Education and the Growth of Knowledge: Perspectives from Social and Virtue Epistemology

In recent years, traditional epistemology, and especially its focus on the analysis of the concept of knowledge, has come under attack from two competing currents in the subject, social epistemology and virtue epistemology. According to the comparatively new enterprise of social epistemology, traditional epistemology that focuses on the individual knower needs to be supplemented - or even replaced - by study of the role of the social in furthering knowledge; according to the enterprise of virtue epistemology, a contemporary re-working of an ancient tradition stretching back to Aristotle, traditional epistemology’s focus on the knowledge of the individual needs to be replaced by a focus on the intellectual character of the knower - the person who knows things. In this collection aimed at an educational and a philosophical audience, a group of eminent philosophers and philosophers of education detail the implications of advances in contemporary epistemology for education. This collection reveals that a reconsideration of epistemology in the light of ideas from social and virtue epistemology will in turn re-invigorate the links between the fields of epistemology and education.