把知识看作一种社会现象已不再是什么新奇的或生僻的观念了。随着社会科学的发展,我们已习惯于从社会的和历史的角度看待观念和信念,并试图了解它们是如何产生的以及它们为什么以那样一些形式出现。然而,哲学家们仅仅是逐渐地采纳这些观点,因为它们对自17世纪以来一直居于认识论主导地位的关于知识性质的那些思想提出了诘难。 Think of knowledge as a social phenomenon is no longer a novel or uncommon concept. With the development of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs from a social and historical perspective and trying to understand how they came about and why they appear in that form. However, philosophers merely adopt these ideas gradually, for they have infuriated those thoughts about the nature of knowledge that have been in epistemological dominance since the seventeenth century.