Imaging a black hole shadow through the Event Horizon Telescope: A study in scientific collaboration and its epistemic constraints

In this paper I present a case study of the creation of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which provided the first image of a black hole shadow (April 2019) and that of the central black hole of the Milky Way (May 2022), as one in which the collaborative approach was primarily motivated by strong epistemic needs. To this end, I introduce and explore the notion of "epistemic constraint," meaning any component of the world that prevents us from gaining some definite kind of knowledge in a specific manner and allows or promotes some other specific kind of knowledge in defined ways. The collaborative approach that led to the recent images of black hole shadows through the EHT is described in terms of "epistemically constrained collaboration" - i.e., a collaborative mode of research where the epistemic constraints prevail over other factors - and the most important features of this concept are expounded.