Social Epistemology

We evaluate several significant objections to the possibility of group belief. These incredulity objections urge that the very concept of group belief is suspect or incoherent. Although many other...

A number of philosophers have defended the view that seemingly intellectually arrogant behaviours are epistemically beneficial. In this chapter I take issue with most of their conclusions. I argue, for example, that we should not expect steadfastness in one's belief in the face of contrary evidence nor overconfidence in one’s own abilities to promote better evaluation of the available evidence resulting in good-quality group-judgement. These features of individual thinkers are, on the contrary, likely to lead groups to end up in (...) stalemates and to polarise over issues. It is true that groups benefit from including members that, prior to discussion, hold diverse views. But disagreement benefits group judgement only when it is transient, rather than entrenched. That is, groups reach better quality conclusions when a number of diverse opinions are disseminated and evaluated fairly before reaching a consensus. If this is right, it would seem that individual qualities, such as open-mindedness and even-handedness about the epistemic value of opinions other than one's own, rather than steadfastness or overconfidence are conducive to better quality group judgement. (shrink)

Recent works by feminist and social epistemologists have carefully mapped the contours of epistemic injustice, including gaslighting and prejudicial credibility deficits, prejudicial credibility excesses, willful hermeneutical ignorance, discursive injustices, contributory injustice, and epistemic exploitation. As we look at this burgeoning literature, attention has been concentrated mainly in four areas in descending order of emphasis: phenomena of epistemic injustice themselves, including the nature of wrongdoings involved, attendant consequences and repercussions, individual and structural changes for prevention or mitigation, and restorative, restitutive, or (...) retributive responses. This project urges greater attention to the last of these, and to that end offers a relational approach to epistemic justice drawing upon Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and reparative justice. In developing and enacting better epistemic practices, how can such practices be made meaningfully restorative: not only recognizing the prospects for epistemic improvement, but responding to the perpetration and experience of epistemic injustice with effective epistemic amelioration? (shrink)

Under the influence of natural science, twentieth century philosophy departed from its Socratic heritage and increasingly isolated itself within the discipline. This new disciplinary way of doing p...

The fact that most of us are ignorant on politically relevant matters presents a problem for democracy. In light of this, some have suggested that we should impose epistemic constraints on democratic participation, and specifically that the franchise be restricted along competency lines – a suggestion that in turn runs the risk of violating a long-standing condition on political legitimacy to the effect that legitimate political arrangements cannot be open to reasonable objections. The present paper therefore outlines a way to (...) solve the problem of public ignorance without restricting the franchise. The proposal involves filtering the electoral input of a universal franchise through a statistical model that simulates what the public's political preferences would have been, had they been informed on politically relevant matters. The result is modelled democracy. A case is made that such democracy both solves the problem of public ignorance and satisfies the aforementioned condition on legitimacy. (shrink)

This paper examines three programmatic responses to the problem of cognitive bias: virtue epistemology, epistemic paternalism, and epistemic collectivism. Each of these programmes focuses on a single level of epistemic analysis: virtue theorists on individuals, paternalists on environments, and collectivists on groups. I argue that this is a mistake in light of the fact that cognitive biases arise from interactions between these three domains. Consequently, epistemologists should spend less time defending these programmes, and more time coordinating them. This paper offers (...) empirically based arguments for the interactionist approach, and contends that its adoption is an essential step for minimizing bias in empirical science. (shrink)

