Cartesian Social Epistemology? Contemporary Social Epistemology and Early Modern Philosophy

Why Social Epistemology Is Real Epistemology

A Social Constructionist Epistemology

Systems - Oriented Social Epistemology *

How can social epistemology (SE) be characterized so that all of these topics fit under its umbrella? Why does each topic qualify as epistemology and in what respects is it social? This paper begins by proposing a tripartite division of SE. Under this classification scheme the first variety of SE is highly continuous with traditional epistemology, whereas the second and third varieties diverge ...

Defending Longino's Social Epistemology

Though critics of traditional epistemology agree that we need to account for the role that social factors play in inquiry, developing a viable social epistemology has proved to be difficult. According to Helen Longino, it is the processes that make inquiry possible that are social, for they require a number of people to sustain them. These processes facilitate inquiry, and ensure that the resul...

Social Epistemology: Theory and Applications

Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors lar...