Why are mistaken beliefs about COVID-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only part of the differences between people in their susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in their belief structures will tend to be more (...) susceptible to believing COVID-19 misinformation. We carried out an observational study (US adult sample, n = 998) in which we measured the level of epistemic vice of participants using a novel Epistemic Vice Scale that captures features of the current competing analyses of epistemic vice in the literature. We also asked participants questions eliciting the extent to which they subscribe to myths and misinformation about COVID-19. We find overwhelming evidence to the effect that epistemic vice is associated with susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. In fact, the association turns out to be stronger than with political identity, educational attainment, scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test, personality, dogmatism, and need for closure. We conclude that this offers evidence in favor of the empirical presuppositions of vice epistemology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The introduction to the special issue on the Ethics and Politics of Disagreement provides a history of the Robert Papazian and PERITIA IJPS Essay prizes, announces the winners of the 2023 prizes, provides a brief overview of the articles in this special issue and highlights some of their connections, and concludes with an announcement of a new IJPS essay prize.

In moral and political philosophy, topics like the distributive inequities conferred via special partial relationships – family relationships, for example – have been frequently debated. However, the epistemic dimensions of such partiality are seldom discussed in the ethical context, and the topic of partial relationships rarely feature in the realm of social epistemology. My view is that the role of partial relationships is worth exploring to enrich our understanding of epistemic injustice and its transmission. I claim that epistemic features typical (...) of partial relationships make phenomena like epistemic injustice easier to mask, more difficult to identify, and harder to correct. (shrink)

This paper introduces three new concepts: epistemic health, epistemic immunity, and epistemic inoculation. Epistemic health is a measure of how well an entity (e.g. person, community, nation) is functioning with regard to various epistemic goods or ideals. It is constituted by many different factors (e.g. possessing true beliefs, being disposed to make reliable inferences), is improved or degraded by many different things (e.g. research funding, social trust), and many different kinds of inquiry are relevant to its study. Epistemic immunity is (...) the robustness with which an entity is resistant to performing certain kinds of epistemic activity, such as questioning certain ideas, believing certain sources, or making certain inferences. Epistemic inoculation occurs when social, political or cultural processes cause an entity to become immune to engaging in certain epistemic activities. After outlining each of these concepts, we close by considering some of the risks associated with attempts to improve others’ epistemic health. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The rise of social media has correlated with an increase in political polarization, which many perceive as a threat to public discourse and democratic governance. This paper presents a framework, drawing on social epistemology and the economic theory of public goods, to explain how social media can contribute to polarization, making us collectively poorer, even while it provides a preferable media experience for individual consumers. Collective knowledge and consensus is best served by having richly connected networks that are epistemically (...) integrated: individuals with diverse levels of expertise should be relatively well connected to each other. In epistemically segregated networks, by contrast, we have reason to predict collective epistemic failures. Expert knowledge will be isolated from the majority, leading average opinion to be less informed than is socially optimal, and entrenching disagreements. Because social media enables users to very easily adopt homophilous network connections – connections to those with similar opinions, education levels, and social backgrounds – it is likely to have increased epistemic segregation compared to older media platforms. The paper explains the theoretical foundations of these predictions, and sketches regulatory measures – such as taxes – that might be employed to preserve the public good of a well integrated social media network. (shrink)

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic (...) practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking. (shrink)

People have always shared information through chains and networks of testimony. It’s arguably part of what makes us human and enables us to live in cooperative communities with populations greater than the Dunbar number. The invention of the Internet and the rise of social media have turbo-charged our ability to share information. In this chapter, we develop a normative framework for sharing information online. This framework takes into account both ethical and epistemic considerations that are intertwined in typical cases of (...) online testimony. We argue that, while the current state of affairs is not entirely novel, recent technological developments call for a rethinking of the norms of testimony, as well as the articulation of a set of virtuous dispositions that people would do well to cultivate in the capacity as conduits (not just sources or receivers) of information. (shrink)

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

We can define state instability as a situation in which a system's previously established norms and rules no longer function properly. Under the circumstances of changed institutional functioning, the main actors of the given environment resort to new strategies to preserve their authority and maintain their positions. In this paper, we aim to present rhetorical strategies as a response of political actors to the environment of state instability. We will use a qualitative content analysis method to present the three political (...) crises in the United States, Serbia, and Croatia. The paper aims to compare international rhetorical strategies as an attempt by political actors to avoid state instability. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to reflect on the communication model of fake news, starting from the assumption that fake news items are not mere falsehoods (e.g., trivial lies) nor something completely new.Drawing inspiration from the work of Umberto Eco, I will investigate the idea that today’s viral fake news can be aligned with the hermetic paradigm he outlined. Then I will consider another communicative model: that of gossip. Thanks to these two models, I will support the thesis that (...) fake news are not something to eliminate or to correct according to the criterion of evidence or truth, but rather something to live with, corresponding to a potentiality of discourse, that is to detect and to analyze. (shrink)

