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Foundations and Applications of Social
Epistemology
Foundations and
Applications of Social
Epistemology
Collected Essays
SANFORD C. GOLDBERG
1
1
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction1
I . F O U N DAT IO N S
1. Social Epistemology, Descriptive and Normative 15
2. A Proposed Research Program for Social Epistemology 26
3. What We Owe Each Other, Epistemologically Speaking:
Ethico-Political Values in Social Epistemology 41
4. Social Epistemology and Epistemic Injustice 62
5. Interpersonal Epistemic Entitlements 76
6. The Division of Epistemic Labor 100
I I . A P P L IC AT IO N S
7. The Epistemic Costs of Politeness 117

8. Can Asserting That p Improve the Speaker’s Epistemic
Position (And Is That a Good Thing)? 120
9. Should Have Known 137
10. If That Were True I Would Have Heard about It by Now 174
11. Epistemically Engineered Environments 191
12. Epistemic Extendedness, Testimony, and the Epistemology
of Instrument-Based Belief 213
Index 235
Acknowledgments
This collection of chapters aims to capture something of the spirit that informs
my work in social epistemology.
No one working in social epistemology can proceed without acknowledging a
huge debt of gratitude to Alvin Goldman, whose pioneering work in the field
influenced so many of us. His influence on my work should be apparent through-
out; I thank him for the many helpful conversations we have had over the years
on these topics. In thinking about these topics I have also benefitted tremendously
from the insights and feedback of a great many other people as well.
I begin with friends and colleagues: Kris Ahlstrom-Vij, Nomy Arpaly, Sven
Bernecker, Elke Brendel, Jessica Brown, Adam Carter, Pascal Engel, Paul Faulkner,
Branden Fitelson, Lizzie Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Mikkel Gerken, Peter Graham,
John Greco, Thomas Grundmann, Michael Hannon, Katherine Hawley, David
Henderson, Klemens Kappel, Chris Kelp, Kareem Khalifa, Martin Kusch, Jennifer
Lackey, Jack Lyons, José Medina, Charles Mills, Lisa Miracchi, Jesús Navarro, Luis
Oliveira, Nikolaj Pedersen, Duncan Pritchard, Baron Reed, Mona Simion, Dan
Singer, Miriam Solomon, Ernie Sosa, Bob Talisse, Jesús Vega, Mark Walker, and
Kevin Zollman. My indebtedness to those in this group is more than I will ever be
able to repay: I thank them not only for the hours of discussions we have had of
these topics, but also for the incisive feedback they have given me on my own
work, their wise counsel on a variety of issues over the years, and above all for
their friendship.
In addition, I have been unusually lucky in the collection of superb graduate
and postdoctoral students, both at Northwestern and beyond, with whom I have
been fortunate to work while they were writing their dissertations or doing post-
doctoral work on related topics. (Many of these people have now successfully
embarked on their own academic careers; all of them have helped my thinking in
ways that are difficult to express in words.) They include David Austin, Katharina
Bernhard, Evan Butts, Michel Croce, Job de Grefte, Chris Dragos, Gretchen
Ellefsen, Amy Flowerree, Eric Garcia Bayruns, Derek Green, Jędrzej Grodniewicz,
Regina Hurley, Michael Hurwitz, Casey Johnson, Matt Kopec, Nate Lauffer, Nick
Leonard, Max Lewis, Lauren Leydon-Hardy, Whitney Lilly, Jon Marsh, Felipe
Medeiros, Ivan Milic, Boaz Miller, Sebastian Neges, Trevor Nyman, Carry
Osborne, Alex Papulis, Spencer Paulson, Jared Peterson, Kathryn Pogin, Joey
Pollock, Dani Rabinowitz, Jon Reibsamen, Andrea Robitzsch, Breno Santos, Mark
Thomson, Jonathan Vandenberg, Lani Watson, Nathan Weston, Emilia Wilson,
and Lauren Woomer. I have found their own work insightful, and I have
viii Acknowledgments
benefitted tremendously from their questions and challenges, which never failed
to spur me to think harder about these and many other issues.
Finally, I want to thank my Evanston running group, whose friendship I cherish,
whose amicable but persistent peer pressure has kept me running these past years,
and whose invariably good humor I have relied on during those many occasions
on which I worked through an idea on our dark early-morning runs along the
lakefront: Kevin Biolsi, Jesse Peterson-Hall, Len Sciara, Dan Stein, David Taylor,
and Andy White.
With the exception of the first introductory chapter, all of the papers published
here have been previously published. The original publication details are as follows:
Social epistemology, normative and descriptive. In P. Graham, N. Pedersen,

M. Fricker, and D. Henderson (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Social
Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2019), 417‒24.
A proposed research program for social epistemology. In P. Reider (ed.), Social
Epistemology and Epistemic Agency (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2015), 3‒20.
What we owe each other, epistemically speaking: ethico-political values in
social epistemology. Synthese 197:10, 4407‒23 (2020).
Social epistemology and epistemic injustice. In J. Medina, I. Kidd, and
G. Polhaus (eds.), Handbook on Epistemic Injustice (New York: Routledge,
2017), 213‒22.
Interpersonal epistemic entitlements. Philosophical Issues 24:1, 159‒83
(October 2014).
The division of epistemic labour. Episteme 8:1, 112‒25 (February 2011).
The epistemic costs of politeness. Think 46:16, 19‒23 (2017; with Guiming Yang).
Can asserting that p improve the speaker’s epistemic position (and is that a
good thing)? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95, 157‒70 (2017).
Should have known. Synthese 194:8, 2863–94 (2018).
If that were true I would have heard about it by now. In A. Goldman and
D. Whitcomb (eds.), Social Epistemology: Essential Readings (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 92‒108.
Epistemically engineered environments. Synthese 197:7, 2783‒802 (2020).
Epistemic extendedness, testimony, and the epistemology of instrument-based
belief. Philosophical Explorations 15:2, 181‒98 (2012).
I want to thank these journals and presses for the right to republish these
papers here.
I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to Peter Momtchiloff at
Oxford University Press for his encouragement and support over many years, as
Acknowledgments ix
well as the team of other superlative folks at OUP for their hard work in bringing
this book to fruition.
Finally, my deepest debts are to my partner, Judy Levey, and to my three chil-
dren, Gideon, Ethan, and Nadia. I regularly marvel at how lucky I am to have
such a family. I bring this up often enough over the years that I have succeeded in
irritating each and every one of them on a regular basis. Perhaps they will permit
me to irritate them one additional time: it is to them, with love, that I dedicate
this book.
Introduction
Broadly speaking, social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of

knowledge: its production and acquisition, its certification, its storage, and its dis-
semination in a population. While this topic itself may well be as old as philo-
sophical ruminations on knowledge itself, social epistemology has emerged as a
cohesive subdiscipline only in the last two or three decades. In that time it has
acquired an academic prominence and has attracted a self-identifying (albeit
loose-knit) community of researchers.1
I offer three illustrations attesting to the emergence of this institutional
standing.2
The first illustration comes in the form of journals. Two journals devoted entirely
or partly to social epistemology were started in this period: Social Epistemology,
which was started in 1987 by Steve Fuller, and Episteme, which was started in 2004
by Alvin Goldman. (The latter originally focused exclusively on social epistemology
but quickly evolved into a general epistemology journal, though it continues to
publish a good deal of social epistemology.) Two other journals (Synthese and
Erkenntnis) have also regularly published papers on social epistemology since the
late 1980s. And in the past several decades various journals in the history and
philosophy of science have published a good deal of social epistemology as well.
The second (related) illustration of the emergence of social epistemology’s
institutional standing in this period can be seen in the dramatic increase in the
number of articles with “social epistemology” in the title. A brief history is telling.
Prior to 1987, there were only a handful of such articles ever published. In the
decade following (1987‒96) there were 109 such articles with “social epistemol
ogy” in the title. From 1997 to 2006, there were 163, in the following decade
(2007‒16) there were 369, and in the four years since (through January 1, 2021)
there have been 157.3
The final illustration of the emergence of social epistemology’s institutional
standing comes in the form of scholarly groups or research collectives that have
1 Some of the early influential contributions include Fuller (1987), Goldman (1992b, 2002b), and
Schmitt (1994).
2 In what follows I focus exclusively on philosophy, though more evidence could be cited if we
extended our focus to sociology and political science; see some of the references below.
3 This data was accessed on Google Scholar on January 1, 2021.
Foundations and Applications of Social Epistemology: Collected Essays. Sanford C. Goldberg, Oxford University Press.
© Sanford C. Goldberg 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856443.003.0001
2 Foundations and Applications of Social Epistemology
started up around the theme of social epistemology. There are several that have
attained some stature. The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective,
started in 2011, “provides an open access forum for intellectual inquiry and dia-
logue concerning issues of knowledge, society, science, technology, politics, eco-
nomics, and ecology.”4 The Social Epistemology Network, which I started in 2017,
is a loose collection of social epistemology researchers; it hosts an annual inter
national conference (the Social Epistemology Network Event, or SENE) and
occasional events online.5 Finally, various university-related research centers
focus exclusively or in significant part on topics in social epistemology; these can
be found at the University of Glasgow, Carnegie Mellon University, the University
of California at Irvine, the University of Nottingham, and the University of
Copenhagen.
What explains the high profile social epistemology has attained in recent years?
Surely part of the explanation is the salience of some concerns in contemporary
social life, regarding which we might hope social epistemology itself would pro-
vide much-needed illumination. These include the rapid and far-reaching spread
of misinformation on social media, extreme political polarization, historically
low levels of social trust, an unhappy tendency toward conspiracy theorizing, and
the obstinacy and pervasiveness of racism and sexism, among others.6 Still, it is
worth underscoring that social epistemology’s recent emergence has academic
roots as well. These can be found in groundbreaking research of the previous
three or four decades, including developments within philosophy,7 computer
science,8 economics,9 sociology,10 political science,11 and psychology.12
4 This is quoted from its website: https://social-epistemology.com.

