Social Epistemology

In their recent article in this journal, Giubilini, Gur-Arie, and Jamrozik argue that there is more to expertise than individual healthcare professionals’ knowledge of their fields. To be an expert is to be recognized as a credible authority, they explain, and being a credible authority necessitates trust. Among the core ethical principles they identify for trustworthy experts in medicine and healthcare are honesty, humility, and transparency. Here I aim to affirm these authors’ linkage of expertise and trust by decoupling both (...) from a presumptive norm of transparency. My suggestion is not that medical or healthcare experts should lie or deceive, but that articulating their credible authority in terms of transparency mischaracterizes things. We see this in several ways: through the negative epistemic effects of a general norm of expert transparency, the importance of discretion in healthy trust relations, and the need for relationally responsive interpretation in how medical and health experts communicate with different patients and publics across social-epistemic difference. (shrink)

The advent of AI calls for an existential self-redefinition of humanity. It necessitates the establishment of a pluralistic global humanist culture that enables us to coexist in the new world of active media and autopoietic technology. In this paper, related philosophical questions give rise to the proposal of a novel metaculture that elevates human heritages and cultural memories to the plane of a digital AI- based infrastructure. I argue for a balanced and holistic approach to human-to-human and human–AI interactions and (...) metaculture that can be developed in the form of combinatorial “metagames” that reflect the potential of human consciousness, transcend the boundaries between technology, human embodiment and biology, the arts, sciences and humanities, and philosophy, and, finally, include the element of meaningful coincidence and spontaneity “in the second potency.” Hermann Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game, offers a key to understanding this basic idea. His vision is extremely relevant today. Based on this, the concept of cultivating global cultural memories through innovative aesthetic-epistemic “Glass Bead Games 2.0” is discussed further from a systematic angle. To complement this, reference is also made to Hesse’s own source of inspiration: Novalis’s “encyclopedist” approach interlinks aesthetic and epistemic productivity in a way that could become a major starting point to create a new holistic metaculture in the Age of AI. (shrink)

Emancipatory social movement solidarities are prefigurative associations. While pursuing broad-based social transformations, solidaristic agents attempt to model—in an incomplete and provisional way—the social relations they wish to bring into existence. Existing structures of domination, deep-set and overlapping as they are, pose an abiding challenge to the prefiguration of just relations, however. This article considers the challenge of prefiguration by developing a diachronic, goal-oriented, and epistemic account of solidarity. The author argues that solidarity is a collaborative process whereby agents prefigure relationships (...) of nondomination while working together to reach shared understandings about the political task at hand. The author examines two epistemologies that have not been traditionally connected to philosophical discussions of solidarity, philosophical hermeneutics and creolization, to elaborate the account. While both frameworks enable an understanding of solidarity as a properly transformative relation, creolization illuminates the possibilities and difficulties of collaborating under conditions of domination. (shrink)

In his new book, La société automatique, Bernard Stiegler departs from a philosophical tradition that opposes autonomy and automatization so as to position automatization at the core of biological, social, and technical forms of life. Responding to the rise of the digital—as the increasing automatization of processes of selection through computational means—Stiegler’s project challenges us to recognize contemporary life as automatic. This shift in approach inevitably recalibrates the ontogenetic grounds of contemporary culture, and necessitates a reconsideration of sociocultural practices from (...) the standpoint of the digital modes of algorithmic existence that are enacted within our midst. -/- Anaïs Nony: Thank you very much, Bernard Stiegler, for having me in Paris today, in your Institute for Research and Innovation. You just finished a new book titled La société automatique. Can you explain what you mean by “automatic society,” and especially that element of it that refers to the self, autos (αὐτός) in Greek? What does it mean to apply this concept to the social order? -/- Bernard Stiegler: Thank you for these questions. First I must say that what I call automatic society is produced by the technology of automatism that is digital technology. (shrink)

