Abstract

The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms that they do. Philosophers, however, are only gradually coming to terms with these views. For they call in question ideas about the nature of knowledge which have dominated epistemology since the seventeenth century.