Social epistemology's normative impulse – signalled most clearly in its preoccupation with criticism, epistemic justice, knowledge policy, progress and rationality – returns to a nineteenth-century idea of philosophers intervening in order to improve knowledge production. In the twentieth century, this case was most pressed by the logical positivists in their Viennese phase, but ultimately to greater effect by that renegade positivist Karl Popper and his students, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, all of whom operated with an appropriately wide scope for understanding the role of knowledge in the human condition, without assuming that science is as it ought to be. (See explaining the normative structure of science.) Originally, philosophical interventions ran the gamut of philosophers advising scientists on matters of conception and interpretation (e.g. William Whewell vis-à-vis Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin), laying out the steps by which a fledgling discipline might become a science (e.g. Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill vis-à-vis the social sciences), and recovering minority dissents from the history of science to which the dominant paradigm has yet to respond adequately (e.g. Ernst Mach visà-vis Newtonian mechanics, an instance of “Tory history”: see historiography).

Social epistemology's normative concerns largely reflect the bureaucratic context of modern resource-intensive “big science”. It situates the points of critical intervention not in the laboratory, but in the policy forums where research is initially stimulated and ultimately evaluated. Part of this shift is due to the gradual demystification of scientific work that has attended the rise of science and technology studies.