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  1. Epistemic Partialism and Taking Our Friends Seriously.Cathy Mason - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (3):233-243.
    Two doxastically significant demands of friendship have been discussed in recent literature, a demand to be epistemically partial and a demand to take our friends seriously. Though less discussed than epistemic partialism, I suggest that the demand to take our friends seriously is motivated by similar cases and considerations, and can avoid key objections to epistemic partialism that have been raised. I further suggest that it does justice to what we care about in friendship, and thus is to be preferred.
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  • Understanding friendship.Michel Croce & Matthew Jope - 2024 - Philosophical Issues 34 (1):371-386.
    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 (...)
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  • If epistemic partialism is true, don’t tell your friends.Scott Woodcock - 2024 - Analysis 84 (3):566-575.
    It is generally recognized that friendship justifies a particular set of special permissions and responsibilities. However, a compelling debate has emerged regarding the question of whether we ought to believe claims about our friends that strangers would not. Advocates of epistemic partialism, such as Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller, argue that friendship ought to sometimes lead us to form beliefs that are inconsistent with what is justified from an impartial perspective. In this paper, I identify a puzzle for epistemic partialism (...)
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  • Insult and Injustice in Epistemic Partiality.Jack Warman - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-21.
    Proponents of epistemic partiality in friendship argue that friendship makes demands of our epistemic lives that are at least inconsistent with the demands of epistemic propriety, and perhaps downright irrational. In this paper, I focus on the possibility that our commitments to our friends distort how we respond to testimony about them, their character, and their conduct. Sometimes friendship might require us to ignore (or substantially underweight) what others tell us about our friends. However, while this practice might help promote (...)
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  • Epistemic Partiality.A. K. Flowerree - forthcoming - In Mathias Steup (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Epistemology. Blackwell.
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  • The Ethics of Belief (3rd edition).Rima Basu - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    This chapter is a survey of the ethics of belief. It begins with the debate as it first emerges in the foundational dispute between W. K. Clifford and William James. Then it surveys how the disagreements between Clifford and James have shaped the work of contemporary theorists, touching on topics such as pragmatism, whether we should believe against the evidence, pragmatic and moral encroachment, doxastic partiality, and doxastic wronging.
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  • Acceptance and the ethics of belief.Laura K. Soter - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2213-2243.
    Various philosophers authors have argued—on the basis of powerful examples—that we can have compelling moral or practical reasons to believe, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. This paper explores an alternative story, which still aims to respect widely shared intuitions about the motivating examples. Specifically, the paper proposes that what is at stake in these cases is not belief, but rather acceptance—an attitude classically characterized as taking a proposition as a premise in practical deliberation and action. I suggest that acceptance’s (...)
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  • Epistemic Partialism.Cathy Mason - 2023 - Philosophy Compass (2):e12896.
    Most of us are partial to our friends and loved ones: we treat them with special care, and we feel justified in doing so. In recent years, the idea that good friends are also epistemically partial to one another has been popular. Being a good friend, so-called epistemic partialists suggest, involves being positively biased towards one's friends – that is, involves thinking more highly of them than is warranted by the evidence. In this paper, I outline the concept of epistemic (...)
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  • The Cognitive Demands of Friendship.Anna Brinkerhoff - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (1):101-123.
    What does friendship require of us cognitively? Recently, some philosophers have argued that friendship places demands on what we believe. Specifically, they argue, friendship demands that we have positive beliefs about our friends even when such beliefs go against the evidence. Call this the doxastic account of the cognitive demands of friendship. Defenders of the doxastic account are committed to making a surprising claim about epistemology: sometimes, our beliefs should be sensitive to things that don’t bear on their truth. I (...)
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  • True Faith: Against Doxastic Partiality about Faith (in God and Religious Communities) and in Defence of Evidentialism.Katherine Dormandy - 2021 - Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (1):4-28.
    ABSTRACT Is it good to form positive beliefs about those you have faith in, such as God or a religious community? Doxastic partialists say that it is. Some hold that it is good, from the viewpoint of faith, to form positive beliefs about the object of your faith even when your evidence favours negative ones. Others try to maintain respect for evidence by appealing to a highly permissive epistemology. I argue against both forms of doxastic partiality, on the grounds that (...)