5 For further information, see http://www.socialepistemologynetwork.com.
6 For interesting volumes dedicated to such topics, see e.g. Lackey (2021) and Bernecker
et al. (2021).
7 Here I have in mind not only the seminal work by Alvin Goldman (1992, 1993, 1994, 2002a,
2002b, 2004a, 2004b), but also path-breaking work by feminist (or feminism-inspired) philosophers
working in epistemology and in the philosophy of science (Code 1984, 2006; Longino 1990, 2002/19,
2002; Alcoff and Potter 1993; Solomon 1994, 2006, 2007; Anderson 1995, 2006, 2012; Fricker 2007;
Pateman and Mills 2007; and Sullivan and Tuana 2007), as well as work of central importance by
philosophers of race (Mills 2007, 2014 and Dotson 2011, 2014).
8 I have in mind especially developments in agent-based modeling and in network theory. For
applications of these to social epistemology, see Weisberg and Muldoon (2009); Zollman
(2010, 2013, 2018); Mayo-Wilson et al. (2011); Muldoon and Weisberg (2011); Weisberg (2012); and
Rubin and O’Connor (2018).
9 Here one thinks of novel applications of game theory and social choice theory. For applications
of these to social epistemology, see e.g. Bicchieri (2005); Zollman (2005); O’Connor and Bruner
(2019); and O’Connor (2019).
10 See e.g. Bloor (1983); Schaffer and Shapin (1985); Shapin (1994); and Barnes et al. (1996).
11 I have in mind the emergence of epistemic theories of democracy, as well as the renewed atten-
tion to theories of judgment aggregation. For the former, see Estlund (2008); Talisse (2009a, 2009b);
Landemore (2017); and Estlund and Landemore (2018). For the latter, see List and Pettit (2011).
12 This includes work in cognitive psychology on implicit bias, as well as work in social and cogni-
tive psychology on features and dysfunctions of group deliberation. The work on these in philosophy
has exploded; seminal contributions include Solomon (2006), Tollefsen (2006), Landemore (2013),
Olsson (2013), Saul (2013), Brownstein and Saul (2016), and Holroyd et al. (2017).
Introduction 3
Despite social epistemology’s increasingly high profile, it is interesting to note

that with one salient exception (in the work of Alvin Goldman), there has been
relatively little attention devoted to the foundations—the methodologies, core
concepts, and/or central theoretical commitments—of this subfield.13 This is not
necessarily a bad thing: early on in the life of an emerging (sub)field, it is probably
best for researchers to spend their time pursuing the topics that interest them,
employing their preferred methods and core concepts rather than reflecting on
them. In addition, one might wonder whether it even makes sense to ask about
the ‘foundations’ of this ‘subfield’: work in social epistemology might be described
with equal warrant as interdisciplinary in nature, with as many methodologies
and concepts as there are within the contributing disciplines themselves. Still,
there comes a point when such foundational reflections can be helpful, if only to
suggest the unity and cohesiveness of what might otherwise seem a motley collec-
tion of disparate research topics.
Part of what animates the essays in this collection is my desire to characterize
social epistemology in such a way as to capture what I see as its cohesiveness as an
area of research. This has taken the form of a series of chapters that aim both to
describe what I take to be a possible research program in social epistemology, as
well as to articulate what I regard as some core concepts to be used in the pursuit
of this program. This is the theme of the chapters that constitute Part I
(Chapters 1‒6).
Chapters 1‒4 focus on articulating a vision for how research in social epistem
ology might proceed. Here I address what is distinctive in the social approach to
epistemology (Chapter 1) and the manner in which it involves both an empirical
dimension and a normative dimension (Chapters 1, 3, and 4). I have contrasted
my own approach to the two leading views in the field, Alvin Goldman’s “verit-
ism” and Steve Fuller’s more empirically oriented approach (Chapters 1 and 2).
And I have tried to situate social epistemology as I conceive of it within other
subdisciplines with a normative orientation, including political philosophy,
ethics, feminism, and critical race theory (Chapters 3 and 4).
No characterization of a social epistemology research program can be com-
plete without an understanding of some of the key concepts needed for the sort of
analyses social epistemologists seek to provide, and this is the topic of the last two
chapters in Part I (Chapters 5 and 6). In my 2010 book Relying on Others, I argued
that when our beliefs exhibit epistemic dependence on others, epistemic
assessment itself ought to reflect this fact; and I argued further that this will
require the development of new (or revised) epistemic concepts to be employed
13 This is not entirely accurate. Steve Fuller has been another seminal figure who has devoted much
of his career to theorizing within and about social epistemology (see Fuller 1987, 1996, 2002, 2012).
However, for reasons that I discuss briefly in Chapters 1 and 2, his influence has been less significant
in the more mainstream circles in which social epistemology is discussed and published.
in such assessment. In the two chapters just mentioned I try to do just this. In
Chapter 5, I seek to highlight a role for the notion of an epistemic entitlement,
and I argue that we should think of such entitlements themselves as fundamen-
tally social in nature (a point which has significant implications for the epistemol-
ogy of testimony).14 And in Chapter 6, I argue that we need to distinguish two
different types of epistemic dependence, direct and diffuse, and that these types
affect epistemic assessment differently.
It would be a mistake—and a serious missed opportunity—to characterize
social epistemology only in terms of its foundations and core concepts. This is
because the overwhelming majority of social epistemology’s contributions to con-
temporary research are to be found in its applications. There can be no doubt that
research on applied topics has contributed significantly to our understanding of
various aspects of the social dimensions of knowledge. Of these I would highlight
six topics: testimony; disagreement; group and collective knowledge and inquiry
(including the epistemic dimensions of scientific knowledge and inquiry); dys-
function in epistemic communities (including silencing and the various types of
epistemic injustice); epistemic features of our social practices and institutions
(the norms of academic publishing; norms within our legal systems, including the
basis for jury verdicts; expertise); and epistemological dimensions of democratic
institutions and practices. These are not the only topics to which social epistem
ologists have devoted attention, but they are widely recognized areas of significant
and successful research in social epistemology.
My own thinking in social epistemology has been attracted to many of these
areas, and Part II collects several of these chapters. Each of them attempts to
exhibit the fruits of the sort of research program I characterized in Part I; they
constitute several theoretical applications to various socio-epistemic phenom-
ena. These phenomena, I contend, have not received the attention they deserve—
owing no doubt to the fact that they do not really come into focus until one
endorses a thoroughgoing social epistemological orientation. These applications,
then, are the theme of Part II (Chapters 7‒12).
The phenomena I highlight in this section are meant to indicate the various
ways we depend on others epistemically, as well as how these sorts of dependence
bear on epistemic assessment for the relevant class of beliefs. Since our depend-
ence on others as testifiers has been amply discussed elsewhere, I focus on less-
discussed types of dependence. They include our dependence on others as
consumers of testimony, whose reactions to others’ say-so can be regarded as evi-
dence bearing on the acceptability of that say-so (addressed in Chapters 7, 8, and
14 I also employ the notion of an entitlement in Chapter 9, only there the sort of entitlement at
issue is one deriving from our social practices—a practice-generated entitlement—rather than an
epistemic entitlement. For an extensive discussion of the difference, as well as a characterization of the
relevance of each to epistemology, see Goldberg (2018).
Introduction 5
10); the normative epistemic expectations we have of one another as epistemic

subjects, and how this leads to the possibility of what I (following Lackey 1999,
2005) call normative defeat (Chapter 9); and the ways in which we structure our
epistemic environments so as to render the use of technology more readily access
ible to all (Chapters 11 and 12). What comes out of all of these chapters is a point
I urged in Relying on Others: when we rely on others in these ways, we should not
think of other people as just one other part of the furniture in our environment,
but as epistemic subjects in their own right.
In order to aid those who do not want to read this book cover to cover, I want to
highlight five themes that emerge in the chapters in this collection, and to indi-
cate the chapters in which the individual themes can be found.
The overarching theme to emerge in my reflections on social epistemology
concerns the distinctiveness of relying on another epistemic subject in one’s
inquiries and in belief-formation. As I noted above, this has been a theme on
which I have been obsessing since at least the publication of Relying on Others
(Goldberg 2010). The theme itself is not novel, nor am I the first person to stress
its importance. It is stressed in one form or another in Paul Grice’s reflections on
the nature of non-natural meaning (and in the act of saying something),15 in Ruth
Millikan’s influential theories of meaning and communication,16 in the wide-
ranging work on trust (in ethics as well as in epistemology),17 and in the so-called
“assurance view” of testimony.18 If I have any distinctive contributions to make in
this regard, they are in the suggestion that the distinctiveness of this sort of reli-
ance ought to be reflected in epistemic evaluation itself, as well as in my particular
proposal for how to do just that. (These are the topics of Chapters 1, 2, 6, 10, 11,
and 12.)
A second theme to emerge has to do with the ways in which social contexts are
the site of various distinct types of normativity. These types of normativity
include the ethical; the social (including e.g. the norms deriving from our profes-
sions, our relationships, and the social practices in which we participate); the
political (norms of justice); the epistemic; and the speech- act theoretic. It
expresses no great insight to say that these (and perhaps other) types of normativ-
ity interact in social contexts.19 More interesting are the claims one might make
about the nature of the norms themselves (their evaluative and prescriptive
15 See Grice (1957). 16 See Millikan (1984, 2000, 2005).

