The End of Epistemology: Structural Conditions of Inquiry, Revision, and Epistemic Agency

Epistemology does not begin and end with justified belief. Contemporary social and virtue epistemology already examine agents, communities, testimony, power, intellectual character, and the conditions of inquiry. This paper develops a narrower proposal within that expanded landscape: sustained inquiry depends not only on possessing reasons but on preserving pathways through which relevant evidence can enter, counterclaims can be heard, beliefs can be revised, and errors can alter future practice. The paper calls this cluster epistemic answerability. Four conditions are distinguished: evidential access, contestability, revisability, and correction uptake. A fifth institutional variable—the cost of dissent, voice, or exit—helps explain why nominally open systems may remain difficult to correct. The contribution is not a replacement for epistemology and not a new faculty of intelligence standing alongside IQ or emotional intelligence. It is a diagnostic vocabulary for the infrastructure of inquiry, situated near social epistemology, virtue epistemology, epistemic injustice, organizational learning, and Hirschman's analysis of exit and voice. The title's “end” is therefore a boundary claim about where propositional analysis is insufficient, not a declaration that epistemology has been superseded. The framework is useful only if it helps predict when otherwise competent reasoners or institutions will fail to update under relevant evidence.