BOOK REVIEW Epistemology socialized

It is by now commonplace that analytic epistemology has moved beyond its oftlamented obsession of safeguarding the analysis of knowledge from Gettier cases. One outflow of post-Gettier epistemology is the scrutiny of the social dimensions of knowing and believing. There are lively debates about testimony, assertion, disagreement, group knowledge, collective practices of inquiry, epistemic division of labor, etc. The present volume (not to be confused with Fuller (2002) and Goldman and Whitcomb (2011), which share the same title) offers a representative sampling of the kinds of issues that are discussed under the heading of social epistemology. It contains fifteen original essays, some of which, I should say, are more clearly related to the social than others. Contributors are: Alvin Goldman, Lorraine Code, Miranda Fricker, Klemens Kappel, Jonathan Kvanvig, Matthew Chrisman, Paul Faulkner, Peter Graham, Alan Millar, Ram Neta, Frederick Schmitt, Sanford Goldberg, Michael Lynch, Ernest Sosa and Jennifer Lackey. In the short scope of this review, I’ll summarize and comment on the essays that stood out for me. The opening essay by Goldman usefully maps the field by introducing three different forms social epistemology might take: revisionism, preservationism and expansionism. Revisionism rejects much of the tenets of traditional analytic epistemology and opts for a relativistic framework, taking its cues from postmodernism, social constructivism, and sociological and anthropological studies of science and technology. In contrast, preservationism follows in the footsteps of traditional analytic epistemology, but focuses on the social aspects of individual agents’ knowledge, discussing topics such as testimony, trust, disagreement, and social decision-making and evidence gathering. Expansionism gives the social an even more prominent role by focusing on collective agents and practices. It