17 For recent examples, see the entries in Faulkner and Simpson (2017).
18 See Hinchman (2005, 2014) and Moran (2006).
19 This theme has received sustained recent attention owing to the success of Fricker (2007) in
highlighting the various types of epistemic injustice.
dimensions; their sources) and their interactions with one another (under what
conditions, if at all, these norms make conflicting demands of us; and how, if at
all, we might reconcile these demands). Although I have had much more to say
about these matters elsewhere,20 many of the chapters in this volume speak to
such topics (see especially Chapters 1, 3, 4, 7, and 9).
A third theme to emerge is the usefulness of thinking of epistemic normativ-
ity in terms of the normative expectations we have of one another as epistemic
subjects. The notion of normative expectations itself is a familiar one among ethi-
cists, political philosophers, and philosophers of action. However, it has not often
been put to work in epistemology. Several of my chapters attempt to make the
case for thinking that it can and should be so employed; and it is in terms of such
a notion that I frame one of my more provocative ideas, the doctrine of normative
defeat (or defeat by evidence one should have had). This idea, as well as the more
general idea of construing epistemic normativity in terms of the normative
expectations we have of one another as epistemic subjects, can be found in
Chapters 3, 5, 9, and 11.
A fourth theme in these essays is the importance for epistemology of the cat-
egory of a socio-epistemic practice. The idea that we might think of some social
practices as epistemic practices—as practices whose point or rationale consists in
the production, certification, or transmission of knowledge—is a familiar one,
and was at the heart of the social epistemology proposals Goldman himself was
making in Goldman (2002b). Still, while the category itself does figure in the
epistemology and philosophy of science literature,21 my sense is that it remains
under-utilized. There are several challenges facing those of us who would employ
this notion in our theories: we must say what such practices are, identify their
epistemically relevant features, and devise ways of assessing these features.
I address these challenges in Chapters 2, 9, 10, and 11.
A fifth and final theme in these essays is the importance of being sensitive to
non-ideal features of our social lives. This theme was first brought to wide philo-
sophical attention by critical race theorists and feminists working in political
philosophy who criticized much extant work for its “idealizing away” from the
messy (and often ugly) realities of everyday life.22 While my own work breaks no
new ground here, I have tried to remain sensitive to these sorts of concern. In
these chapters, what I have to say on this topic focuses on how features of
20 See Goldberg (2015, 2018, and 2020).

21 See Longino (1990, 2002/19, 2002); Solomon (1994, 2007); Goldman (2006); Congdon (2018);
Giladi and McMillan (2018); Reed (2018); and Henderson and Graham (2019). I should note that this
category is much more often used by those working in the field of science and technology studies (for
recent examples of which see e.g. Davis 2018; Jalas et al. 2019; Lösch et al. 2019); as well as in educa-
tion theory (see e.g. Kalamaras 1992; Rinehart et al. 2016; and Iversen and Pedersen 2017).
22 See Code (1984, 2006); Anderson (1995); Fricker (2007); Pateman and Mills (2007); Dotson
(2011, 2014); Mills (2014).
Introduction 7
oppression are relevant to the task of theorizing about, and evaluating, one or
another social dimension of knowledge. This is a theme in Chapters 3, 4, and 7.
I would like to conclude with two brief comments on how my own views regard-
ing social epistemology fit in with what I anticipate is the future of this burgeon-
ing area of research. These comments are oriented around what I acknowledge
are two significant limitations of my own work in this area.
First, although I am at pains in many of the chapters in this volume to sketch a
research program for social epistemology, I recognize that a good deal of contem-
porary work in social epistemology (i) won’t fit neatly into the program I’ve
sketched and (ii) does not employ any of the core concepts I have characterized.
This is fine by me. I do not present my sketch in order to advocate for a single
research program to the exclusion of all others, still less for a single way to
approach particular topics within social epistemology. Instead, I offer this sketch
in an effort to suggest how various topics might be seen as hanging together as a
cohesive whole. If I favor this way of proceeding, it is because it constitutes what I
hope is a systematic approach to the social dimensions of knowledge, one which
maintains strong connections with more traditional work in epistemology. Still, I
find myself looking forward to the many new developments in social epistemol
ogy, whether or not they partake of my own approach. Far be it from me to sup-
press that creativity in the name of a rigid orthodoxy.
Second, although I am a wholehearted proponent of the idea that research in
social epistemology has (and should have) both a normative and a descriptive
dimension, most of my own work tends to focus on the normative side. This
reflects my background and sensibility as a philosopher: while a historian (soci-
ologist; political scientist) would be keen to investigate the actual details of this or
that socio-epistemic practice, I have been keen to articulate the basis on which
such practices can be evaluated as better or worse, epistemically speaking. This
has led me to focus my attention on the sources of and justification for our evalu-
ative standards, rather than on the fine details of the targets of those evaluations
(the practices themselves). This sensibility carries over, no doubt, even to the
more “applied” chapters in this volume: while I do focus in these on particular
knowledge practices, I have little doubt that these are described at a level of
abstraction far above that which would be employed by more empirically oriented
researchers. Still, I hope that I have managed to provide sufficient detail in my
descriptions of the practices I discuss so that my proposals can be taken up—
whether this involves supplementation, as when my claims can be vindicated with
the addition of details about our actual on-the-ground practices, or criticism, as
when my claims are objectionable owing to my having abstracted away from
relevant details.23 In short, I offer these chapters as a contribution to the ongoing

discussion.
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The Journal of Philosophy 115:1, 5–33.
I
FOUNDATIONS
1
Social Epistemology, Descriptive
and Normative
Recent work in social epistemology has exploded in the last three decades.1 There
can be little doubt but that this reflects an increasingly popular commitment to
two claims. The first claim is that there are important social dimensions to the
acquisition, processing, retention, distribution, and assessment of knowledge; the
second is that these dimensions ought to be represented in epistemological theor
izing itself. But precisely how should epistemology represent the social dimen
sions of knowledge? On this matter there is no consensus even among those who
call themselves social epistemologists. In fact, two distinct methodological para
digms would seem to have emerged.
One paradigm, typified by research in Science and Technology Studies as well
as in the sociology of knowledge, focuses on describing the actual practices by
which we acquire, process, retain, distribute, and assess knowledge, as well as the
institutions that are implicated in these practices, which I will call our socio-
epistemic practices.2 A premium is placed on having accurate descriptions of the
practices and institutions themselves. The goal of accurate descriptions includes
describing the evaluative standards that participants bring to these practices, as
well as the (perhaps implicit) norms employed as participants resolve disputes
and occasionally re-assess the very standards themselves.
Another paradigm, typified by the veritistic research program initiated by
Alvin Goldman in his influential (1999, 2002), focuses on evaluating our know
ledge practices by assessing the extent to which following these practices leads to
reliable belief-formation among those who participate in the practices. A pre
mium here is placed on the identification of all of the downstream epistemic
effects of a socio-epistemic practice, as well as on the accuracy of our evaluative
assessment of the practices themselves (in terms of those effects). Social epistem
ologists working in this tradition often compare and contrast different epistemic
regimes, comparing them as to which, if any, yields better outcomes along the
reliability dimension.
1 This chapter borrows heavily from parts of Goldberg (2015b).

2 For an overview, see Fuller (2012).
To be sure, neither one of the methodological paradigms themselves, which I

will call the descriptive and the normative paradigms, ignores the other. After all,
the descriptive paradigm includes descriptions of participants’ evaluations (and
meta-evaluations) of the knowledge practices themselves, thereby aiming to
incorporate a “normative” dimension to its models. And the normative paradigm
purports to be a normative assessment of the very knowledge practices that charac
terize the epistemic community itself, and so it cannot succeed in its aim unless it
is based on an accurate characterization—often in the form of a description—of
those practices.
Even so, the paradigms tend to emphasize the one over the other, in ways that
can only distort our understanding of the social dimensions of knowledge.
Focusing too much on the descriptive, for example, we might lose sight of the
evaluative aims of traditional epistemology. After all, it is one thing to describe
the norms and standards that actually inform a practice (and that participants
rely on in their dealings with one another); it is another to evaluate those norms
and standards. Even if we are careful to describe how participants themselves
criticize the norms and standards of their own practices, and how they resolve
any resulting disputes, even so we might want to be able to assess their resolutions
as well.
Focusing too much on the normative, on the other hand, we might abstract
away from the messy details of our actual practices, and in this way lose sight of
what it was we were supposed to be evaluating in the first place. Admittedly, there
is nothing special about the abstractions in normative social epistemology; any
research that engages in abstraction—which is to say, all research—runs this risk.
Still, I think it is fair to worry that if what we want out of our social epistemology
is an assessment of the reliability effects of our socio-epistemic practices, we will
ignore all aspects of that practice that we don’t regard as having any such effects,
and it is reasonable to fear that the result will be an impoverished understanding
of our socio-epistemic practices themselves.
I recognize that these criticisms will likely not move those already committed
to one or the other methodological paradigm. I won’t try to convince these folks
here.3 Instead, what I want to offer is a conception of social epistemology for
those who are not already committed. In doing so, my aim is twofold. First, I aim
to present a conception of social epistemology that properly acknowledges both
the normative and the descriptive dimensions of our knowledge communities.
Second, I aim to motivate this conception by appealing to considerations that
make clear both how and why we ought to pay particular attention to the social
dimension itself as we seek to understand the nature of knowledge. I will begin
there, with a brief discussion of the point of and motivation behind a distinctly
“social” epistemology.
3 I have tried to do this in Goldberg (2017).

