This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Proponents of structural approaches suggest that our proneness to consuming fake news could only be reduced by reshaping the architecture of online environments. Proponents of educational approaches suggest that fake news consumers should be empowered to improve their epistemic agency. In this paper, we address a question that is relevant to this debate: namely, whether fake news consumers commit mistakes for which they can be criticized and (...) that they could easily avoid by reforming their doxastic conduct. Proponents of structural approaches, like R. Rini and B. Millar, have defended in different ways a negative answer to this question. In this paper, we criticize their views and suggest that individual users could improve on their epistemic practice by widening their information diet. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with the exemplarist strategy of fostering virtue development with the specific goal of improving its applicability in the context of education. I argue that, for what matters educationally, we have good reasons to endorse a liberal account of moral exemplarity. Specifically, I challenge two key assumptions of Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017), namely that moral exemplars are exceptionally virtuous agents and that imitating their behavior is the main strategy for acquiring the virtues. I will introduce (...) and discuss the notions of enkratic exemplars and injustice illuminators and show that we have good reasons to consider them moral exemplars although they fail to satisfy (either of) the key assumptions. (shrink)

This paper tackles the problem of defining what a cognitive expert is. Starting from a shared intuition that the definition of an expert depends upon the conceptual function of expertise, I shed light on two main approaches to the notion of an expert: according to novice-oriented accounts of expertise, experts need to provide laypeople with information they lack in some domain; whereas, according to research-oriented accounts, experts need to contribute to the epistemic progress of their discipline. In this paper, I (...) defend the thesis that cognitive experts should be identified by their ability to perform the latter function rather than the former, as novice-oriented accounts, unlike research-oriented ones, fail to comply with the rules of a functionalist approach to expertise. (shrink)

This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does (...) not require that fake news must be circulated with the intention to deceive one’s audience. In this way, our account overcomes a potential limitation of the current philosophical discussion about fake news, which appears to individuate the main problem with this phenomenon in the fact that fake news consumers are misled and misinformed. In contrast, the proposed analysis shows that an additional (and perhaps equally fundamental) problem uncovered by the spread of fake news is a widespread pathological relationship with information, one on which we consume information not to satisfy our interest in the truth but to strengthen our social identities and quench our hunger for social recognition. (shrink)

According to a recent account of epistemic authority proposed by Linda Zagzebski (2012), it is rational for laypersons to believe on authority when they conscientiously judge that the authority is more likely to form true beliefs and avoid false ones than they are in some domain. Christoph Jäger (2016) has recently raised several objections to her view. By contrast, I argue that both theories fail to adequately capture what epistemic authority is, and I offer an alternative account grounded in the (...) abilities that different kinds of authorities are required to possess. (shrink)

This article introduces an account of moral education grounded in Zagzebski’s recent Exemplarist Moral Theory and discusses two problems that have to be solved for the account to become a realistic alternative to other educational models on the market, namely the limited-applicability problem and the problem of indoctrination. The first problem raises worries about the viability of the account in ordinary circumstances. The second charges the proposed educational model with indoctrinating students. The main goal of this article is to show (...) how an exemplar-based account of moral education can handle both problems without compromising its structure and upshot. (shrink)

This paper confronts Zagzebski’s exemplarism with the intertwined debates over the conditions of exemplarity and the unity-disunity of the virtues, to show the advantages of a pluralistic exemplar-based approach to moral education (PEBAME). PEBAME is based on a prima facie disunitarist perspective in moral theory, which amounts to admitting both exemplarity in all respects and single-virtue exemplarity. First, we account for the advantages of PEBAME, and we show how two figures in recent Italian history (Giorgio Perlasca and Gino Bartali) satisfy (...) Blum’s definitions of ‘moral hero’ and ‘moral saint’ (1988). Then, we offer a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of heroes and saints with respect to character education, according to four criteria derived from PEBAME: admirability, virtuousness, transparency, and imitability. Finally, we conclude that both unitarist and disunitarist exemplars are fundamental to character education; this is because of the hero's superiority to the saint with respect to imitability, a fundamental feature of the exemplar for character education. (shrink)

This contribution discusses two aspects of Watson’s account of epistemic rights: namely, the nature of epistemic rights, and a particular form of epistemic rights violation that Watson calls the abuse of perceived epistemic authority. It is argued that Watson’s take on both aspects is unsatisfactory, and some suggestions for an alternative view are offered.

