An epistemic agent A is a false epistemic authority for others iff they falsely believe A to be in a position to help them accomplish their epistemic ends. A major divide exists between what I call "epistemic quacks", who falsely believe themselves to be relevantly competent, and "epistemic charlatans", i.e., false authorities who believe or even know that they are incompetent. Both types of false authority do not cover what Lackey (2021) calls "predatory experts": experts who systematically misuse their social-epistemic (...) status as a cover for predatory behavior. Qua experts, predatory experts are competent and thus could (and maybe sometimes do) help their clients. But should we count them as genuine epistemic authorities? No, I argue, they are false epistemic authorities because, in addition to their practical and moral misconduct, such experts systematically deceive their clients, thereby thwarting the clients’ epistemic ends. (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)

We discuss the social-epistemic aspects of Catherine Elgin’s theory of reflective equilibrium and understanding and argue that it yields an argument for the view that a crucial social-epistemic function of epistemic authorities is to foster understanding in their communities. We explore the competences that enable epistemic authorities to fulfil this role and argue that among them is an epistemic virtue we call “epistemic empathy”.

Sometimes it is epistemically beneficial to form a belief on authority. When you do, what happens to other reasons you have for that belief? Linda Zagzebski’s total-preemption view says that these reasons are “preempted”: you still have them, but you do not use them to support your belief. I argue that this situation is problematic, because having reasons for a belief while not using them forfeits you doxastic justification. I present an alternative account of belief on authority, the proper-basing view, (...) which enables the agent to base her belief on as many reasons as she has. A salient result is that the notion of a preemptive reason, useful though it may be in accounting for acting on authority, does not have any place in an account of believing on authority or in epistemology more generally. (shrink)

ABSTRACTExperts use their superior skills and understanding to mediate between evidence in some domain and non-experts. But how should we understand the proper relationship between experts and non-experts? In this paper, I present two ways of conceiving experts’ mediating role from the perspective of non-experts: the Authority View and the Advisor View. Jennifer Lackey has criticized the Authority View and defended the Advisor View. I defend an account of epistemic authority that avoids her criticisms while arguing the Advisor View lacks (...) the advantages she claims. Ultimately, I present a hybrid approach according to which whether we should treat experts as authorities or advisors varies depending upon the presence of certain epistemic and moral concerns. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the problem of integrating deference to experts with thinking for oneself from a layperson’s perspective. This integration requires more than acknowledging that proper deference always involves epistemic agents who decide for themselves whether and how to defer in any concrete situation. This would only suffice to show that deference and thinking for oneself are interwoven in such a way that whenever a layperson forms deferential beliefs about some proposition, she must also think for herself about (...) some other proposition. However, an adequate reply to the target problem requires an explanation of how it is possible to defer and to think for oneself concerning the very same proposition. As argued here, this is possible only if we distinguish between beliefs and acceptances: the former being deferential, the latter being responsive to thinking for oneself. I motivate this distinction and inquire into how it can be fruitfully applied to solve the problem. (shrink)