Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
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Understanding Epistemic Trespassing
eing able to recognize your limitations as an epistemic agent may be difficult, especially for those who have devoted enough time to become an expert. When individuals are unable to do so they risk becoming what Nathaniel Ballantyne calls epistemic trespassers : “thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field but move to another field where they lack competence—and pass judgment nevertheless.” 1 Perhaps these individuals feel like their time devoted to their field has increased their intellectual virtues, thus increasing their ability to weigh in on conversations outside their expertise. Ballantyne says it can also be the result of the agent offering confident answers to hybridized questions without expanding their expertise or corroborating their assertion with experts from other disciplines. 2 Whichever way the agent trespasses, the process is undoubtedly epistemically irresponsible and volatile, but I believe it’s nothing new in epistemology. The only thing that makes Ballantyne’s concept unique is its framing expertise and fields. Once you strip this away, epistemic trespassing begins to look a lot like Harry Frankfurt’s On B ullshit . This isn’t to say that epistemic trespassing isn’t a real occurrence, but instead that it’s just another form of bullshit. A form provoked by experts' confirmation biases, unreliable knowledge-acquisition processes, and desire to get away with appearing as an expert in another field. 3 I’ll begin by giving further insight into Ballantyne’s claims and then move on to present counterarguments through the
1 Nathan Ballantyne, “Epistemic Trespassing,” Mind 128, no. 510 (2019): 367–367, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzx042. 2 Ballantyne, 372. 3 Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 21-22.
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