Deepfakes pose a multi-faceted threat to the acquisition of knowledge. It is widely hoped that technological solutions—in the form of artificially intelligent systems for detecting deepfakes—will help to address this threat. I argue that the prospects for purely technological solutions to the problem of deepfakes are dim. Especially given the evolving nature of the threat, technological solutions cannot be expected to prevent deception at the hands of deepfakes, or to preserve the authority of video footage. Moreover, the success of such (...) technologies depends on institutional trust that is in short supply. Finally, outsourcing the discrimination between the real and the fake to automated, largely opaque systems runs the risk of undermining epistemic autonomy. (shrink)

Life is a group project. It takes a village. The same is true of our intellectual lives. Since we are finite cognitive creatures with limited time and resources, any healthy intellectual life requires that we rely quite heavily on others. For nearly any question you want to investigate, there is someone who is in a better epistemic position than you are to determine the answer. For most people, their expertise does not extend far beyond their own personal lives, and even (...) here we can sometimes find others who are more reliable. Without relying on them we would know very little about the world. Since others are typically better positioned to determine the answers to the questions we have, it should make us wonder why we should bother to try and figure out much of anything at all for ourselves. After all, when trying to find an answer to a question, we should take the best route to the answer, and the most reliable route to the answer to most questions is to rely on the minds of others. At the same time, there is something defective about an intellectual life that outsources nearly all of its intellectual projects. That is, it seems that individuals ought to think for themselves, at least about some issues and at least some of the time. The puzzle is in determining why it is epistemically valuable to think for yourself, since doing so will almost always not be the best available route to the answer of your question. In this paper, I will first clarify our central question and sharpen this puzzle regarding epistemic autonomy. Having done so, I will argue that autonomous deliberation can be epistemically valuable to inquirers both when it is successful, as well as when it is unsuccessful. I conclude by gesturing at how these considerations point us toward an account of epistemic autonomy as an intellectual virtue. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

Philosophy and Literature is an internationally renowned refereed journal founded by Denis Dutton at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. It is now published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since its inception in 1976, Philosophy and Literature has been concerned with the relation between literary and philosophical studies, publishing articles on the philosophical interpretation of literature as well as the literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature has sometimes been regarded as iconoclastic, in the sense that it repudiates academic pretensions, (...) insidious jargon and institutional vogue. Dutton, who remains the editor, still writes a regular column. A distinctive feature of Philosophy and Literature was the annual Bad Writing Contest, held from 1995–98, which sought to identify (and publish) the ‘most stylistically lamentable passages’ of academic prose, often to great amusement. (shrink)

Over the last decades, science has grown increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary and has come to depart in important ways from the classical analyses of the development of science that were developed by historically inclined philosophers of science half a century ago. In this paper, I shall provide a new account of the structure and development of contemporary science based on analyses of, first, cognitive resources and their relations to domains, and second of the distribution of cognitive resources among collaborators and (...) the epistemic dependence that this distribution implies. On this background I shall describe different ideal types of research activities and analyze how they differ. Finally, analyzing values that drive science towards different kinds of research activities, I shall sketch the main mechanisms underlying the perceived tension between disciplines and interdisciplinarity and argue for a redefinition of accountability and quality control for interdisciplinary and collaborative science. (shrink)

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on the philosophy of epistemic autonomy. In addition to giving some background on various conceptions of epistemic autonomy it provides brief summaries of the articles in the special issue.

I present an account of epistemic autonomy as a distinctively wide-ranging epistemic virtue, one that helps us to understand a range of phenomena that might otherwise seem quite disparate – from the appropriate selection of epistemic methods, stances and topics of inquiry, to the harms of epistemic oppression, gaslighting and related phenomena. The account draws on four elements commonly incorporated into accounts of personal autonomy: (i) self-governance, (ii) authenticity, (iii) self-creation and (iv) independence. I further argue that for a distinctively (...) epistemic virtue of autonomy; the above elements must ultimately reliably lead to valuable epistemic goods (for the agent herself and others). I then turn to the domains or ways in which epistemic autonomy so understood, can be made manifest. I suggest that epistemic autonomy is a virtue that allows us to appropriately choose (i) subject matters and areas of inquiry, (ii) methods, sources, and processes of belief formation, (iii) epistemic goals and (iv) epistemic stances or frameworks. So understood, epistemic autonomy has a role to play in shaping most every aspect of our epistemic lives. (shrink)

