This commentary offers a coherent reading of the papers presented in the special issue ‘Exclusion, Engagement, and Empathy: Reflections on Public Participation in Medicine and Technology’. Focusing on intellectual self-trust it adds a further perspective on the harmful epistemic consequences of social exclusion for individual agents in healthcare contexts. In addition to some clarifications regarding the concepts of ‘intellectual self-trust’ and ‘social exclusion’ the commentary also examines in what ways empathy, engagement and participatory sense-making could help to avoid threats to (...) intellectual self-trust that arise form being excluded from participation in communicative practices in the context of healthcare. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a shift in epistemological studies of intellectual self-trust or epistemic self-trust: intellectual self-trust is not merely epistemologists’ tool for silencing epistemic skepticism or doubt, it is recognized as a disposition of individuals and collectives interesting in its own rights. In this exploratory article I focus on a particular type of intellectual self-trust—collective intellectual self-trust—and I examine which features make for valuable or pernicious collective intellectual self-trust. From accounts of the value of individual intellectual self-trust I take (...) three frameworks for evaluating collective intellectual self-trust: an epistemically consequentialist, a virtue-theoretic and a prudential/pragmatic framework (§2). Then I introduce collective intellectual self-trust (§3). Against this background I explain what is distinctive of valuable collective intellectual self-trust (§4) and pernicious collective intellectual self-trust (§5) within the three frameworks. I close by discussing the relation between the three frameworks and argue that evaluating intellectual self-trust requires a multi-perspectival approach constituted by the three frameworks. (shrink)