تقترب التقاليد الفلسفية من الأخلاق اعتمادًا بشكل أساسي على المفاهيم والنظريات الميتافيزيقية واللاهوتية. ومن بين مفاهيم الأخلاق التقليدية، يُعتبر نظرية الأمر الإلهي (DCT) الأكثر بروزًا. وفقًا لهذه النظرية، يمنح الله الأسس الأخلاقية للبشرية من خلال الخلق والوحي. الأخلاق والألوهية لا ينفصلان منذ أقدم الحضارات. هذه المفاهيم تنغمس في إطار لاهوتي وتُقبل بشكل واسع من قبل معظم أتباع التقاليد الإبراهيمية الثلاثة: اليهودية، المسيحية، والإسلام، التي تشمل الجزء الأكبر من سكان العالم. وبما أن نظرية الأمر الإلهي تعتمد على الإيمان والوحي كأساس، فهي (...) ليست خاضعة تمامًا للإثبات العلمي. وقد حاول معارضو التصور الأخلاقي المستند إلى الأمر الإلهي، بناءً على استحالة إثبات افتراضاته الميتافيزيقية والدينية، لعدة قرون (وإن كان ذلك دون نجاح) تقليل أهميته. واستندوا إلى الحجة القائلة بأنه لا يظهر أدلة مادية ولا اتساقًا منطقيًا، ولهذا السبب، لا يمكن اعتباره لأغراض علمية أو فلسفية. إنه مجرد اعتقاد، ويجب فهمه كذلك. إلى جانب هذه المعارضة الشديدة، هناك العديد من المفاهيم الأخرى التي تعارض نظريات الأمر الإلهي، بطريقة أو بأخرى، جزئيًا أو كليًا. العديد من الفلاسفة والعلماء الاجتماعيين، بدءًا من الفلسفة اليونانية الكلاسيكية وحتى يومنا هذا، على سبيل المثال، يؤكدون أن الأخلاق مجرد بناء، وبالتالي فهي نسبية ثقافيًا ومحددة ثقافيًا. ومع ذلك، يثير هذا العديد من النقاشات الأخرى ويفرض تحديًا لتحديد معنى الثقافة، وأي عناصر من الثقافة تُعتبر محددة أخلاقيًا، وأخيرًا، ما هي حدود هذه النسبية. يدعي الحتميون الأخلاقيون أن كل شيء يتعلق بالسلوك البشري، بما في ذلك الأخلاق، محدد مسبقًا، نظرًا لعدم وجود إرادة حرة. وفي الآونة الأخيرة، جادل المفكرون الحديثون بأن هناك علمًا صارمًا للأخلاق. ومع ذلك، فإن المنهج العلمي وحده، رغم تفسيره للعديد من الحقائق والأدلة، لا يمكنه إلقاء الضوء على المحتوى الكامل والمعنى الشامل للأخلاق. فهم الأخلاق يتطلب تصورًا أوسع، واتفاقًا بين الفلاسفة، وهو أمر لم يتحقق أبدًا. كل هذه الأسئلة تأخذ أشكالًا مختلفة اعتمادًا على كل اتجاه فلسفي، وتبدأ تحليلات معقدة ونقاشات لا تنتهي، حيث أن العديد منها يتضارب بشكل متبادل. الكون والأجواء المحيطة بهذه الأطروحات هي ميادين كل هذه الصراعات المفاهيمية، التي تُلاحظ من منظور موضوعي وتطوري. بغض النظر عن هذه الظروف وأهميتها الجوهرية، فإن هذه الأسئلة بعيدة كل البعد عن النهج المنهجي لمناقشة تحليلية حول الأخلاق الموضوعية، وهو بالفعل هدف ونطاق هذا العمل. يجب علينا استعراض هذه النظريات التقليدية البارزة باختصار لأن هذه الأطروحة تحتوي على دراسة مقارنة، وفرضياتها تختلف على الأقل بشكل عميق عن جميع النظريات التقليدية. لذلك، يصبح من الضروري تقديم عناصر مباشرة ومحددة للمقارنة للقارئ، لأجل النقد الصحيح، دون الحاجة إلى أبحاث مقاطعة. ومع ذلك، حتى عند استعراض النظريات التقليدية، لأغراض هذا العرض المقارن والنقدي، ستظل هذه النظريات جانبًا من اهتماماتنا الرئيسية، كـ"مواد خارجية". بغض النظر عن صحة أي أو جميع عناصر هذا النقاش، ومعناها كجزء من الكون الفلسفي لهذه الأطروحة، فإن الغرض من هذا العمل هو إثبات وتبرير وجود ومعنى النماذج الأخلاقية البدائية التي نشأت مباشرة من الاحتياجات الاجتماعية الأولى وجهود البقاء. هذه النماذج هي تعريف الأساس الأساسي للأخلاق، وارتباطها باللاوعي الجمعي والتنظيم المنطقي المقابل لها وانتقالها إلى المراحل التطورية للجينوم البشري وعلاقات الزمان والمكان المختلفة، بغض النظر عن أي تجربة معاصرة للأفراد. النظام الذي تحدده هذه النماذج يشكل نموذجًا اجتماعيًا تطوريًا للبشر. هل هذا موقف ميتاأخلاقي؟ نعم، هو كذلك. وعلاوة على ذلك، كما هو الحال في أي تفكير ميتاأخلاقي، يجب علينا أن نبحث بعناية عن أفضل الطرق وأكثرها اتساقًا، كما تقدمها الفلسفة التحليلية. وبالتالي، يجب أن يُظهر هذا العمل بشكل معقول أن الأخلاق ليست نتاجًا ثقافيًا للإنسان المتحضر أو المجتمعات الحديثة، وأنه على الرغم من خضوعها للعديد من الإضافات والطرح الثقافي النسبي، فإن أسسها الأساسية هي نماذج بدائية ولم تتغير هيكليًا أبدًا. هذا التفكير يستنتج أن الأخلاق هي صفة أصلية لـ"الإنسان العاقل"، فهي ليست ملكية ولا حادثة: إنها تدمج جوهر الإنسان وتنتمي إلى مجال الهوية الأنطولوجية للإنسان. الظاهرة البشرية هي عملية مستمرة، تلعب دورها بين التحديد العشوائي والإرادة الحرة، ويجب أن نتساءل كيف بدأت الأخلاق وكيف وصلت إلينا في الحاضر. -/- . (shrink)

El propósito de este estudio es analizar las principales causas de los movimientos poblacionales en Colombia como consecuencia de factores ambientales, en especial, del cambio climático, en vista de discernir una distinción no solo conceptual, sino metodológica entre dos categorías de movimiento poblacional: la migración forzada y el desplazamiento forzado. De este modo, se dará cumplimiento a los siguientes objetivos específicos: 1) examinar la concordancia entre los factores causales que configuran temporalmente los fenómenos de migración y de desplazamiento forzado y (...) 2) elucidar si todo desplazamiento forzado está oculto en un evento migratorio. (shrink)

