Main Aims

Recent work in social epistemology has made major advances in 

1. virtue epistemology and performance normativity (especially telic approaches), 

2. constitutivist and teleological theories of normativity, 

3. zetetic epistemology on the aims of inquiry over time, 

4. social and political epistemology (including injustice, oppression, and institutional design), 

5. the social epistemology of the Internet and digital publics, and 

6. educational theory at the intersection of rationality, virtue, and flourishing. 

However, the literature still lacks an integrated, systematically articulated account of epistemic aims that can (i) locate them within this broader landscape, (ii) clarify their relation to practical aims and to different kinds of normativity, and (iii) explain how epistemic aims can be constitutive of individual, collective, and institutional agency while remaining sensitive to the pressures of contemporary social and technological environments. E-AIMS aims to fill this lacuna by developing a reliability-focused, telic virtue-epistemological framework that can accommodate responsibilist insights, and by advancing a teleological constitutivist view that remains compatible with externalist approaches, while also clarifying the normative tensions between epistemic and zetetic norms.

More schematically, the project’s main aims are these (see work packages for development):

1. To define and map the notion of epistemic aim and its normative profile by investigating three intersecting contrasts:

(i) epistemic vs. practical aims (and what this reveals about rationality and epistemic rationality),

(ii) constitutive vs. non-constitutive aims (which aims help define agents—individual, collective, institutional—as the kinds of agents they are), and

(iii) positive aims (goals) vs. negative aims (risks) (and why epistemic normativity cannot be reduced to risk-avoidance alone).

2. To apply this framework to core social and political problems of agency and public life, developing four interconnected strands of work:

(i) Constitution of autonomous agents: how constitutive aims shape autonomy, authenticity, and ownership, including tensions between first-hand conviction and relations of social dependence;

(ii) Design of environments with epistemic aims: how digital platforms and educational institutions can be structured or reformed to promote epistemic goals while sustaining democratic principles;

(iii) Political conflicts between epistemic and practical aims: how these aims interact in contexts marked by oppression, extraction, and injustice, without collapsing epistemic normativity into “encroachment”; and

(iv) Integration of positive and negative aims in flourishing: how human flourishing requires both the pursuit of epistemic goods and the management (sometimes even strategic accommodation) of epistemic risks, through appropriate epistemic emotions, traits, competences, and practices (including the roles of privacy, secrecy, ignorance, and resistant scepticism).