Fondecyt Iniciación #11140279 (2014-2017) Knowledge-Relevant Responsibility, Epistemic Externalism, and Distributed Cognition

This research project aims to deliver a novel anti-individualist account of knowledge-relevant responsibility within a traditional objectivist framework that can do the job at hand in an empirically informed and explanatory fruitful way. In order to achieve this, it will first be argued that an anti-individualist approach to epistemic responsibility, which can be satisfied at the social level and which capitalizes on the real and pervasive human phenomenon that is the social dispersal of labour, can accomplish the desired combination. Second, it will be argued that the division of labour that the resulting account promotes makes this social responsibilism amenable to Distributed Cognition treatment and this in turn shows the proposal to be cognitively possible and empirically supported. Third, it will be argued that this social responsibilism has significant implications for one of the most central debates within contemporary epistemology, namely the internalism/externalism debate, since it questions its motivations, normally linked to epistemic responsibility, hence prompting a new anti-individualist understanding of the debate that would allow us to overcome the impasse presently reached.