Online research in philosophy

In this paper I respond to three commentaries on Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. In response to Alcoff, I primarily defend my conception of how an individual hearer might develop virtues of epistemic justice. I do this partly by drawing on empirical social psychological evidence supporting the possibility of reflective self-regulation for prejudice in our judgements. I also emphasize the fact that individual virtue is only part of the solution – structural mechanisms also have an essential role in combating epistemic injustice. My response to Goldberg principally concerns my perceptual account of the epistemology of testimony, which I defend as being both well-motivated and best categorized as a species of non-inferentialism. I also explain its relation to the reductionism/non-reductionism contrast, and defend my resistance to casting it as any kind of default view. In response to Hookway, I contrast discriminatory with distributive forms of epistemic injustice, and defend the basic taxonomy I present in the book, which casts testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as the two fundamental discriminatory forms of epistemic injustice.

Moral realism of a paradigmatic sort -- Defending the parallel -- The parity premise -- Epistemic nihilism -- Epistemic expressivism : traditional views -- Epistemic expressivism : nontraditional views -- Epistemic reductionism -- Three objections to the core argument.

Local reductionism purports to defend a middle ground in the debate about the epistemic status of testimony-based beliefs. It does so by acknowledging the practical ineliminability of testimony as a source of knowledge, while insisting that such an acknowledgment need not entail a default-acceptance view, according to which there exists an irreducible warrant for accepting testimony. The present paper argues that local reductionism is unsuccessful in its attempt to steer a middle path between reductionism and anti-reductionism about testimonial justification. In particular, it challenges local reductionism 'from within', without appealing to anti-reductionist intuitions. By offering novel arguments to the effect that local reductionism fails by its own standards, the present paper considerably strengthens the case against this version of reductionism. Local reductionism, it is argued, fails for three main reasons. First, it cannot account for the rationality of testimonial rejection in paradigmatic cases, even though the possibility of rational rejection is thought to be of central justificatory importance. Second, it does not provide a sufficiently distinct non-testimonial basis to which testimonial justification can be successfully reduced. Finally, local reductionism is shown to be an intrinsically unstable position, in danger of collapsing into full-fledged 'credulism' of the kind historically associated with Thomas Reid.

This paper is an examination of modest foundationalism in relation to some important criteria of epistemic dependence. The paper distinguishes between causal and epistemic dependence and indicates how each might be related to reasons. Four kinds of reasons are also distinguished: reasons to believe, reasons one has for believing, reasons for which one believes, and reasons why one believes. In the light of all these distinctions, epistemic dependence is contrasted with defeasibility, and it is argued that modest foundationalism is not committed to criteria of epistemic dependence on which foundational beliefs are indefeasible. Modest foundationalism is contrasted with coherentism and is shown to be hospitable to a causal criterion of epistemic dependence, compatible with reliabilism, and neutral with respect to skepticism.

It has recently been suggested that, for Leibniz, temporal facts globally supervene on causal facts, with the result that worlds differing with respect to their causal facts can be indiscernible with respect to their temporal facts. Such an interpretation is at variance with more traditional readings of Leibniz's causal theory of time, which hold that Leibniz reduces temporal facts to causal facts. In this article, I argue against the global supervenience construal of Leibniz's philosophy of time. On the view of Leibniz defended here, he adopts a non-modal reduction of time to events, a form of reductionism that entails a strong covariation between a world's temporal facts and its causal facts. Consequently, worlds discernible with respect to their temporal facts must be discernible with respect to their causal facts, and worlds discernible with respect to their causal facts must be discernible with respect to their temporal facts. This position strongly favors the standard identificatory reduction of time to causation often imputed to Leibniz.

Participants on both sides of the contemporary debate between reductionism and anti-reductionism about testimony commonly describe testimonial knowledge as knowledge acquired at second hand. I argue that fully appreciating the distinctive sense in which testimonial knowledge is secondhand supports anti-reductionism over reductionism but also that it supports a particular kind of anti-reductionism very different from that typically offered in the literature. Testimonial knowledge is secondhand in the demanding sense of being justified by the authority of a speaker where this requires that epistemic responsibility for meeting challenges to the audience's testimonial knowledge is shared between speaker and audience. The epistemic credentials of testimonial knowledge are in this sense importantly interpersonal.

Bickle argues for both a narrow causal reductionism, and a broader ontological-explanatory reductionism. The former is more successful than the latter. I argue that the central and unsolved problem in Bickle's approach to reductionism involves the nature of psychological terms. Investigating why the broader reductionism fails indicates ways in which phenomenology remains more than a handmaiden of neuroscience.

The dilemma of functionalism -- The metaphysics of causal structures -- The theory of evolution and causal structures in biology -- Case study: classical and molecular genetics -- Conservative functional reduction.

Reductionism about testimony holds that testimonial warrant or entitlement is just a species of inductive warrant. Anti-Reductionism holds that it is different from inductive but analogous to perceptual or memorial warrant. Perception receives much of its positive epistemic status from being reliably truthconducive in normal conditions. One reason to reject the epistemic analogy is that testimony involves agency – it goes through the will of the speaker – but perception does not. A speaker might always choose to lie or otherwise deliberately mislead. It is argued that the force of this derives (in part) from Libertarianism about agency, and that Libertarianism, if it undermines the Anti-Reductionist explanation of why we are entitled to rely upon testimony, undermines the Reductionist explanation as..