A recent paper by Bullock (2018) raises a dilemma for proponents of epistemic paternalism. If epistemic paternalists contend that epistemic improvements contribute to one’s wellbeing, then their view conflates with general paternalism. Instead, if they appeal to the notion of a distinctive epistemic value, their view is unjustified, in that concerns about epistemic value fail to outweigh concerns about personal sovereignty. In this chapter, I address Bullock’s challenge in a way that safeguards the legitimacy of epistemic paternalism, albeit restricting its (...) scope to a limited range of cognitive projects. After shedding light on a problem with how Bullock singles out cases to which the dilemma applies, I argue that there is at least one reasonable way of interpreting the notion of ‘personal autonomy’ which legitimates and justifies undertaking epistemically paternalistic interferences for one’s epistemic good. (shrink)

Article Summary. The epistemology of disagreement studies the epistemically relevant aspects of the interaction between parties who hold diverging opinions about a given subject matter. The central question that the epistemology of disagreement purports to answer is how the involved parties should resolve an instance of disagreement. Answers to this central question largely depend on the epistemic position of each party before disagreement occurs. Two parties are equally positioned from an epistemic standpoint—namely, they are epistemic peers—to the extent that they (...) have roughly equal access to the evidence and comparable intellectual resources. When one party is epistemically better positioned than the other—that is, when one is an epistemic superior—it is widely agreed that this party should retain their belief while the other party—the epistemic inferior—should revise their opinion in the direction of what the epistemic superior believes. Addressing the central question is a complex task when the disagreeing parties are epistemic peers. Three main answers can be distinguished. Conciliatory answers mandate that both parties revise—i.e. lower their confidence in—their beliefs upon the occurrence of peer disagreement. Steadfast answers allow both parties to retain their respective beliefs, thereby committing them to demote the epistemic position of the interlocutor. The third group of answers suggests that the solution to peer disagreement depends on whether either party is highly justified in holding their belief. If either party is highly justified, then it is rational that this party retains its view. If neither party is highly justified, both should revise. The epistemology of disagreement addresses further important questions such as: whether the occurrence of disagreement opens the doors to skepticism and/or relativism; what the consequences of epistemic disagreement on intellectual character are; what laypeople should do when experts disagree with each other; and whether disagreement among groups can be treated in the same way as disagreement among individuals. (shrink)

Christian Quast has recently embarked on the project of systematizing the debate about the notion of expertise, an extremely fascinating and important issue addressed by scholars of many disciplines yet still in need of an interdisciplinary take. He sheds light on a number of relevant features of this notion and defends what he calls a “balanced” account of expertise, namely one that defines this concept in light of an expert’s dispositions, manifestations of their dispositions, and social role or function. In (...) this critical reply, I offer some considerations that put pressure on Quast’s balanced account and hopefully help anyone interested in this debate take a step forward toward explaining what it takes for one to be an expert. The reply is structured as follows. First, I argue that his allegedly balanced view is liable to a potentially compromising tension between its function component and the ingredients of objective expertise (§1). Then, I show that Quast’s threefold characterization of an objective expert is too strong, as it imposes conditions that several individuals whom we would consider experts are unable to fulfill (§2). Finally, I provide reasons in favor of endorsing an objective account of expertise in light of some specific features of our society and show how this account can take into due consideration the different services experts ordinarily perform (§3). (shrink)

This paper attempts to provide a remedy to a surprising lacuna in the current discussion in the epistemology of expertise, namely the lack of a theory accounting for the epistemic authority of collective agents. After introducing a service conception of epistemic authority based on Alvin Goldman’s account of a cognitive expert, I argue that this service conception is well suited to account for the epistemic authority of collective bodies on a non-summativist perspective, and I show in detail how the defining (...) requirements of an expert can apply to epistemic groups. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical introduction to moral epistemology, that is, one of the emerging disciplines within metaethics and epistemology. The main sections of this contribution are devoted to addressing the three following issues: first, whether it is possible to acquire moral knowledge; second, how – viz., through which sources – we can acquire moral knowledge; and third, which implications moral epistemology draws from empirical sciences.