Social Epistemology, Descriptive and Normative 17
In the last thirty years or so, philosophers, social scientists, and others have begun
to speak of and pursue inquiry within a distinctly “social” epistemological frame
work. In one sense, the fact that there should be a “social” epistemology is easy to
explain. As standardly conceived, epistemology is the theory of knowledge. As
standardly practiced, the theory of knowledge is interested in the various sources
of knowledge. We might think to explain the existence of a distinctly “social”
epistemology, then, in terms of the existence of distinctly social sources of know
ledge. While there is much to this explanation, I believe that at best it is incom
plete: our community is implicated in our body of knowledge in ways that go far
beyond that of being a source of information. Once we appreciate this, we will be
in a position to appreciate the variety of different ways in which knowledge acqui
sition is (often, and perhaps even typically) a social activity.4
Traditional epistemology is individualistic in its orientation: it focuses on the
states, skills, capacities, and background information of individual epistemic sub
jects. As such it recognizes only two general ways for an individual to acquire
knowledge of her environment: through perception (broadly construed), or
through inference (relying on her own background information). On this frame
work, others’ antics and appearances—their doings and sayings, their dress and
manner of presentation, etc.—are no different in principle from the antics and
appearances of any of the objects in one’s environment. In particular, all of these
things have the status of evidence from which one can come to know things
through inference. On this picture, when I come to know e.g. that the Dean is in
London through your telling me that she is, my route to knowledge here is no
different in kind than the route by which I come to know that we have a mouse
problem by observing the mouse droppings under the sink. In both cases percep
tion makes available to me a piece of evidence—an utterance of yours; mouse
droppings—from which I go on to make inferences. In making these inferences, I
am relying on my background information, both for interpreting the evidence in
the first place (you have asserted that the Dean is in London; those things are
mouse droppings), and for knowing which inferences to draw from my evidence
(e.g. your asserting something is highly correlated with the truth of what you’ve
asserted; the presence of mouse droppings is highly correlated with the nearby pres-
ence of mice).5
I believe that this approach to the role others play in one’s pursuit of knowledge
fundamentally mischaracterizes that role. While we often do draw inferences
4 “often” or “typically”: I want to remain neutral on the issue of whether ordinary perceptual
knowledge is social in any interesting sense. (Those who think it is often appeal to the social dimen
sion brought in by one’s public language in shaping one’s perceptual capacities.)
5 For a defense of something in the neighborhood in the epistemology of testimony, see Fricker
(1987, 1994, 1995).
from others’ antics, speech, and appearances (and so treat these things as evi
dence), there are also cases in which we rely on others as epistemic subjects in their
own right. Perhaps the clearest and most straightforward example of this is the
case of testimony. When we accept another’s word for something, we regard them
not merely as providing potential evidence, but also, and more centrally, as mani
festing the very results of their own epistemic sensibility. Nor is this the only way in
which we rely on others as epistemic subjects in their own right. We so rely when
ever we participate in our community’s socio-epistemic practices—that is, in
social practices whose point is (or includes) the acquisition, processing, storage,
dissemination, or assessment of knowledge.
This last point is worth illustrating in some detail. To give just one (admittedly
overly simplified) example, consider my reliance on a thermometer for reaching a
belief about the ambient temperature. When I use a thermometer I have not pre
viously employed, I do so against a host of expectations regarding the manufac
ture of such objects.6 These include expectations regarding the construction,
testing, and sale of the instrument: I rely on the manufacturers to have made their
thermometers so that they give reliable information regarding the temperature;
I also expect the thermometer to be easy to read, so that the information they
provide is easily apprehended; I expect the manufacturers not to bring their
instruments to market if they fail to meet these conditions; and so forth. What is
more, if a particular thermometer is saliently placed in a public park overseen by
the local community, I expect the vigilance of those tasked with the upkeep of the
park: I assume that they would have replaced that particular thermometer if it
were not working properly. Each of these expectations is fallible: any one of them
can fail to be satisfied. And while none of the expectations individually, or the set
of them as a whole, entitle(s) me to accept the thermometer’s readout come what
may, they do lessen the epistemic burdens on me as I seek to come to know the
temperature. For insofar as the temperature I take to be indicated on the therm
ometer is plausible (relative to my background beliefs about the temperature
ranges around here during this time of year), I can properly accept what it “tells”
me. In particular, I do not need to know anything else about the track record of
this particular thermometer (i.e. to have independent knowledge that it is reli
able), nor do I need to have conducted any experiments on thermometers in gen
eral (i.e. to have independent knowledge that they are generally reliable); and I do
not need any further knowledge of how thermometers work. I am relying on the
various people in my community to have played their roles, and this lightens
the epistemic burdens on me as I come to form beliefs through my reliance on the
instrument(s) they have made available to me.
6 Below I will characterize these expectations as normative in nature.

When one comes to acquire knowledge in these and many other ways, it is
plausible to think that the epistemic task has been socially distributed. What is
more, we might speculate that subjects who are implicated in the relevant socio-
epistemic practices constitute (part of) an epistemic community. That is to say,
they are members of a group whose knowledge environment is structured by
various social practices regarding the acquisition, processing, storage, transmis
sion, and assessment of knowledge.
The foregoing picture is clearly controversial, especially among those who grew
up in the more traditional, individualistic orientation that characterizes orthodox
epistemology. For my purposes here, however, I want to suggest how social epis
temology looks from the vantage point of those who take this picture seriously.
For such theorists, we stand in a fundamentally different relation to other epi
stemic subjects than we do to the rest of the items in our environment. Since the
point at issue reflects the roles epistemic subjects play as epistemic agents in a
common epistemic community, and since a proper characterization of these roles
will require characterizing the descriptive and normative dimensions in play in
the epistemic community itself, it will be helpful to begin by saying a few words
about epistemic subjects, epistemic agents, and epistemic communities.
Here and in what follows I will use “epistemic subject” to refer to the sort of
entity of whom we can intelligibly ascribe knowledge and other epistemic states
(such as justified or rational belief). I will sometimes want to highlight the vari
ous roles that epistemic subjects play in acquiring, processing, storing, transmit
ting, or assessing information. When I want to highlight these roles, I will speak
of them (not as epistemic subjects, which they remain, but rather) as “epistemic
agents.” This difference in nomenclature marks a notional difference: to speak of
an epistemic agent is to speak of an epistemic subject, albeit in a way that high
lights the role(s) played by the subject in the process(es) by which knowledge is
acquired, processed, stored, transmitted, or assessed. Finally, I will also be speak
ing of the socio-epistemic practices, institutions, and norms that structure the
relations between epistemic agents as they go about their information-seeking
business (both individually and socially); to do so I will speak of their shared
“epistemic community.”
Consider now how our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our
relations to the rest of the items in our environment. Here I highlight three
dimensions of difference, each of which ought to be captured in our social epis
temological theories.
The first way in which our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our
relations to the rest of the items in our environment is this: epistemic subjects
stand in various epistemic dependency relations to other epistemic subjects in their

shared epistemic community. The basic idea of an epistemic dependency relation
can be brought out in terms of the nature of epistemic assessment itself, in which
we assess a subject’s belief (or her degree of belief) in a proposition. Such assess
ment aims to characterize how well supported her belief is (alternatively: whether
that degree of belief is warranted by her evidence). This sort of assessment is a
fully normative affair, since it appeals to standards (e.g. of rationality, epistemic
responsibility, and/or reliability, among other standards) whose satisfaction is
required if the subject’s (degree of) belief is to count as amounting to justified
belief or knowledge. I describe one subject (S2) as epistemically dependent on
another subject (S1), then, when an epistemic assessment of S2’s belief—an assess
ment along one or more of the dimensions just described—requires an epistemic
assessment of the role S1 played in the process through which S2 acquired (or sus
tained) the belief. It is of course a substantial assumption that we do exhibit epi
stemic dependence on others; traditional epistemology would deny this. But
social epistemology as I understand it embraces this assumption, and with it rec
ognizes that our epistemic tasks are often socially distributed among the mem
bers of our epistemic community. Relying on another person’s say-so is one kind
of epistemic dependence (for which see Goldberg 2010); but it is not the only
kind, and it is a task of social epistemology to enumerate and describe the variety
of kinds of epistemic dependence exhibited in our interactions with others.7
A second way in which our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our
relations to the rest of the items in our environment lies in the variety of norms
that enable us to calibrate our expectations of one another as epistemic agents, as
we pursue our inquiries (whether individually or jointly).8 Consider for example
the expectations you have when you rely on your doctor, or your lawyer, or your
accountant. You expect them to be knowledgeable in certain ways, to be apprised
of the best practices, to be responsive to any relevant developments in their spe
cialties, and so forth. Alternatively, consider the expectations you have of the
other members of your research team, or of your business partners. You expect
them to do their jobs properly, to notify the rest of the team (the other partners) if
there are any developments that bear on the research of the whole team (the suc
cess of the business), and so forth. Or consider the expectations you have of your
neighbors, friends, and family members. When you have long and mutually
acknowledged traditions of informing one another of the news in certain
domains, you come to expect this of one another. Or, to take a final example,
consider the mutual expectations that a speaker and audience have of one another
7 I make some initial taxonomic distinctions in Goldberg (2011).

