Main Aims

While discussions of epistemic risk in the literature have mainly revolved around truth-related varieties of epistemic risk in the context of different epistemological debates, our project, New Perspectives on Epistemic Risk, aims to investigate how both truth-related risk and the other novel varieties of epistemic risk (as well as further varieties that might be distinguished in the course of investigation) bear on several ongoing debates in epistemology, such as (1) virtue epistemology and performance normativity; (2) the analysis of knowledge and the role of epistemic luck; (3) knowledge closure and the safety principle; (4) the epistemology of testimony, and (5) the debate on the ethics of belief regarding the twin epistemic goals of attaining truth and avoiding error.

Although some work has been done on distinguishing types of epistemic risk and on analyzing their implications for those debates in epistemology, we believe that further investigation is required to fully understand the role that epistemic risk plays in such debates as well as to draw further implications in them. Moreover, we believe that the centrality of the notion of risk to epistemological theorizing does not, and should not, reduce to the varieties of epistemic risk already distinguished in the literature, nor to the debates previously glossed.

Indeed, we think that the epistemological literature lacks a systematic investigation of the whole spectrum of varieties of epistemic risk and implications thereof. Our research project, New Perspectives on Epistemic Risk, aims to fill this lacuna by further investigating the role of epistemic risk and its consequences in the debates we have discussed, by distinguishing new varieties of epistemic risk, and by identifying new epistemological debates where these may have an impact on, especially in the field of social epistemology. More schematically, the two main aims of the project are the following (see work packages section for further development):

(1) To provide an exhaustive taxonomy of forms of epistemic risk in which new varieties will be distinguished and existing ones will be classified.

(2) More importantly, to carry out a thorough investigation of the relevance and implications of this taxonomy of types of epistemic risk for central questions in epistemology, including the topics already mentioned as well as new ones.