In this entry, I offer a critical analysis of virtue epistemology, which is a fundamental collection of recent approaches to epistemology. After a few remarks on the roots of this view, I reconstruct the key features of the two main accounts of virtue epistemology and I discuss how these accounts respond to some traditional epistemological challenges. -/- Questo contributo propone una disamina critica dell’epistemologia delle virtù, una delle correnti più importanti della teoria della conoscenza contemporanea. Dopo un breve affondo sulle (...) origini di questa corrente, vengono analizzate le caratteristiche dei due approcci fondamentali all’epistemologia delle virtù e le risposte che essi offrono ad alcuni problemi epistemologici tradizionali. (shrink)

The recent literature has seen a burgeoning discussion of the idea that the overarching epistemic goal of education is the cultivation of the intellectual virtues. Moreover, there have been attempts to put this idea into practice, with virtue-led educational interventions in schools, universities, and even prisons. This paper explores the question of whether—and, if so, to what degree—such intellectual virtue-based approaches to education are essentially social. The focus in this regard is on the role of intellectual exemplars within this approach, (...) and in particular the extent to which direct social interaction with such exemplars is crucial to the implementation of this educational methodology. (shrink)

Questo contributo riguarda il tema specifico dell’umiltà come virtù etica e nasce all’interno di uno studio più ampio sulla relazione tra umiltà in campo morale e umiltà intellettuale, tema ricorrente tra i sostenitori della Virtue Epistemology. L’intento di questo saggio è quello di approfondire il recente dibattito circa la natura dell’umiltà come virtù e la sua definizione e il mio obiettivo è quello di mostrare come la tradizione aristotelico-tomista, generalmente sottovalutata da chi si occupa di umiltà nella filosofia analitica contemporanea, (...) possa fornire una risposta soddisfacente alle problematiche più recenti relative a questo tema. La struttura di questo breve contributo prevede un primo paragrafo in cui offrirò una sintetica panoramica sulla concezione di umiltà di Aristotele e Tommaso d’Aquino. Quindi, nel secondo paragrafo, analizzerò la ricezione di questa virtù all’interno della filosofia morale contemporanea di matrice analitica, affrontando due problemi di cui qualsiasi definizione di umiltà deve dare spiegazione: la compatibilità di umiltà e conoscenza di sé, e la possibilità, per chi eccelle in un determinato ambito, di essere umile. Mostrerò come la tradizione aristotelico-tomista possa fornire una risposta efficace a tali quesiti recenti e presenterò i tratti generali della concezione di umiltà come virtù relazionale. Infine concluderò indicando alcuni punti degni di futuri sviluppi. (shrink)

This paper explores the educational potential of epistemic exemplars, namely those individuals who possess intellectual virtues to an exceptional degree. It purports to do so by applying the exemplarist framework proposed by Linda Zagzebski in her Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017) to the domain of intellectual virtues. After a brief summary of the main features of her view, I explain how the exemplarist dynamics can apply to the intellectual domain. Then, I introduce the basics of an exemplar-based account of education and (...) explain how it can be employed to educate the young to intellectual virtues. Finally, I attempt to show how this model can accommodate several objections and, in particular, how it addresses the charge of indoctrinating the students raised by proponents of a critical thinking approach to education. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether practical interests affect knowledge attributions in cases of testimony. It is argued that stakes impact testimonial knowledge attributions by increasing or decreasing the requirements for hearers to trust speakers and thereby gain the epistemic right to acquire knowledge via testimony. Standard, i.e. invariantist, reductionism and non-reductionism fail to provide a plausible account of testimony that is stakes sensitive, while non- invariantist versions of both traditional accounts can remedy this deficiency. Support for this conceptual analysis of stakes (...) is found through a review of the experimental philosophy literature on stakes effects on knowledge attribution. Finally, a diagnosis is offered for what is needed to provide a more robust defense of the paper’s primary claims in terms of future experimental study. (shrink)

