Epistemic Responsibility

Epistemic Responsibility is mentioned in three main articles, Huemer, Ritola and Vaidya. The former two respond to Huemer’s original argument that ‘Is Critical Thinking Epistemically Responsible?” Both the terms ‘critical thinking’ and ‘epistemically responsible’, are mentioned in tandem, however both are not used interchangeably, which is why there are these three papers.
According to Huemer there are three strategies to formulate an argument and opinion. One is credulity, taking the opinions of experts to adopt the majority belief. Two is skepticism- which ends with suspending judgement and not giving an opinion one way or another on the topic in question. And the third is Critical Thinking, which gathers all reasons for an argument to create your own opinion. Although critical thinking is agreed as the best for the epistemic responsibility of informing on a topic, Huemer also states that the responsibility could go either way, except for skepticism, which is not helpful to the passage of epistemic knowledge.
Ritola takes the critical thinking approach itself to prove why it is the best for epistemic responsibility. She argues for and against that critical thinking, but overall critical thinking is the best because it looks at all possible opinions to be able to give the most informed argument. Skepticism is not epistemically responsible because withholding judgement while not being completely informed does nothing for creating an opinion, which is the core of being epistemically responsible. If you have the knowledge, but still not an expert, then you can present the argument knowing that you didn’t give up finding the answers while practicing skepticism, or base only on one side of an argument. Vaidya argues that if there is too much information from the Critical thinking strategy, than sometimes one is unable to be epistemically responsible in coming to a verdict on an argument. This also falls into the requirement of epistemic responsibility to be knowledgeable, but realise that one is not an expert, and cannot necessarily be expected to be treated as such.
Since it is epistemically responsible for giving an unbiased argument and a learned opinion to a topic, following in the Critical Thinking, therefore critical thinking is the best possible strategy of philosophy.
Sources:
Vaidya, Epistemic Responsibility and Critical Thinking
Ritola, Critical Thinking is Epistemically Responsible
Huemer, Is Critical Thinking Epistemically Responsible?

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