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Imposters, Tricksters, and Trustworthiness as an Epistemic Virtue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Karen Frost‐Arnold
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Abstract

This paper argues that trustworthiness is an epistemic virtue that promotes objectivity. I show that untrustworthy imposture can be an arrogant act of privilege that silences marginalized voices. But, as epistemologists of ignorance have shown, sometimes trickery and the betrayal of epistemic norms are important resistance strategies. This raises the question: when is betrayal of trust epistemically virtuous? After establishing that trust is central to objectivity, I argue for the following answer: a betrayal is epistemically vicious when it strengthens or promotes oppressive, exclusive networks of trust, and a betrayal is epistemically virtuous when it expands trust networks to involve the oppressed. These criteria correctly account for both the epistemic vice of a recent case of Internet imposture and the epistemic virtue of resistant tricksters.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Fall 2014 , pp. 790 - 807
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I thank Sarah Hoagland, Anne Leighton, Jacqueline Anderson, Cory Andrews, Sarah Berry, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, the works‐in‐progress group and the Philosophy department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, audiences at the Society for Analytical Feminism and FEMMSS4, and two anonymous reviewers for Hypatia for helpful feedback on this paper.

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