"Epistemic Infrastructure and Adequate Care"
Introduction: Anna Boncompagni
Speaker: Casey Rebecca Johnson
Commentators: Alisha Nesslage and Gustavo Velazquez-Quintana
In my 2023 monograph, Epistemic Care, I argued that the adequacy of the epistemic care provided in and by a community of inquiry is an important epistemic evaluation. To measure epistemic adequacy, I adapted Joan Tronto's measures of the integrity of care which she develops to measure a community's moral adequacy. These include attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. In this paper, I argue that to these criteria we should add a 5th: adequate infrastructure. To make this case, I will consider three examples in which the 4 established criteria are more-or-less met, but the epistemic care provided is still inadequate. Drawing lessons from these examples, I'll end by sketching a bit more about what I mean by infrastructure.