Molte questioni aperte che interessano la nostra società e ci fanno preoccupare per il futuro ruotano intorno a un problema fondamentale: capire chi sia davvero esperto in un determinato ambito e, di conseguenza, decidere di chi possiamo fidarci. È inevitabile che ognuno di noi debba riporre la propria fiducia in altri individui quando si tratta di questioni quali il riscaldamento globale e la tutela dell’ambiente, le terapie mediche a cui sottoporsi, la sicurezza informatica e l’istruzione dei propri figli. Ma come (...) dovremmo scegliere le persone a cui affidarci? E cosa dobbiamo fare quando il parere dell’esperto si discosta dalla nostra opinione? Il libro si propone di rispondere a queste domande offrendo una chiave di lettura originale e innovativa dell’attuale dibattito sulle nozioni di esperto e di autorità nella filosofia della conoscenza e nella filosofia morale di matrice analitica. (shrink)

Se nell’era della post-verità la competenza degli esperti è oggetto di continui attacchi, la figura dell’esperto morale è da sempre vista con un certo scetticismo. Riconoscerne l’esistenza implica ammettere che alcune persone sono moralmente superiori ad altre e richiede di determinare la natura della loro superiorità. Dobbiamo immaginare l’esperto morale come una persona virtuosa o come uno specialista in fatto di dilemmi etici? E quale contributo possiamo aspettarci dall’esperto morale all’interno delle nostre comunità? Il volume si propone di rispondere a (...) queste domande e offrire una concezione originale dell’expertise in campo etico, a partire dagli studi più recenti in etica delle virtù ed epistemologia morale. (shrink)

Response to Steven Bland’s ‘Interactionism, Debiasing, and the Division of Epistemic Labour’ (in Social Virtue Epistemology, (eds.) M. Alfano, C. Klein & J. de Ridder). Biased cognition is an obvious source of epistemic vice, but there is some controversy about whether cognitive biases generate reliabilist or responsibilist epistemic vices. Bland’s argument, in a nutshell, is that since the development of cognitive biases is due to the interplay of internal psychological processes and external (i.e., environmental) conditions, it cannot be expected that (...) a solution to the problem tackles only one of these dimensions. We argue that the complex architecture on which Bland’s coordinated approach is grounded appears to lose some stability once we analyze more closely its pillars. We shall concentrate our attention on the notion of reliabilist and responsibilist epistemic virtues that the approach should foster as well as on the educational implications of Bland’s view. (shrink)

The insightful commentaries to our contribution "Education as the Social Cultivation of Intellectual Virtue" (in 'Social Virtue Epistemology', (eds.) M. Alfano, C. Klein & J. de Ridder, Routledge 2022) offered by Alessandra Tanesini and Lani Watson highlight some important aspects of the work that philosophers, education theorists, and educators should carry out to strengthen the theoretical and practical advantages of the educational approach we have proposed. This commentary briefly addresses a few points that could set the grounds for future investigations (...) on intellectual virtue-based approaches to education and their social dimensions. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of moral expertise in the contemporary philosophical debate, with a focus on three accounts discussed across moral epistemology, bioethics, and virtue ethics: an epistemic authority account, a skilled agent account, and a hybrid model sharing key features of the two. It is argued that there are no convincing reasons to defend a monistic approach that reduces moral expertise to only one of these models. A pluralist view is outlined in the attempt to reorient the discussion (...) about moral expertise. (shrink)