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  • Loving truly: An epistemic approach to the doxastic norms of love.Katherine Dormandy - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-23.
    If you love someone, is it good to believe better of her than epistemic norms allow? The partiality view says that it is: love, on this view, issues norms of belief that clash with epistemic norms. The partiality view is supposedly supported by an analogy between beliefs and actions, by the phenomenology of love, and by the idea that love commits us to the loved one’s good character. I argue that the partiality view is false, and defend what I call (...)
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  • On the epistemic significance of practical reasons to inquire.Sanford C. Goldberg - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1641-1658.
    In this paper I explore the epistemic significance of practical reasons to inquire. I have in mind the range of practical reasons one might have to do such things as collect (additional) evidence, consult with various sources, employ certain methods or techniques, double-check one’s answer to a question, etc. After expanding the diet of examples in which subjects have such reasons, I appeal to features of these sorts of reason in order to question the motivation for pragmatic encroachment in epistemology. (...)
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  • Epistemic Norms, the False Belief Requirement, and Love.J. Spencer Atkins - 2021 - Logos and Episteme 12 (3):289-309.
    Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as well. (...)
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  • On the Epistemic Costs of Friendship: Against the Encroachment View.Catherine Rioux - 2023 - Episteme 20 (2):247-264.
    I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose (...)
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  • There is no such thing as doxastic wrongdoing.David Enoch & Levi Spectre - forthcoming - Philosophical Perspectives.
    People are often offended by beliefs, expect apologies for beliefs, apologize for their own beliefs. In many mundane cases, people are morally criticized for their beliefs. Intuitively, then, beliefs seem to sometimes wrong people. Recently, the philosophical literature has picked up on this theme, and has started to discuss it under the heading of doxastic wrongdoing. In this paper we argue that despite the strength of such initial intuitions, at the end of the day they have to be rejected. If (...)
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  • The epistemic demands of friendship: friendship as inherently knowledge-involving.Cathy Mason - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2439-2455.
    Many recent philosophers have been tempted by epistemic partialism. They hold that epistemic norms and those of friendship constitutively conflict. In this paper, I suggest that underpinning this claim is the assumption that friendship is not an epistemically rich state, an assumption that even opponents of epistemic partiality have not questioned. I argue that there is good reason to question this assumption, and instead regard friendship as essentially involving knowledge of the other. If we accept this account of friendship, the (...)
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  • Against the Alleged Insufficiency of Statistical Evidence.Sam Fox Krauss - 2020 - Florida State University Law Review 47:801-825.
    Over almost a half-century, evidence law scholars and philosophers have contended with what have come to be called the “Proof Paradoxes.” In brief, the following sort of paradox arises: Factfinders in criminal and civil trials are charged with reaching a verdict if the evidence presented meets a particular standard of proof—beyond a reasonable doubt, in criminal cases, and preponderance of the evidence, in civil trials. It seems that purely statistical evidence can suffice for just such a level of certainty in (...)
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  • Anti‐reductionism and Expected Trust.Sanford C. Goldberg - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4):952-970.
    According to anti‐reductionism, audiences have a default (but defeasible) epistemic entitlement to accept observed testimony. This paper explores the prospects of arguing from this premise to a conclusion in ethics, to the effect that speakers enjoy a default (but defeasible) moral entitlement to expect to be trusted when they testify. After proposing what I regard as the best attempt to link the two, I conclude that any argument from the one to the other will depend on a strong epistemological assumption (...)
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  • Believing in Others.Sarah K. Paul & Jennifer M. Morton - 2018 - Philosophical Topics 46 (1):75-95.
    Suppose some person 'A' sets out to accomplish a difficult, long-term goal such as writing a passable Ph.D. thesis. What should you believe about whether A will succeed? The default answer is that you should believe whatever the total accessible evidence concerning A's abilities, circumstances, capacity for self-discipline, and so forth supports. But could it be that what you should believe depends in part on the relationship you have with A? We argue that it does, in the case where A (...)
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  • Giving the Benefit of the Doubt.Paul Faulkner - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (2):139-155.
    Faced with evidence that what a person said is false, we can nevertheless trust them and so believe what they say – choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is particularly notable when the person is a friend, or someone we are close to. Towards such persons, we demonstrate a remarkable epistemic partiality. We can trust, and so believe, our friends even when the balance of the evidence suggests that what they tell us is false. And insofar (...)
