Epistemic Authority

Extract

1. Introduction

This is an ambitious book.¹ It aims to ‘… defend the existence of epistemic authority on grounds that almost all modern philosophers would accept’ (2). Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m not convinced that it achieves its aims. Nonetheless, it contains much of interest and is worthy of further study. I’ll begin with a brief overview, before considering in more detail the fundamental argument.

Zagzebski’s basic defence of epistemic authority takes up the first five chapters. The operative understanding of epistemic authority isn’t explained until Chapter 5, when it’s revealed to be an epistemicized version of Joseph Raz’s account (Raz 1988). (It would have been helpful to have the operative notion of epistemic authority introduced earlier.) On this account, someone figures as an epistemic authority only if the following conditions are met: (i) their believing something provides content-independent reasons for believing it myself, so that if they had believed something else instead, that would have been a reason for me to emulate them; (ii) their believing something provides preemptive reasons to believe it, reasons that replace, rather than add to, my other reasons; (iii) a dependency thesis holds, in that their belief is ‘formed in a way that I would conscientiously believe is deserving of emulation’ (109); (iv) a justification thesis holds, in that it is my conscientious belief that I’m more likely to believe well if I emulate the authority (105–113).