Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2026 number 3

The article considers two approaches to understanding the subject of social epistemology. The first determines its content by D. Bloor’s sociology of scientific knowledge and A. Goldman’s veritist epistemology, with a deliberate tilt towards opposing scientific thinking to the cultural factors of knowledge and the dominance of standards of pure epistemology without relating scientific practice, respectively. A structural model of this approach proposed by Yu.S. Morkina is critically examined. The second approach determines the content of social epistemology by the activity of agents of cognition who, according to K. Popper, consider the criteria of rationality and progress in science as the highest epistemic goals, and, on the other hand, by the establishment, according to T. Kuhn, of normal science’s social structure with derived epistemic values. It is shown that taking into account the role of the scientific community is more adequate to the current state of social epistemology, in particular, in S. Fuller’s analysis of the alternative versions of Kuhn and Popper. In general, while the first pair of concepts of social epistemology prefers, in a certain sense, abstrаct excursions into culture and “pure” epistemology, the second pair prefers a narrower vision of social epistemology as directly addressing not just the fate of knowledge, or even of scientific knowledge, but the activities of the scientific community, with its realities and its own history.