Catherine Elgin, "Epistemic Ecology" (MIT Press, 2025)
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What is the central idea behind Catherine Elgin’s ‘Epistemic Ecology’?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdore, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Sarah Tyson and Blaine Newfeld. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Catherine Elgin, Professor of Philosophy of Education at Harvard University. Her new book, Epistemic Ecology, is just out from the MIT Press. Humans are highly inquisitive yet fallible and cognitively limited. How can we improve our epistemic lot despite our limitations? In epistemic ecology, Elgin develops a model in which individuals learn to rely on communal epistemic resources, such as communally endorsed standards for correcting ourselves, and in turn we contribute to those resources through our active epistemic agency.
In this way, she shows how epistemic autonomy and epistemic interdependence are mutually reinforcing rather than intention. Elgin also distinguishes between belief, which entails truth, and acceptance, an active epistemic attitude that constitutively involves reflection and assessment. This capacity for reflection is learned, but we use it widely, in sports bars, for example, just as much as in academic contexts. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Catherine Elgin. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Oh, thank you. It's nice to be here. Um, so I'm really looking forward to our discussion about epistemic ecology. Uh before we get to the book, tell me a bit about yourself, you know, how you became a philosopher or philosopher of education, um, and how the book came about.
Okay. Um the deep background to how I became as a philosopher, I I don't really know because I kind of think I always was. Um I remember when I was in high school I was taking geometry and I demanded to know First, why do we have to prove things if we already know them? And secondly, why should we trust the proofs if we have to rely on axioms? I felt after the fact, kind of sorry for my poor math teacher who had to answer these questions, but that was my sort of ordinary take on things. So so I got to college. I didn't even know what philosophy was, but I sort of thought it was like religion without God, which is to ask the questions that religion asks, but don't defer to God for the answer. So I took a philosophy course and that was it.
That was it forevermore. Um, so My interests are mainly in epistemology. Uh but is epistemology quite broadly construed because it also includes the way that the arts advance understanding. So it's not focusing on S knows that P or anything like that. And mainly my interest is on the nature and scope of understanding. And that we can bring to how does it bring us to this book? And again we can go kind of deep history. Uh, I'm married to a scientist and I've been married to him for over fifty years, so it's been a while. And um it occurred to me over time that he and his friends did not talk the way epistemologists seem to think they ought to be talking. They didn't talk about truth. When they had a success they didn't talk about finding the truth.
And it didn't seem as though this was just a terminological difference because the metrics for success that they used did not seem to map onto truth. So eventually I kind of decided to ask, well, what are they doing? And that led well led um first to uh my nineteen ninety-six book, uh Considered Judgment, and then beyond that to the 2017 book, um true enough, where I took very seriously the importance of models and idealizations in science that aren't true and don't purport to be true and nobody thinks they're true. But they're core to scientific understanding. And among other things, this is just a slight footnote to get back to the bit about the arts, it seemed to me that that's very much the same thing that is going on when we say of a work of art, I really learned something from it.
You know, I mean, it was false.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central idea behind Catherine Elgin’s ‘Epistemic Ecology’?
0:01–11:01
2
How did Elgin’s personal journey shape her view of epistemic agency?
11:01–17:54
3
What does ‘epistemic autonomy vs. interdependence’ mean for individual learners?
17:54–24:44
4
How does the three‑part ecological model (individual, community, world) work?
24:44–32:12
5
Why are communal standards and ‘acceptance’ more important than simple belief?
32:12–39:49
6
How can disagreement and peer disagreement be productive in epistemic communities?
39:49–47:18
7
What role do aesthetic judgments (elegance, beauty) play in scientific understanding?
47:18–54:01
8
What are Elgin’s next research goals and how might they extend epistemic ecology?
54:01–57:53
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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