Social epistemology is a naturalistic (see naturalism) approach to the normative (see normativity) questions surrounding the organization of knowledge processes and products. It seeks to provide guidance on how and what we should know on the basis of how and what we actually know. The subject matter corresponds to what the pragmatists used to call “the conduct of enquiry” and what may appear to today's readers as an abstract form of science policy. (See knowledge policy.) Social epistemology advances beyond other theories of knowledge by taking seriously that knowledge is produced by agents who are not merely individually embodied but also collectively embedded in certain specifiable relationships that extend over large chunks of space and time.

The need for social epistemology is captured by an interdisciplinary (see disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity) gap between philosophy and sociology: philosophical theories of knowledge tend to stress normative approaches without considering their empirical realizability or political consequences. Sociological theories suffer the reverse problem of capturing the empirical and ideological character of knowledge, but typically without offering guidance on how knowledge policy should be conducted. Social epistemology aims to consolidate the strengths and eliminate the weaknesses of these two approaches. Even the traditionally conservative analytic school of philosophy has been increasingly forced to treat social epistemological themes as they come to accept the findings of historical, sociological, psychological and economic studies of science as constraints on the advice they issue about the pursuit of knowledge.