Vectors of epistemic insecurity

This chapter highlights the ways in which epistemic virtue and vice depend on the larger structure of one’s epistemic community. It addresses the way that modal epistemic standings and the virtues and vices that accompany these standings are networked. The chapter argues that safety in a social network context is best understood as vector-relativized. Given this framework, authors discuss the virtues and vices that are operative within the social epistemic context and how these dispositions related to attention, motivation and cognition, navigate the trade-offs between security and safety narrowly construed. They argue that understanding safety as vector-relativized brings modal epistemic standings in line with a truly social epistemology. Virtue epistemologists have largely neglected the ways in which epistemic virtue functions in social epistemic environments of inter-connected information sharers.