Socialising epistemic risk: On the risks of epistemic injustice

Abstract

Epistemic risk is of central importance to epistemology nowadays: one common way in which a belief can fail to be knowledge is by being formed in an epistemically risky way, that is, a way that makes it true by luck. Recently, epistemologists have been expanding this rather narrow conception of risk in every direction, except arguably the most obvious one—to enable it to accommodate the increasingly commonplace thought that knowledge has an irreducibly social dimension. This paper fills this lacuna by bringing issues of epistemic injustice to bear on epistemic risk. In particular, it draws on the phenomenon of white ignorance, to sketch a more social notion of epistemic risk, on which the interests of one's epistemic community partly determine whether a belief‐forming procedure is epistemically risky.

Social Group Moral Encroachment

“…Although some think that certain beliefs are morally, and therefore epistemically, impermissible regardless of their truth-value (e.g., Basu 2019 b ), the more common view is that what matters is the moral cost of possible error. I have argued elsewhere (Mitova 2023) for a notion of epistemic risk at least which doesn't concern false belief alone, but I stay neutral on this issue here.…”