This paper makes the case that when wishful thinking ill-founds belief, the belief depends on the desire in ways can be recapitulated at the level of perceptual experience. The relevant kinds of desires include motivations, hopes, preferences, and goals. I distinguish between two modes of dependence of belief on desire in wishful thinking: selective or inquiry-related, and responsive or evidence-related. I offers a theory of basing on which beliefs are badly-based on desires, due to patterns of dependence that can found (...) in the relationship between experiences and desires as well. This conclusion brings us a large part of the way to the conclusion that like beliefs, experiences can be ill-founded by depending on a desire. (shrink)

Contemporary Western culture is experiencing a heightened awareness of religious diversity. This article surveys a range of possible responses to such diversity, and distinguishes between responses that concern the salvation or moral transformation of persons (soteriological views) and those that concern the alethic or epistemic status of religious beliefs (doctrinal views). After providing a brief taxonomy of these positions and their possible relations to one another, the article focuses primarily on competing views about the truth and rationality of religious beliefs (...) (e.g., pluralism, exclusivism, and skepticism). Here a heavy emphasis is placed on arguments for and against the rationality and moral propriety of retaining one's religious beliefs in the face of disagreement. The article surveys some of the more prominent arguments from the literature on this topic and closes with suggestions for further research. (shrink)

The New Diversity Theory (NDT) represents a novel approach to public reason liberalism, providing an alternative to the traditional, Rawlsian public reason paradigm. One of the NDT's distinctive features is its emphasis on the potential advantages of a diverse society, with a particularly strong focus on the epistemic benefits of diversity. In this paper, I call into question whether societal diversity has the epistemic benefits that New Diversity theorists claim. I highlight a number of pernicious epistemic phenomena that tend to (...) arise in diverse contexts, ultimately arguing that the only feasible way around these epistemic pitfalls is through widespread convergence on certain intellectual virtues. If these virtues are indeed necessary, then the benefits highlighted by the NDT should only be expected in societies that reflect certain kinds of diversity. More precisely, only the kinds of diversity that can still persist despite homogenization along the lines of certain intellectual virtues are compatible with the NDT's claims. Building upon this insight, I then highlight features of the NDT that require further development in order for it to serve as a compelling alternative to its Rawlsian counterpart. (shrink)

“Political epistemology” has recently emerged as an area of analytic epistemology. While it may not be an entirely new area, and its precise boundaries are up for negotiation, recent political events in the UK (e.g. Brexit) and the US (e.g. the election of Donald Trump) played a key role in its rise to prominence within contemporary analytic epistemology. Further, political epistemology is an inter-disciplinary field, drawing on relevant work in political science, political psychology, and science communication that is often equally (...) focused on the UK and US. Political epistemology is therefore parochial, though it is the kind of parochialism that is not always conscious of itself as parochial. In this talk I adopt a critical stance towards parochialism in political epistemology. But my aim is not just to point out the mistakes that can result from a parochial concern with political events in one’s own country. I suggest that we can view political epistemology as interested in certain fundamental problems and tensions, which political epistemologists may then seek to identify and address within the political context in which they are working. (shrink)

In this talk I present the main results from Anta (2021), namely, that the theoretical division between Boltzmannian and Gibbsian statistical mechanics should be understood as a separation in the epistemic capabilities of this physical discipline. In particular, while from the Boltzmannian framework one can generate powerful explanations of thermal processes by appealing to their microdynamics, from the Gibbsian framework one can predict observable values in a computationally effective way. Finally, I argue that this statistical mechanical schism contradicts the Hempelian (...) (1958) thesis that the predictive power of a scientific theory is directly proportional to its explanatory potential, and vice versa. (shrink)