Is it permissible for the state to censor or suppress conspiracy theories, even within liberal democracies? According to a number of political and legal theorists, it is. In this paper, I will argue that the state may sometimes censor conspiracy theories, but it should be permitted to do so only after very strict conditions have been met. I shall first offer some brief thoughts about the definition of ‘conspiracy theory’. I will then critique one existing attempt to address this issue (...) – namely Cíbik and Hardoš’s public reason approach. Next, I shall outline my own proposal. I will argue that we should sometimes consider conspiracy theorising to be a form of discriminatory speech against vulnerable individuals and groups, and we can consider it to be a form of defamation in these cases. Consequently, the state may sometimes be permitted to enact civil laws to sanction such theorising. Finally, I will outline some of the conditions that should be met before state censorship can be considered. (shrink)

This book provides an accessible yet rigorous introduction to political epistemology. It investigates some of the central topics, questions, and problems in political epistemology, such as: the role of truth in politics, the epistemology of political disagreement, voter ignorance, political irrationality, distrust of experts, the epistemic value of democracy, and epistocracy.

Who deserves credit for epistemic successes, and who is to blame for epistemic failures? Extreme views, which would place responsibility either solely on the individual or solely on the individual’s surrounding environment, are not plausible. Recently, progress has been made toward articulating virtue epistemology as a suitable middle ground. A socio-environmentally oriented virtue epistemology can recognize that an individual’s traits play an important role in shaping what that individual believes, while also recognizing that some of the most efficacious individual traits (...) have to do with how individuals structure their epistemic environments and how they respond to information received within these environments. I contribute to the development of such an epistemology by introducing and elucidating the virtue of epistemic exactingness, which is characterized by a motivation to regulate the epistemically significant conduct of others. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that false and misleading claims, spread primarily on social media, are a serious problem in need of urgent response. Current strategies to address the problem – relying on fact-checks, source labeling, limits on the visibility of certain claims, and, ultimately, content removals – face two serious shortcomings: they are ineffective and biased. Consequently, it is reasonable to want to seek alternatives. This paper provides one: to address the problems with misinformation, social media platforms should abandon third-party (...) fact-checks and rely instead on user-driven prediction markets. This solution is likely less biased and more effective than currently implemented alternatives and, therefore, constitutes a superior way of tackling misinformation. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the epistemic situation one faces when using a Large Language Model based chatbot like ChatGPT: When reading the output of the chatbot, how should one decide whether or not to believe it? By surveying strategies we use with other, more familiar sources of information, I argue that chatbots present a novel challenge. This makes the question of how one could trust a chatbot especially vexing.

Many believe that we ought to treat people as individuals and that this form of treatment is in some sense incompatible with treating people as members of groups. Yet, the relation between these two kinds of treatments is elusive. In this paper, we develop a novel account of the normative requirement to treat people as individuals. According to this account, treating people as individuals requires treating people as agents in the appropriate capacity. We call this the Agency Attunement Account. This (...) view has the surprising implication that it's not only possible to fail in treating people as individuals but also possible to fail in treating people as members of groups, on the presumption that people's agency is sometimes nested in, and exercised via, agential groups. (shrink)

Rational or epistemically justified beliefs are often said to be defeasible. That is, beliefs that have some otherwise justification conferring property can lose their epistemic status because they are defeated by some evidence possessed by the believer or due to some external facts about the believer’s epistemic environment. Accordingly, many have argued that we need to add a so-called no defeater clause to any theory of epistemic justification. In this paper, I will survey various possible evidentialist as well as responsibilitst (...) no-defeater clauses and develop a general taxonomy of defeater cases against which these clauses can be tested. Despite influential arguments that evidentialist understandings of justification are ill-equipped to handle the full spectrum of defeater cases, I will demonstrate that evidentialism has the right tools to make sense of all kinds of defeaters, including propositional and normative defeaters. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the proposed solution avoids recently influential objections against the notion of defeat. (shrink)

Education as a Thick Epistemic Concept (ETEC) is a thick epistemology project that highlights the role of education in both epistemic virtues acquirement and motivation. In this paper, I argue that ETEC is not satisfactory because it relies on a version of Virtue Responsibilism (VR) that is also not plausible, in so far as it relies on the premise that both the motivation and the action-guidedness of epistemic and moral virtues are unified. By rejecting this unification premise, I show that (...) an epistemically virtuous person is not necessarily a morally virtuous/caring person either. It might happen to be the case that an epistemically virtuous person is also a morally virtuous person. However, there is no necessary connection between the two since there can be a sharp gap between their motivation and their action-guidedness. I also argue that there are bad forms of education that can further sharpen the gap between epistemic and moral virtues, further undermining ETEC. Thus, when it comes to education, a thick epistemology project should consider how different forms of education can sharpen the gap in the motivation and the action-guidedness of different types of virtues developed by learners. (shrink)

