12 found
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  1.  58
    In defence of epistemic vices.Steven Bland - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-22.
    Vice essentialism is the view that epistemic vices have robustly negative effects on our epistemic projects. Essentialists believe that the manifestation of epistemic vices can explain many of our epistemic failures, but few, if any, of our epistemic successes. The purpose of this paper is to argue that vice essentialism is false. In §1, I review the case that some epistemic vices, such as closed-mindedness and extreme epistemic deference, have considerably beneficial effects when manifested in collectivist contexts. In §2, I (...)
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  2.  24
    Mandevillian vices.Mandi Astola, Steven Bland & Mark Alfano - 2024 - Synthese 204 (1):1-19.
    Bernard Mandeville argued that traits that have traditionally been seen as detrimental or reprehensible, such as greed, ambition, vanity, and the willingness to deceive, can produce significant social goods. He went so far as to suggest that a society composed of individuals who embody these vices would, under certain constraints, be better off than one composed only of those who embody the virtues of self-restraint. In the twentieth century, Mandeville’s insights were taken up in economics by John Maynard Keynes, among (...)
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  3.  41
    An Interactionist Approach to Cognitive Debiasing.Steven Bland - 2022 - Episteme 19 (1):66-88.
    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 asinglelevel 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 frominteractionsbetween these three domains. Consequently, epistemologists should spend less time defending these programmes, and more timecoordinatingthem. This paper offers empirically based arguments for the interactionist (...)
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  4.  14
    Epistemic Relativism and Scepticism: Unwinding the Braid.Steven Bland - 2018 - Cham: Springer Verlag.
    This book confronts the threats of epistemic relativism and Pyrrhonian scepticism to analytic philosophy. Epistemic relativists reject absolute notions of knowledge and justification, while sceptics claim that knowledge and justification of any kind are unattainable. If either of these views is correct, then there can be no objective basis for thinking that one set of methods does a better job of delivering accurate information than any other set of methods. Philosophers have generally sought to resist these threats by responding to (...)
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  5.  47
    Scepticism, relativism, and the structure of epistemic frameworks.Steven Bland - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (4):539-544.
    This paper has four aims: first, to outline the role of the sceptical problem of the criterion in the principal argument for epistemic relativism; second, to establish that methodist and particularist responses to the problem of the criterion do not, by themselves, constitute successful strategies for resisting epistemic relativism; third, to argue that a more fruitful strategy is to attempt to evaluate epistemic frameworks on the basis of the epistemic resources that they have in common; and finally, to make the (...)
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  6.  35
    Intellectual Humility and Humbling Environments.Steven Bland - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-22.
    While there are many competing accounts and scales of intellectual humility, philosophers and psychologists are generally united in treating it as an epistemically _beneficial_ disposition of _individual_ agents. I call the research guided by this supposition the _traditional approach_ to studying intellectual humility. The traditional approach is entirely understandable in light of recent findings that individual differences in intellectual humility are associated with various deleterious epistemic tendencies. Nonetheless, I argue that its near monopoly has resulted in an underestimation of important (...)
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  7. Incommensurability, relativism, and the epistemic authority of science.Steven Bland - 2014 - Episteme 11 (4):463-473.
  8.  65
    Schlick, Conventionalism, and Scientific Revolutions.Steven Bland - 2012 - Acta Analytica 27 (3):307-323.
    Abstract Schlick quite clearly maintains that the shift from classical physics to the theories of relativity is not necessitated by experience, but motivated by the pragmatic payoff of simplifying space-time ontology. However, there is in his work another, heretofore unrecognized argument for the revolutionary shift from classical to relativistic physics. According to this conceptual line of argument, the principles that define simultaneity and motion in classical physics fail to establish a univocal correspondence to physical quantities, and therefore must be revised, (...)
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  9.  97
    Circularity, Scepticism and Epistemic Relativism.Steven Bland - 2016 - Social Epistemology 30 (2):150-162.
    It would seem that an epistemic framework can be justified only by means of a non-circular argument that establishes its truth-conduciveness. The problem of epistemic circularity suggests that no such argument is possible. Externalists and particularists have addressed the problem of scepticism by claiming that epistemically circular arguments can establish the truth-conduciveness of a framework’s epistemic methods. However, since these arguments are available for a good many frameworks, this response does nothing to answer the threat of epistemic relativism. The purpose (...)
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  10.  16
    Conceptual Analysis, Analytic Philosophy, and the Psychologistic Turn.Steven Bland - 2015 - Discipline filosofiche. 25 (1):43-64.
    There is an influential, ongoing debate between traditionalists and experimentalists about how to carry out conceptual analysis by means of the method of possible cases. The debate concerns whose intuitions are evidentially relevant to philosophical theories, and which methods are most appropriate for collecting such evidence. The aim of this paper is not to take sides in this debate, but to question the monopoly that the method of possible cases has in contemporary discussions of philosophical methodology. Since early analytic philosophy (...)
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  11.  54
    Cognitive bias, situationism, and virtue reliabilism.Steven Bland - 2018 - Synthese 198 (1):471-490.
    Mark Alfano claims that the heuristics and biases literature supports inferential cognitive situationism, i.e., the view that most of our inferential beliefs are arrived at and retained by means of unreliable heuristics rather than intellectual virtues. If true, this would present virtue reliabilists with an unpleasant choice: they can either accept inferential skepticism, or modify or abandon reliabilism. Alfano thinks that the latter course of action is most plausible, and several reliabilists seem to agree. I argue that this is not (...)
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  12.  27
    Rationality in context: unstable virtues in an uncertain world.Steven Bland - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
    This book uses the psychological literature on rationality to weigh in on the recent debate between virtue epistemologists and epistemic situationists. It argues that both sides have misconstrued the literature and that an interactionist framework is needed to square epistemic theory with empirical facts about reasoning and inference. The explosion of empirical literature on human rationality has led to seismic shifts across a multitude of academic disciplines. This book considers its implications for epistemology. In particular, it critically evaluates the treatment (...)
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