8 For an extensive discussion of epistemic norms as social norms, see Graham and Henderson
(2019). For my part, in Goldberg (2017) I attempt to ground epistemic normativity itself in our social
expectations of one another as epistemic subjects.
when the former tells the latter something. The audience expects the speaker to
be relevantly authoritative regarding the truth of what she said,9 and the speaker
expects the audience to recognize her (the speaker) as performing a speech act
that purports to be epistemically authoritative, and so which demands to be
treated in the manner appropriate to acts of that kind.10 In many and perhaps
even all of these cases, the expectations themselves reflect various norms that
regulate our interactions with other epistemic agents. In some cases, these norms
are provided by professional or institutional organizations, and rationalize our
reliance on members of those professions or institutions; in other cases, the
norms in question are established explicitly, as a matter of agreement e.g. amongst
team members or business partners; in still other cases, the norms themselves are
part of the practices (e.g. of information-sharing) that emerge over the course of
repeated interaction between the parties, after the parties mutually (if perhaps
only implicitly) acknowledge their mutual reliance on certain aspects of the prac
tice; and in still other cases, the norms are part of sophisticated social practices
(such as those regarding the practice of assertion) whose features are, if only
implicitly, mutually acknowledged by all participants. (This is not intended to
exhaust the possibilities.)
Norm-sanctioned expectations, I submit, are not so much predictions of the
behavior of our fellows—although they may give rise to such predictions—as they
are normative expectations of our fellows. E.g., your expectation that your doctor
knows best practices for the treatment of your condition is not (or not merely)
based on the evidence that doctors are generally reliable in these ways; rather, it
constitutes something you normatively expect of her. It is akin to parents’ expect
ation that their teenager will be home by midnight (an expectation to which they
are entitled even if their teenager has a long history of staying out too late). These
expectations enable us to solve complicated coordination problems we face as we
seek to acquire knowledge in communities that exhibit a highly differentiated
division of intellectual labor.11 I regard it as a central task for social epistemology
to enumerate and describe the norms that underwrite these expectations, to
articulate their epistemic bearing on the predictive expectations they underwrite,
9 This idea is prevalent in the literature on the so-called “norm of assertion.” See e.g. Williamson
(2000), Lackey (2007), and the various papers in Brown and Cappelen (2011). Arguably, this idea can
be traced back to a “deontic scorekeeping” view of assertion developed by Robert Brandom in his
(1983 and 1994). However, Brandom’s approach to assertion is explicitly distinguished from the
approach favored by the “norm of assertion” crowd in MacFarlane (2011). See also Goldberg (2015a)
for my attempt to take this idea and develop it into a full theory of the speech act of assertion.
10 The speaker’s expectations of her audience were forcefully brought to the attention of epistem
ologists by Fricker (2007).
11 See Bicchieri (2006, 2017) for a discussion of how normative expectations can be fruitfully
employed in characterizations of information-sharing games.
and ultimately to evaluate the norms themselves in terms of their role in securing
true belief and knowledge.12
It is important to be clear about the relationship between normative and pre
dictive expectations. To a first approximation, one epistemic agent, S2, norma-
tively expects something from another epistemic agent, S1, when S2 holds S1
responsible in the relevant way. Such normative expectations are warranted by the
norms of prevailing practice, when that practice is a legitimate one (for a defense
of which see Goldberg 2017, 2018). In such cases we can speak of agents’ entitle-
ment to have the normative expectation in question. There are three fundamental
theoretical questions regarding normative expectations. The first is a question
primarily for ethics and political philosophy: when is a practice legitimate, so that
the expectations it sanctions are ones to which its participants are entitled? But
the next two are core questions for social epistemology. One asks whether the
expectations sanctioned by the norms of a given practice actually conduce to
epistemically good outcomes. In asking this, we are taking a critical perspective
on the norms and practices of a given community, with the aim of assessing how
well these norms and practices serve epistemological ends. (This is one place
where the traditional normative vocabulary of epistemology will come in handy.)
The other asks how the normative expectations to which an agent is entitled relate
to corresponding predictive expectations she has. The latter expectations are a
species of belief (about the future), and hence are straightforwardly assessable
from an epistemic point of view. But it remains to be seen how being entitled to
hold someone responsible for an outcome relates to the justification one has for
believing that one will get that outcome. And this point brings me to the third way
in which our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our relations to the
rest of the items in our environment.
Given the normative expectations one has of those on whom one epistemically
relies, as well as the epistemic dependence that results thereby, the epistemic
assessment of beliefs formed through one of the “social routes” to knowledge
(Goldman 2002; see also Goldman 1999 and 2009) is decidedly different from the
epistemic assessment of beliefs not so formed. Insofar as epistemic tasks really are
socially distributed, our assessment itself must be a social one. It must take into
account not only the other individual(s) on whom the belief epistemically
depends, but also the social practices and the norms that regulate these practices.
This will include the various practices and norms that constitute what we might
call the “epistemic environment” in which agents go about their knowledge-
seeking business—and (as noted in the preceding paragraph) their relationship to
the justification of belief. To the extent that one’s epistemic environment bears on
the proper assessment of one’s beliefs, we will need to rethink the nature of
12 I offer a framework in terms of which to theorize about these norms in Goldberg (2017, 2018).
epistemic assessment itself, in a way that reflects the various epistemic dependencies
and social norms that are implicated in the production and sustainment of belief.
I regard it as a task for social epistemology to reconceive the nature of epistemic
assessment, and, where needed, to reconceive the categories employed in the
assessment.
We can summarize the previous section’s three points by portraying them as cap
turing what I have elsewhere called the epistemic significance of other minds. This
significance can be seen in (i) the various forms taken by our epistemic depend
ence on others, (ii) the variety of norms that underwrite our expectations of one
another as we make our way in the common epistemic environment, and (iii) the
distinctive epistemic assessment(s) implicated whenever a doxastic state is the
result of a “social route” to knowledge. In characterizing (i)‒(iii) we aim to cap
ture the ways in which our relations to other epistemic agents differ from our
relations to the rest of the items in our environment. And it is this, I propose, that
provides the rationale for a distinctly social epistemology: social epistemology
ought to be the systematic investigation into the epistemic significance of other
minds, where this is understood to involve the epistemic tasks I have described in
connection with each of (i)‒(iii).
There are three lessons I want to draw from the foregoing rationale.
First, if it is to be adequate, social epistemology must include a detailed
description of our socio- epistemic practices—those social practices through
which we acquire, process, store, disseminate, and evaluate knowledge. These will
include the following (and no doubt much more): the practices whereby (1) we
establish and certify expertise, as well as those by which experts are identified; (2)
we institute and enforce the standards of assertoric speech and writing; (3) we
implement peer review; (4) our professions govern themselves and regulate their
members’ professional (including intellectual) behavior; (5) we devise technolo
gies aimed at enabling us to discern more of nature’s secrets, and train others how
to use that technology; and (6) we educate our young to become thoughtful, crit
ical, productive members of society. In all of these (and no doubt many other)
ways, we depend on each other epistemically. It is the task of social epistemology
to enumerate and describe these ways, and to characterize the norms that under
write our expectations of one another in these efforts.
Second, if it is to be adequate, social epistemology must include an evaluation
of these practices. It is not enough to describe, even when these descriptions
include a characterization of the norms by which we hold one another respon
sible as participants in the practice. Rather, we need to evaluate these norms in
terms of their role in securing true belief and knowledge. As we do so we will
need to distinguish the true from the false, and to do so we will appeal to our own
best lights, of course. Still, we must recognize that our own epistemological
accounts are fallible, and can stand corrected by subsequent evidence.
Third and finally, it is an open question whether the solitary epistemic subject
is the only proper unit of analysis at which to conduct epistemic assessment. So
far I have been speaking as if the unit of analysis is the individual subject. But
many social epistemologists will take issue with this assumption. The develop
ment and evaluation of the case for and against this assumption ought to be on
the agenda of social epistemology.13
In short, I submit that the pursuit of social epistemology is the attempt to come
to terms with the epistemic significance of other minds. There is a straightfor
ward rationale for making such an attempt: other people are (not mere sources of
knowledge, but) epistemic subjects in their own right who, through their epi
stemic agency, bring their own epistemic sensibility to bear in all sorts of ways as
we shape and operate within a common epistemic environment. In recognizing
this we will appreciate the overriding importance of the social dimension in the
theory of knowledge. What is more, we must recognize that to capture this
dimension we cannot but incorporate a descriptive and a normative component
into the study of our epistemic communities.
References
Bicchieri, C. (2006). The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social
Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Bicchieri, C. (2017). Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social
Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Brandom, R. (1983). Asserting. Noûs 17:4, 637–50.
Brandom, R. (1994). Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brown, J. and Cappelen, H. (2011). Assertion: New Philosophical Essays (Oxford:
Fricker, E. (1987). The epistemology of testimony. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, Supplemental Vol. 61, 57–83.
Fricker, E. (1994). Against gullibility. In B. Matilal and A. Chakrabarti (eds.), Knowing
from Words (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 125–61.
Fricker, E. (1995). Telling and trusting: reductionism and anti-reductionism in the
epistemology of testimony. Mind 104: 393–411.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford:
13 See e.g. Tollefsen (2006, 2011); Pettit and List (2011); Lackey (2012); Fricker (2012).
Fricker, M. (2012). Group testimony? The making of a collective good informant.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84:2, 249–76.
Fuller, S. (2012). Social epistemology: a quarter-century itinerary. Social Epistemology
26: 267–83.
Goldberg, S. (2010). Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Goldberg, S. (2011). The division of epistemic labour. Episteme 8, 112–25.
Goldberg, S. (2015a). Assertion: On the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech
Goldberg, S. (2015b). A proposed research program for social epistemology.
In P. Reider (ed.), Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield), 3–20.
Goldberg, S. (2017). To the Best of Our Knowledge: Social Expectations and Epistemic
Normativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Goldberg, S. (2018). Should have known. Synthese 194:8, 2863–94.
Goldman, A. (1999). Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Goldman, A. (2002). Pathways to Knowledge: Public and Private (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Goldman, A. (2009). Social epistemology: theory and applications. Royal Institute of
Philosophy Supplement 64, 2–18.
Graham, P. and Henderson, D. (2019). Epistemic norms as social norms. In Miranda
Fricker, Peter J. Graham, David Henderson, and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen (eds.), The
Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology (New York: Routledge), 425–36.
Lackey, J. (2007). Norms of assertion. Noûs 41, 594–626.
Lackey, J. (2012). Group knowledge attributions. In J. Brown and M. Gerken (eds.),
Knowledge Ascriptions (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 243–69.
MacFarlane, J. (2011). What is an assertion? In J. Brown and J. Cappelen (eds.),
Assertion: New Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 79–96.
Pettit, P. and List, C. (2011). Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of
Corporate Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Tollefsen, D. (2006). From extended mind to collective mind. Cognitive Systems
Research 7, 140–50.
Tollefsen, D. (2011). Groups as rational sources. Collective Epistemology 20: 2–11.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
2
A Proposed Research Program for Social
Epistemology
1. The Emergence of and Rationale for a Distinctly