What does effective poverty relief entail? How are we to assess the capacity of advanced industrialized societies to solve the problem of poverty? What role, if any, is left for the welfare state? This chapter argues that poverty relief, far from being primarily a matter of post hoc redistribution, primarily consists in a Hayekian-Schumpeterian discovery (or innovation) procedure whereby the problems of the poor are continuously discovered, identified, and eventually solved from the bottom up. This suggests new avenues for reform. (...) I argue, from the point of view of complexity theory, that governments must overcome knowledge and governance problems that limit their competence in the realm of solving the problems of the poor. As a result, any efficient system of poverty relief is unlikely to emerge from imposing an efficient and equitable top-down delivery of given goods and services based on established practices or preferences. The knowledge of what goods and services are required, and what practices should be modified to produce them, is not given to policy makers; it needs to be discovered. And this discovery is best modeled as an entrepreneurial, inquisitive, and experimental process. This process is best understood by applying complexity theory and the Austrian (Hayekian) epistemic paradigm. (shrink)

Given the inevitability of our social dependencies, some social epistemologists have defended that dogmatism, rather than open-mindedness, is the more appropriate cognitive habit for laypeople to acquire good beliefs in specialized like the sciences. They claim that dogmatically relying on experts’ deliverances, rather than exercising one’s own intellectual virtues, like open-mindedness, is the best epistemic strategy for maximizing the acquisition of true beliefs and avoiding false ones. In this paper, I challenge this view by arguing that open-mindedness is a valuable (...) epistemic trait for laypeople who seek an appropriate pattern of epistemic dependence concerning scientific theories. While laypeople are generally incapable of fully understanding and evaluating scientific theories – an effort that only properly trained experts can undertake – they can still achieve some level of understanding of these theories. Such understanding is impeded by habits like dogmatism. Conversely, open-mindedness proves beneficial in these contexts as it disposes individuals to engage with and incorporate cognitively challenging ideas, such as many scientific theories. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently argued that there is such a thing as ‘epistemic blame’: blame targeted at epistemic norm violations qua epistemic norm violations. However, Smartt (2024) and Matheson and Milam (2022) have recently provided several arguments in favour of thinking epistemic blame either doesn’t exist, or is never justified. This paper argues these challenges are unsuccessful, and along the way evaluates the prospects for various accounts of epistemic blame. It also reflects on the dialectic between sceptics and (...) realists about epistemic blame, and what choice-points are available for moving the debate forward. (shrink)

Social media misinformation is widely thought to pose a host of threats to the acquisition of knowledge. One response to these threats is to remove misleading information from social media and to de-platform those who spread it. While content moderation of this sort has been criticized on various grounds—including potential incompatibility with free expression—the epistemic case for the removal of misinformation from social media has received little scrutiny. Here, I provide an overview of some costs and benefits of the removal (...) of misinformation from social media. On the one hand, removing misinformation from social media can promote knowledge acquisition by removing misleading evidence from online social epistemic environments. On the other hand, such removals require the exercise of power over evidence by content moderators. As I argue, such exercises of power can encourage suspicions on the part of social media users and can compromise the force of the evidence possessed by such users. For these reasons, the removal of misinformation from social media poses its own threats to knowledge. (shrink)

This dissertation presents a theory of online propaganda and radicalization which highlights the interaction between communication, epistemology, and technology. The central focus is providing an analysis of online media communications, content posted on social media platforms and transmitted by automated recommendation systems, which better explains how propaganda and radicalization have adapted so well to this technological environment. First, propaganda is interpreted as a unique approach to communication which manipulates the expectations an audience has of successful communications, and not simply as (...) a collection of individual acts with characteristic properties. A major aspect to this interpretation of propaganda is an emphasis on those environmental factors and sociological conditions involved in communication, which can have a direct impact on our experience and interpretation of reality. Second, considering these aspects a detailed account of how users experience the technical machinery facilitating social media platforms is presented, highlighting the problematic epistemic states users are forced to inhabit. Finally, online radicalization is explained through this new propaganda interpretation, the user experience of the technology underpinning social media platforms, and the epistemic states forced by online automation. (shrink)

The classical Virtue Epistemology, one of the most interesting contributions of late 20th century American philosophy, proposed to analyze knowledge and epistemic evaluation in general in terms of intellectual virtues. In this approach, these virtues were understood as faculties or personal traits that contribute to the production of knowledge and other epistemic goods. However, the value of some plausible candidates for intellectual virtues, which can be called “generous virtues,” cannot be explained in those terms. This paper proposes a novel account (...) of the general value of intellectual virtues that includes other‑regarding ones. To that end, it considers three strategies of socialization of Virtue Epistemology, and proposes original solution: Epistemic Social Environmentalism. (shrink)

Recent proposals for a “critical character epistemology” attend to the ways in which environments, institutions, social practices, and relationships promote the development of epistemic vice whilst acknowledging that the contexts of differently situated agents demand different epistemic character traits. I argue that a tension arises between two features of critical character epistemology: the classification as “epistemically corrupting” of environments, institutions, or structures which promote the development of epistemic vice; and commitment to normative contextualism—the doctrine that the normative status (the status (...) of a trait as a virtue or as a vice) of some or all epistemic character traits is context-dependent. I show how these two features lead to the claim that certain traits both are epistemic virtues and hinder the development of epistemic virtues. To make such an evaluation consistent, I propose a modified form of normative contextualism: dual-level normative contextualism. (shrink)

