This branch of social epistemology studies conceptions of knowledge as products of cultural variation. (See multiculturalism.) The “folk knower” typically travels under such names as the “native speaker”, “naive knower” or, more abstractly, the “first-person perspective”. Originally, under the influence of imperial anthropology and positivist science, folk epistemology had the derogatory connotation of pre-scientific or even primitive accounts of knowledge. However, in contemporary analytic philosophy, the value placed on the expression “folk epistemology” varies considerably. For example, folk views of the mind, which typically define mental states in terms of a grammar of thought without making reference to brain states, are still given at least some credence by most philosophers of mind, and figure prominently in the sort of philosophical writing (e.g. by Jerry Fodor, Thomas Nagel) likely to appear in the Times Literary Supplement or the London Review of Books. (See explaining the cognitive content of science.)

Nevertheless, for the past quarter-century, Stephen Stich has queered the pitch by treating philosophical theories of knowledge as themselves instances of folk epistemology. Thus, as a folk epistemologist, Stich is less concerned with defending epistemological relativism than with undermining the assumption that there is a universal problem of knowledge to which relativism attempts to provide one general solution. (See universalism versus relativism.) Indeed, the fixation on defeating the sceptic as the ultimate goal of a theory of knowledge may turn out to be an elite Western preoccupation.