In this response to Seisuke Hayakawa’s paper, “Empathy, Timeliness, and Virtuous Hearing,” I have three distinct aims: to highlight how Hayawaka’s account of virtuous hearing deepens our understanding of ethical engagement; to raise questions about how timeliness will work in certain situations; and to draw attention to a line of empirical research that may support Hayawaka’s account.

I analyze Casey Johnson’s “care-based epistemology” in terms of four concepts—“epistemic need,” “relational epistemic obligations,” “epistemic labor,” and “epistemic reproduction”—that she derives from the relational framework of care. I first discuss how these notions reconfigure epistemic normativity as crafting healthy communities that satisfy epistemic needs of its members. Then I point to two theoretical resources that could strengthen this thesis but which Johnson either ignores or explicitly rejects. While Johnson is interested in drawing out the implications of care ethics for (...) a theory of knowledge, there is much in her discussion to suggest that a care-based epistemology can loop back to enrich care ethics itself—indicating a tighter connection between good caring and good knowing. (shrink)

***This paper was published along with Professor Amy Coplan's commentary, "Response to 'Empathy, Timeliness, and Virtuous Hearing'." ** This paper aims to demonstrate how the notion of timeliness enriches our understanding of empathy and its associated virtuous hearing as discussed in liberatory virtue epistemology. I begin by showing how timeliness is relevant to empathy. Next, I apply this insight to the idea of virtuous hearing, in which empathy plays a significant role. I thus broaden the liberatory-epistemological conception of virtuous hearing (...) as a corrective to timing-related injustice. Finally, I connect virtuous hearing with the ancient Greek concept of kairos, clarifying the conditions under which virtuous hearers must be sensitive to another’s opportune timing to testify. (shrink)

In this precis, I explain the basic commitments and the master argument from my book, Epistemic Care: Vulnerability, Inquiry, and Social Epistemology (2023), in which I explore the normative implications of a central observation from social epistemology: we are epistemically interdependent. We depend on other inquirers as we ask questions, assess evidence, and form beliefs—in short, in our inquiry. This means that our inquiry stands to go better or worse depending on the actions that other inquirers take or have taken. (...) We are, therefore, vulnerable in our inquiry. Vulnerability, according to care ethics, generates obligations in many cases. Care epistemology echoes this commitment. We can evaluate communities of inquiry for how well the epistemic vulnerabilities of their members are met. Adequate epistemic care is a necessary requirement for an epistemically admirable community. (shrink)

In his Two Treatises of Government John Locke declared that all men are naturally free, but that they can consent with others to form a civil society under government. In fact, what “actually constitutes any Political Society, is nothing but the consent of any number of Freemen.” There are competing views about what socially defined groups Locke had in mind for the domains that are naturally free and those who consent to form a civil society, whether they are, for example, (...) adult males with property or all adults. But I argue for a different approach. Depending on the context, Locke either referred to human beings who by nature have the disposition to be free when they reach maturity, or to those who in fact are actually free. Locke reserved the term “Freemen” to those that are in fact free, and not just dispositionally free. Locke believed that all human beings are born with dispositional freedom, which for Locke was an important normative feature that all human beings have at birth. Nevertheless, there are various conditions in which human beings, while born with the disposition to be free, are not in fact free, specifically, criminals, slaves, servants, children, most wives, and the mentally disabled. (shrink)

I begin by defending Heinrich Gustav Hotho’s foundational edition of the Lectures on Aesthetics (LA) contra Gethmann-Siebert and others who argue for a non-systematic view of Hegel’s aesthetics generally and music specifically. I defend Hegel against the common conceit that his comprehension of music was somehow deficient and introduce the Hegelian idea of absolute agency as performative in art and music. Reference to Kant’s transcendental aesthetics then allows us to grasp how, in Hegel, meaningful tones arise from the vibratory oscillation (...) between selfhood’s presiding unity and its temporal self-positing. I then trace back further elements of musical architecture, such as rhythm, harmony and melody to the temporal oscillation arising from within selfhood. The fundamental ambiguity within temporal oscillation is the source of meaningfulness in music, the feeling that its experience is meaningful without telling us exactly what that meaning is. Meaningfulness forms the absolute Ur-Ton of beautiful music, which arises as determinate tones within selfhood and resonates into the soul of the listener. The temporal vanishing of musical tones within a compositional framework is a pre-linguistic expression of meaning, performative of the ambiguous oscillation between the human and the divine. (shrink)