Truth is a contested concept, yet the current contest takes place within an idealistic picture that accords all conceptions of truth three features: truth is singular, atemporal and independent. Because of these features, conceptions of truth within the idealist picture are ‘sovereign’ conceptions of truth that lead to serious obstacles in different parts of philosophy, e.g. regarding the concept of normativity or the relationship between truth and politics. The article makes a case for changing the underlying philosophical picture in which (...) truth is conceptualised. To that end, it sketches a materialist picture that can account for the contextuality, historicity and plurality of truth, leading to ‘non-sovereign’ conceptions of truth. Thinking of truth as a force that emerges from social practices but is not reducible to them, that is weak in comparison to other forces (like affects or social power), that exclusively targets subjectivities and that has a ‘ratchet effect’ on these subjectivities provides enough details of the materialist picture to overcome the obstacles mentioned. (shrink)

Proponents of epistocracy claim that amplifying the political power of politically knowledgeable citizens can mitigate some of the harmful effects of widespread political ignorance, since being politically knowledgeable improves one’s ability to make sound political decisions. But many critics of epistocracy suggest that we have no reason to expect it to make better decisions than democracy, for those who are politically knowledgeable can also possess other attributes that compromise their ability to make sound political decisions. This is one version of (...) the Demographic Objection to epistocracy, and in this paper I argue that the reasoning which underlies it generalizes in such a way that it applies not only to epistocracy, but also to democracy. Thus, there are demographic objections to both epistocracy and democracy. I argue that such demographic objections to democracy have important and overlooked implications. Among other things, they imply that we should be skeptical about the arguments of epistemic democrats; they count against proposals to democratize extant epistocratic practices and institutions; and they even count against certain democratic reforms taking place within a wholly democratic framework. (shrink)

In response to several articles on SERRC, I argue that the common pejorative use of the phrase “conspiracy theory” is the fundamental basis for the distinction between generalism and particularism. That is, generalism describes the “conventional wisdom” about conspiracy theories to which particularism is the corrective. Generalism is best understood as the idea that conspiracy theories ought to be dismissed (perhaps even ridiculed) because they are conspiracy theories--for that is the conventional wisdom (as Charles Pigden has maintained). This is not (...) merely to say, vaguely, that such theories have "epistemic defects." Given this definition, particularism, as the rejection of generalism, is true for any definition of "conspiracy theory" for which Watergate would have at one time counted as one--not just for a minimal definition. Rather than being dismissed based on features that apply to conspiracy theories generally (as generalism would have it), each conspiracy theory should be judged on a case-by-case basis according to its own particular merits and demerits. (shrink)

The battlefield of the Anthropocene is a tragic one. It begins at the end. It emerges out of melancholy, in the locality of being not-dead-yet. As an Epoch dating the human impact on earth, the Anthropocene looks like a graveyard-to-come, one in which the story of humankind is writing its own epitaph in real time. The tragedy of our moment, or the tragic moment of our action means having to act despite knowing it is too late, searching for hope in (...) the dark. This tragedy produces the sensation that humankind must necessarily face its own limits. And these limits are telling a story that is not a happy one: we cannot keep up with the pace of such an entropic boneyard. When it comes to the massive eradications of people and species, no one can justify the feelings of sympathy that proliferate against a back- ground of intellectual numbness. The battlefield of the Anthropocene is one that demands action. (shrink)

Disagreement on political and social issues often seems intractable, but personal narratives may offer a means of bridging epistemic divides by vividly conveying lived experiences and personal motivations. My recent work emphasizes the role of narrative structure in fostering common ground, highlighting its ability to convey the contextual richness of marginalized perspectives while mitigating risks of epistemic exploitation. Ulatowski and Lumsden respond by emphasizing the "personal reality" of narratives and suggesting the importance of matching self-narratives between narrators and audiences. I (...) argue that narrative structure enhances persuasiveness by contextualizing lived experiences without overburdening marginalized narrators, though allyship must be approached cautiously to avoid co-opting or distorting such narratives. (shrink)

How should we respond to extremist views that we know are false? This paper proposes that we should be intellectually humble, but not open-minded. We should own our intellectual limitations, but be unwilling to revise our beliefs in the falsity of the extremist views. The opening section makes a case for distinguishing the concept of intellectual humility from the concept of open-mindedness, arguing that open-mindedness requires both a willingness to revise extant beliefs and other-oriented engagement, whereas intellectual humility requires neither. (...) Building on virtue-consequentialism, the second section makes a start on arguing that intellectually virtuous people of a particular sort—people with ‘effects-virtues’—would be intellectually humble, but not open-minded, in responding to extremist views they knew were false. We suggest that while intellectual humility and open-mindedness often travel together, this is a place where they come apart. (shrink)

This article is concerned with "all-or-nothing" approaches to female genital cosmetic surgeries, those that overemphasize either women's autonomy to defend total accessibility or the oppressive social context affecting women to defend the total banning of the procedures. By contrast, the author takes both phenomena into consideration. The author argues identifying patterns of false consciousness and weighing those against harm done to a patient provides a moral basis for a doctor to possibly deny their consent at face value. This also requires (...) a shift in understanding the doctor–patient relationship as a first step toward a feminist model for women's healthcare. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that responsible knowers are responsive to critical feedback that their reasons for believing in a given proposition or using certain principles of reasoning are inadequate. The project of democracy expects that agents can provide reasons for their beliefs during testimonial exchange. Voters provide reasons to representatives. Representatives provide reasons to voters. Voters provide reasons to each other. And representatives provide reasons to each other. This means that when voters or representatives cannot provide reasons, democratic mechanisms (...) are obstructed. But not all beliefs are adopted autonomously through reflection, but rather by social-institutional context. I argue, then, that responsible agents reflect on the reasons for their belief when their reasons are inadequate. They are attuned to the nature of expertise and evaluate expert testimony with this in mind. In full, democracy requires that agents hold beliefs autonomously and be cognizant of the nature of expertise. (shrink)

