Mindshaping and Epistemic Agency

The aim of this chapter is to explore the complex relation between mindshaping and epistemic agency. I will begin by providing a brief account of epistemic agency in terms of an agent’s activities of belief formation and maintenance. Notably, while traditional epistemologists tend to focus on what I will call the self-directed dimension of epistemic agency, social and feminist epistemologists emphasize the relational nature of both knowledge and agency. In the following, I will argue that mindshaping bears important relations both to the self-directed as well as to the other-directed dimensions of epistemic agency. In particular, I will propose that we can conceive of mindshaping as both enabling as well as potentially undermining epistemic agency. This is important, I think, because it brings into view the relation between the way in which our social world is structured and our capacities for epistemic agency and encourages us to ask what well-functioning and just epistemic communities, that is communities that enable their members to properly develop and exercise their epistemic agency, should look like.