Thanks to Peter I came across an article in The Philosophers’ Magazine titled The real thing? (by Julian Baggini, Issue 43, posted May 5, 2009) about social epistemology. Social epistemology according to Alvin Goldman, who was interviewed for the article, examines the social dimension of knowing. Goldman is quoted as saying,
Historically, epistemology focused on how you can get the truth about the world. The question for social epistemology is something like, how does the social affect people’s attempts to get the truth? So what I want to do, and this has been part of my efforts for these 10 years or so, is to try to give a bigger focus to the social side of epistemology, while remaining continuous with the philosophical tradition.