Formulated in 1952 by Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera, two American researchers in the Library Science field, the concept of 'Social Epistemology', envisaging the study of the production, flow and consumption of any sort of "intellectual product", received limited acceptance and was slightly discussed within the specialized literature of that period. Resuming the concept and relating it to ideas and theories conceived by contemporary authors as Foucault, Lévy and Latour, this paper suggests that 'Social Epistemology' might be understood as the study of the reciprocal relations that are established between human beings and their changing social, cultural and technological environment regarding the cognitive activity or, in other words, regarding the cycle of knowledge production, circulation and use, featured in its materiality as a socio-technical ecology of the intellectual labor. Settled in this articulated manner, such a conceptual framework could be adopted by Information Science researchers as a relevant and interesting theoretical foundation for their scientific investigations.
Social epistemology; Actor-network theory; Science studies