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  • Evidentialism and Moral Encroachment.Georgi Gardiner - 2018 - In McCain Kevin (ed.), Believing in Accordance with the Evidence: New Essays on Evidentialism. Cham: Springer Verlag.
    Moral encroachment holds that the epistemic justification of a belief can be affected by moral factors. If the belief might wrong a person or group more evidence is required to justify the belief. Moral encroachment thereby opposes evidentialism, and kindred views, which holds that epistemic justification is determined solely by factors pertaining to evidence and truth. In this essay I explain how beliefs such as ‘that woman is probably an administrative assistant’—based on the evidence that most women employees at the (...)
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  • The Role of Epistemic Virtue in the Realization of Basic Goods.Baril Anne - 2016 - Episteme 13 (4):379-395.
    ABSTRACTIn this paper, I argue that, contrary to popular opinion, there is good reason to think that the qualities that make people good reasoners also make them better off. I will focus specifically on epistemic virtue: roughly, the kind of character in virtue of which one is excellently oriented towards epistemic goods. I propose that epistemic virtue is importantly implicated in the realization of some of the goods that are widely believed to be instrumental to, or even constitutive of, well-being. (...)
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  • II—What’s Wrong with Paternalism: Autonomy, Belief, and Action.David Enoch - 2016 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (1):21-48.
    Several influential characterizations of paternalism or its distinctive wrongness emphasize a belief or judgement that it typically involves—namely, 10 the judgement that the paternalized is likely to act irrationally, or some such. But it's not clear what about such a belief can be morally objectionable if it has the right epistemic credentials (if it is true, say, and is best supported by the evidence). In this paper, I elaborate on this point, placing it in the context of the relevant epistemological (...)
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  • Epistemic Partiality and the Nature of Friendship.Jack Warman - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (3):371-388.
    The debate around epistemic partiality in friendship presents us with several tough philosophical puzzles. One of these has been articulated in two objections to the view that friendship can require epistemic partiality on the grounds it is incompatible with the nature of friendship. The first, owed to Crawford, argues that you should not treat your friends with epistemic partiality because your beliefs about your friends should be responsive to the facts about them, and epistemic partiality is incompatible with this demand. (...)
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  • Friendship.Bennett W. Helm - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who (...)
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  • The Loyalty of Religious Disagreement.Katherine Dormandy - 2021 - In Matthew A. Benton & Jonathan L. Kvanvig (eds.), Religious Disagreement and Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 238-270.
    Religious disagreement, like disagreement in science, stands to deliver important epistemic benefits. But religious communities tend to frown on it. A salient reason is that, whereas scientists should be neutral toward the topics they discuss, religious believers should be loyal to God; and religious disagreement, they argue, is disloyal. For it often involves discussion with people who believe more negatively about God than you do, putting you at risk of forming negative beliefs yourself. And forming negative beliefs about someone, or (...)
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  • It’s Friendship, Jim, but Not as We Know It: A Degrees-of-Friendship View of Human–Robot Friendships.Helen Ryland - 2021 - Minds and Machines 31 (3):377-393.
    This article argues in defence of human–robot friendship. I begin by outlining the standard Aristotelian view of friendship, according to which there are certain necessary conditions which x must meet in order to ‘be a friend’. I explain how the current literature typically uses this Aristotelian view to object to human–robot friendships on theoretical and ethical grounds. Theoretically, a robot cannot be our friend because it cannot meet the requisite necessary conditions for friendship. Ethically, human–robot friendships are wrong because they (...)
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  • Can the Demands of Justice Always Be Reconciled with the Demands of Epistemology? Testimonial Injustice and the Prospects of a Normative Clash.Sanford C. Goldberg - 2021 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4):537-558.
    ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that there are possible cases in which the demands of justice and the norms of epistemology cannot be simultaneously satisfied. I will bring out these normative clashes in terms of the now-familiar phenomenon of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). While the resulting argument is very much in the spirit of two other sorts of argument that have received sustained attention recently – arguments alleging epistemic partiality in friendship, and arguments that motivate the hypothesis of moral (...)
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  • Fake News vs. Echo Chambers.Jeremy Fantl - 2021 - Social Epistemology 35 (6):645-659.