Social Epistemology
In the last thirty years or so, philosophers, social scientists, and others have begun
to speak of and pursue inquiry within a distinctly “social” epistemological
framework.1,2
The orientation of traditional epistemology is individualistic. By this I mean
that it focuses on the states, skills, and background information of individual
epistemic subjects. By the lights of such a theory there are two general routes to
knowledge of the environment: through perception (broadly construed), or
through inference (relying on one’s own background information). Within this
framework, there are only a limited number of role(s) that other people can be
recognized as playing in one’s pursuit of knowledge. Put in the starkest terms pos
sible, others’ antics and appearances—their doings and sayings, their dress and
manner of presentation, etc.—are no different in principle from the antics and
appearances of any of the objects in one’s environment. That is to say, on this indi
vidualistic framework other people’s antics and appearances have the status of
evidence from which one can come to know things through inference.
As I attempted to argue in Chapter 1, this approach to the role others play in
one’s pursuit of knowledge fundamentally mischaracterizes that role. When we
accept another’s word for something, we regard them not merely as providing
potential evidence, but also, and more centrally, as manifesting the very results of
their own epistemic sensibility. When one comes to acquire knowledge in this way,
it is plausible to think that the epistemic task has been socially distributed; and we
might speculate that subjects who share knowledge in this way constitute (part
of) an epistemic community. That is to say, they are members of a group whose
knowledge environment is structured by various social practices regarding the
acquisition, storage, processing, transmission, and assessment of information.
1 With thanks to Matt Kopec and Patrick Reider for extensive comments on an earlier version of
this chapter.
2 “often” or “typically”: I want to remain neutral on the issue of whether ordinary perceptual
knowledge is social in any interesting sense. (Those who think it is often appeal to the social dimen
sion brought in by one’s public language in shaping one’s perceptual capacities.)
A Proposed Research Program for Social Epistemology 27
I cannot pretend that this picture is anything but controversial among those
who grew up in the more traditional, individualistic orientation that characterizes
orthodox epistemology. Even so, I won’t defend this picture further here.3 Instead,
I would like to suggest how social epistemology looks from the vantage point of
those who take this picture seriously. For those who do take this picture seriously,
we stand in a fundamentally different relation to other epistemic subjects than we
do to the rest of the items in our environment. Since the point at issue reflects the
roles epistemic subjects play as epistemic agents in a common epistemic commu
nity, it will be helpful to begin by saying a few words about epistemic subjects,
epistemic agents, and epistemic communities.
Throughout this chapter, I will want to be able to refer to the sort of entity of
whom we can intelligibly ascribe knowledge and other epistemic states (such as
justified or rational belief). I will use “epistemic subject” to do so. Thus other
people are epistemic subjects: we can intelligibly affirm or deny that Smith knows
that it is raining, or that Jones believes with justification that the economy will
improve. But so too might some collectives be epistemic subjects: at any rate we
do affirm or deny such things as that the Obama administration knows that
immigration laws in the US need to be addressed, or that the firm’s engineering
team believes with justification that the bridge is no longer structurally sound.4 In
addition to speaking of epistemic subjects, I will sometimes want to highlight the
various roles that epistemic subjects play in acquiring, storing, processing, trans
mitting, or assessing information. When I want to highlight these roles, I will
speak of them (not as epistemic subjects, which they remain, but rather) as “epi
stemic agents.” This difference in nomenclature—between “epistemic subject” and
“epistemic agent”—marks a notional difference: to speak of an epistemic agent is
to speak of an epistemic subject, albeit in a way that highlights the role(s) played
by the subject in the process(es) by which knowledge is acquired, stored, pro
cessed, transmitted, or assessed. Finally, I will also be speaking of the practices,
institutions, and norms that structure the relations between epistemic agents as
they go about their information-seeking business (both individually and socially);
to do so I will speak of their shared “epistemic community.”
Having introduced these terms, I can now proceed to describe in more detail
how (from the epistemic point of view) our relations to other epistemic subjects
differ from our relations to the rest of the items in our environment. Here I high
light three dimensions of difference. These dimensions correspond to what I will
proceed to call the core project of social epistemology: that of characterizing the
epistemic significance of other minds.
3 But see Goldberg (2001, 2010).

4 I say they “might” be epistemic subjects: there is some dispute about whether this talk of collect
ives as epistemic subjects is necessary, or whether it can be translated into talking about individual
people and their relations to one another. I am neutral on this question here.
The first way in which our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our
relations to the rest of the items in our environment is this: epistemic subjects
stand in various epistemic dependency relations to other epistemic subjects in their
shared epistemic community. The basic idea of an epistemic dependency relation
can be brought out in terms of the nature of epistemic assessment itself, in which
we assess a subject’s belief (or her degree of belief) in a proposition. Such assess
ment aims to characterize how well supported her belief is (alternatively: whether
that degree of belief is warranted by her evidence). This sort of assessment is a
fully normative affair, since it appeals to standards (e.g. of rationality, epistemic
responsibility, and/or reliability, among other standards) whose satisfaction is
required if the subject’s (degree of) belief is to count as amounting to justified
belief or knowledge. I describe one subject (S2) as epistemically dependent on
another subject (S1), then, when an epistemic assessment of S2’s belief—an assess
ment along one or more of the dimensions just described—requires an epistemic
assessment of the role S1 played in the process through which S2 acquired (or sus
tained) the belief. (As we will see below, it will be helpful to think of S1 here not
merely as an epistemic subject but as an epistemic agent.) It is of course a substan
tial assumption that we do exhibit epistemic dependence on others; traditional
epistemology would deny this. But social epistemology as I understand it
embraces this assumption, and with it recognizes that our epistemic tasks are
often socially distributed among the members of our epistemic community.
Relying on another person’s say-so is one kind of epistemic dependence (for
which see Goldberg 2010); but it is not the only kind, and it is a task of social
epistemology to enumerate and describe the variety of kinds of epistemic depend
ence exhibited in our interactions with others.5
A second way in which our relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our
relations to the rest of the items in our environment lies in the variety of norms
that enable us to calibrate our expectations of one another as epistemic agents, as
we pursue our inquiries (whether individually or jointly). Consider for example
the expectations you have when you rely on your doctor, or your lawyer, or your
accountant. You expect them to be knowledgeable in certain ways, to be apprised
of the best practices, to be responsive to any relevant developments in their spe
cialties, and so forth. Alternatively, consider the expectations you have of the
other members of your research team, or of your business partners. You expect
them to do their jobs properly, to notify the rest of the team (the other partners) if
there are any developments that bear on the research of the whole team (the suc
cess of the business), and so forth. Or consider the expectations you have of your
neighbors, friends, and family members. When you have long and mutually
acknowledged traditions of informing one another of the news in certain
5 I make some initial taxonomic distinctions in Goldberg (2001).

