Social Epistemology

What it asks

Consider what you believe about the size of the earth, the existence of Antarctica, the safety of a medicine, the year you were born. You checked almost none of it. Nearly everything anyone knows arrived on someone else's authority.

Traditional epistemology treated this as second best, and built its account of knowledge around a lone knower with evidence. Social epistemology starts from the actual case and asks what makes testimony a source of knowledge in its own right, and what makes trusting it reasonable rather than lazy.

The recurring problems

Whether testimony is basic. Hume held that you are entitled to believe a report only if you have independent grounds for thinking such reports reliable. Reid held that trust is a default, and that a child could learn nothing on Hume's rule. Neither position has won.

Disagreement. You find that someone as well informed and careful as you believes the opposite. Should you become less confident? Saying no seems arrogant; saying yes means an expert should be moved by any other expert, which makes conviction almost impossible to sustain.

Recognising expertise. To identify a genuine expert you would need enough of their expertise to judge, which is exactly what a non-expert lacks. The problem is practical rather than sceptical and it has no clean solution.

Epistemic injustice. Some speakers are believed less than their evidence warrants because of who they are. Miranda Fricker named this in 2007 and showed it is a wrong done to someone specifically as a knower, which is a moral fault located inside epistemology.

How it developed

The eighteenth century supplied the founding dispute in Hume and Reid, and then the topic almost disappeared for two centuries, because the individualist picture of the knower was too firmly in place for testimony to look like anything but a shortcut.

The field re-formed in the 1980s, drawing on work in the sociology of scientific knowledge that philosophers had mostly resisted, and on the plain observation that science is a collective enterprise whose results no individual could verify.

Fricker's Epistemic Injustice in 2007 changed its character. By showing that credibility is distributed unevenly along the same lines as everything else, it connected the field to political philosophy and gave it a vocabulary that has spread well outside academic use.

The last fifteen years have been driven by the information environment: platforms, misinformation, manufactured doubt and the question of what a reasonable person can be expected to do about any of it.

The positions within it

Reductionism and anti-reductionism divide over whether testimony needs independent support. Conciliationism and steadfastness divide over disagreement. Veritism holds that social arrangements should be judged by whether they produce true beliefs; pragmatist rivals judge them by what they enable. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

This is the fastest-growing area in epistemology, and unusually for the field it has an audience outside it - in platform design, in public health communication and in law.

The most useful recent distinction is between an echo chamber, where contrary voices are actively discredited, and a mere bubble, where they are simply absent. They look alike from outside and need opposite remedies, and mistaking one for the other is why most attempts to fix the problem fail.