Friendships: Epistemically Dangerous Liaisons?

Abstract

At least since Aristotle, friendship has been held to have epistemic benefits. Friendship has been thought to facilitate acquiring both knowledge of oneself and knowledge of others. More recently, however, it has been suggested that friendship also has serious epistemic disadvantages. Both Simon Keller (2004) and Sarah Stroud (2006) have argued that friendship brings with it an obligation to exhibit what Stroud calls ‘epistemic partiality’ toward one’s friends, and that this partiality is epistemically irrational, at least according to mainstream views of rationality. I argue that, although it is true that friendship may require epistemic partiality, in several senses, in none of these senses is such partiality necessarily irrational or epistemically objectionable.