Virtue epistemology and the epistemic environment

Virtue epistemology asks us to evaluate beliefs by looking at the intellectual character of the person who holds them: their carefulness, open-mindedness, honesty, and the other traits that make someone a good thinker. On this picture, knowledge is a kind of success that is creditable to the knower — it reflects well on how they went about inquiry.

My work presses on a complication for that story. The traits we exercise when we form beliefs do not operate in a vacuum. They operate in an epistemic environment: the testimony available to us, the reliability of our sources, the incentives to inquire or to look away, the background assumptions a community takes for granted. Two people with the same intellectual virtues can end up in very different epistemic positions depending on the environment they think in.

The question I keep returning to is how much of the credit — or blame — for an epistemic outcome belongs to the agent, and how much belongs to the conditions they were placed in. Getting the balance right matters for how we assess disagreement, how we hold each other responsible for what we believe, and how we design institutions that are supposed to help people know things.