Epistemic Responsibility1

Abstract Given the hundreds of articles and books that have been written in epistemology over the span of just the past few decades, relatively little has been written specifically on epistemic responsibility. What has been written rarely considers the nature of epistemic responsibility and its possible role in epistemic justification or knowledge. Instead, such work concerns philosophical analyses and arguments about related concepts such as epistemic virtues or duties, rather than epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. 2 2 Such work includes: Mark Bernstein, ‘Moral and Epistemic Saints’, Metaphilosophy, 17 (1986), pp. 102–8; Roderick Chisholm, ‘C. I. Lewis’s Ethics of Belief’, in Paul Schilpp, (ed.) The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (LaSalle: Open Court, 1968), pp. 223–42; ‘Firth and the Ethics of Belief’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51 (1991), pp. 117–28; Jonathan Kvanvig, The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992); Jack Meiland, ‘What Ought We to Believe? Or the Ethics of Belief Revisited’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 17 (1980), pp. 15–24; James A. Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993); Anthony O’Hear, ‘Belief and the Will’, Philosophy, 47 (1972), pp. 95–112; H. H. Price, ‘Belief and the Will’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 28 (1954), pp. 1–22; Holly Smith, ‘Culpable Ignorance’, Philosophical Review, 92 (1983), pp. 543–71; Ernest Sosa, ‘Knowledge and Intellectual Virtue’, The Monist, 68 (1985), pp. 226–45; Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); J. T. Stevenson, ‘On Doxastic Responsibility’, in Keith Lehrer (ed.) Analysis and Metaphysics (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), pp. 229–53; Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Linda Zagzebski and Abrol Fairweather (eds) Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). It is epistemic responsibility in the blameworthiness and praiseworthiness senses that is the primary concern of this paper, though the duty sense of epistemic responsibility is explored in terms of its pertinence to epistemic virtue. What is epistemic responsibility? And what, if anything, is its relationship to justification and knowledge?