The foundations of social epistemology

There is no more prolific analytical philosopher than Alvin I. Goldman when it comes to social epistemology. During the past two decades, he has done more than any other analytical philosopher to set the tone for how social epistemology ought to be conceptualized. However, while Goldman has provided numerous contributions to our understanding of how applied epistemology can assist not only philosophy, but other fields of learning such as the sciences, law, and communication theory, there are concerns with the way he conceptualizes the foundations of social epistemology. One is that he somewhat problematically partitions off social epistemology from traditional analytic epistemology in ways that make the latter, but not the former, naturalistic and reliabilist (on his construal of naturalism and reliabilism). Another difficulty is that he seems not to recognize that social epistemology poses a rather embarrassingly potential problem for traditional epistemology, namely, it exposes traditional epistemology’s excessive individualism. That Goldman seems not to recognize this is evidenced by the fact that in his conceptualization of the foundations of epistemology he retains traditional epistemology as an area of philosophical inquiry on its own terms, without arguing that elements of the social might well have to be taken into account by traditional analyses of human knowledge. Thus, to put it in the terms of another social epistemologist, Steve Fuller, Goldman’s social epistemology is not revisionistic, though Goldman himself insists that it is normative. This leads to a third problem for Goldman’s social epistemology, namely, that it contains no justified true belief analysis of the nature of social knowledge