 Contemporary philosophers pursue both formal and informal modeling approaches in addressing the social character of knowledge. Those pursuing formal models tend to bracket questions about rationality, objectivity, or justification and concentrate on mathematically investigating the effects of community structures on features of the pursuit of knowledge and its diffusion in a community. Those pursuing informal models are more interested in understanding the role of the community in enhancing or constituting desired features of inquiry such as rationality and objectivity and in thinking about the ways knowledge is realized