ABSTRACT
I begin with a certain temerity on an autobiographical note, sketching some of the reasons that prompted me to write a book called Epistemic Responsibility in the 1980s, after completing a PhD with a dissertation titled ‘Knowledge and Subjectivity’. The dissertation topic did not lead directly into thoughts about epistemic responsibility since the concept was not then so central a part of the philosophical lexicon as it briefly came to be, and as it is again reclaiming explanatory space. Yet a rigorous if short-lived exchange assessing its ‘scope and limits’, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, prompted me to take it up in ways its then-articulators subsequently ceased to pursue, perhaps because of its apparent fluidity, its lack of conceptual rigour, and/or its uneasy fit within then-current epistemological orthodoxy. For my work, it was the missing piece in a range of issues I was thinking about without the conceptual resources to articulate them.