People develop and deploy epistemic norms – normative sensibilities in light of which they regulate both their individual and community epistemic practice. There is a similarity to folk's epistemic normative sensibilities – and it is by virtue of this that folk commonly can rely on each other, and even work jointly to produce systems of true beliefs – a kind of epistemic common good. Agents not only regulate their belief forming practices in light of these sensitivities, but they make clear (...) to others that they approve or disapprove of practices as these accord with their sensibilities – they thus regulate the belief forming practices of others in an interdependent pursuit of a good – something on the order of a community stock of true beliefs. Such general observations suggest ways in which common epistemic norms function as social norms, as these are characterized by Cristina Bicchieri's discussion of various kinds of norms. I draw on this framework – together with an important elaboration in Bicchieri – as it affords an analysis of the various related ways in which normative sensibilities function in communities of interdependent agents. The framework allows one to probe how these normative sensibilities function in the various associated choice situations. I argue that epistemic norms are fundamentally social norms, and, at the same time, they also are widely shared sensibilities about state-of-the-art ways of pursuing projects of individual veritistic value. The two foundations suggest the analogy of an arch. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that in Western contemporary societies testimony is structured by norms of reciprocation and thus is best understood as involving the exchange of gifts rather than, as philosophers and game theorists have tended to presume, market transactions. My argument is based on an initial analysis of the reactive attitudes that are exhibited in testimonial exchanges. I highlight the central role played by the reciprocating attitudes of gratitude and gratification respectively in the recipient and the donor of (...) testimony. This analysis leads to an account of the speech act of telling that is the primary vehicle of testimony. Telling, I argue, is a commissive but it is not, as it is usually presumed, akin to promising. Instead, its nature is that of an offer of a gift. Finally, I develop an account of the norms of trust and trustfulness as reciprocating social norms. I show that adopting these norms provides a particularly effective solution of the problem of cooperation. The solution is particularly effective because it incentivises both the sharing of epistemic goods and the acquisition of further such goods so that one is able to share them. (shrink)

A Lockean metaphysics of belief that understands outright belief as a determinable with degrees of confidence as determinates is supposed to effect a unification of traditional coarse-grained epistemology of belief with fine-grained epistemology of confidence. But determination of belief by confidence would not by itself yield the result that norms for confidence carry over to norms for outright belief unless belief and high confidence are token identical. We argue that this token-identity thesis is incompatible with the neglected phenomenon of “mistuned (...) knowledge” – knowledge in the absence of rational confidence. We show how partial epistemological unification can be secured, even without token identity, given determination of outright belief by degrees of confidence. Finally, we suggest a direction for the pursuit of thoroughgoing epistemological unification. (shrink)

Field philosophy marks out a new path for 21st century philosophy, offering both a practical and theoretical alternative to disciplinary philosophy. The balance between disciplinary philosophy and...

Field philosophy is a method of philosophical practice. As such, it is open or neutral with regard to topic and content, to the social location of collaborators, and to the type of outcome or produ...

A growing set of Chinese scholars view field philosophy as a new approach toward philosophical research. Field philosophy offers a meta-philosophy, and a methodology, but most importantly an instit...

My aim in this chapter is twofold. I attempt to provide an example of how (1) careful analysis in the history of philosophy can (2) elucidate contemporary debates about philosophical issues. My analysis of Hume’s account of the contagion of belief unfolds in three parts. In section one, I offer a summary of Hume’s account of the nature of beliefs concerning matters of fact. In section two, I elucidate his account of the “contagion of opinion” itself, explaining how beliefs are (...) contagious, why the contagious nature of beliefs is so powerful, and how people can resist the contagion. In section three, I elucidate the significance of Hume’s account of contagious beliefs for his account of doxastic virtues and explain the conditions under which it is virtuous to resist contagious beliefs. (shrink)

In this paper, I approach epistemic norms from an ontogenetic point of view. I argue and present evidence that to understand epistemic norms – e.g., scientific norms of methodology and the evaluation of evidence – children must first develop through their social interactions with others three key concepts. First is the concept of belief, which provides the most basic distinction on which scientific investigations rest: the distinction between individual subjective perspectives and an objective reality. Second is the concept of reason, (...) which in the context of science obligates practitioners to justify their claims to others with reasons by grounding them in beliefs that are universally shared within the community. Third is the concept of social norm, which is not primarily epistemic, but provides children with an understanding of norms as collective agreements. The theoretical argument is that all three of these concepts emerge not from just any kind of social interaction, but specifically from social interactions structured by the human species’ unique capacities for shared intentionality. (shrink)

This is an essay in environmental philosophy on the way toward field philosophy, using the Chinese National Park System as a case study. The CNPS was initiated in 2015, which began with the...

Chinese philosophy is practical in orientation. This practical orientation is consistent with field philosophy, which aims to break the disciplinary mode of knowledge production and establish inter...

