Epistemic Autonomy in a Social World of Knowing

For virtue epistemologists, who understand the traits and capacities of epistemic subjects as central to most epistemic questions, the idea of autonomy plays a significant role. Autonomy is especially important for responsibilists, who explicitly focus on those virtues that involve the exercise of epistemic agency. Understood in moral and political philosophy as “self-governance” or “self-determination,” epistemic autonomy, or intellectual autonomy as many phrase it (Coady 2002; Zagzebski 2012), is central to the idea of epistemic agency itself.