AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

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.