Epistemic Modesty Analysis

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To begin, Gomberg argues that a normal human life and reliable knowledge of the world around us requires us to have two virtues: we must trust what others tell us; we must be modest about what we believe ourselves to know when we recognize we may be wrong. He goes on to say that trust in knowledge by testimony is important because testimony is a special way of acquiring knowledge. It allows you to learn things such as when you were a child, your name, colors, animals, words, parts of our bodies, and common objects in the home. You learn these things from the people closest to you, like your parents. But as you grow older, you come to realize that this "testimony" isn 't as special as people may think it is. Humans come to know the world by …show more content…

His notion of epistemic modesty occurs when we 're encountered with an exception, a rare and unusual case of recovery from a disease rather than an event whose cause one already …show more content…

This is a case where as if God had come and intervened in the course of nature and caused something to happen that isn 't as likely to happen. Epistemic modesty is a means of unassuming about what it is we think we know. Epistemic is one that means it 's concerning what we know. Epistemic trust and modesty are frequently conflicting virtues. When there is a conflict between these two, it 's your modesty that triumphs over your trust. According to Gomberg, what makes a community worthy of trust is that is shares practices of organized skepticism as science does. Most people are part of multiple communities of trust so this allows them to compare the communities and see which one, in their view, is most trustworthy than the others. When we do this, we realize that the communities that incorporate each person 's ideas into their practices are most worthy of trust. The role of trust in gaining knowledge by expert testimony is that we gain knowledge from the people we are closest to and who we can trust. For example, when we 're younger, we tend to look up to our parents. We watch everything they do and learn what they say. We look at them as trustworthy so everything they tell us we believe and their actions and words will shape us into the adults we