ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the notion of epistemic community to refer to such a group of agents faced with a shared epistemic task. It explores division of labor between the members of the group as a necessary property of an epistemic community, so as to distinguish such groups from mere statistical or aggregative epistemic collectives, where there is no communication or coordination between group members. The chapter provides a review of the modeling work, which has aimed at understanding the functioning of epistemic communities. Modeling done by social epistemologists resides at an interesting junction of various strands of inquiry. The chapter provides an overview of some of the most prominent modeling approaches in social epistemology and describes a general approach to interpreting models, thereby suggesting how they could be integrated with conceptual and empirical work done in the rest of the field.
