Reply to Schwengerer: Epistemic Overestimation in Prosocial Behaviour-Promoting Virtual Reality and Practical Safeguards

This reply addresses Schwengerer’s concern that prosocial behaviour-promoting virtual reality may generate overconfidence in users’ understanding of marginalised perspectives. I clarify that grounded inferential knowledge, as developed in my original account, is not intended to license epistemic overestimation, though I acknowledge that such overconfidence remains a practical risk, particularly in non-ideal implementations of prosocial behaviour-promoting (PBP-VR). I therefore outline a set of risk-mitigation strategies, building on Schwengerer’s suggestions.