This thesis is a collection of three self-contained papers on related themes in the area of formal and social epistemology. The first paper explores the possibility of measuring the coherence of a set with multiplicative averaging. It has been pointed out that all the existing probabilistic measures of coherence are flawed for taking the relevance between a set of propositions as the primary factor which determines the coherence of the set. What I show in this paper is that a group (...) of measures, namely the confirmation-based ones, can be saved from this problem if we adopt a nonlinear averaging function to measure the coherence of a set. The second paper discusses how people should conciliate in disagreements. Some epistemologists take linear averaging as the only way of conciliating and claim that conciliating leads to fallacious results. In the paper, I show that the problem is not conciliating, but taking linear averaging as the only way to conciliate. Since there is no reason for us to insist on conciliating with linear averaging, we can adopt nonlinear averaging functions for conciliating and thereby avoid the formal deficiencies. The third paper focuses on the pragmatic results of taking conciliating as a general strategy in disagreements. There is a potential dilemma about conciliating: if everyone always conciliates, it is likely for an epistemic bubble to arise. If everyone refuses to conciliate, an epistemic echo chamber may appear. A possible way of solving the dilemma is to develop a diachronic strategy which tells people how to both conciliate and update their estimate of their interlocutors’ reliability. Although the three papers differ in the subject, they jointly offer some unifying reflections on the way we approach philosophical problems with formal tools. From 5 the first two papers, we see that a formal analysis of a philosophical position is incomplete if philosophers fail to consider a sufficiently wide range of formal tools. The third paper, on the contrary, shows that we should change the ordinary way of modelling a notion if required. This thesis concludes by proposing a pluralistic view of formal methods in formal epistemology. (shrink)

This paper introduces and motivates a solution to a dilemma from peer disagreement. Following Buchak (2021), I argue that peer disagreement puts us in an epistemic dilemma: there is reason to think that our opinions should both change and not change when we encounter disagreement with our epistemic peers. I argue that we can solve this dilemma by changing our credences, but not our beliefs in response to disagreement. I explain how my view solves the dilemma in question, and then (...) offer two additional arguments for it: one related to contents and attitudes, and another related to epistemic peerhood. (shrink)

Thought insertion is a condition characterized by the impression that one's thoughts are not one’s own and have been inserted by others. Some have explained the condition as resulting, in part, from impaired or defective self-knowledge, or knowledge of one’s mental states. I argue that such models do not shed light on the most puzzling feature of thought insertion: the patient’s experience that an introspected thought does not feel like her own. After examining ways in which existing versions of the (...) model might address this worry, I propose a significant modification. I argue that the experience of disownership consists in a rational indifference that one feels towards one’s inserted thought. I further contend that the experience is generated by an underlying absence of an expectation of rational authority towards the inserted thought, such that the patient does not expect her thought to reflect, or be shaped by, her own rational considerations. I defend my proposal using empirical studies from cognitive and social psychology which suggest that we ordinarily have and experience an expectation of rational authority towards a certain subset of our thoughts, and direct analysis of patient reports, which strongly suggest that it is this expectation and the corresponding experience that thought insertion patients lack. (shrink)

In this paper we present the results of a simulation study of credence developments in groups of communicating Bayesian agents, as they update their beliefs about a given proposition p. Based on the empirical literature, one would assume that these groups of rational agents would converge on a view over time, or at least that they would not polarize. This paper presents and discusses surprising evidence that this is not true. Our simulation study shows that these groups of Bayesian agents (...) show group polarization behavior under a broad range of circumstances. This is, we think, an unexpected result, that raises deeper questions about whether the kind of polarization in question is irrational. If one accepts Bayesian agency as the hallmark of epistemic rationality, then one should infer that the polarization we find is also rational. On the other hand, if we are inclined to think that there is something epistemically irrational about group polarization, then something must be off in the model employed in our simulation study. We discuss several possible interfering factors, including how epistemic trust is defined in the model. Ultimately, we propose that the notion of Bayesian agency is missing something in general, namely the ability to respond to higher-order evidence. (shrink)

A novel experimental paradigm that measured theory change and confidence in participants' theories was used in three experiments to test the effects of anomalous evidence. Experiment 1 varied the amount of anomalous evidence to see if “dose size” made incremental changes in confidence toward theory change. Experiment 2 varied whether anomalous evidence was convergent or replicating. Experiment 3 varied whether participants were provided with an alternative theory that explained the anomalous evidence. All experiments showed that participants' confidence changes were commensurate (...) with the amount of anomalous evidence presented, and that larger decreases in confidence predicted theory changes. Convergent evidence and the presentation of an alternative theory led to larger confidence change. Convergent evidence also caused more theory changes. Even when people do not change theories, factors pertinent to the evidence and alternative theories decrease their confidence in their current theory and move them incrementally closer to theory change. (shrink)