Questo lavoro di tesi propone una ricerca riguardante le teorie del complotto seguendo un approccio che mette in collaborazione la filosofia, l’epistemologia, la semiotica e la psicologia sociale al fine di poter disegnare un quadro sufficientemente ampio del modo in cui si formano e diffondono le teorie del complotto nelle società contemporanee. Inizialmente si cercherà di fare chiarezza sui motivi per cui si è scelto questo argomento, su quali obiettivi si propone questo lavoro di tesi e sul perché si ritenga (...) importante studiare le teorie del complotto, in quanto strumenti per comprendere le dinamiche attraverso cui si produce il senso nelle società contemporanee. Successivamente si discuteranno le eventuali conseguenze sociali e il ruolo di bias cognitivi e vizi epistemici nella formazione di una mentalità complottista. Infine la trattazione verterà sul nuovo, introducendo l’influenza che i social media esercitano sulla diffusione di questo fenomeno. -/- . (shrink)

This paper contributes to the recent explosion of literature on the epistemological role of emotions and other affective states by defending two claims. First, affective states might do more than position us to receive evidence or function as evidence. Affective states might be thought to appraise evidence, in the sense that affective states influence what doxastic state is rational for someone given a body of evidence. The second claim is that affective evidentialism, the view that affective states function rationally in (...) this way, is not just possible but plausible and fruitful. We offer two arguments in favor of affective evidentialism. (shrink)

Epistemologists who study credences have a well-developed account of how you should change them when you learn new evidence; that is, when your body of evidence grows. What's more, they boast a diverse range of epistemic and pragmatic arguments that support that account. But they do not have a satisfactory account of when and how you should change your credences when you become aware of possibilities and propositions you have not entertained before; that is, when your awareness grows. In this (...) paper, I consider the arguments for the credal epistemologist's account of how to respond to evidence, and I ask whether they can help us generate an account of how to respond to awareness growth. The results are surprising: the arguments that all support the same norms for responding to evidence growth support a number of different norms when they are applied to awareness growth. Some of these norms seem too weak, others too strong. I ask what we should conclude from this, and argue that our credal response to awareness growth is considerably less rigorously constrained than our credal response to new evidence. (shrink)

O presente artigo visa discutir o conceito de objetificação epistêmica enquanto uma consequência da pornografia mainstream para o discurso sexual das mulheres. Para tratar sobre essa questão, o texto está dividido em três seções. Na primeira, será apresentada a teoria das injustiças epistêmicas de Miranda Fricker, explicando a injustiça testemunhal e a injustiça hermenêutica. Em seguida, na segunda seção, será feita uma breve exposição da conceitualização que Martha Nussbaum oferece a respeito da objetificação. Por último, na terceira seção, discutiremos a (...) ideia de objetificação epistêmica proposta por Fricker para explicar o impacto da pornografia na recusa das mulheres em contextos sexuais. (shrink)

I discuss the relationship of epistemic corruption to non-ideal epistemology. A symposium on Robin McKenna's book "Non-Ideal Epistemology".

This paper suggests that virtue epistemology can help decide how to respond to conflicts between different epistemic goals for social media. It is a contribution to critical epistemology of social media insofar as it supplements system-level consideration with insights from individualist epistemology. In particular, whereas the proposal of critical social epistemology of social media by Joshua Habgood-Coote suggests that conflicts between epistemic goals of social media have to be solved by ethical consideration, I suggest that virtue epistemology can also solve (...) at least some of these conflicts fully within the epistemic realm. (shrink)

This paper seeks to intervene in environmental ethics and social epistemology. Within a predominant strand of environmental ethics, one witnesses accounts based on nonhumans’ ability to suffer, and consequently, the passivity of nonhumans. On the other hand, social epistemology is often not social enough insofar as it does not include nonhumans. Seminal accounts of epistemic injustice often conceal or exclude the possibility that nonhumans can be subjects of knowledge and victims of epistemic injustice because of an anthropocentric bias that maintains (...) propositional language is a necessary condition for knowledge. By presenting a non-anthropocentric, corporeal epistemology, this paper reveals a more affirmative account of nonhumans as epistemic agents with tacit, embodied knowledge. To prevent epistemic depreciation turning into ethical indifference or wrongdoing, this paper focuses on whether it is possible to commit epistemic injustices against nonhumans. In particular, this paper argues that humans can commit fourth-order epistemic exclusion, testimonial injustice, and testimonial smothering against nonhumans. (shrink)

Evidence is often taken to be “normative” for doxastic agents. What accounts for the normativity of evidence? According to the view that I'll call “evidential minimalism”, there is a close connection between strong evidence for the truth of p and a normative reason to believe p: evidence is either itself a normative reason for belief, or evidence gives rise to such a reason when certain other minimal conditions are met. In this paper, I argue against evidential minimalism. I will argue (...) that there are cases where: (i) an individual S possesses strong evidence E for the truth of p at time t, (ii) all other minimal conditions for the normativity of E are met at t, (iii) S doesn't believe p at t, yet (iv) S isn't open to any form of criticism on account of (i)–(iii) at t. I will then formulate a plausible linking claim connecting openness to criticism and the existence of normative reasons for belief. The minimalist can either accept or reject this linking claim. I will argue that, either way, the minimalist view falters. (shrink)

