Epistemic Alienation

The concept of alienation has been used to capture a specific kind of social ill or malady, and one that philosophers have argued is distinctive of life in modern society. I argue that there is a properly epistemic form of alienation present in modern society that arises due to a conflict between the dynamics of group knowledge and traditional requirements on the intellectual virtue of individuals. As group-based knowledge becomes increasingly widespread in modern society, the conflict with virtue becomes more pervasive, and the virtuous become alienated from fundamental epistemic goods. The aim of this paper is to examine this conflict and to highlight that the ‘social turn’ in epistemology is not free from costs.