Background

In the last decade, epistemology has moved from being a largely academic concern to becoming a matter of social and political urgency. The spread of organized disinformation and its capacity to destabilize democratic institutions (Bernecker et al., ed. 2021), the growth of emotionally driven thinking and public disregard for evidence (McIntyre 2018), persistent shortcomings in education aimed at strengthening citizens’ epistemic capacities (Moshman 2020), and conspiratorial distrust of traditional sources (Dentith 2023) are now familiar features of our public landscape. At the same time, many people increasingly rely on new “epistemic agents”—influencers, networks, bots—that typically lack epistemic credentials (Lynch & Gunn 2021), while generative AI systems introduce the prospect of scalable deepfakes and other epistemically corrosive outputs (Habgood-Coote 2023).

This situation reverses a classical philosophical puzzle. Whereas Plato (in the Meno) wondered how we can know so much from so little, our predicament is closer to its opposite: information has expanded dramatically, yet knowledge and understanding often seem to be shrinking (Lynch 2016). The result is not merely a practical problem of “misinformation management,” but a pressure on our very standing as epistemic agents—beings who can acquire knowledge and understanding and share them with others. E-AIMS addresses this pressure by focusing on the normative role of epistemic aims.

Aims are what agents pursue through action. In the epistemic domain, aims divide naturally into positive aims (goals) and negative aims (risks). Goals include truth, justification, knowledge, and understanding, as well as agential qualities such as reliability and epistemic virtue, and environmental supports such as trustworthy networks and curated resources. Risks include false belief, irrationality, confusion, and social dynamics that undermine inquiry—opacity, secrecy, epistemic injustice, or epistemic oppression. To avoid conflating aims with nearby notions, E-AIMS distinguishes epistemic aims from (i) epistemic goods (valuable outcomes like knowledge and understanding), (ii) epistemic functions (features selected—biologically or culturally—for reliably producing those goods), and (iii) epistemic interests (motivational priorities that influence which goods matter to us in practice).

Building on the earlier E-RISK project, E-AIMS advances a constitutive approach: certain epistemic aims are not optional add-ons to agency, but partly constitute what it is to be a rational autonomous agent (individual, collective, or institutional). The project develops this idea across four work packages: 

• WP1 (the constitution of autonomous agents), 

• WP2 (the design of environments shaped by epistemic aims), 

• WP3 (political conflicts between epistemic and practical aims), and 

• WP4 (integrating positive and negative aims within a broader account of human flourishing).