Epistemically engineered environments

In other work I have defended the claim that, when we rely on other speakers by accepting what they tell us, our reliance on them differs in epistemically relevant ways from our reliance on instruments, when we rely on them by accepting what they “tell” us. However, where I have explored the former sort of reliance at great length (Goldberg 2010), I have not done so with the latter. In this paper my aim is to do so. My key notions will be those of our social practices, the normative expectations that are sanctioned by those practices, and the epistemically engineered environments constituted by some of these practices. With these notions in mind, I will argue that one’s reliance on instruments, while relevantly different (epistemically speaking) from one’s reliance on other speakers, can nevertheless manifest a kind of epistemic dependence which epistemological theory can and should acknowledge.