While possessing moral understanding is agreed to be a core epistemic and moral value, it remains a matter of dispute whether it can be acquired via testimony and whether it involves an ability to engage in moral reasoning. This paper addresses both issues with the aim of contributing to the current debates on moral understanding in moral epistemology and virtue ethics. It is argued that moral epistemologists should stop appealing to the argument from the transmissibility of moral understanding to make (...) a case for their favorite view of moral understanding. It is also argued that proponents of exemplarist moral theories cannot remain neutral on whether the ability to engage in moral reasoning is a necessary component of moral understanding. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the topics of trust and expertise from the perspective of political epistemology. In particular, it addresses four main questions: (§1) How should we characterise experts and their expertise? (§2) How can non-experts recognize a reliable expert? (§3) What does it take for non-experts to trust experts? (§4) What problems impede trust in experts?

This article takes issue with two prominent views in the current debate around epistemic partiality in friendship. Strong views of epistemic partiality hold that friendship may require biased beliefs in direct conflict with epistemic norms. Weak views hold that friendship may place normative expectations on belief formation but in a manner that does not violate these norms. It is argued that neither view succeeds in explaining the relationship between epistemic norms and friendship norms. Weak views inadvertently endorse a form of (...) motivated reasoning, failing to resolve the normative clash they seek to avoid. Strong views turn out to be incoherent once we consider the question of whether the requirement to form an epistemically partial belief is independent of whether the belief in question would be true. It is then argued that an epistemology of friendship should recognise the special role that understanding plays in friendship. On this view, friendship normatively requires understanding the truth about our friends. This entails that epistemic partiality, far from being a requirement, is in fact at odds with good friendship. (shrink)

Questo articolo prende in esame il fenomeno della proliferazione di fake news da un punto di vista filosofico—anzi, per meglio dire, prettamente epistemologico—con particolare attenzione a tre questioni fondamentali: cosa sono le fake news e come debbano essere definite; quali meccanismi ne favoriscono la proliferazione sui social media; chi debba essere ritenuto responsabile e degno di biasimo nel processo sotteso alla generazione, pubblicazione e diffusione di fake news. A partire dall'analisi dei principali lavori nella letteratura filosofica sul tema, ci proponiamo (...) di: offrire una definizione di fake news che eviti le obiezioni sollevate contro altre definizioni discusse dalla letteratura (§1); mettere in luce le principali cause della propagazione di fake news, con particolare riferimento ai bias cognitivi e alle strutture comunitarie in cui si organizzano gli utenti dei social media (§2); infine, presentare una analisi originale della responsabilità epistemica dei consumatori di fake news (§3). (shrink)

This paper investigates civility from an Aristotelian perspective and has two objectives. The first is to offer a novel account of this virtue based on Aristotle’s remarks about civic friendship. The proposed account distinguishes two main components of civility—civic benevolence and civil deliberation—and shows how Aristotle’s insights can speak to the needs of our communities today. The notion of civil deliberation is then unpacked into three main dimensions: motivational, inquiry-related, and ethical. The second objective is to illustrate how the post-truth (...) condition—in particular, the spread of misinformation typical of the digital environments we inhabit—obstructs our capacity to cultivate the virtue of civility by impairing every component of civil deliberation. The paper hopes to direct virtue theorists’ attention to the need to foster civic virtues as a means of counteracting the negative aspects of the post-truth age. (shrink)

Il problema di determinare quali siano i fondamenti dell’etica si riflette direttamente sul dibattito tra le principali etiche normative che si è arricchito, in tempi molto recenti, della teoria morale detta “esemplarista”, proposta da Linda Zagzebski, voce illustre nel panorama della filosofia morale, della conoscenza e della religione analitiche. L’esemplarismo, come ogni altra teoria morale fondazionalista, ha a cuore la questione del fondamento, ma si distingue dalle classiche teorie fondazionaliste sfidando l’idea che tale fondamento possa essere un concetto. Infatti, Zagzebski (...) non fonda la sua teoria su uno dei concetti morali fondamentali (bene, virtù, atto giusto), bensì fa derivare la definizione di tali concetti dall’individuazione di un esemplare morale in “questa o quella” persona. In altre parole, l’esemplarismo trova la sua fondazione non-concettuale in quei soggetti che ammiriamo per la loro eccezionalità morale. Questo contributo intende fornire una breve analisi della proposta esemplarista suddivisa in due parti: nella prima parte, ricostruirò i lineamenti essenziali dell’esemplarismo tentando di definire chi sia l’esemplare e quale sia la struttura portante della teoria esemplarista; la seconda parte, invece, includerà una breve critica della proposta di Zagzebski e alcune riflessioni sui vantaggi e le prospettive di ricerca che essa apre. (shrink)

