Zagzebski on Authority and Preemption in the Domain of Belief

Linda Zagzebski's Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy of Belief is an important contribution to the study of epistemology, and social epistemology in particular. It is also a very timely contribution. For too long, epistemologists and social epistemologists have talked about authority in the domain of belief without paying enough attention to the very concept of epistemic authority. Zagzebski's book is bound to change this. Zagzebski presents a detailed account of the concept of epistemic authority, describing the essential features of authority, which allow us to talk of authority both in the practical realm, and in the realm of belief. Building on Joseph Raz's account of political and practical authority, she claims that to have authority is to have a special kind of normative power: "a normative power that generates reasons for others to do or to believe something preemptively" (Zagzebski 2012, 102). Thus she has directed the philosophical community's attention to an important concept that has previously received only little attention: to the concept of preemptive reasons for belief, a reason for belief that "replaces other reasons the subject has," (102), rather than being added to them. 1 She has thus done more than anyone else to bring to the attention of the