Review
TL;DR: Epistemic autonomy refers to the degree to which you are able to change your mind without letting outside sources, such as social and financial pressure, affect it. To increase your epistemic autonomy, you can refrain from publishing your opinions, reduce your conflicts of interest, or change your environment, among other things. However, there are usually tradeoffs, and increasing epistemic autonomy might not always be worth it.
Imagine you are a politician who, in the middle of her term, experiences a genuine change of mind. Perhaps a world event or personal reflection leads you to reject a stance you once held. After adjusting your political behavior based on the newly held belief, you find that your fellow party members start to dislike you. You also find people mocking you on the internet, vowing to not vote for you anymore, since you don’t represent their views anymore.
Imagine you work for a fast fashion retailer. You have worked in the company for many years, and are in a high position in the company. In the past few years the public has raised concerns regarding the environment and labor exploitation, and you have also been challenged for furthering these effects. However, you continue to believe your work is valuable for society, and don’t see anything wrong with your company’s impact on the environment and workers.
Imagine you were raised in a religious family in a small village. Everyone in the village goes to church, and the church has a lot of power over villagers’ lives. You aren’t totally isolated though, because you have a TV and internet. The people in movies don’t always practice religion and sometimes they even say heretical things. To you, these people seem weird, and you couldn’t see such people in your village.
In all of the above situations, there are powerful forces which push you away from reaching true beliefs autonomously. In other words, your epistemic autonomy is hampered. The concerns of humiliation, shame, and simple inconvenience could render it difficult to even start questioning your beliefs.
As we are all a part of a social network, our epistemic autonomy is somehow limited. However, there are ways of increasing your epistemic autonomy.
Epistemic autonomy is a resource, so if you want more of it, you often need to give up something. For example, when you participate in a political discussion on social media, you’re giving up some of your epistemic autonomy in exchange for many possible things: social status, entertainment, possibility of changing other people’s minds, etc. This tradeoff might be worth it for you, or it might not be. Or if you take up a particular job, you become less autonomous in exchange for things like money and social status. Making these tradeoffs is not always trivial, but having the concept of epistemic autonomy can help you make them.