The problem of explaining how we acquire knowledge via testimony gives rise to a dilemma, according to which any theory must make testimonial knowledge either too hard or too easy, and therefore no adequate account of testimonial knowledge is possible. In recent work, John Greco offers a solution to the dilemma on behalf of anti-reductionism that appeals to Edward Craig’s functionalist epistemology. It is argued that Greco’s solution is flawed, in that his functionalist account provides wrong verdicts of ordinary cases (...) of testimonial knowledge. In contrast, it is shown that both anti-reductionism and reductionism have the resources to solve the dilemma and provide the right verdicts in ordinary cases of testimonial knowledge without appealing to Greco’s functionalism. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of the current debate in vice theory. Its main aim is to provide the reader with the conceptual and methodological tools to navigate the discussion among reliabilist, responsibilist, and obstructivist approaches to moral and epistemic vices. After a brief exploration of the reasons underlying the recent flourishing of vice theories (§2), the responsibilist account is introduced (§3) and several critical remarks are offered to ensure that this view can accommodate the cases of malevolent and (...) indifferent individuals (§4). The two following sections are devoted to a critical discussion of vice-reliabilism (§5) and Quassim Cassam’s obstructivism (§6). The conclusive section (§7) provides reasons to favor vice-responsibilism over vice-reliabilism and Heather Battaly’s pluralist approach, and sheds light on the innovative features of an obstructivist reading. (shrink)

This article sheds light on moral education from an exemplarist perspective. Following Linda Zagzebski's Exemplarist Virtue Theory, we relate several fundamental exemplarist intuitions to the classical virtue ethical debate over the unity-disunity of the virtues, to endorse a pluralistic exemplar-based approach to moral education ("Empe"). After a few preliminary remarks, we argue that Empe amounts to defending "a prima facie" disunitarist perspective in moral theory, which admits both exemplarity in all respects (moral sainthood) and single-domain exemplarity (moral heroism). Then, we (...) evaluate the effectiveness of heroes and saints for moral education, according to four criteria derived from Empe. This analysis allows us to conclude that moral education should value both kinds of exemplars and, therefore, adopt weaker standards of exemplarity than the unitarist's ones. (shrink)

The volume is the first treatment in the Italian language, introductory yet as complete and up-to-date as possible, of Virtue Ethics, a current of contemporary ethics that is still relatively unknown and underdeveloped in continental Europe, which centers around the notion of virtue. Although this term is not particularly used or appreciated in today's common language, the interest it has generated in recent decades allows Virtue Ethics to be presented as a true branch of contemporary ethics with classical roots, distinguishing (...) itself from deontological and utilitarian-consequentialist approaches. After a review of the main authors associated with Virtue Ethics, the book examines its most relevant and debated conceptual points from a thematic or problem-based perspective, highlighting the connections between virtues and other dimensions of human action. Lastly, it includes an extensive and up-to-date bibliography. (shrink)

This is the foreword written by me in italian with the English translation to the volume Virtù, legge e fioritura umana: Saggi in onore di Angelo Campodonico edited by Simona Langella, Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, Michel Croce.

