Social epistemology from Jesse Shera to Steve Fuller

Abstract

This article examines the project of Jesse Hauk Shera (1903–82), carried out originally in association with his colleague Margaret Egan, of formulating an epistemological foundation for a library science in which bibliography, librarianship, and the then newly emerging ideas about documentation would be integrated. The scholarly orientation and research agenda of the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School provided an appropriate context for his work for social epistemology, though this work was continued long after he left the University of Chicago. A short time after his death, a group of philosophers that included Steve Fuller (1959– ) began to study the collective nature of knowledge. Fuller, independently of Shera, identifi ed, named, and developed a program of social epistemology, a vehicle for which was a new journal he was responsible for creating in 1987, Social Epistemology. Fuller described his program as an intellectual movement of broad cross-disciplinary provenance that attempted to reconstruct the problem of epistemology once knowledge is regarded as intrinsically social. Fuller, like other philosophers interested in this area, acknowledges the work of Shera.

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