Abstract

RIMOLDI, Florencia. Epistemic Agency and Reflection: On Fernandez Vargas, M.A., Performance Epistemology: Foundations and Applications. Anal. filos. [online]. 2018, vol.38, n.2, pp.221-226. ISSN 1851-9636.

Virtue epistemology is among the most influential standpoints in contemporary epistemology. According to this view, the agent, together with her epistemic virtues or vices, plays a central role in epistemic evaluation. Miguel Ángel Fernández's book, Performance Epistemology: Foundations and Applications, offers an insider's view into the heart of what is nowadays known as "performance based epistemology", one of the most prominent research programs among virtue epistemology. In this review I want to discuss the notion of epistemic agency and explore the possibility of illuminating it with the notion of reflection. In section 1 I discuss Reed's proposal (in the book) and show how a non-specific notion of epistemic agency turns out to be theoretically inconvenient. In section 2 I show how, against the objections presented by Kornblith and Grimm (in the book), a specific notion of epistemic agency in terms of reflection turns out to be theoretically fruitful. These arguments and discussions are only a few among the many fruitful ones that take place within this extraordinary book. Aside from offering an up-to-date version of virtue epistemology, this book constitutes a substantial advancement of this research program within epistemology.

Keywords : Agency; Reflection; Person; Belief.