In the past two decades, epistemologists have significantly expanded the focus of their field. To the traditional question that has dominated the debate — under what conditions does belief amount to knowledge? — they have added questions about testimony, epistemic virtues and vices, epistemic trust, and more. This broadening of the range of epistemic concern has coincided with an expansion in conceptions of epistemic agency beyond the individualism characteristic of most earlier epistemology. We believe that these developments have not gone (...) far enough. While the weak anti-individualism we see in contemporary epistemology may be adequate for the kinds of cases it tends to focus on, a great deal of human knowledge production and transmission does not conform to these models. Furthermore, the dispositions and norms that are knowledge-conducive in the familiar cases may not be knowledge-conducive generally. In fact, dispositions that, at an individual level, count as epistemic vices may be epistemic virtues in common social contexts. We argue that this overlooked feature of human social life means that epistemology must become more deeply and pervasively social. (shrink)

An influential version of intellectualism about knowledge how holds that acquiring facts is necessary and sufficient for learning how to do things. I argue that such a view is incompatible with learning to do things through effort and practice, which suggests that intellectualists don’t have a coherent way to explain the role of work in our acquisition of knowledge how. By way of an alternative, I argue that work serves to establish patterns of thinking that coordinate propositional truths with powers (...) of action. (shrink)