The global age has confronted human beings with new and numerous challenges, from global poverty, to labour exploitation, to climate change. Many individuals, aware of such challenges, wish to act in solidarity, and give their contribution to countering them. Acting in solidarity in such contexts can be challenging, however, as which actions are most effective for reaching the desired goal is not obvious. Furthermore, an action that is intended in solidarity at times not only fails to promote the desired objective (...) but proves detrimental to it. In this article, I wish to propose a reflection on a prior duty of solidarity action: the epistemic duty to acquire information about the correct way to promote a cause. By analyzing the anti-sweatshop movement and climate action, I will show how acting in solidarity has significant epistemic requirements that should be considered as part of the solidarity action itself. (shrink)

Linda Zagzebski’s book on epistemic authority is an impressive and stimulating treatment of an important topic. 1 I admire the way she manages to combine imagination, originality and argumentative control. Her work has the further considerable merit of bringing analytic thinking and abstract theory to bear upon areas of concrete human concern, such as the attitudes one should have towards moral and religious authority. The book is stimulating in a way good philosophy should be -- provoking both disagreement and emulation. (...) I agree with much of what she says, and have been instructed by it, but it will be of more interest and relevance here if I concentrate upon areas of disagreement. Perhaps they are better seen as areas, at least some of them, where her emphases suggest a position that seems to me untenable, but that she may not really intend. In that event, I will be happy to have provoked a clarification or the dispelling of my misunderstanding. My focus will be upon problems in her account of communal authority and autonomy, especially with respect to religious and political authority. Here my worry is that she places too much trust in trust and not enough in what I call selective mistrust. (shrink)

Many people agree that a proper epistemological treatment of testimonial knowledge will regard testimonial warrant—the total truth-conducive support enjoyed by a belief grounded on a piece of testimony —as socially diffuse, in the sense that it is not something that supervenes on the proper functionality of the hearer’s cognitive resources together with the reasons she has for accepting the testimony. After arguing for such a view, I go on to identify a challenge many people think flows from an acknowledgment of (...) the social diffusion of warrant. In particular, such an acknowledgment appears to preclude a happy account of the rationality of testimony-based belief. After identifying the nature of this challenge and the various positions that one can take on it, I develop a response according to which rationality itself (like warrant) is socially diffuse. (shrink)

Testimony is an important source of knowledge in many contexts, including that of education, but the notion of the teacher as testifier is not often discussed. Since much that is believed by individuals has come to them not from direct experience but by accepting the accounts of others, the trustworthiness of their interlocutors' testimonies, whether these be spoken, textual or electronic in form, is an important factor in determining whether or not they acquire true, justified beliefs. Testimonial trustworthiness is a (...) combination of competence and sincerity, both of which tend to be high when a teacher testifies in her area of expertise. But in the world beyond the classroom there are situations in which the competence or sincerity of the testifier is low, so it is important that the learner acquires an epistemically-virtuous, well-attuned disposition towards testimony. (shrink)

Intellectual autonomy indicates how human being can preserve her epistemic agency and intellectually manage and regulate herself. This epistemic value is commonly proposed against intellectual heteronomy according to which the believer is not capable of applying her epistemic agency because of internal or external impediments. Since the early modern era, some philosophers and intellectuals have supposed, implicitly or explicitly, that religious belief violates intellectual autonomy. However, the responsibilist version of virtue epistemology shows that autonomy, as an intellectual virtue, is not (...) epistemic self-reliance and independence from the other but prescribes a way to regulate one’s epistemic agency in intellectual interactions with the other. On this basis, a conscientious autonomous believer is capable of knowing and managing the variety of her epistemic relations with others. Intellectual autonomy in this sense is compatible with believing and maintaining religious beliefs. Religious belief can be autonomous if the believer find the other’s role in her beliefs as imparting knowledge, critic, model, adherent, and authority and regulate, conscientiously and equipped with intellectual virtues, the way in which the other participates in them. (shrink)