If you think you're a great artist, or a great thinker, then chances are, of course, that you are not.

Nevertheless, you almost certainly have to believe you are a great artist or great thinker actually to be one. This is for two reasons.

First, if you're a great artist, then you know what a great art work looks like. But then you'd recognize that your own works have the quality in question. And similarly, if you're a great thinker, then you know what great thinking looks like, and you'd recognize that your own has that quality. To fail to recognize great art and great thinking seem like failures that are inconsistent with - or at least in very serious tension with - being a producer of such things (for then one would be producing them arbitrarily - which seems inconsistent with being great, as then you'd just be lucky).

Second, we do not typically do things we think we're going to fail at. Indeed, that might even by psychologically impossible. You're surely not really trying to do something unless you believe you'll succeed. Yet to produce great art or great thoughts you obviously have to produce something that is original and goes beyond where other great people have taken things. You don't do that by luck (and if one did, we would not consider the person who did it to be great, but rather to be very lucky). You do it by effort. By trying to do it. So, great artists and great thinkers are trying to be great. To be a great thinker you have to think, then, that you will succeed in going beyond where other great thinkers have taken things. If you didn't think you were capable of doing that, you'd not even try - and if you don't even try to be great, you're not going to be great. Thus, a great thinker will think they are a great thinker, for they will be confident that they can have great thoughts. That's step one of having any.

So, if you think you're not a great thinker then guess what - you're not. But if you think you are a great thinker then, though the odds are against it, there's a tiny possibility that you are. Likewise if you think you're a great artist.

But given that the odds that you're a great artist or great thinker are so vanishingly small, surely you are not justified in believing you're a great thinker? You'd surely be being epistemically irresponsible in believing yourself great, especially given that you're unlikely to be receiving much confirmation from others (it's very hard for the mediocre to recognize greatness - great thinking will seem very peculiar to someone who thinks in a mediocre way and the odds are very high that they will deem it a kind of stupidity. LIkewise for great art. It was no accident that someone like Van Gogh was only thought to be great by other great artists and those with extremely sophisticated tastes....everyone else thought his art was utter rubbish. And similarly, Hume was not recognized to be a great thinker by his contemporaries, but only by later great thinkers such as Reid).

So a great artist or great thinker seems inevitably to be guilty of epistemic irresponsibility, at least when it comes to their own abilities. They will believe themselves great long before anyone else does, and they will have believed themselves to be on the basis of no publicly verified evidence. They will produce art works that will be thought either to be rubbish, or at least not to be positively great, by most others, or they will produce thinking that will be thought silly or nonsense by most others. Yet despite this they will believe themselves to be great.

I do not believe the great are guilty of an epistemic vice, however. I think the great 'know' that they are great, rather than unjustifiably believe it. And I think this is the case despite the fact others will think they are not great and that the great thinker or artist will probably be aware that most people do not share their own assessment of their own abilities.

First, if you believe something to be true that everyone else believes to be false - and that everyone else is justified in believing to be false, too - are you epistemically irresponsible for believing it?

No, not necessarily. Here's an example (not mine - don't know whose it is, but it isn't mine). Imagine your plane has crashed into the ocean and you have washed up on an unknown island. You know that rescue missions will have been launched to find you and your plane. And as you have now been on the island for months, you know by now that everyone else will now believe you are dead. Furthermore, it is clear that others are perfectly justified in believing this. Indeed, it'd be epistemically irresponsible of them not to believe it. Your plane crashed into the ocean and there's been no evidence of your survival for months - it is beyond a reasonable doubt that you're dead.

But you're not. And you know you're not. It'd be quite absurd, would it not, for you to conclude that you might actually be dead on the grounds that everyone else believes - and believes justifiably - that you're dead? Yes, of course.

So, you know you're alive, even though everyone else is justified in believing you're dead (and you know this too). You're in no way being epistemically irresponsible in believing yourself to be alive.

Of course, in this case you have access to some evidence of your continued existence here that others do not possess. You are having your experiences. And so you can reliably infer your continued existence from those. But others can't, as they're not having them.

But this applies to the great artist and great thinker. Everyone else thinks the great thinker is not a great thinker. And they're probably justified in thinking this. They've considered what the great thinker thinks, and to the best of their judgement, it seems to them that the thoughts the great thinker is having are not that great at all - indeed, a lot of them don't really make much sense to them. So, in light of that, they are justified in believing the great thinker to be something else - a mediocre thinker or even a bad thinker. And the great thinker will be aware of this; aware that others think they're not a great thinker, and aware that they're probably justified in that assessment.

But the great thinker or artist has access to some evidence that others do not have access to. They are discerning, correctly, their own greatness. Others do not have access to this evidence, or at least most don't, for you'd need to be great or somewhere close to have such powers of discernment. But great people do have such powers, for it is by exercising them that they produce great art and great thoughts. And thus the great thinker and the great artist are not being epistemically irresponsible in believing themselves to be great. They are in relevant respects like the person on the island who knows he's alive, even though everyone else is justified in believing him to be dead.

I conclude, then, that great people 'know' that they are great and will typically know it a long time before anyone else does.