Impurist Epistemology and the Social Turn

An emerging narrative links the rise of social epistemology with the decline of a purist epistemological orthodoxy. The thought that motivates this narrative is that impurist epistemologies make space for social, moral, and pragmatic considerations, whereas purist epistemologies did not, which transforms epistemology from something that was once overly idealized and abstract into something that makes meaningful contact with the social realities of knowledge. Despite the intuitive appeal of this narrative, I argue that it owes its plausibility to a lack of conceptual clarity. When we more clearly articulate the contours of the purist orthodoxy, we see that (i) different varieties of impurism make space for social, moral, and pragmatic considerations in importantly different ways, which complicates how this set of views hangs together, and (ii) even the strictest of purists can attend to social, moral, and pragmatic factors in the sense necessary for producing socially engaged epistemology.