The topic of fake news has received increased attention from philosophers since the term became a favorite of politicians (Habgood-Coote 2016; Dentith 2016). Notably missing from the conversation, however, is a discussion of fake news and conspiracy theory media as a market. This paper will take as its starting point the account of noxious markets put forward by Debra Satz (2010), and will argue that there is a pro tanto moral reason to restrict the market for fake news. Specifically, we (...) begin with Satz’s argument that restricting a market may be required when i) that market inhibits citizens from being able to stand in an equal relationship with one another, and ii) this problem cannot be solved without such direct restrictions. Our own argument then proceeds in three parts: first, we argue that the market for fake news fits Satz’s description of a noxious market; second, we argue against explanations of the proliferation of fake news that are couched in terms of “epistemic vice”, and likewise argue against prescribing critical thinking education as a solution to the problem; finally, we conclude that, in the absence of other solutions to mitigate the noxious effects of the fake news market, we have a pro tanto moral reason to impose restrictions on this market. At the end of the paper, we consider one proposal to regulate the fake news market, which involves making social media outlets potentially liable in civil court for damages caused by the fake news hosted on their websites. (shrink)

The question of church-state separation has haunted America since her founding. James Madison and select founding fathers suggest that religions and states are better off when they minimize (or altogether eliminate) their interactions. Many Muslims in Iran, for instance, believe the opposite – aligning state functions with religious motives results in the most effective state. In this paper, I propose a model of thinking about church-state separation in which states and religions must maintain epistemic vulnerability to allow legal, political, and (...) socio-religious change. Simply put, epistemic vulnerability is an attitude of susceptibility to new sources and instances of knowledge. I present institutions as sets of constraints which interact with shared mental models. In this way, I explain how cultural institutions limit and shape individuals’ susceptibility to new knowledge. The more accommodating a religion is to self-assessment when confronted with new knowledge aids in forming institutions that are reliable, efficient, and robust for groups to grow and adopt new ideas. This results in a model of state-religion that highlights the impact on epistemic vulnerability when either religious organizations or state governance expand their responsibilities outside of their proper functions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore whether and how the concept of dual-use can be applied to philosophical research, as well as its potential for explaining cases of misuse of philosophical theory and for justifying any restrictions on academic freedom. I argue that there are two ways in which philosophical research can be misused: by using its methods for purposes that contradict the general purposes of philosophy, and by using (parts of) a theory against the purposes intended by (...) its author. Philosophical research is dual-use research of concern (DURC) if the theory can be misused without modification, which is the case when a theory is not entirely conclusive. The misuse of philosophical research differs from the misuse in paradigmatic cases of DURC in that its potential to cause harm depends on social conditions. Given these conditions and the lack of relevant research, the risk of harmful misuse of philosophy as of yet does not constitute a sufficient reason to restrict academic freedom in a meaningful way. Instead, researchers should be aware of any potential for misuse, make their arguments as conclusive as possible, and emphasise the aim of their theory. To prevent harmful misuse in the public sphere, scholars should engage in public philosophy and provide an accurate and conclusive account of their research. Institutions should support this. (shrink)

In Bad Beliefs, Levy presents a picture of belief-forming processes according to which, on most matters of significance, we defer to reliable sources by relying extensively on cultural and social cues. Levy conceptualizes the kind of evidence provided by socio-cultural environments as higher-order evidence. But his notion of higher-order evidence seems to differ from those available in the epistemological literature on higher-order evidence, and this calls for a reflection on how exactly social and cultural cues are/count as/provide higher-order evidence. In (...) this paper, I draw on the three-tiered model of epistemic exchange that I have been developing recently, which highlights the centrality of relations of attention and trust in belief-forming processes, to explicate how social and cultural cues provide higher-order evidence. I also argue that Levy’s account fails to sufficiently address the issue of strategic actors who have incentives to pollute epistemic environments for their benefit, and more generally the power struggles, incentives, and competing interests that characterize human sociality. Levy’s attempted reduction of the political to the epistemic ultimately fails, but his account of social and cultural cues as higher-order evidence offers an insightful perspective on epistemic social structures. (shrink)