I propose a different strategy for developing the response to situationism from early Confucian thought. This response is criticized because of its association with antidemocratic social arrangements. I argue that the criticism is based on a failure to recognize the distinction between a theoretical account of virtue and human behavior, and a practical guide for cultivating virtue while also managing situations. Confucian virtue cultivation with integrated situation control can only be effectively implemented by sustaining certain social arrangements. But what matters (...) is not that these arrangements are antidemocratic. I show that the requisite social arrangement can be realized in different ways. And that what matters is that they are (a) wide, meaning they involve community-level participation; (b) grounded in a tension system based on the confidence that everyone has a natural propensity for virtue and doubt about whether anyone can easily act in accordance with this propensity; and (c) focused on correcting morally relevant cognition so that people can do the right thing. My proposal also allows for a new empirically grounded approach to developing Confucian ideas on virtue. (shrink)

According to the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument (QPIA), we should be realists about mathematics because mathematics is indispensable to science. QPIA’s reasoning can be understood in two ways. Under the confirmational analysis, QPIA argues that mathematics is confirmed as part of our best scientific theories. Under the pragmatic analysis, QPIA argues that our scientific practices implicitly assume the truth of mathematics. The usual reasons given in favour of the pragmatic analysis are that it affords advantages to proponents of QPIA by avoiding (...) some dependencies of the confirmational analysis. This paper argues that these reasons are indecisive, because the pragmatic analysis introduces some dependencies of its own. Nevertheless, the paper also argues, there are other reasons to prefer the pragmatic analysis. QPIA is an instance of a wider class of realist arguments—indispensability arguments—and the pragmatic analysis yields a preferable overall understanding of indispensability arguments than does the confirmational analysis. (shrink)

I characterize epistemic trust as an intellectual virtue of a responsibilist kind. I argue that an agent H places epistemic trust in agent S that p if and only if: (1) H takes S to communicate that p; (2) H believes that p; (3) H depends upon S’s (perceived) communication for H’s belief that p; (4) H sees S as epistemically authoritative with respect to p; and (5) H is confident that S will not purposefully lie about p. The virtuous (...) epistemic truster does all the above while also being skilled at judging when it is epistemically appropriate to trust, motivated to trust out of a desire for epistemic goods, and competent at the characteristic activity of epistemic trust. Having classified epistemic trust as a virtue, I highlight its tremendous epistemic value in the age of misinformation. Today, although we have access to an ocean of information at the click of a button, we can fall victim to fake news, rumors, and echo chambers. Thus, it is critical that we are able to discern who to trust, when to trust them, and about which epistemic goods. (shrink)

Epistemic structuralism, the idea that social structures have an immense influence on our inquiries and epistemic behavior, presents a unique challenge to the emerging field of vice epistemology. The most extreme application of this challenge results in the rejection of vice explanations in favor of structural explanations for epistemic behavior. Some vice epistemologists have expressed the intuitive idea that vice explanations and structural explanations may be synthesized, but the exact details of such a synthesis have yet to be adequately examined. (...) This paper starts by trying to gain clarity about structuralism and structuralist explanations in epistemology, then it discusses how a well-developed vice-structural explanation can be done. I end this paper by briefly noting a few crucial issues that demand further investigation. (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)

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)

Hegel’s theory of indexicality appears in the first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Sensuous-Certainty (SC). Current interpretations of the meaning of the universals that Hegel attributes to indexicals diverge from one another. Such interpretations can be divided into three groups: the universals as Fregean senses, as properties expressed by predicates in complex demonstratives, and as contrastive and recollective repeatability. I argue that all three exegeses face difficulties. Fregean senses, as referent-dependent modes of presentation, are particulars rather than universals. The (...) interpretation that appeals to predicates in complex demonstratives confuses referential indeterminacy with context sensitivity. The view of universals as contrastive and recollective repeatability misses the point of Hegel’s relevant arguments regarding universals. I propose to understand the universal in question as an indexical expression type akin to David Kaplan’s character (linguistic rules for expression use). In SC, Hegel argues for an expression/reference distinction by appealing to the context sensitivity of indexicals. (shrink)