ABSTRACT
McCraw argues that proper epistemic trust is an intellectual virtue. First, he offers a brief analysis of what it means to place epistemic trust in someone involving several components: belief, communication, dependence, and confidence. Second, he shows that this account of trust fits a major approach to virtue. Next, he argues that epistemic trust both contributes to the epistemic good life and that the paradigmatically rational or virtuous agent is motivated to display epistemic trust. Considerations from both the structure and meta-epistemology of virtues provide excellent grounds to accept that this trait is an epistemic virtue. McCraw discusses a few implications of his view. Epistemic trust is a mean between the two vices of credulity and suspiciousness, but that mean is sensitive to the agent’s particular epistemic context. The view is not evidentialist (for good trust is not defined solely in terms of evidence), but it does account for the role that evidence often plays in good epistemic trust (because other virtues relevant to the obtaining and weighing of evidence must be in operation). Finally, McCraw applies the view to three issues in epistemology—the problem of easy or low-grade knowledge, testimony, and disagreement, arguing that it provides fruitful ways of approaching them.
