ABSTRACT
The distinctive flavor of the thesis I want to elaborate and defend in the following pages is captured by the oddity of thinking of standing on the shoulders of others or riding others’ coattails as an art form. In the following pages, I advance the claim that depending on others should be and is often a domain of skill. The claim is not that we are able to take advantage of others through our own cunning and that this is what makes our intercourse with others skillful. It is neither the Machiavellian manipulator nor the person who treats others as one might treat a thermometer or GPS device that I have in mind. Rather, I am thinking of the ways we relate to others as friends, family, colleagues, parishioners, or citizens, and the claim is that these relationships and the patterns of interaction that compose them are permeated with skillful interdependence, at least when things are going as they should. In particular, what I will have in mind is epistemic skill, which is to say, skill at relating one’s mind to reality so as to arrive at truth and avoid error. Rather than attenuating or abrogating one’s credit for success, I claim that skillful dependence on others is a way of generating such credit.