Instances of epistemic injustice elicit resistance, anger, despair, frustration or cognate emotional responses from their victims. This sort of response to the epistemic injustices that accompanied historical systems of oppression such as colonialism, for example, is normal. However, if their victims have internalised these oppressive situations, we could get the counterintuitive response of appreciation. In this paper, I argue for the phenomenon of appreciative silencing to make sense of instances like this. This is a form of epistemic silencing that happens (...) when the accepted hegemonic intuitions of the oppressed are formed/influenced by the ideologies of the oppressors over time. Here, we have a resilient, oppressive and hegemonic epistemic system. Put together, it creates a variant of epistemic injustice and silencing that is obscure since its victims are neither resistant nor aware of the injustice they face but are appreciative. (shrink)

Experts are sharply divided concerning the prevalence and influence of misinformation. Some have emphasized the severe epistemic and political threats posed by misinformation and have argued that some such threats have been realized in the real world. Others have argued that such concerns overstate the prevalence of misinformation and the gullibility of ordinary persons. Rather than taking a stand on this issue, I consider what would follow from the supposition that this latter perspective is correct. I argue that, if the (...) prevalence and influence of misinformation are indeed overstated, then many reports as to the prevalence and influence of misinformation constitute a kind of higher-order misinformation. I argue that higher-order misinformation presents its own challenges. In particular, higher-order misinformation, ironically, would lend credibility to the very misinformation whose influence it exaggerates. Additionally, higher-order misinformation would lead to underestimations of the reasons favoring opposing views. In short, higher-order misinformation constitutes misleading higher-order evidence concerning the quality of the evidence on which individuals form their beliefs. (shrink)

Can you rationally double-check what you already know? In this paper, I argue that you can. Agents can know that something is true and rationally double-check it at the very same time. I defend my position by considering a wide variety of cases where agents double-check their beliefs to gain epistemic improvements beyond knowledge. These include certainty, epistemic resilience, and sensitivity to error. Although this phenomenon is widespread, my proposal faces two types of challenges. First, some have defended ignorance norms, (...) on which agents are only allowed to inquire about things they don't already know. Second – motivated by strong conceptions of belief or pragmatic encroachment – some have argued that double-checking destroys knowledge. I argue that these competing views fail to capture both the epistemic value of double-checking and the many reasons why agents might double-check. Moreover, they rely on overly strong assumptions about what inquiry, knowledge, or belief requires. Finally, I marshal linguistic data in favor of the compatibility of knowledge and double-checking. (shrink)

After viewing a painting, reading a novel, or seeing a film, audiences often feel that they improve their cognitive standing on the world beyond the canvas, page, or screen. To learn from art in this way, I argue audiences must employ high degrees of epistemic autonomy and creativity, engaging in a process I call ‘insight through art.’ Some have worried that insight through art uses audience achievements to explain an artwork’s cognitive and artistic value, thereby failing to properly appreciate the (...) cognitive and artistic achievements of artists. I move against this worry by arguing that in order to learn via insight through art audiences must collaborate with artists, sharing the labour and credit for the cognitive achievements they co-produce. I claim this co-productive outlook reveals that our appreciation of art’s cognitive and artistic value involves far more audience participation than has hitherto been realised. (shrink)

For Quassim Cassam, intellectual vices obstruct knowledge. On his view, that’s what makes them vices. But obstructing knowledge seems unnecessary. Some intellectual vices can manifest passively, without obstructing knowledge. What’s more, obstructing knowledge seems insufficient. Some traits of intellectual character, not yet matured to full virtues, obstruct knowledge but earn us no blame or criticism. A motive-based theory of intellectual vice – a rival theory – can handle both of these issues.

In philosophical work on the ethics of conversational exchange, much has been written regarding the speaker side—i.e., on the rights and duties we have as speakers. This paper explores the relatively neglected topic of the duties pertaining to listeners’ side of the exchange. Following W.K. Clifford, we argue that it’s fruitful to think of our epistemic resources as common property. Furthermore, listeners have a key role in maintaining and improving these resources, perhaps a more important role than speakers. We develop (...) this idea by drawing from Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s “interactionist” picture of reason, which suggests that reasoning is essentially dialogical and relies on the epistemic vigilance of listeners. The paper defends an imperfect, prima facie duty to listen, one that is sufficiently strong to place substantial demands on individuals, but not so overly demanding as to be implausible. (shrink)

De Cruz and Levy, in their commentaries on Religion as make‐believe, present distinct questions that can be addressed by clarifying one core idea. De Cruz asks whether one can rationally assess the mental state of religious credence that I theorize. Levy asks why we should not explain the data on religious “belief” merely by positing factual beliefs with religious contents, which happen to be rationally acquired through testimony. To both, I say that having religious credences is p‐irrational: a purposeful departure (...) from rational thought and behavior, where the purpose in question is maintaining a group identity. (shrink)

