Folk Epistemology as Normative Social Cognition

Epistemology tout court is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of knowledge (as a product) and knowing (as a process that produces knowledge). One of the epistemologist’s goals is to separate the epistemic wheat from the doxastic chaff, the knowledge from the mere belief; another one is to describe the very nature of knowledge: its features, conditions, sources, justification and limits. Folk-epistemology is the folksy version of this philosophical investigation. I will here use a definition of folk-epistemology that—I hope—does not specifies in advance what would be a proper characterization of it. Folkepistemology refers to the ordinary, commonsensical, everyday, naïve and intuitive conceptions of knowledge. As Kitchener puts it, it is “our ‘untutored’ views about the nature of knowledge (R. F. Kitchener, 2002, p. 89). Under various labels1 folk-epistemology has been an object of study for many researchers. This research falls in two broad, sometimes overlapping, categories that we might call epistemic theories and epistemic intuitions. Research on the former seeks to elucidate how people think, reason and represent knowledge (a field often referred to as “personal epistemology”).