Abstract

Social epistemology presents different theories about the status of shared knowledge, but only some of them retain a fruitful relation with classical epistemology. The aim of my contribution is to present a pragmatic model which is, on the one side, related to the classical concepts of “truth” and “justification”, while, on the other side, addressing to a fundamentally “social” structure for the justification of knowledge. The shift from formal semantics to pragmatics is based on a notion of “material inference” embedding commitments implicit in the use of language, that favors the recognition of the social source of shared knowledge.