People sometimes try to call others’ beliefs into question by pointing out the contingent causal origins of those beliefs. The significance of such ‘Etiological Challenges’ is a topic that has started attracting attention in epistemology. Current work on this topic aims to show that Etiological Challenges are, at most, only indirectly epistemically significant, insofar as they bring other generic epistemic considerations to the agent’s attention. Against this approach, we argue that Etiological Challenges are epistemically significant in a more direct and (...) more distinctive way. An Etiological Challenge prompts the agent to assess whether her beliefs result from practices of indoctrination, and whether she should reduce confidence in those beliefs, given the anti-reliability of indoctrination as a method of belief-acquisition. Our analysis also draws attention to some of the ways in which epistemic concerns interact with political issues—e.g. relating to epistemic injustice, identity-based discrimination, and segregation—when we’re thinking about the contingent causal origins of our beliefs. (shrink)

I argue that reflection on philosophers who could have been working among us but aren’t can lead us to give up our philosophical beliefs.

As a general rule, whenever a hearer is justified in forming the belief that p on the basis of a speaker’s testimony, she will also be justified in assuming that the speaker has formed her belief appropriately in light of a relevantly large and representative sample of the evidence that bears on p. In simpler terms, a justification for taking someone’s testimony entails a justification for trusting her assessment of the evidence. This introduces the possibility of what I will call (...) “evidential preemption.” Evidential preemption occurs when a speaker, in addition to offering testimony that p, also warns the hearer of the likelihood that she will subsequently be confronted with apparently contrary evidence: this is done, however, not so as to encourage the hearer to temper her confidence in p in anticipation of that evidence, but rather to suggest that the (apparently) contrary evidence is in fact misleading evidence or evidence that has already been taken into account. Either way, the speaker is signalling to the hearer that the subsequent disclosure of this evidence will not require her to significantly revise her belief that p. Such preemption can effectively inoculate an audience against future contrary evidence, and thereby creates an opening for a form of exploitative manipulation that I will call “epistemic grooming.” Nonetheless, I argue, not all uses of evidential preemption are nefarious; it can also serve as an important tool for guiding epistemically limited agents though complex evidential scenarios. (shrink)

According to the Dogmatism Puzzle, knowledge breeds dogmatism: if a subject knows a proposition h, then she is justified in disregarding any future evidence against h, for she knows that such evidence is misleading. The standard, widely accepted, solution to the puzzle appeals to the defeasibility of knowledge. I argue that the defeat solution leaves intact a residual dogmatist puzzle. Solving this puzzle requires proponents of defeat to deny a plausible principle that the original puzzle relies on called Entitlement, a (...) principle stating roughly that knowing that a piece of evidence is misleading entitles one to disregard it. The plausibility of Entitlement should cast doubt not only on the defeat solution, but on an assumption that has often been taken for granted: the falsity of the dogmatist conclusion of the original puzzle. I conclude that we face a dilemma between giving up Entitlement and living with dogmatism. (shrink)

O presente Volume é a primeira obra publicado no Brasil que trata acerca da Epistemologia Social.

ABSTRACT: Most of what we believe comes to us from the word of others, but we do not always believe what we are told. We often reject thinkers' reports by attributing biases to them. We may call this debunking. In this essay, I consider how debunking might work and then examine whether, and how often, it can help to preserve rational belief in the face of disagreement.

