Social Epistemology

The term “social epistemology” (SE) was first used by the library and information scientist Jesse Shera in 1951, but soon the term became muddled, and it did not become influential at that time. Later, it became known as the name for two different traditions outside library and information science, one led by Alvin Goldman and based on analytic philosophy, and the other led by Steve Fuller and related to science policy. It seems, however, problematic just to associate the term with these two schools, which, in different ways, are found not to represent genuine approaches to SE. SE is an alternative to individualist epistemologies and, as such, has roots back to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Charles Peirce, among others. In the twentieth century, the concept became influential in the wake of Thomas Kuhn’s historicist view and in pragmatic, hermeneutic, critical, and feminist views (but mostly not by using the term SE). In these contexts, it represents an alternative to “positivism.” Shera’s 1951 use of the term SE is found to represent the best vision for SE, although it could not be properly concretized before alternatives to positivism were developed in 1962.