Epistemic deferral, gnoseology, and intellectual ethics

TL;DR

The paper explores how we balance personal understanding with trusting experts in different areas of knowledge.

Contribution

It introduces a virtue-theoretic account of epistemic deferral that unifies two domains of inquiry.

Findings

A virtue-theoretic account of epistemic deferral is developed using Sosa’s triple-A and triple-S structures.

The account shows that intellectual ethics applies equally to both humanistic and practical domains.

There is no real tension between autonomous inquiry and deferring to epistemic authorities.

Abstract

Sosa (2021) has recently presented a dichotomy between, as he puts it, the humanistic domain, in which we seek first-hand understanding of why-questions of value and normativity through our own intuitive insight, and the practical domain in which we defer to epistemic authorities for information that correctly answers utilitarian questions. However, this neat picture is too simplistic. To use Sosa’s terminology, whereas gnoseology also applies in the humanistic domain, intellectual ethics is very much equally about the practical domain. Moreover, the distinction between first- and second-hand knowledge does not coincide with any such distinction between domains of inquiry. In this paper, we first develop a virtue-theoretic account of epistemic deferral, which displays Sosa’s (2021) triple-A and triple-S structures, and reflects his different levels of telic assessment. We then show how this account not only pertains to both domains, but also explains why there is no real tension between conducting our epistemic inquiries autonomously and deferring to the epistemic authorities for knowledge that we are incapable of acquiring ourselves.