We explore the question of whether sustained rational disagreement is possible from a broadly Bayesian perspective. The setting is one where agents update on the same information, with special consideration being given to the case of uncertain information. The classical merging of opinions theorem of Blackwell and Dubins shows when updated beliefs come and stay closer for Bayesian conditioning. We extend this result to a type of Jeffrey conditioning where agents update on evidence that is uncertain but solid (hard Jeffrey (...) shifts). However, merging of beliefs does not generally hold for Jeffrey conditioning on evidence that is fluid (soft Jeffrey shifts, Field shifts). Several theorems on the asymptotic behavior of subjective probabilities are proven. Taken together they show that while a consensus nearly always emerges in important special cases, sustained rational disagreement can be expected in many other situations. (shrink)

Blake Roeber argues that examples of a certain neglected kind cast doubt on the following piece of epistemological orthodoxy: your acquisition of a particular belief couldn’t itself be a directly voluntary action. In this paper, I undermine and then rebut Roeber’s anti-involuntarism conclusion. After arguing for the denial of one of the premises on which Roeber’s conclusion is based, I articulate a plausible pro-involuntarism explanation of Roeber’s focal example.

Trust is central to our social lives in both epistemic and practical ways. Often, it is rational only given evidence for trustworthiness, and with that evidence is made available by communication. New technologies are changing our practices of communication, enabling increasing rich and diverse ways of ‘being there’, but at a distance. This paper asks: how does telepresent communication support evidence-constrained trust? In answering it, I reply to the leading pessimists about the possibility of the digital mediation of trust, Philip (...) Pettit and Hubert Dreyfus. I also rebut Media Richness Theory, which proposes a linear relationship between the volume of mediated information and the quality of communication. Positively, I develop a speech-act theory of digitally mediated communication, drawing on Austen’s identification of the illocutionary act. The choice of a particular technology of communication constitutes part of what is communicated, including a setting of the social ‘frame’, and thus the possibilities for trust to be sustained or eroded. How something is said is part of what it is that is said. (shrink)

There has been a growing interest within analytic philosophy in addressing political and social issues, which has been referred to as the “political turn” in the discipline. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it discusses the very characterization of the political turn. In particular, it introduces the definition proposed by Bordonaba-Plou, Fernández-Castro, and Torices, suggests that we should not consider the turn a form of activism, and explores an additional benefit of the ideal/nonideal distinction for characterizing the turn. (...) Second, it addresses the concern of what attitude we should take in the face of the different sensitivities we might have with respect to what constitutes an injustice. Which philosophical works should count as part of the political turn? The paper explores three different attitudes toward this dilemma, and favors what it calls the revisionist attitude, which emphasizes the fact that our perception of injustice is subject to error. (shrink)

This paper introduces a multi-agent dynamic epistemic logic for abstract argumentation. Its main motivation is to build a general framework for modelling the dynamics of a debate, which entails reasoning about goals, beliefs, as well as policies of communication and information update by the participants. After locating our proposal and introducing the relevant tools from abstract argumentation, we proceed to build a three-tiered logical approach. At the first level, we use the language of propositional logic to encode states of a (...) multi-agent debate. This language allows to specify which arguments any agent is aware of, as well as their subjective justification status. We then extend our language and semantics to that of epistemic logic, in order to model individuals’ beliefs about the state of the debate, which includes uncertainty about the information available to others. As a third step, we introduce a framework of dynamic epistemic logic and its semantics, which is essentially based on so-called event models with factual change. We provide completeness results for a number of systems and show how existing formalisms for argumentation dynamics and unquantified uncertainty can be reduced to their semantics. The resulting framework allows reasoning about subtle epistemic and argumentative updates—such as the effects of different levels of trust in a source—and more in general about the epistemic dimensions of strategic communication. (shrink)

