political or sociological nature) into an analysis of how the human society develops and functions in this respect. Particularly, this Marxist analysis prompted Mannheim to write Ideology and Utopia, which investigated the classical sociology of knowledge and the construct of ideology. The term “social epistemology” was first coined by the library scientists Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera in the 1950s. The term was used by Robert K. Merton in a 1972 article in the American Journal of Sociology and then by Steven Shapin in 1979. However, it was not until the 1980s that the current sense of “social epistemology” began to emerge. The rise of social epistemology In the 1980s, there was a powerful growth of interest amongst philosophers in topics such as epistemic value of testimony, the nature and function of expertise, proper distribution of cognitive labor and resources among individuals in the communities and the status of group reasoning and knowledge. In 1987, the philosophical journal ‘’Synthese‘’ published a special issue on social epistemology which included two authors that have since taken the branch of epistemology in two divergent directions: Alvin Goldman and Steve Fuller. Fuller founded a journal called ‘’Social Epistemology: A journal of knowledge, culture, and policy‘’ in 1987 and published his first book, ‘’Social Epistemology’’, in 1988. Goldman’s ‘’Knowledge in a Social World’’ came out in 1999. Goldman advocates for a type of epistemology which is sometimes called “veritistic epistemology” because of its large emphasis on truth. This type of epistemology is sometimes seen to side with “essentialism” as opposed to “multiculturalism”. But Goldman has argued that this association between veritistic epistemology and essentialism is not necessary. He describes Social Epistemology as knowledge derived from one’s interactions with another person, group or society. Goldman looks into one of the two strategies of the socialization of epistemology. This strategy includes the evaluation of social factors that impact knowledge formed on true belief. In contrast, Fuller takes preference for the second strategy that defines knowledge influenced by social factors as collectively accepted belief. The difference between the two can be simplified with exemplars e.g.: the first strategy means analyzing how your degree of wealth (a social factor) influences what information you determine to be valid whilst the second strategy occurs when an evaluation is done on wealth’s influence upon your knowledge acquired from the beliefs of the society in which you find yourself. Fuller's position supports the