Nel quadro di una teorizzazione, derivante da più ambiti, indebolente, non fondazionalistica, dell'approccio alla realtà fenomenica, la nostra attenzione si è soffermata sull'ambito psicologico, nel quale contestiamo una visione statica, atemporale e oggettivistica dell'identità soggettuale, e sosteniamo, tra l'altro, l'imprescindibilità, per la psicoterapia, del rimando alla sintomatologia dei significati esperiti dall'individuo.

Standpoint epistemology, the view that social identity is relevant to knowledge-acquisition, has been consigned to the margins of mainstream philosophy. In part, this is because the principles of standpoint epistemology are taken to be in opposition to those which guide traditional epistemology. One goal of this paper is to tease out the characterization of traditional epistemology that is at odds with standpoint epistemology. The characterization of traditional epistemology that I put forth is one which endorses the thesis of intellectualism, the (...) view that knowledge does not depend on non-epistemic features. I then suggest that two further components – the atomistic view of knowers and aperspectivalism – can be usefully interpreted as supporting features of intellectualism. A further goal of this paper is to show that we ought to resist this characterization of traditional epistemology. I use pragmatic encroachment as a dialectical tool to motivate the denial of intellectualism, and consequently, the denial of both supporting components. I then attempt to show how it is possible to have a view, similar to pragmatic encroachment, that takes social identity, rather than stakes, to be the feature that makes a difference to what a person is in a position to know. (shrink)

In this paper, I put the claim that sensitivity is a necessary condition for knowledge under pressure, by considering its applicability with regard to testimonially-formed beliefs. Building on, and departing from, Goldberg, I positively draw out how we might understand the required sensitivity as a social interaction between speaker and hearer in testimonial cases. In doing so however, I identify a concern which places the whole notion of testimonial sensitivity in potential jeopardy: the problem of the reliable liar. I find (...) an apparently paradoxical inverse relationship between better-differentiating methods that fulfil sensitivity conditions, and being able to have sensitive beliefs with regard to specific instances of testimony. After examining potential resolutions, I conclude that only a focus on minimally realising the problem, rather than “solving” it, will enable us to retain sensitivity as a necessary condition for testimonial-knowledge. (shrink)

Systems-oriented social epistemology, studies epistemic systems in which individuals work together to determine the epistemic status (true, justified, true beyond a reasonable doubt, e...

Field philosophy is both a collaborative practice of engaged scholarship and a theory of knowledge that contrasts with the model of disciplinary knowledge production. I briefly describe the origins...

This essay has two purposes. One is to present a detailed analysis of a historical example to defend the validity of the idea of universal rationality. Although diverse arguments have been offered...

How is economics made public? Specifically, how is economics made public on Google? Here we explore a methodological problem – studying google-knowing – and simultaneously explore the more pragmati...

Race is often epistemically relevant, but encoding racial stereotypes can lead to implicitly biased behavior. Thus, given the way race structures society, it seems to be impossible to be both epist...

Voting is often said to be irrational because of the incredibly small likelihood that an individual voter’s ballot will be pivotal in favour of her preferred candidate or party. A persuasive respon...

In this article, I introduce and analyze the notion of joint abilities; a species of ability possessed by agents who perform joint actions of a certain kind. Joint abilities are abilitie...

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I will characterize a phenomenon I call ‘self-appointed speaking-for’, and show how it constitutes a counter-example to Miranda Fricker’s definition of testimonial injustice...

ABSTRACTThe article examines how the epistemologies of Islam and modern science are reconciled in the writings of the contemporary Turkish Sunni Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, one of th...

This article addresses the question, ‘Should scholars debunk conspiracy theories or stay neutral?’ It describes ‘conspiracy theories’ and two senses of ‘neutrality,’ arguing that scholars should be...

Academic discussions concerning what to do about conspiracy theories often focus on whether or not to debunk them. Less often discussed are the methods, audiences and effectiveness of debunking eff...

