The traditional strategy for instilling a common sense of collective enquiry has been to engage in a transcendental rhetoric of truth, whereby enquirers are led to believe (usually with the help of a philosophical theory) that they are all already heading in a common direction, fixated on a common end (a.k.a. truth), and that all subsequent discussion should be devoted to finding the most efficient means towards that end. rationality and progress are often invoked in this context. Most versions of analytic social epistemology are truth-oriented in this broad sense. Some advocates, such as Alvin Goldman, even believe that there is an interesting – and superior – sense of enquiry common to all those who seek the truth of whatever domain that interests them.

Fuller's version of social epistemology denies this doctrine, which Goldman calls “veritism”, for two main reasons. The first is that, in practice, veritism is not quite as it seems. Indeed, the doctrine is applied selectively, as Plato and Machiavelli might: knowledge is fashioned as an instrument of power for stabilizing the social order. (See consensus versus dissent.) In Goldman's own formulation, truth is necessary but not sufficient for knowledge worth having. Some truths may not be worth “knowing” – in the sense of publicly disseminated – not simply because their content is trivial but because the knower is incapable of drawing valid inferences from those truths.