This is the preprint version of a paper that is scheduled to appear in Episteme,Vol. 7 No. 1 (2010), Edinburgh University Press. For citation, please refer to the final version at the publisher’s website.

Social epistemology is an expanding sector of epistemology. There are many directions of expansion, however, and the rationales for them may vary. To illustrate the scope of social epistemology, consider the following topics that have occupied either whole issues or single articles in Episteme, A

information technology. One of the main reasons why the digital divide is an important issue is that access to information technology has a tremendous impact on people's ability to acquire knowledge. According to Alvin Goldman (1999), the project of social epistemology is to identify policies

Shera's social epistemology recast as psychological bibliology

The impact of the Internet on democracy is a widely discussed subject. Many writers view the Internet, potentially at least, as a boon to democracy and democratic practices. According to one popular theme, both e-mail and web pages give ordinary people powers of communication that have hitherto been the preserve of the relatively wealthy (Graham 1999, p. 79). So the Internet can be expected to close the influence gap between wealthy citizens and ordinary citizens, a weakness of many procedural democracies. I want to focus here on another factor important to democracy, a factor that is emphasized by so-called epistemic approaches to democracy. According to epistemic democrats, democracy exceeds other systems in its ability to “track the truth”. According to Rousseau, for example, the people under a democracy can track truths about the “general will ” and the “common good ” (Rousseau 1962, book 4). Recent proponents of epistemic democracy include Estlund (1990, 1993), Grofman and Feld (1988), and List and Goodin (2001). Their idea is that, assuming certain political outcomes are “right ” or “correct”, democracy is better than competing systems at choosing these outcomes.

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“There is a sociological dimension to science and to the prospering [or

Social epistemology is a many-splendored subject. 1 Different theorists adopt different approaches and the options are quite diverse, often orthogonal to one another. The approach I favor is to examine social practices in terms of their impact on knowledge acquisition (Goldman 1999). This has

for Library Quarterly in 1952; this article marked the fi rst appearance of the term “social epistemology. ” After Egan’s death, Shera has often been credited for the idea of social epistemology. However, there is ample evidence to show that it was Egan who originated the concept

1. Why were you initially drawn to socio-epistemic phenomena? My original interest was in epistemology in the traditional individualistic sense. This led me to study the concept of epistemic coherence, the property which beliefs have when they in some sense “hang well together”, a topic which I