Elias Anttila
Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge. Traditionally, in the anglophone world epistemologists have asked and tried to answer questions like
‘What is knowledge?’,
‘What can and can’t we know?’, and
‘How do we acquire knowledge?’, among others.
The basic idea is that if you’re thinking about knowledge and doing so philosophically, you’re doing epistemology.
The traditional approach to epistemology, the kind that asks questions such as the above, has studied knowledge in a way that isolates it from social relationships, groups, culture, and society. Another way to think about it is that the traditional approach has engaged with the concept of knowledge only on its own terms, without roping in social elements. For example, a classical (though unsuccessful) answer to the question ‘what is knowledge?’ goes ‘knowledge is justified true belief.’ Nothing social is referenced, no social stuff really required.
Social epistemology, a relatively young subdiscipline in anglophone philosophy, changes that. Social epistemologists are interested in knowledge as a social phenomenon. Some social epistemologists might ask and try to answer similar questions to our non-social epistemologist, but their answer may just include people, relationships, groups, or societies. However, most social epistemologists are interested in new philosophical questions that arise from thinking about the social aspects of knowledge:
‘When should I trust information that I’m given?’,
‘Can groups of people know things, or just individuals?’,
‘How can I correctly identify experts?’,
‘Can two people disagree on something, yet still be justified in believing what they believe?’, and
‘What should the relationship between knowledge, expertise, and democracy be?’
Of course, these examples all subdivide into an infinite array of tricky, further questions, but they should illuminate the idea that social epistemologists situate knowledge within society. It is an uncontroversial opinion among social epistemologists to believe that knowledge has a fundamentally social character (although not all social epistemologists think knowledge is only social): it gets exchanged, challenged, argued about, and, if you think about it, most of the things you know relate in one way or another to your social relationships, community, or society at large. In life, you get taught things, you learn things for the sake of being able to make others happy, and what you think you know is socially influenced. It might be only a slight exaggeration to say that the knowledge we hold is always by someone and for someone. Social epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge that accounts for its social character.
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