Abstract

A central feature of any particular epistemology is its conception of an epistemic subject or knower. Classical epistemology has portrayed knowledge acquisition as an individualistic enterprise, and has conceptualized those individuals as atomistic and self-sufficient. Yet recent work in social epistemology emphasizes the social nature of knowing, making it difficult to understand how individuals could know. This thesis seeks to further the goals of social epistemology by arguing that a re-conceptualization of individual knowers as individuals-in-communities can provide an account of the role of the individual in knowing, while detailing the relationship between individual and communal elements of knowing. Additionally, it argues that by conceptualizing knowers as individuals-in-communities, we can understand how social epistemology can retain a normative dimension, as a project of epistemology. The account developed emphasizes the importance of a critical relation between the individual knowers and their epistemic communities. It is this critical relation which provides the possibility for a prescriptive dimension within a social epistemology. ;In response to their insights concerning the social nature of knowing, some social epistemologists have begun to develop conceptions of communities rather than individuals as epistemic subjects. I examine the works of John Hardwig, Steve Fuller, and Lynn Hankinson Nelson, arguing that their accounts suffer difficulties in accounting for the role of individuals in knowledge-seeking, and retaining the normative force demanded of a robust epistemology. Further, I argue that these theorists are attracted to the idea of communities as knowers because of the mistaken assumption that to conceptualize individuals as knowers requires conceptualizing them on an atomistic view, a view prevalent within classical epistemology. ;Rather than upholding remnants of this atomistic view, I develop a view of knowers as individuals-in-communities. I argue that this conception is better able to account for the role of individuals in social practices of knowing, at the same time as it permits social epistemology to retain a normative dimension