Informed reflexivity: enacting epistemic virtue

To discuss reflexive practice in relation to epistemic cognition, we posit informed reflexivity as an epistemic virtue that is informed by its particular context and purposes of knowing and action and promotes use of reliable processes to achieve epistemic aims. It involves reasoning about social relationships in which a person is embedded when acting in a specific kind of context—whether academic or real-world—that requires construction, evaluation, and application of knowledge. Informed reflexivity is the learned disposition to reason about one’s knowledge-related actions, entailing context-specific epistemic characteristics. It involves an intentional stance about the need to reason about oneself and the context. Discussions of two disciplinary competencies (science and history) and two crossdisciplinary competencies (critical thinking and writing) illustrate how epistemically competent practices instantiate informed reflexivity. Promoting informed reflexivity as an epistemic virtue might dispose students toward reliable processes of knowing and making epistemically informed resolved action appropriate to the context.