Epistemic Autonomy

This is the first book dedicated to the topic of epistemic autonomy. It features original essays from leading scholars that promise to significantly shape future debates in this emerging area of epistemology. While the nature of and value of autonomy has long been discussed in ethics and social and political philosophy, it remains an underexplored area of epistemology. The essays in this collection take up several interesting questions and approaches related to epistemic autonomy. Topics include the nature of epistemic autonomy, whether epistemic paternalism can be justified, autonomy as an epistemic value and/or vice, and the relation of epistemic autonomy to social epistemology and epistemic injustice. Epistemic Autonomy will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy.

Any attempt to help us reason in more accurate ways faces a problem: While we acknowledge that others stand to benefit from intellectual advice, each and every one of us tends to consider ourselves an exception, on account of overconfidence. The solution? Accept a form of epistemic paternalism.

Gives an extended argument for epistemic authority from the implications of reflective self-consciousness. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic self-reliance is incoherent. The book argues that epistemic and emotional self-trust are rational and inescapable, that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others, and that among those we are committed to trusting are some whom we ought to treat as epistemic authorities, modelled on the well-known principles of authority of Joseph Raz. Some of these authorities can be in the moral and religious domains. The book investigates the way the problem of disagreement between communities or between the self and others is a conflict within self-trust, and argue against communal self-reliance on the same grounds as the book uses in arguing against individual self-reliance. The book explains how any change in belief is justified--by the conscientious judgment that the change will survive future conscientious self-reflection. The book concludes with an account of autonomy. -- Información de la editorial.

This book uses the framework of care ethics to articulate a novel theory of our epistemic obligations to one another. It presents an original way to understand our epistemic vulnerabilities, our obligations in education, and our care duties toward others with whom we stand in epistemically vulnerable relationships. As embodied and socially interdependent knowers, we have obligations to one another that are generated by our ability to care – that is, to meet each other’s epistemic vulnerabilities. The author begins the book by arguing that the same motivations that moved social epistemologists away from individualistic epistemology should motivate a move to a care-based theory. The following chapters outline our epistemic care duties to vulnerable agents, and offer criteria of epistemic goodness for communities of inquiry. Finally, the author discusses the tension between epistemic care and epistemic paternalism. Epistemic Care will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social epistemology, ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of education.

"This book collects 20 papers in epistemology by Linda Zagzebski, covering her entire career of more than 25 years. She is one of the founders of contemporary epistemology and is well-known for broadening the field and re-focusing it on epistemic virtue and epistemic value. The subject areas of most of epistemology are included in these papers: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, and (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem"--

This is the first edited scholarly collection devoted solely to the epistemology of democracy. Its fifteen chapters, published here for the first time and written by an international team of leading researchers, will interest scholars and advanced students working in democratic theory, the harrowing crisis of democracy, political philosophy, social epistemology, and political epistemology. The volume is structured into three parts, each offering five chapters. The first part, Democratic Pessimism, covers the crisis of democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, public epistemic vices, misinformation and disinformation, civic ignorance, and the lacking quantitative case for democratic decision-making. The second part, Democratic Optimism, discusses the role of hope and positive emotions in rebuilding democracy, proposes solutions to myside bias, and criticizes dominant epistocratic approaches to forming political administrations. The third and final part, Democratic Realism, assesses whether we genuinely require emotional empathy to understand the perspectives of our political adversaries, discusses the democratic tension between mutual respect for others and a quest for social justice, and evaluates manifold top-down and bottom-up approaches to policy making.

A central conclusion developed and defended throughout the book is that epistemic autonomy is necessary for knowledge (both knowledge-that and knowledge-how) and in ways that epistemologists have not yet fully appreciated. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 motivates (using a series of twists on Lehrer's TrueTemp case) the claim that propositional knowledge requires autonomous belief. Chapters 2 and 3 flesh out this proposal in two ways, by defending a specific form of history-sensitive externalism with respect to propositional knowledge-apt autonomous belief (Chapter 2) and by showing how the idea that knowledge requires autonomous belief—understood along the externalist lines proposed—corresponds with an entirely new class of knowledge defeaters (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 extends the proposal to (both intellectualist and anti-intellectualist) knowledge-how and performance enhancement, and in a way that combines insights from virtue epistemology with research on freedom, responsibility, and manipulation. Chapter 5 concludes with a new twist on the Value of Knowledge debate, by vindicating the value of epistemically autonomous knowledge over that which falls short, including (mere) heteronomous but otherwise epistemically impeccable justified true belief.