Francis Sparshott introduced the term ‘remote art’ in his 1982 presidential address to the American Society for Aesthetics. The concept has not drawn much notice since—although individual remote arts, such as palaeolithic art and the artistic practices of subaltern cultures, have enjoyed their fair share of attention from aestheticians. This paper explores what unites some artistic practices under the banner of remote art, arguing that remoteness is primarily a matter of some audience’s epistemic distance from a work’s context of creation. (...) I introduce palaeoart—the depiction of extinct prehistoric fauna and flora, especially from the Mesozoic—as a paradigmatic case of remote art, showing that its remoteness is secured both by the deceptively rich cognitive load required for its creation and appreciation, and by its existence at the margins of the institutional artworld, which ensures that this cognitive loading is largely obscured. Too often, remote art is not just inscrutable, it is invisible to us. (shrink)

Psychiatric research is in crisis because of repeated failures to discover new drugs for mental disorders. Lack of measurement validity could partly account for these failures. If researchers do not actually measure the effects of drugs on the disorders they aim to investigate, one should expect suboptimal treatment outcomes. I argue that this is the case, focusing on depression, and fear & anxiety disorders. In doing so, I show how psychiatric research illustrates a more general phenomenon that I call “validity (...) drift.” A validity drift occurs when, in the course of developing new measurement procedures, researchers end up studying something different from what they originally aimed to study. I analyze the different ways in which scientists attempt to validate procedures for measuring mental disorders for the purpose of testing drugs in animal models. I show how those validation efforts might fail, thereby leading to validity drifts. Overall, this analysis highlights the complex interplay between the development of new measurement procedures, their calibration, and scientific theories of the target phenomena. (shrink)

Studying consciousness requires contrasting conscious and unconscious perception. While many studies have reported unconscious perceptual effects, recent work has questioned whether such effects are genuinely unconscious, or whether they are due to weak conscious perception. Some philosophers and psychologists have reacted by denying that there is such a thing as unconscious perception, or by holding that unconscious perception has been previously overestimated. This article has two parts. In the first part, I argue that the most significant attack on unconscious perception (...) commits the criterion content fallacy: the fallacy of interpreting evidence that observers were conscious of something as evidence that they were conscious of the task-relevant features of the stimuli. In the second part, I contend that the criterion content fallacy is prevalent in consciousness research. For this reason, I hold that if unconscious perception exists, scientists studying consciousness could routinely underestimate it. I conclude with methodological recommendations for moving the debate forward. (shrink)

There is a tendency to take mounted dinosaur skeletons at face value, as the raw data on which the science of paleontology is founded. But the truth is that mounted dinosaur skeletons are substantially intention-dependent—they are artifacts. More importantly, I argue, they are also substantially imagination-dependent: their production is substantially causally reliant on preparators’ creative imaginations, and their proper reception is predicated on audiences’ recreative imaginations. My main goal here is to show that dinosaur skeletal mounts are plausible candidates for (...) art-status. But, what is more, I think they are artworks—specifically, sculptures. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that metal’s ‘heaviness’ is conceptually inarticulable. I argue, on the contrary, that ‘heaviness’ is a matter of inaccessibility—the ‘something more’ that makes metal ‘heavy’ is actually something less: less auditory processing fluency. Like profound literature, metal resists, but also invites and rewards, interpretation. I argue that understanding ‘heaviness’ in terms of auditory processing fluency allows us to make sense of a number of otherwise puzzling features of the music, and to articulate a unifying gestalt for (...) the genre. (shrink)

Despite contemporary moral philosophers' renewed attention to the moral significance of emotions, the attitudinal repertoire with which they equip the mature moral agent remains stunted. One attitude moral philosophers neglect (if not disown) is contempt. While acknowledging the nastiness of contempt, I here correct the neglect by providing an account of the moral psychology of contempt. In the process, I defend the moral propriety of certain tokens of properly person-focused contempt against some prominent objections -- among them, objections stemming from (...) Kantian worries that contempt is incompatible with the respect we owe to persons as such. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended judgement, full (...) belief, credences, and acceptance. In closing, I point to the epistemological significance of hypothesis. More specifically, I contend that holding an attitude of hypothesis enables us to respond rationally to peer disagreement, and I suggest that such an attitude offers a suitable articulation of the view, originally put forward by Philip Kitcher, that cognitive diversity in inquiry has epistemic benefits. (shrink)