Formal epistemologists criticise the Conciliatory View of peer disagreement for being non-commutative with conditionalisation, path dependent and does not preserve the independence between propositions. Failing to commute with conditionalisation, one may switch the order between conciliating and conditionalising and obtain different outcomes. Failing to be path independent, the outcome of conciliation varies with the order of the acquisition of new testimonies. Failing to preserve the independence between propositions, one may suffer from a sure-loss and hence be deemed irrational. The three (...) formal deficiencies urge people to abandon the Conciliatory View. This paper aims to show that one may save the Conciliatory View by conciliating with nonlinear functions. Research in the study of opinion pooling shows that the three deficiencies are not problems of the Conciliatory View, but problems of linear averaging. Hence, one can get rid of these formal deficiencies by making conciliation with nonlinear averaging functions. After showing how the three deficiencies can be avoided, I will explore the features of nonlinear averaging functions and argue that they have properties that correctly capture people’s intuition concerning disagreement. The conclusion, therefore, is to suggest epistemologists develop a more fine-grained taxonomy for cases of disagreement. With a deliberate categorisation of different kinds of disagreement, epistemologists can pick the proper averaging rule to apply in each specific case, and get rid of possible formal deficiencies. (shrink)

Contributors to the recent disagreement debate have sought to provide a uniform response to cases in which epistemic peers disagree about the epistemic import of a shared body of evidence, no matter what kind of evidence they are disagreeing about. The varied cases addressed in the literature have included examples of disagreement about restaurant bills, court verdicts, weather forecasting, chess, morality, religious beliefs, and even disagreements about philosophical disagreements. The equal treatment of these varied cases has motivated the search for (...) a uniform response to peer disagreement wherever it is encountered. In this article I challenge this prevalent approach in the literature. I grant the notion of epistemic peer and accept that being a peer may amount to the same thing in different domains; nonetheless I contend that different domains appear to call for different responses to disagreement. I argue that the appropriate response to finding out about a disagreement with a peer is different in different domains. (shrink)

Evidential Preemption occurs when a speaker asserts something of the form “Others will tell you Q, but I say P,” where P and Q are incompatible in some salient way. Typically, the aim of this maneuver is to get the audience to accept P despite contrary testimony of others, who might otherwise be trusted on the matter. Phenomena such as echo chambers, conspiracy theories, and other political speech of interest to epistemologists today, all commonly involve evidential preemption, so the question (...) arises: What effect, if any, does evidential preemption have on the audience's epistemic situation? In a widely discussed paper, Begby (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2021, 102, 515) argues that evidential preemption can change the audience's epistemic situation in such a way that future testimony that Q, which would otherwise have been persuasive, can be rationally discounted to a significant degree. If so, evidential preemption is not a mere rhetorical flourish, but rather results in a rationally insulated belief that P. Since evidential preemption is a common feature of echo chambers and conspiracy theories, this would be a disturbing result. We bring good news: it is not so, at least not in the way Begby suggests. If evidential preemptions can change one's epistemic situation in a worrying way, it is a mystery how. (shrink)

In his book Prejudice, Endre Begby argues that people who hold paradigmatically prejudiced beliefs – for example, the belief that women are less adept at math than men – might be fully rational in holding those beliefs. In this article, I argue that Begby fails to provide compelling examples of beliefs that are both rational and prejudiced. On Begby’s account, whether a belief is prejudiced is determined by its content: it follows that any two token beliefs with the same content (...) will either both be prejudiced, or both unprejudiced, regardless of how they differ in other respects. I sketch an alternative account, on which whether a person’s belief counts as prejudiced might be sensitive to a greater range of factors. I then turn to Bebgy’s discussion of ‘evidential preemption,’ a phenomenon by which certain speech acts seem to inoculate themselves from having their contents disconfirmed or falsified by later counterevidence. I argue for skepticism about evidential preemption. To the extent that there is a genuine normative phenomenon in the neighborhood, it is the familiar one of testimonial defeat, in which testimony from one source is neutralized by conflicting testimony from another source that one has reason to think is more reliable. (shrink)

The way digital information technologies work and, more specifically, the possibilities for action that technological devices offer to us affect our processes of political belief formation. In particular, there seems to be a close connection between our digital affordances and the increase of the sort of polarization that threatens the proper functioning of democracy. In this paper, we analyze whether the type of polarization linked to the use of digital technologies, and which endangers the health of public deliberation, has to (...) do with the adoption of beliefs whose contents are increasingly extreme—extremism—or, on the contrary, has more to do with increasing our credence in the core beliefs of our political identity—radicalism. (shrink)

