Melissa Koenig is a contemporary philosopher and cognitive developmental scientist whose work sits at the intersection of epistemology and developmental psychology. She is best known for her research on how children acquire and evaluate testimony, including the mechanisms by which trust in informants develops and is calibrated. Her work has significantly advanced social epistemology by grounding questions about testimonial justification in empirical findings about human cognition.
Pioneered empirical research on selective trust in testimony among young children
Contributed to debates on testimonial justification and the transmission of knowledge through chains of informants
Bridged developmental psychology and epistemology in the study of how humans evaluate source reliability
Advanced understanding of how epistemic vigilance emerges in early cognitive development
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