This dissertation is about the relationship between Epistemology and other domains. In it I want to show that in an important sense, Epistemology is an autonomous domain. That is, epistemic vocabulary (e.g., “knowledge”, “justification”, “rationality”, “epistemic reason”, etc.) cannot be analyzed without remainder into non-epistemic vocabulary. Epistemic phenomena must be explained in terms of epistemic reasons and the form of assessment proprietary to them. Although epistemic vocabulary cannot be reduced to the vocabulary of other domains, Epistemology is nonetheless connected with (...) other domains in an important way. In this dissertation I focus on the connection between Epistemology and the Philosophy of Mind. I distinguish different forms cognitive self-monitoring can take and corresponding forms of cognitive autonomy. The kind of self-monitoring that receives the most attention involves simulating interpersonal argumentation. I argue that the capacity to self-monitor in this way grounds familiar epistemic standards (e.g., knowledge and justification) and explains how reasons get their grip on us. On the picture that emerges, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind need to be done in tandem. Epistemology gives us the normative framework that is modeled by the self-monitoring system. The self-monitoring system, conversely, explains the kind of activity we engage in that makes that normative framework applicable to us. Epistemic reasons themselves are just episodes of this kind of activity. In Chapter 1 I argue that epistemic luck cannot be analyzed in non-epistemic terms. Here I generalize Jennifer Lackey’s criticism of Duncan Pritchard’s safety-based account of epistemic luck to all reductive theories. I argue that they will either be extensionally inadequate, or they will illicitly presuppose the vocabulary they are trying to reduce. The upshot is that epistemic luck can only be understood in terms of the epistemic assessment of reasons. By extension, we can’t give a reductive analysis of knowledge. This is not to say we cannot analyze knowledge, just that we can’t analyze away the epistemic vocabulary without remainder. In chapter 2 I explain the relation between epistemic luck, epistemic justification, and knowledge. I argue that previous work in the defeasible reasoning tradition, despite being on the right track, fell short of realizing its full potential. This is because the account of how these three things relate given by its proponents was insufficiently unified, which encouraged many epistemologists to abandon the defeasible reasoning tradition entirely. I argue that a unified and principled account of their relation is possible, and it allows for an elegant analysis of knowledge. In slogan form: good reasons are apparent to the knowing subject. In chapter 3 I extend the defeasible reasoning tradition to explain how knowledge is gradable. I show that this enables us to bring the debates about fake barns and knowledge from falsehoods to ecumenical resolutions, while also shedding light on a new kind of case. Furthermore, I explain how background assumptions are themselves defeasible and some of the epistemic significance of this fact. In chapter 4 I make the connection between Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind. I argue that the self-monitoring system of cognitively mature humans uses a model of the normative framework described in the previous chapters to regulate its own cognition. Here I build on that claim to develop an account of the role played by knowledge and justification in doxastic social coordination. I build on the claim that background assumptions are themselves defeasible to develop an account of the foundations of knowledge according to which they are social but not brutely sociological. In chapter 5 I discuss the relation between the epistemic states of cognitively mature humans, children, and non-human animals. I do this in a way meant to integrate an insight from virtue epistemology into the reasons-first picture developed here: positive epistemic standing is a state attributable to the subject. In chapter 6 I discuss the metaphysics of epistemic reasons. I claim that they are episodes of the activity of reasoning. In the preceding chapters, we get a sense of what that activity involves. Here I argue that the materials developed there put us in a position to understand what epistemic reasons are. This account incorporates the insights of rival positions while sidestepping familiar objections to them. The resulting picture is in line with the non-reductive approach to the epistemic developed so far. In fact, it goes further than other “reasons-first” approaches to Epistemology by claiming that reasons are not only basic within Epistemology, but they are also basic full-stop. One key consideration for my argument here is that reasons are, by their very nature, competitors. Although this point is generally acknowledged in the literature on reasons, its consequences for the metaphysics of reasons hasn’t been. Participants in the debate about the metaphysics of reasons typically try to identify reasons with something (e.g., facts or mental states) that are either not competitors, or only competitors insofar as they constitute, or bear on the epistemic assessment of, episodes of reasoning. (shrink)

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance to determine (...) the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality. (shrink)

A ‘vestigial social practice' is a norm, convention, or social behavior that persists even when few endorse it or its original justifying rationale. Begby (2021) explores social explanations for the persistence of prejudice, arguing that even if we all privately disavow a stereotype, we might nevertheless continue acting as if it is true because we believe that others expect us to. Meanwhile the persistence of the practice provides something like implicit testimonial evidence for the prejudice that would justify it, making (...) it rational for members of the next generation to acquire the corresponding prejudiced beliefs. This paper distinguishes between three different types of vestigial social practice in terms of the underlying explanatory mechanisms, and argues that the persistence of prejudicial social stereotypes is most tightly linked not to others’ beliefs or expectations, but to the ways that material infrastructure constrains options shapes social outcomes. Given that, the persistence of a practice only provides grounds to infer that most people endorse the corresponding prejudiced belief only if we are in a position to dismiss relevant alternative explanations. (shrink)

This entry provides an opinionated overview of key epistemological debates regarding experts. To comprehend, justify, and enhance our practices of trusting, utilising, and depending on experts' judgments, it is crucial to clarify the characteristics of experts and the means of identifying those who exemplify them. Consequently, this entry examines and evaluates accounts of the main characteristics of experts. Furthermore, it discusses indicators of experts that help recognise experts and considers to what extent they are accessible to other experts and laypersons.