“This latter [logic
of knowledge] is concerned not with questions of fact (Kant’s quid facti?),
but only with questions of justification or validity (Kant’s quid juris?). Its
questions are of the following kind. Can a statement be justified? And if so,
how? Is it testable? Is it logically dependent on certain other statements? Or
does it perhaps contradict them?”
Karl Popper, The
Logic of Scientific Discovery
The attitude -which is a largely postmodernist- that advocates that knowledge is entirely social direct to the discussion of the relation between "knowledge and social". When social epistemology is broadly considered as an analysing of the forms of knowledge, judgment and justification of groups and communities, -in this large and slippery territory- the meaning of knowledge shifts from philosophical to social field. The social meaning of scientific knowledge, the scientists as a society, the historicity of knowledge, the politics of knowledge are the subjects of this field. Social epistemology as an epistemological method is necessitated by the following reasons: the social environment and social practices are related to knowledge, in as much as the individual is a member of a society concerning both the acquisition and the justification of knowledge. In this context, it is a necessity that konowledge is evaluated as a social and linguistic practice in terms of testimony, rationality and transmission to others. It is a question that whether this assessment does enclose all forms of knowledge and that philosophical validity of their methods. This case requires an important distinction for some writers, including Alvin Goldman. Since epistemology is placed in the focus of the sociological problem before it becomes the philosophical problem. Culture-based explanation models, or sociologism in general require relativism as a necessity since they inspire the function of the definition and justification of knowledge to construction from the social context.
Goldman has produced a classification model in order to defend social epistemology and to overcome approaches that undermine the philosophical foundations in this field. Accordingly, social epistemological approaches are classified according to their relation to the presuppositions of traditional epistemology. According to Goldman, there are three types of social epistemology (SE): Revisionist SE, Preservationist SE and Expansionist SE. According to the author, the Revisionist approach is not a "real" social epistemology because of its destructive attitude to the bases of traditional epistemology, while the others are "real".
While Goldman is creating this classification, he starts to work out some of the presuppositions of classical epistemology:
In classical epistemology;