This paper discusses two conservative ways of treating evidence. (I) Closing inquiry involves discounting evidence bearing on one's belief unless it is particularly strong evidence; (II) biased assimilation involves dedicating more investigative resources to scrutinizing disconfirming evidence (than confirming evidence), thereby increasing the chances of finding reasons to dismiss it. It is natural to worry that these practices lead to irrational biases in favor of one's existing beliefs, and that they make one's epistemic condition significantly path-sensitive by giving a bigger (...) role to batches of evidence obtained earlier in the course of inquiry compared with those subsequently acquired. However, I argue that both practices are demanded by considerations of practical rationality. I also argue that, contrary to initial appearances, there is little reason to worry about the effects of these practices on the dynamics of one's beliefs. (shrink)

We describe and analyze an important cognitive obstacle in inter- and intra-community ar-gumentation processes, which we propose to call 'Cognitive Systemic Dichotomization'. This social phenomenon consists in the collective use of shared cognitive patterns based upon dichotomous schemati-zation of knowledge, values, and affection. We discuss the formative role of CSD on a community’s collec-tive cognition, identity, and public discourse, as well as the challenges it raises to reasoned argumentation, and how different approaches to argumentation undertake to face this obstacle to (...) the reasonable debate of issues of public concern. (shrink)

A person’s epistemic goals sometimes clash with pragmatic ones. At times, rational agents will degrade the quality of their epistemic process in order to satisfy a goal that is knowledge-independent (for example, to gain status or at least keep the peace with friends.) This is particularly so when the epistemic quest concerns an abstract political or economic theory, where evidence is likely to be softer and open to interpretation. Before wide-scale adoption of the Internet, people sought out or stumbled upon (...) evidence related to a proposition in a more random way. And it was difficult to aggregate the evidence of friends and other similar people to the exclusion of others, even if one had wanted to. Today, by contrast, the searchable Internet allows people to simultaneously pursue social and epistemic goals.This essay shows that the selection effect caused by a merging of social and epistemic activities will cause both polarization in beliefs and devaluation of expert testimony. This will occur even if agents are rational Bayesians and have moderate credences before talking to their peers. What appears to be rampant dogmatism could be just as well explained by the nonrandom walk in evidence-gathering. This explanation better matches the empirical evidence on how people behave on social media platforms. It also helps clarify why media outlets (not just the Internet platforms) might have their own pragmatic reasons to compromise their epistemic goals in today’s competitive and polarized information market. Yet, it also makes policy intervention much more difficult, since we are unlikely to neatly separate individuals’ epistemic goals from their social ones. (shrink)

In academic contexts the appeal to authority is a quite common but seldom tested argument, either because we accept the authority without questioning it, or because we look for alternative experts or reasons to support a different point of view. But, by putting ourselves side by side an already accepted authority, we often rhetorically manoeuvre to displace the burden of the proof to avoid the fear to present our opinions and to allow face saving.

Obligations to provide evidence to others arise in many contexts. This paper develops a framework within which to understand what it is to provide evidence to someone. I argue that an initially plausible connection between evidence-providing and evidence-possession fails: it is not the case that in order to count as providing evidence to someone, the intended recipient must have the evidence. I further argue that the following is possible: evidence is provided to an agent, the agent does not have the (...) evidence, but it is not the case that the agent is culpably ignorant of the evidence. (shrink)

Las herramientas teóricas destinadas a señalar las injusticias que sufren ciertos grupos socialmente oprimidos pueden acabar siendo utilizadas con propósitos completamente opuestos a los iniciales. Modificar el alcance de una herramienta teórica no es necesariamente problemático: la popularización de un concepto abre las puertas a que se utilice estratégicamente para diferentes fines. La tesis que defendemos en este artículo es que algunos personajes públicos cultivan una imagen particular de sí mismos que parece satisfacer los requisitos de la noción de injusticia (...) testimonial y utilizan esta situación como medio para obtener beneficio político de ella. Más concretamente, estos personajes públicos se benefician de esta condición para generar situaciones de desacuerdos cruzados, que están estrechamente relacionados con el aumento de la polarización. (shrink)