Virtue epistemology has emerged as an influential alternative to traditional knowledge theories. It has two main branches: reliabilism, which sees epistemic virtues as cognitive faculties that reliably produce true beliefs (Sosa, 2007), and responsibilism, which prioritizes acquired epistemic habits over innate faculties, considering them "appropriate objects of praise and blame" (Axtell, 1997, p. 26). Virtue epistemology, in either of its classical strands, argues that the epistemic arises from personal virtues. This has been questioned as it understands both cognitive faculties and responsibilist virtues as traits of the individual agent and difficult to apply to collective agents (see Navarro & Pino, 2021). In our presentation, we argue that virtues can be traits of the group, of society, based on networks of trust and collaboration (see Broncano, 2020). Many have developed a reliabilist virtue epistemology grounded not in an individual agent but in a collective agent (see Kellestrup, 2020). However, if these new reliabilist models aim to account for how agents come to know (based on reliable dispositions) in collective terms, the main thesis of our presentation is that this new way of understanding virtue epistemology is insensitive to social structures that generate ignorance and epistemic injustices, such as meritocracy and ableism.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
One site of agreement among several proponents and opponents of the knowledge norm of justified belief (KNJ) is that some senses of justification ought to be unified. Consider the deontic sense of justification, whereby one’s belief itself is justified just in case it follows the norm of belief, and the hypological sense of justification, whereby the believer herself is justified in their belief just in case her epistemic performance in so believing is positively evaluable to a sufficient degree. Littlejohn, for instance, leverages the equation of these two senses – i.e., one’s belief is deontically justified if and only if one is hypologically justified in so believing (DHJ) – to undermine non-factive norms of justification. Now, DHJ does not suffice to establish KNJ, but I argue that the most plausible way to do so is by an infallibilist interpretation of DHJ, called DHJ-i: infallible hypological justification just is infallible deontic justification. I also argue that DHJ-i is a more defensible principle than DHJ. Therefore, given that DHJ is independently plausible outside of KNJ’s truth-value, this spells trouble for opponents of KNJ: they must either deny their very position or commit to a problematic denial of this way of unifying justification’s different senses.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Impurists about knowledge believe practical factors and considerations about what might be rational for an agent to choose might impose constraints on the scope of what she might know. I shall argue that the most familiar and influential impurist views are mistaken. These impurist views must be mistaken because they are incompatible with something I've dubbed "epistemic encroachment". Epistemic encroachment occurs when considerations about what we know impose constraints on what might rationally be chosen. Epistemic encroachment makes sense of some seemingly robust but puzzling intuitions about choice that, I shall argue, our impurists about knowledge cannot make sense of given their distinctive views about the relationships between belief, credence, and choice.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
