn 2024 are excellent handbooks with chapters surveying central topics and questions; Goldman & Whitcomb 2011 is also an important collection.  

Goldman 2011, Schmitt 1994, Schmitt 2017 each seek to explain the nature of social epistemology and introduce it with examples.  O'Connor et al 2024 is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry and has been recently updated.  Toole 2021 provides an excellent introduction to contemporary standpoint epistemology.