Toward a `Responsibilist' Epistemology

The foundationalist pyramid has no ultimate foundations, and the coherentist raft must inevitably find itself adrift. Faced with this impasse, epistemologists might well see a potentially fruitful new approach in some version of the 'reliabilism' proposed in a recent paper' as a better route to establishing conditions of justification for knowledge claims. This would be an account of knowledge and justification in terms of, and based upon, intellectual virtues. Such an epistemology would roughly parallel an ethics based upon moral virtues: it would be analogous to such an ethics, but not derivative from it. We have only a preliminary account of the nature of this new approach; one hopes for its amplification in the near future. In the meantime I shall explore some of its implications in the context of my own attempts to develop a theory of epistemic responsibility as a potential new focal point for theory of knowledge. I shall give an account of what an epistemology thus focussed might consider, and of how it would differ from more traditional approaches.