The aim of this commentary is to complement Haslanger’s view of cognition as a skill shaped by culture. I start by presenting an empirically oriented account of the process of enculturation based on the cognitive integration framework. I then illustrate the active role of material (and not just symbolic) culture in cognition by drawing on extended cognition theory. Finally, I argue that embedding Haslanger’s work within these two theories of cognition better serves the objectives of her project and, at the (...) same time, promotes a critical philosophy of cognitive science. (shrink)

Scientists, philosophers, and policymakers disagree about how to define microaggression. Here, we offer a taxonomy of existing definitions, clustering around (a) the psychological motives of perpetrators, (b) the experience of victims, and (c) the functional role of microaggression in oppressive social structures. We consider conceptual and epistemic challenges to each and suggest that progress may come from developing novel hybrid accounts of microaggression, combining empirically tractable features with sensitivity to the testimony of victims.

“Epistemic safety” refers to an epistemic status in which the subject acquires true beliefs without involving epistemic luck. There is a tradition of cashing out safety-defining modality in terms of possible world semantics, and even Julian Dutant's and Martin Smith's normalcy-based notions of safety also take this semantics as a significant component of them. However, such an approach has to largely depend on epistemologists’ ad hoc intuitions on how to individuate possible worlds and how to pick out “close” worlds. In (...) contrast, I propose a probabilistic approach to safety to maximally preclude the preceding type of ad hoc-ness. The main idea is as follows: Each epistemic vignette wherein a subject S holds a true belief p has to be evaluated by a safety-ascriber, hence, S holds a true belief p safely iff according to the safety-ascriber's evaluation, the probability of the occurrence of the truth-maker of p is above a pre-fixed “safety threshold”. My theory will be applied to Lottery Cases, Gettierized Cases and Skeptical Cases to test the scope of its applicability. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I question the orthodox position that true belief is a fundamental epistemic value. I begin by raising a particularly epistemic version of the so-called “value problem of knowledge” in order to set up the basic explanandum and to motivate some of the claims to follow. In the second section, I take aim at what I call “bottom-up approaches” to this value problem, views that attempt to explain the added epistemic value of knowledge in terms of its relation (...) to a more fundamental value of true belief. The final section is a presentation of a value-theoretic alternative, one that explains the value problem presented in the first section while also doing justice to intuitions that may cause us to worry about bottom-up approaches. In short, knowledge and not mere true belief is a fundamental epistemic value as it is the constitutive goal of propositional inquiry. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI offer an epistemic framework for theorising about faith. I suggest that epistemic faith is a disposition to believe or infer according to particular methods, despite a kind of tendency to perceive an epistemic shortcoming in that method. Faith is unjustified, and issues into unjustified beliefs, when the apparent epistemic shortcomings are actual; it is justified when the epistemic worries are unfounded.Virtuous faith is central to a great deal of epistemology. A rational agent will manifest faith in their perceptual abilities, (...) in determining which experts and testifiers to trust, in their a priori reasoning, and in the epistemic capacities that are specific to their social environment. To ignore faith is to ignore a crucial element of our social and individualistic epistemic lives.One exercises faith when one forms beliefs despite a kind of apparent epistemic shortcoming, which may or may not correspond to a genuine weakness in evidential support. For example, standing on a bridge one knows to be safe, despite one's natural but irrational fear, can manifest a kind of epistemic faith. So too can forming perceptual beliefs, or engaging in logical inferences, despite lacking a dialectically satisfying response to skeptical arguments. The same goes for beliefs that are informed by one's ideological stance – these too count as manifestations of faith, and under some circumstances, such faith is epistemically appropriate. One upshot of my project will be that an intuitively appealing neutrality ideal for education and discourse is untenable. I'll conclude with some discussion of practical questions about whether, when, and why it can be worthwhile engaging seriously with people who have radically opposed views and frameworks. (shrink)

Decision theorists tend to treat indicative conditionals with reservation, because they can easily lead a deliberating agent astray. However, many indicatives can be very helpful in contexts of deliberation, so denying them all a role in such contexts seems to be overkill. We show that a recently revived inferential view on conditionals provides a straightforward explanation of why some indicatives are unassertable in contexts of deliberation and hints at a way of telling "deliberationally useless" and "deliberationally useful" conditionals apart.