Permissivism is the view that, sometimes, there is more than one doxastic attitude that is perfectly rationalised by the evidence. Impermissivism is the denial of Permissivism. Several philosophers, with the aim to defend either Impermissivism or Permissivism, have recently discussed the value of (im)permissive rationality. This paper focuses on one kind of value-conferring considerations, stemming from the so-called “truth-connection” enjoyed by rational doxastic attitudes. The paper vindicates the truth-connected value of permissive rationality by pursuing a novel strategy which rests on (...) two main planks: first, there is a distinction between a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of belief-forming methods. Secondly, different kinds of decision-theoretic reasoning, i.e. expected-accuracy reasoning and accuracy-domination reasoning, must be paired with a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of methods, respectively. I argue that while the first pair is wholly irrelevant to the question of the truth-connection, the second affords the means to a permissivist explanation of the truth-connected value of rationality. (shrink)

Notes prises par Jacques Lagrange lors du cours d'anthropologie donné par Michel Foucault en 1954-1955 à l'École Normale Supérieure.

Negative subjective reports such as “I didn’t see the stimulus” can be interpreted as indicating either that the subject didn’t see the stimulus, or as indicating that, while the subject did see the stimulus, the strength of sensory signals associated with the stimulus fell below a conservative criterion for answering “seen”. Determining which of these two interpretations is correct is the criterion problem. I present two ways in which researchers can solve this problem. But there’s more. What I call the (...) “new criterion problem” consists in determining whether criteria effects reflect perceptual changes, or changes in response strategy. Through case studies, I argue that this new version of the problem can be solved as well, although there is currently no systematic way to solve it. I conclude that criterion problems do not constitute good reasons for skepticism about the scientific study of consciousness. (shrink)

As part of recent epistemic challenges to democracy, some have endorsed the implementation of epistemic constraints on voting, institutional mechanisms that bar incompetent voters from participating in public decision-making procedures. This proposal is often considered incompatible with a commitment to political equality. In this paper, I aim to dispute the strength of this latter claim by offering a theoretical justification for epistemic constraints on voting that does not rest on antiegalitarian commitments. Call this the civic accountability justification for epistemic constraints (...) on voting. On this view, voters stand to one another in a normative relation of reciprocal accountability that requires them to uphold an epistemically responsible conduct. Modest epistemic constraints on voting are justifiable because they secure that participation in voting is conforming to this normative requirement. Thanks to its distinctive features, the civic accountability justification can overcome two problems that egalitarians commonly associate with the idea of epistemic constraints on voting: the disrespect problem and the hierarchy problem. (shrink)

Tradition has it that first-person thought is somehow special. It is also commonplace to maintain that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. Following Annalisa Coliva and, more recently, Santiago Echeverri, I take the specialness claim to be the claim that thinking a first-person thought comes with a certain guarantee of its pattern of reference. Echeverri maintains that such a guarantee is explained by a (...) fairly flatfooted interpretation of the thinker-reflexive rule. I argue, however, that the explanatory aspirations of the thinker-reflexive rule are fulfilled only if we accept an epistemically loaded gloss on the notion of a thinker of a thought featuring the rule. That gloss is unpacked in terms of the subject’s ability to be acquainted with the phenomenal character of their thoughts. (shrink)

Opponents to consciousness in fish argue that fish do not feel pain because they do not have a neocortex, which is a necessary condition for feeling pain. A common counter-argument appeals to the multiple realizability of pain: while a neocortex might be necessary for feeling pain in humans, pain might be realized differently in fish. This paper argues, first, that it is impossible to find a criterion allowing us to demarcate between plausible and implausible cases of multiple realization of pain (...) without running into a circular argument. Second, opponents to consciousness in fish cannot be provided with reasons to believe in the multiple realizability of pain. I conclude that the debate on the existence of pain in fish is impossible to settle by relying on the multiple realization argument. (shrink)