    I argue that there is a prima facie tension between solutions to the problem of fake news and solutions to the problem presented by various cognitive biases that dispose us to dismiss evidence against our prior beliefs (what might seem to be the driving force behind echo chambers). We can guard against fake news by strengthening belief. But we can exit echo chambers by becoming more sensitive to counterevidence, which seems to require weakening our beliefs. I resolve the tension by (...)
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  • Friendship and the grades of doxastic partiality.Hamid Vahid - 2024 - Theoria 90 (1):122-133.
    It has been claimed that friendship not only involves partial treatment of one's friends but that it also involves some degree of doxastic partiality towards them. Taking these claims as their starting points, some philosophers have argued that friendship not only involves such partiality but that this is also what is normatively required. This gives rise to the possibility of conflict between the demands of friendship on the one hand and the demands of epistemic norms on the other. In this (...)
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  • Bias and interpersonal skepticism.Robert Pasnau - 2022 - Noûs 56 (1):154-175.
    Recent philosophy has paid considerable attention to the way our biases are liable to encroach upon our cognitive lives, diminishing our capacity to know and unjustly denigrating the knowledge of others. The extent of the bias, and the range of domains to which it applies, has struck some as so great as to license talk of a new form of skepticism. I argue that these depressing consequences are real and, in some ways, even more intractable than has previously been recognized. (...)
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  • Against epistemic partiality in friendship: value-reflecting reasons.Sanford C. Goldberg - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (8):2221-2242.
    It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology—in particular, that there are cases in which the moral demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief :329–351, 2004; Stroud in Ethics 116:498–524, 2006; Hazlett in A luxury of the understanding: on the value of true belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). (...)
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  • (1 other version)Interpersonal hope and loving attention.Catherine Rioux - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Imagine that your lover or close friend has embraced a difficult long-term goal, such as advancing environmental justice, breaking a bad habit, or striving to become a better person. Which stance should you adopt towards their prospects for success? Does supporting our significant others in the pursuit of valuable goals require ignoring part of our evidence? I argue that we have special reasons––reasons grounded in friendship––to hope that our loved ones succeed in their difficult goals. I further propose that hope (...)
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  • Friendship and the wishes of the dead.Dale Dorsey - 2022 - Legal Theory 28 (2):124-145.
    ABSTRACTThe wishes of the dead seem to have normative significance. We not only respect last wills and testaments, but we take seriously what the dead loved, what they valued, even after they have long escaped this mortal coil. But this presents a philosophical puzzle. Is this a normatively justified practice? Why should the fact that some dead person preferred state of affairs x to state of affairs y be a reason to bring about x rather than y—especially if there is (...)
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  • On the special insult of refusing testimony.Allan Hazlett - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (sup1):37-51.
    In this paper, I defend the claim, made by G. E. M. Anscombe and J. L. Austin, that you can insult someone by refusing her testimony. I argue that refusing someone’s testimony can manifest doubt about her credibility, which in the relevant cases is offensive to her, given that she presupposed her credibility by telling what she did. I conclude by sketching three applications of my conclusion: to the issue of valuable false belief, to the issue of testimonial injustice, and (...)
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  • Evidentialism, Transparency, and Commitments.Christian Piller - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):332-350.
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  • Paternalism.Jessica Begon - 2016 - Analysis 76 (3):355-373.
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  • Moral encroachment and the ideal of unified agency.Cory Davia - 2022 - Philosophical Explorations 26 (2):179-196.
    According to the moral encroachment thesis, moral features of a situation can affect not just what we’re practically justified in doing but also what we’re epistemically justified in believing. This paper offers a new rationale for that thesis, drawing on observations about the role of reflection in agency.
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  • Love and Rationality.Sarah Cyr - 2020 - Stance 13:12-23.
    Much work has been done in contemporary epistemology to reconcile our epistemic ideals with our human need for healthy relationships with our loved ones. Ryan Preston-Roedder makes an attempt to resolve the tension between these two goals in his paper, “Three Varieties of Faith.” However, his account lacks the clarity necessary to make a thoroughly convincing argument. In this paper, I expand on Preston-Roedder’s ideas, distilling a novel account of epistemic partiality that allows us to maintain epistemic rationality without sacrificing (...)
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