Abstract
Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with
sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend
on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and
the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have
knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive
to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization
shapes our psychological and practical orientation so that we perform local social
practices fluently. Connecting practical orientation to an account of ideology, I argue
that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow
ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique
cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices
through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.V