2026/06/10 by Neil Levy
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies #Educational Strategies and Epistemologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/0020174x.2026.2684557
The social turn in epistemology was driven, in important part, by the recognition that we are dependent on testimony for much of our knowledge. But this dependence renders us vulnerable if we are unable to distinguish reliable testimony from unreliable. With the debate over echo chambers as a case study, I argue that social epistemology remains deeply individualist: it is driven by the search for individualistic foundations by reference to which we can assess testimony for and by ourselves. I argue that this search for individualistic foundations is a fantasy: our capacity to assess the reliability of evidence and informants is constituted by the dispositions that are constitutive of our echo chambers. Social epistemology must finally be truly social, and live with the vulnerability that comes from epistemic dependence.