Epistemology of Belief

Abstract

The following article discovers current trends of contemporary epistemology, related to epistemic agent and his/her activities. A number of issues raised here describe internal experience of the agent, such as (in)voluntary nature of belief formation, trust in one’s faculties of perception, correspondence of formed beliefs to evidence, demarcation between purely epistemic and pragmatic rationality. Another part of the issues is related to external experiences of the agent. The most crucial among them are: blameworthiness of the agent’s belief system, limited intake of testimonial knowledge as a result of social bias; epistemic disagreement and “epistemic peers” as the sources of knowledge or additional pressure from the environment. The author considers virtue epistemology as a new way of performing normativity.