Accessible Knowledge Theory: A Structural Model of Epistemic Humility

This paper addresses the philosophical puzzle of why expertise fosters humility whereas superficial knowledge breeds certainty. It introduces Accessible Knowledge Theory (AKT), a generative, graph-theoretic model grounded in the scale-free structure of real-world knowledge networks. AKT posits that as an agent's Collected Knowledge (known knowns) grows, their Accessible Knowledge (known unknowns) expands superlinearly. This dynamic structurally explains novice overconfidence and expert humility, and diagnoses pathologies like the ``arrogant expert'' through the formal mechanism of Occluded Knowledge. The paper argues this makes humility a rational necessity, pioneering a structural virtue epistemology that grounds intellectual virtue in the measurable properties of a doxastic network. This framework unifies reliabilist and responsibilist schools by modeling how responsibilist virtues (e.g., open-mindedness) maintain a reliable, truth-conducive network topology. Finally, the model points to future applications in analyzing concepts in critical and social epistemology, like testimonial injustice, peer disagreement, and epistemic authority.