Statistical resentment, or: what’s wrong with acting, blaming, and believing on the basis of statistics alone

Synthese 199 (3-4):5687-5718 (2021)
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Abstract

Statistical evidence—say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other—can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context—with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context of a wider set of examples of responses and attitudes that seem not to be appropriately groundable in statistical evidence. Regrettably, we do not come up with a fully general, fully adequate, fully unified account of all the phenomena discussed. But we give reasons to believe that no such account is forthcoming, and we sketch a somewhat messier account that may be the best that can be had here.

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Author Profiles

David Enoch
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Levi Spectre
Open University of Israel

Citations of this work

Praise.Daniel Telech - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (10):1-19.
Encroachment on Emotion.James Fritz - 2022 - Episteme 19 (4):515-533.
Hope, Worry, and Suspension of Judgment.James Fritz - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (8):573-587.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The wrongs of racist beliefs.Rima Basu - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2497-2515.
Philosophical explanations.Robert Nozick - 1981 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge and practical interests.Jason Stanley - 2005 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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