domains, you come to expect this of one another. Or, to take a final example,
consider the expectations you have when you encounter someone who tells you
something. You expect her to be relevantly authoritative regarding the truth of
what she said. In many and perhaps even all of these cases, the expectations
themselves reflect various norms that regulate our interactions with other epi
stemic agents. In some cases, these norms are provided by professional or institu
tional organizations, and rationalize our reliance on members of those professions
or institutions; in other cases, the norms in question are established explicitly, as a
matter of agreement e.g. amongst team members or business partners; in still
other cases, the norms themselves are part of the practices (e.g. of information-
sharing) that emerge over the course of repeated interaction between the parties,
after the parties mutually (if perhaps only implicitly) acknowledge their mutual
reliance on certain aspects of the practice; and in still other cases, the norms are
part of sophisticated social practices (such as those regarding the practice of
assertion6) whose features are, if only implicitly, mutually acknowledged by all
participants. (This is not intended to exhaust the possibilities.)
Norm-sanctioned expectations, I submit, are not so much predictions of the
behavior of our fellows—although they may give rise to such predictions—as they
are normative expectations of our fellows. E.g., your expectation that your doctor
knows best practices for the treatment of your condition is not (or not merely)
based on the evidence that doctors are generally reliable in this way; rather, it
constitutes something you normatively expect of her. It is akin to parents’ expect
ation that their teenager will be home by midnight (an expectation to which they
are entitled even if their teenager has a long history of staying out too late). These
expectations enable us to solve complicated coordination problems we face as we
seek to acquire knowledge in communities that exhibit a highly differentiated
division of intellectual labor. I regard it as a central task for social epistemology to
enumerate and describe the norms that underwrite these expectations, to articu
late their epistemic bearing on the predictive expectations they underwrite, and
ultimately to evaluate the norms themselves in terms of their role in securing true
belief and knowledge.7
Since the notions of normative and predictive expectations will loom large in
the sections to follow, it is important to be clear about the relationship between
them. To a first approximation, one epistemic agent, S2, normatively expects
something from another epistemic agent, S1, when S2 holds S1 responsible in the
6 This idea is prevalent in the literature on the so-called “norm of assertion.” See e.g. Williamson
(2000); Lackey (2007), and the various papers in Brown and Cappelen (2011). Arguably, this idea can
be traced back to a “deontic scorekeeping” view of assertion developed by Brandom (1983, 1994).
However, Brandom’s approach to assertion is explicitly distinguished from the approach favored by
the “norm of assertion” crowd in MacFarlane (2011). See also Goldberg (2015) for my attempt to take
this idea and develop it into a full theory of the speech act of assertion.
7 I offer a framework in terms of which to theorize about these norms in Goldberg (2018).
relevant way. Such normative expectations are warranted by the norms of prevail
ing practice (for a defense of which see Goldberg 2018). When a normative
expectation is warranted in this way, I will speak of agents’ entitlement to have the
normative expectation in question. As I noted above, there are two fundamental
theoretical questions regarding normative expectations. First, given a set of nor
mative expectations sanctioned by the norms of a given practice, do these expect
ations actually conduce to epistemically good outcomes? In asking this, we are
taking a critical perspective on the norms and practices of a given community,
with the aim of assessing how well these norms and practices serve epistemo
logical ends. (As I will argue in section 3, this is one place where the traditional
normative vocabulary of e.g. epistemology will come in handy.) Second, how do
the normative expectations to which an agent is entitled relate to corresponding
predictive expectations she has? The latter expectations are a species of belief
(about the future), and hence are straightforwardly assessable from an epistemic
point of view. But it remains to be seen how being entitled to hold someone
responsible for an outcome relates to the justification one has for believing that
one will get that outcome. And this point brings me to the third way in which our
relations to other epistemic subjects differ from our relations to the rest of the
items in our environment.
Given the normative expectations one has on those on whom one epistemic
ally relies, as well as the epistemic dependence that results thereby, the epistemic
assessment of beliefs formed through one of the “social routes” to knowledge
(Goldman 2002; see also Goldman 1999 and 2009) is decidedly different from the
epistemic assessment of beliefs not so formed. Insofar as epistemic tasks really are
socially distributed, our assessment itself must be a social one. It must take into
account not only the other individual(s) on whom the belief epistemically
depends, but also the social practices and the norms that regulate these practices.
This will include the various practices and norms that constitute what we might
call the “epistemic environment” in which agents go about their knowledge-
seeking business—and (as noted in the preceding paragraph) their relationship to
the justification of belief. To the extent that one’s epistemic environment bears on
the proper assessment of one’s beliefs, we will need to rethink the nature of epi
stemic assessment, in a way that reflects the various epistemic dependencies and
social norms that are implicated in the production and sustainment of belief. I
regard it as a task for social epistemology to reconceive the nature of epistemic
assessment, and, where needed, to reconceive the categories employed in the
assessment.8
In short, what I would call the epistemic significance of other minds can be seen
in (i) the various forms taken by our epistemic dependence on others, (ii) the
8 See Goldberg (2010, 2018) for various extended arguments to this effect, and attempts to develop
this sort of framework.
variety of norms that underwrite our expectations of one another as we make our
way in the common epistemic environment, and (iii) the distinctive epistemic
assessment(s) implicated whenever a doxastic state is the result of a “social route”
to knowledge. In characterizing (i)‒(iii) we aim to capture the ways in which our
relations to other epistemic agents differ from our relations to the rest of the items
in our environment. And it is this, I propose, that provides the rationale for a
distinctly social epistemology: social epistemology ought to be a systematic inves
tigation into the epistemic significance of other minds, where this is understood
to involve the epistemic tasks I have described in connection with each of
(i)‒(iii).
There are several lessons to be drawn from the foregoing rationale.
First, if the foregoing rationale is to be our guide, it is an open question to what
extent epistemology is social. To be sure, it is social at least in part because we
depend on others as sources of knowledge. But this does not exhaust the roles
others play in our pursuit of knowledge. Consider the roles others play as experts,
as well as in the certification of expertise; in policing standards of assertoric
speech and writing; in peer review; in professional organizations, where there is a
need to articulate and police the standards of professional (including intellectual)
behavior of its members; in devising technologies aimed at enabling us to discern
more of nature’s secrets, and in training others how to use that technology; and in
the process by which we educate our young to become thoughtful, critical, pro
ductive members of our own knowledge community. In all of these (and no doubt
many other) ways, we depend on each other epistemically. As I see matters, it is
the task of social epistemology to enumerate and describe these ways, to charac
terize the norms that underwrite our expectations of one another in these efforts,
and to evaluate these norms in terms of their role in securing true belief and
knowledge. None of us should be confident of the precise contours of social epis
temology (or its place in epistemology more generally) in advance of an extended
investigation into these matters.
A second lesson is this: it is an open question how best to understand the role
of technology in inquiry. Here I mean to include not only tools of communication
and information technology but also the distinctive technology and instrumenta
tion employed in mathematics and the social, natural, and human sciences. On
one hand, technology falls within that part of the world whose antics, it would
seem, provide us merely with evidence. On the other, technology itself is typically
the result of a good deal of epistemic effort: other epistemic subjects bring their
epistemic sensibility to bear on the construction, validation, employment, and
teaching of technology. What is more, at least some of our technology—here I
have in mind scientific instruments—is specifically designed for the purpose of
providing results which represent, or at least enable us to discern, aspects of the
world’s features. Thus our reliance on technology does appear, in both indirect
and direct ways, to involve reliance on other epistemic agents. It would thus seem
that social epistemology would do well to explore the epistemological dimension

