Abstract

Sperber's concept of epistemic vigilance refers to the natural ability of individuals to filter information when they perceive that something in the message or the source of the message may be misleading, or because the beliefs being communicated generate noise in their core beliefs. Epistemic vigilance is part of our cognitive design to balance the degree of default trust that we use and a tendency to monitor ourselves. This paper proposes that a better conceptual notion would be that of distributed epistemic vigilance, i.e. epistemic vigilance distributed across different sources that emerge coherently as a collective agency (groups with specific identities, value-based communities, corporations, institutions). In this proposal, distributed epistemic vigilance refers to the natural tendency (or capacity) of group members or the group as a whole to deposit both their beliefs and reflective processes with other members of the group or in semi-formal or formal institutional spaces, and which become mechanisms for deciding what to believe and what courses of action to take.