ABSTRACTConventional wisdom holds that there is no lucky knowledge: if it is a matter of luck, in some relevant sense, that one's belief that p is true, then one does not know that p. Here I will argue that there is similarly no lucky understanding, at least in the case of one type of luck, namely environmental luck. This argument has three parts. First, we need to determine how we evaluate whether one has understanding, which requires determining what I will (...) call understanding's evaluative object. I argue that as the evaluative object of knowledge is a belief in a proposition, the evaluative object of understanding is a mental representation of a relational structure. Next, I show that arguments that environmental luck is incompatible with understanding miss the mark by considering cases in which one has a belief in a proposition is lucky to be true, instead of ones in which one's mental representation of a relational structure is lucky to obtain. I agree, then, with those who argue that one can have understanding when one's beliefs are environmentally lucky to be true, but that this compatibility is not relevant when considering the question of whether one can have environmentally lucky understanding. I then present what I take to be a properly constructed case which shows the incompatibility of environmental luck with understanding. (shrink)

In order to deal with the problem caused by environmental luck some proponents of robust virtue epistemology have attempted to argue that in virtue of satisfying the ability condition one will satisfy the safety condition. Call this idea the entailment thesis. In this paper it will be argued that the arguments that have been laid down for the entailment thesis entail a wrong kind of safety condition, one that we do not have in mind when we require our beliefs to (...) be safe from error in order for them to be knowledge. (shrink)

Feminist epistemologies hold that differences in the social locations of inquirers make for epistemic differences, for instance, in the sorts of things that inquirers are justified in believing. In this paper we situate this core idea in feminist epistemologies with respect to debates about social constructivism. We address three questions. First, are feminist epistemologies committed to a form of social constructivism about knowledge? Second, to what extent are they incompatible with traditional epistemological thinking? Third, do the answers to these questions (...) raise serious problems for feminist epistemologies? We argue that some versions of two of the main strands in feminist epistemology – feminist standpoint theory and feminist empiricism – are committed to a form of social constructivism, which requires certain departures from traditional epistemological thinking. But we argue that these departures are less problematic than one might think. Thus, (some) feminist epistemologies provide a plausible way of understanding how (some) knowledge might be socially constructed. (shrink)

Climate science denial results from ignorance and perpetuates ignorance about scientific facts and methods of inquiry. In this paper, I explore climate science denial as a type of active ignorance...

This article examines posthuman subjectivity and singularity as it exists within a nature-culture continuum. It reinterprets Rosi Braidotti’s idea of posthuman subjectivity from the philosophical p...

This paper uses the concept of epistemic injustice to shed light on the discriminatory treatment of experts in and by development aid. While the literature on epistemic justice is largely based on...

In most testimonial transactions between adults, the hearer’s obligation is to accord the speaker a level of credibility that matches the evidence that what she is saying is true. When the speaker...

There is a large gap between the specialized knowledge of scientists and laypeople’s understanding of the sciences. The novice-expert problem arises when non-experts are confronted with (real or apparent) scientific disagreement, and when they don’t know whom to trust. Because they are not able to gauge the content of expert testimony, they rely on imperfect heuristics to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientists. This paper investigates why some bodies of scientific knowledge become polarized along political fault lines. Laypeople navigate conflicting epistemic (...) and social demands in their acceptance of scientific testimony; this might explain their deference to scientific fringe theories, which often goes together with denying established scientific theories. I evaluate three approaches to mitigate denialism: improving the message, improving the messenger, and improving the environment in which the message is conveyed. (shrink)

Manuel Padilla Cruz has written an excellent response piece (Padilla Cruz 2019) to my initial article (Cull 2019) on dismissive incomprehension, where he raises a number of interesting issues and has put forward a number of excellent ideas for avenues for further research. Here I seek to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon by developing some responses that have come forward in thinking about and discussing dismissive incomprehension, especially in reference to what Padilla Cruz has said. Hopefully this adds to (...) his analysis and helps to provoke the further research we are both interested in seeing. (shrink)

More than ever before it is clear that suicidology requires a serious re-thinking of its approach to understanding and responding to suicide. This is not simply because disciplines such as medicine...

Suicidology, the scientific study of suicide and suicide prevention, constructs suicide as primarily a question of individual mental health. Despite recent engagement with suicide from a broader pu...