Reliability and Social Knowledge-Relevant Responsibility

Knowledge seems to need the admixture of de facto reliability and epistemic responsibility. But philosophers have had a hard time in attempting to combine them in order to achieve a satisfactory account of knowledge. In this paper I attempt to find a solution by capitalizing on the real and ubiquitous human phenomenon that is the social dispersal of epistemic labour through time. More precisely,the central objective of the paper is to deliver a novel and plausible social account of knowledge-relevant responsibility and to consider the merits of the proposed combination of reliability and responsibility with respect to certain cases of unreflective epistemic subjects.