Scope

EPISTEME publishes articles on the social dimensions of knowledge from the perspective of philosophical epistemology and related social sciences (e.g., economics, political theory, information science). It focuses on theoretical work, but also welcomes policy-oriented discussions, i.e., applications to contemporary society and its institutions. It does not publish straightforward empirical studies or case studies. The principal style is that of analytical philosophy, but rigorous approaches of other kinds are appropriate so long as they remain accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. For a detailed overview that reflects the Journal’s conception of the scope and contours of social epistemology, see Alvin Goldman’s article “Social Epistemology” to be found in  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Topics of interest to the journal include, but are not limited to:

Testimony

Judgment aggregation

Juries and expert panels

Social models of science

Knowledge and democracy

Analytical feminist epistemology

Collective belief, group rationality

Social applications of Bayesian inference

Incentives and interests in an epistemic context

Intellectual trust and comparative assignments of trustworthiness

Epistemological relativism, objectivism, contextualism, communitarianism

How epistemic goals, norms or desiderata (e.g., knowledge, truth, warrant, justification, rationality, consensus) are promoted or impeded by various social practices

Patterns, institutions and networks of communication (dialogue and argumentation, the Internet, education, the press, research dissemination, epidemiology of ideas, distributed cognition)