of our reliance on technology.
And there is a third lesson as well: it is an open question whether the solitary
epistemic subject is the only proper unit of analysis at which to conduct epistemic
assessment. So far I have been speaking as if the unit of analysis is the individual
subject. But many social epistemologists will take issue with this assumption. The
development and evaluation of the case for and against this assumption ought to
be on the agenda of social epistemology.9
All three of these lessons suggest that we do a great disservice to the potential
of social epistemology research if the only rationale we recognize for pursuing
this research is that there are social sources of knowledge. Such a conception is far
too limited. In studying the variety of epistemic dependency relations, the set of
epistemic norms that enable epistemic tasks to be socially distributed, and the
nature of the epistemic standards used to assess the resulting beliefs, we can see
clearly why social epistemology is not merely one category among others on the
list of sources of knowledge. We can also see the sort of challenge that social epis
temology presents to orthodoxy. In a nutshell, our epistemic dependence on
others cannot be understood in the orthodox (individualistic) terms of traditional
epistemology, nor can the questions about the nature and scope of this depend
ence find their place among the standard questions of individualistic epistemol
ogy. It would thus be a significant mistake to think that acknowledging the
relevance of social epistemology is merely adding one other item to the list of
knowledge sources.
In short, I submit that the pursuit of social epistemology is the attempt to come
to terms with the epistemic significance of other minds. There is a straightfor
ward rationale for making such an attempt: other people are (not mere sources of
knowledge, but) epistemic subjects in their own right who, through their epi
stemic agency, bring their own epistemic sensibility to bear in all sorts of ways as
we shape and operate within a common epistemic environment.
2. Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency
The foregoing provides a clear sense of the relevance of epistemic agency to issues
of social epistemology. The link is provided by the variety of norms that under
write our normative expectations of one another as we make our way in the com
mon epistemic environment.
As I already mentioned in note 6, one sort of norm that underwrites our nor
mative expectations of one another as inquirers is what philosophers of language
9 See e.g. Tollefsen (2006, 2011); Pettit and List (2011); Lackey (2012); and Fricker (2012).
and epistemologists have called the “norm of assertion.” Consider the sort of
expectation you form when another person tells you something: if a person tells
you that things are thus and so, you hold the speaker responsible for being in a
suitably authoritative epistemic position to judge that things are thus and so.
Precisely what this involves—whether this requires that the speaker know, or
merely that she have good reason to believe—is a matter over which there is some
debate. But the basic idea, that each of us expects others to be relevantly authori
tative when they state that things are thus and so, is easily seen in our practices.
(Consider how you would react on learning that what you were “told” was some
thing the speaker had no good reason to think was true.)
Now it is a tricky matter to say precisely how the norm in question, requiring
suitable authoritativeness when one makes an assertion, bears on the epistemic
standing of beliefs that are acquired through accepting another’s assertion. Does
the presence of this norm, together with a hearer’s absence of reasons to doubt the
speaker’s assertion, justify acceptance of that statement? Or does the hearer need
to have additional positive reasons to think that the speaker lived up to the norm
on this occasion?10 But whatever one thinks about this matter, it seems patent
that hearers do expect speakers to recognize that when an assertion is made the
speaker renders herself answerable to the relevant expectation itself. And herein
we see one dimension of agency in our social epistemic practices: speakers ought
to act so as to conform to the standards that govern proper assertion.
Nor is the “norm of assertion” the only norm that bears on our wider practices
in which information is acquired, stored, processed, transmitted, or assessed.
Also relevant here are moral norms. For example, consider how the moral norm
enjoining us to help others in need can generate an obligation to respond to
another’s need for information. Take a case in which a good friend asks you some
thing. If you know the answer and have no good reason to refrain from respond
ing, you should tell her. If you don’t tell him under these conditions and she were
to find out that you knew, she would be warranted in saying, “You should have
told me so!” This sort of case gives added significance to the agency involved in
satisfying the norm of assertion: not only must we regulate our speech so that we
don’t assert something when we fail to be relevantly authoritative, there are also
cases in which we are under moral pressure to assert when we are relevantly
authoritative. Among other things, this will require that we be responsible in
determining whether we know the answer to a question presently before us.
The satisfaction of other norms structuring our epistemic environments illu
minates still other aspects of epistemic agency. (Here I must be very brief.) The
professional must be in a position in which she has all of the relevant evidence—
that is, the evidence properly expected of her. One who relies on a doctor, for
10 For reasons I explore in Goldberg (2015: chs 2 and 3), something like this is the heart of a spir
ited debate in the epistemology of testimony.
example, is entitled to expect that the doctor’s degree of expertise and knowledge
ableness conforms to all of the relevant professional standards, and that she (the
doctor) stays abreast of all of the relevant developments in her specialization
(perhaps under the regulation of a specialist group, such as that for pediatricians
or radiologists, etc.). These standards themselves are norms that structure our
reliance on doctors: they enable the ordinary citizen to take systematic advantage
of the medical expertise in her community at only a small epistemic cost11 to her
self. Once again, the norms articulate what we properly normatively expect of the
relevant individuals as epistemic agents: we expect that these individuals have
acquired the evidence properly expected of them, that they have the knowledge
properly expected of them, and in general that they have behaved with the sort of
epistemic responsibility properly expected of them. Similar things can be said of
our reliance on other professionals as well.
The prevalence of other norms regulating our epistemic communities high
lights still other aspects of epistemic agency. Consider the sorts of expectations
we have when we rely on familiar kinds of devices and instruments: thermo
meters and other temperature gauges, clocks, the instrumentation in our cars,
GPS navigation, and so forth. Although it is often a straightforward matter to
learn how to “read” these devices, most of us do not have anything beyond the
most rudimentary understanding of how the devices themselves work. And,
while many of us have enough experience with them to have empirically grounded
confidence in their reliability, it is by no means clear that one needs to have such
experience in order to be in a position to acquire knowledge through reliance on
the devices. To see this, consider a young child just learning to tell time; and sup
pose such a child learns, not by looking at real clocks, but by looking at images of
clock-faces, where she is told by her teacher how to read time by the orientation
of the clock’s hour and minute hands. Once the child learns to “read time” in this
way, it would seem that she is in a position to know what time it is by looking at a
clock, even if her teacher never once testified to the reliability of clocks (and even if
the child herself did not have other evidence with which to confirm their reliabil
ity). Here it is natural to think that once we are properly initiated into a clock-
using community, one can take for granted that clocks tell proper time. This
presumption is defeasible, of course, and one must remain sensitive to the possi
bility that a particular clock on which one is relying is not working properly (and
so is not a reliable indication of the time).12 But the point is that one need not also
acquire additional positive evidence for thinking that the clocks around here are
11 The “small epistemic cost” is that those who would rely on doctors must be properly sensitive to
indications that they are in the presence of a doctor, and must remain sensitive as well to signs of
incompetence or insincerity even when in the presence of a doctor. (This requires less effort and less
expertise than what would be required to attain expertise in the medical subject-matter itself!) Of
course, this reduction in epistemic cost comes at a financial cost to ordinary citizens; but that is
another matter.
12 Or that the recent change to daylight savings time makes salient the possibility that one’s clock is
an hour off. (With thanks to Matt Kopec for raising this possibility in this connection.)
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Camphorated Oil, nine drachms:
Mix for a Liniment. For an adult, four drachms of the former, and eight of
the latter, may be used. If the child be young, or if the skin be very tender, the
camphorated oil may be used without the turpentine.
259. Wilson, on Healthy Skin.
260. Rain water ought always to be used in the washing of a child; pump-
water is likely to chap the skin, and to make it both rough and irritable.
261. Sometimes, if the child’s skin be very irritable, the glycerin requires
diluting with water—say, two ounces of glycerin to be mixed in a bottle with four
ounces of spring water—the bottle to be well shaken just before using it.
262. One frequent, if not the most frequent, cause of tape-worm is the eating
of pork, more especially if it be underdone. Underdone pork is the most
unwholesome food that can be eaten, and is the most frequent cause of tape-worm
known. Underdone beef also gives tape-worm; let the meat, therefore, be well and
properly cooked. These facts ought to be borne in mind, as prevention is always
better than cure.
263. The Grocer.
264. Shakspeare.
265. Tennyson.
266. Every house where there are children ought to have one of these india-
rubber hot water bottles. It may be procured at any respectable vulcanized india-
rubber warehouse.
267. South’s Household Surgery.
268. “It has been computed that upwards of 1000 children are annually
burned to death by accident in England.”
269. The cotton wool here recommended is that purposely made for surgeons,
and is of a superior quality to that in general use.
270. If there be no other lard in the house but lard with salt, the salt may be
readily removed by washing the lard in cold water. Prepared lard—that is to say,
lard without salt—can, at any moment, be procured from the nearest druggist in
the neighborhood.
271. See the Lancet for October 10th, 17th, and 24th, 1840.
272. A stick of pointed nitrate of silver, in a case, ready for use, may be
procured of any respectable chemist.
273. Which may be instantly procured of a druggist, as he always keeps it
ready prepared.
274. A Bee-master. The Times, July 28, 1864.
275. Shaw’s Medical Remembrancer, by Hutchinson.
276. A tepid bath from 62 to 96 degrees of Fahrenheit.
277. A warm bath from 97 to 100 degrees of Fahrenheit.
278. Health. By John Brown, M.D. Edinburgh: Alexander Strahan & Co.
279. Several years ago, while prosecuting my anatomical studies in London
University College Dissecting-rooms, on opening a young woman, I discovered an
immense indentation of the liver large enough to admit a rolling-pin, entirely
produced by tight lacing!
280. Dryden.
281. Sir W. Temple.
282. Goldsmith’s Essays.
283. Geoffry Hamlyn. By H. Kingsley.
284. Proverbs, xx. 29.
285. “I would have given him, Captain Fleming, had he been my son,” quoth
old Pearson the elder, “such a good sound drubbing as he never would have
forgotten—never!”
“Pooh! pooh! my good sir. Don’t tell me. Never saw flogging in the navy do
good. Kept down brutes; never made a man yet.”—Dr. Norman Macleod in Good
Words, May, 1861.
286. The Birmingham Journal.
287. A Woman’s Thoughts about Women.
288. If a girl has an abundance of good nourishment, the school-mistress
must, of course, be remunerated for the necessary and costly expense; and how
this can be done on the paltry sum charged at cheap boarding-schools? It is utterly
impossible! The school-mistress will live, even if the girls be half-starved. And
what are we to expect from poor and insufficient nourishment to a fast-growing
girl, and at the time of life, remember, when she requires an extra quantity of good
sustaining, supporting food? A poor girl, from such treatment, becomes either
consumptive or broken down in constitution, and from which she never recovers,
but drags out a miserable existence. A cheap boarding-school is dear at any price.
289. A horse-hair mattress should always be preferred to a feather bed. It is
not only better for the health, but it improves the figure.
290. Spare Hours. By John Brown, M.D., F.R.S.E.
291. Household Verses on Health and Happiness. London: Jarrold and Sons.
292. Hurdis’s Village Curate.
293. Shakspeare.
294. Todd’s Student’s Guide.
295. Sir Astley Cooper’s Lectures on Scrofula.
296. I. Chronicles, xxi. 13.
297. A. K. H. B., Fraser’s Magazine, October, 1861.
298. Shakspeare.
299. The Times, May 16, 1867.
300. Winter in the South of Europe. By J. Henry Bennett. Third Edition.
London: Churchill and Sons, 1865.
301. A wineglassful of barm, a wineglassful of vinegar, and the remaining sage
tea, to make a half-pint bottle of gargle.
302. December 10, 1864.
303. Shakspeare knew the great importance of not crowding around a patient
who has fainted. He says:
“So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons;

Come all to help him, and so stop the air
By which he should revive.”
Measure for Measure, Act ii. sc. 4.
304. For the best way of stewing prunes, see page 1258.
305. Professor Trousseau in Medical Circular, Feb. 5, 1862.
306. Exodus, v. 12.
307. Wilson on Healthy Skin.
308. Four poppy-heads and four ounces of chamomile blows to be boiled in
four pints of water for half an hour, and then to be strained to make the
fomentation.
309. Cut a piece of bread, about the size of the little finger—without breaking
it into crumb—pour boiling hot milk upon it, cover it over, and let it stand for five
minutes, then apply the soaked bread over the gum-boil, letting it rest between the
cheek and the gum.
310. As long as fashion, instead of common sense, is followed in the making of
both boots and shoes, men and women will as a matter of course suffer from corns.
It has often struck me as singular, when all the professions and trades are so
overstocked, that there should be, as there is in every large town, such a want of
chiropodists (corn-cutters)—of respectable chiropodists—of men who would
charge a fixed sum for every visit the patient may make; for instance, to every
working-man a shilling, and to every gentleman half a crown or five shillings for
each sitting, and not for each corn (which latter system is a most unsatisfactory
way of doing business). I am quite sure that if such a plan were adopted, every
town of any size in the kingdom would employ regularly one chiropodist at least.
However we might dislike some few of the American customs, we may copy them
with advantage in this particular—namely, in having a regular staff of chiropodists
both in civil and in military life.
311. Youth—Ablution, page 1321.
312. A very small quantity of pure nitric acid—just a drain at the bottom of a
stoppered bottle—is all that is needed, and which may be procured of a chemist.
313. Dublin University Magazine.
314. The Round Table.
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Foundations and Applications of Social

Epistemology: Collected Essays

7. The Epistemic Costs of Politeness 117

Social epistemology, normative and descriptive. In P. Graham, N. Pedersen,

Broadly speaking, social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of

4 This is quoted from its website: https://social-­epistemology.com.

Despite social epistemology’s increasingly high profile, it is interesting to note

10); the normative epistemic expectations we have of one another as epistemic

15 See Grice (1957). 16 See Millikan (1984, 2000, 2005).

20 See Goldberg (2015, 2018, and 2020).

rele­vant details.23 In short, I offer these chapters as a contribution to the ongoing

Dotson, K. (2014). Conceptualizing epistemic oppression. Social Epistemology

Goldman, A. (2002b). Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Longino, H. (1990). Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific

1 This chapter borrows heavily from parts of Goldberg (2015b).

To be sure, neither one of the methodological paradigms themselves, which I

3 I have tried to do this in Goldberg (2017).

6 Below I will characterize these expectations as normative in nature.

stand in various epistemic dependency relations to other epistemic subjects in their

7 I make some initial taxonomic distinctions in Goldberg (2011).

Fricker, M. (2012). Group testimony? The making of a collective good informant.

1. The Emergence of and Rationale for a Distinctly

3 But see Goldberg (2001, 2010).

5 I make some initial taxonomic distinctions in Goldberg (2001).

that social epistemology would do well to explore the epistemological dimension

2. Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency

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4 This is quoted from its website: https://social-epistemology.com.

relevant details.23 In short, I offer these chapters as a contribution to the ongoing