Robust collective virtue reliabilism
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Two influential approaches in contemporary epistemology have largely developed in parallel: virtue reliabilism and group or collective epistemology. Although several attempts have been made to integrate these frameworks (Carter, 2022; Đorđević & Berber,
2025; Greco, 2021; Harris, 2025; Jarczewski, 2024; Jarczewski & Riggs, 2025; Palermos, 2022; Palermos y Pritchard 2016), the original formula in its robust version (Sosa, 1991, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2021)—offers a twofold resistance to such integration. It either denies the compatibility of virtue reliabilism with collective epistemology (Sosa, 2007, pp. 94-95) or construes the latter as a marginal case within Sosa’s own framework (Kallestrup, 2020). This paper examines the conditions that ground these two positions—here labelled Incompatibility and Excepcionality—and challenges both by advancing an alternative view, Compatibility. The proposed model of Robust Collective Virtue Reliabilism aims to show that epistemic virtues can be coherently attributed to irreducibly collective agents, thereby reconciling individual and group-level normativity without relinquishing the realist commitments of Sosa’s virtue epistemology.
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