2025/08/12 by Enno Fischer, Tammo Lossau · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies #Political Philosophy and Ethics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/02691728.2025.2539121
openalex publication_date 2025/08/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Epistemic standards have attracted some attention in recent discussions in social epistemology and philosophy of science. Yet these discussions typically lack a more general approach to what standards are and how we develop and assess them. Here we propose a Craigian-functionalist approach to epistemic standards. This approach helps to get a clearer view of tensions between universalist and particularist requirements for epistemic standards and highlights the need for a compromise. This has consequences for our understanding of concrete scientific episodes where epistemic standards have been debated such as recent discussions of the 5-sigma criterion in particle physics.