Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices. The result is a bold, (...) timely, and systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of an information society. (shrink)

I offer an account of the virtue of intellectual humility, construed as a pair of dispositions enabling proper management of one's intellectual confidence. I then show its integral role in a range of familiar educational practices and concerns, and finally describe how certain entrenched educational attitudes and conceptions marginalise or militate against the cultivation and exercise of this virtue.

Hobbits and hooligans -- Ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists -- Political participation corrupts -- Politics doesn't empower you or me -- Politics is not a poem -- The right to competent government -- Is democracy competent? -- The rule of the knowers -- Civic enemies.

Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared (...) to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us. In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists--why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.--. (shrink)

Education's Epistemology extends and defends Siegel's "reasons conception" of critical thinking, developing it in both philosophical and educational directions. Of particular note is its emphasis on epistemic quality and epistemic rationality and its concerted defense of "universal" educational and philosophical ideals in the face of multicultural, postmodern, and other challenges.

"In this exceptionally brilliant book, ranging effortlessly from Herodotus and Thucydides to Diderot and Nietzsche, Bernard Williams daringly asks--and still more daringly answers--one of the central questions of philosophy: what is the ...

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine.Modern culture exhibits two attitudes toward truth: suspicion of being deceived and skepticism that objective truth exists at (...) all. This tension between a demand for truthfulness and the doubt that there is any truth to be found is not an abstract paradox. It has political consequences and signals a danger that our intellectual activities, particularly in the humanities, may tear themselves to pieces.Williams's approach, in the tradition of Nietzsche's genealogy, blends philosophy, history, and a fictional account of how the human concern with truth might have arisen. Without denying that we should worry about the contingency of much that we take for granted, he defends truth as an intellectual objective and a cultural value. He identifies two basic virtues of truth, Accuracy and Sincerity, the first of which aims at finding out the truth and the second at telling it. He describes different psychological and social forms that these virtues have taken and asks what ideas can make best sense of them today. Truth and Truthfulness presents a powerful challenge to the fashionable belief that truth has no value, but equally to the traditional faith that its value guarantees itself. Bernard Williams shows us that when we lose a sense of the value of truth, we lose a lot both politically and personally, and may well lose everything. (shrink)

And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political ...

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as skills (...) but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHélène Landemore's Democratic Reason offers a new justification for democracy and for broad-based citizen participation, appealing to the “emergent” intelligence of large, diverse groups. She argues that ordinary citizens should rule as directly as possible because they will make better informed, more intelligent decisions than, for example, appointed officials, councils of experts, or even elected representatives. The foundation of this conclusion is the premise that “diversity trumps ability” in a wide range of contexts. But the main support for that claim (...) is merely a series of computer experiments that are strongly biased toward that result and tell us essentially nothing about decision making in real-world political settings. Moreover, Landemore's analyses of alternative forms of rule deal only in abstract comparisons between sharply distinguished ideal types. Among other difficulties, they entirely overlook the central consideration in such comparisons: the relative ability of any decision-making process to go beyond stereotyped, intrinsic strategies and integrate multiple sources and varieties of information. In the end, Landemore's claims for the superior intelligence of broadly participatory forms are thus not supported by credible evidence. (shrink)

This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.

There is a widely accepted family of views in the epistemology of testimony centering around the claim that belief is the central item involved in a testimonial exchange. For instance, in describing the process of learning via testimony, Elizabeth Fricker provides the following: “one language-user has a belief, which gives rise to an utterance by him; as a result of observing this utterance another user of the same language, his audience, comes to share that belief.” In a similar spirit, Alvin (...) Plantinga says that “…a belief on the part of the testifiee has warrant only if that belief has warrant for the testifier.” In both of these passages, we find strands of what I shall call the Belief View of Testimony. (shrink)

There is a widely accepted family of views in the epistemology of testimony centering around the claim that belief is the central item involved in a testimonial exchange. For instance, in describing the process of learning via testimony, Elizabeth Fricker provides the following: “one language-user has a belief, which gives rise to an utterance by him; as a result of observing this utterance another user of the same language, his audience, comes to share that belief.” In a similar spirit, Alvin (...) Plantinga says that “…a belief on the part of the testifiee has warrant only if that belief has warrant for the testifier.” In both of these passages, we find strands of what I shall call the Belief View of Testimony. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Hong-Page theorem holds that a group of low-ability, cognitively diverse problem solvers can outperform a more uniform group of high-ability problem solvers. Abigail Thompson’s recent mathematical criticisms of the theorem are incorrect, misleading, or irrelevant to the validity of the theorem. A common thread running through Thompson’s objections is a lack of appreciation for how mathematics is used in social science. One element of her critique that has considerable value for the epistemic democracy literature, however, is her discussion of (...) the importance of randomization for the Hong-Page result. (shrink)

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline‐based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5‐year‐olds could cluster knowledge (...) in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline‐based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined. (shrink)

The most widely debated conception of democracy in recent years is deliberative democracy--the idea that citizens or their representatives owe each other mutually acceptable reasons for the laws they enact. Two prominent voices in the ongoing discussion are Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In Why Deliberative Democracy?, they move the debate forward beyond their influential book, Democracy and Disagreement.What exactly is deliberative democracy? Why is it more defensible than its rivals? By offering clear answers to these timely questions, Gutmann and (...) Thompson illuminate the theory and practice of justifying public policies in contemporary democracies. They not only develop their theory of deliberative democracy in new directions but also apply it to new practical problems. They discuss bioethics, health care, truth commissions, educational policy, and decisions to declare war. In "What Deliberative Democracy Means," which opens this collection of essays, they provide the most accessible exposition of deliberative democracy to date. They show how deliberative democracy should play an important role even in the debates about military intervention abroad.Why Deliberative Democracy? contributes to our understanding of how democratic citizens and their representatives can make justifiable decisions for their society in the face of the fundamental disagreements that are inevitable in diverse societies. Gutmann and Thompson provide a balanced and fair-minded approach that will benefit anyone intent on giving reason and reciprocity a more prominent place in politics than power and special interests. (shrink)

Mainstream epistemology is a highly theoretical and abstract enterprise. Traditional epistemologists rarely present their deliberations as critical to the practical problems of life, unless one supposes—as Hume, for example, did not—that skeptical worries should trouble us in our everyday affairs. But some issues in epistemology are both theoretically interesting and practically quite pressing. That holds of the problem to be discussed here: how laypersons should evaluate the testimony of experts and decide which of two or more rival experts is most (...) credible. It is of practical importance because in a complex, highly specialized world people are constantly confronted with situations in which, as comparative novices, they must turn to putative experts for intellectual guidance or assistance. It is of theoretical interest because the appropriate epistemic considerations are far from transparent; and it is not clear how far the problems lead to insurmountable skeptical quandaries. This paper does not argue for flat-out skepticism in this domain; nor, on the other hand, does it purport to resolve all pressures in the direction of skepticism. It is an exploratory paper, which tries to identify problems and examine some possible solutions, not to establish those solutions definitively. (shrink)

Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers ; second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers ; third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them by others. Each of these three claims is argued for (...) separately from premises about the ways in which humans, adult and child, succeed in gaining knowledge by testimony. The three arguments provide the structure for Anti-Individualism.Goldberg's argument for the first claim – that the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers – begins from uncontroversial facts about testimony. Gaining knowledge by testimony depends on knowing the meanings of some utterances, and it is possible to know the meaning of a person's utterance while knowing little that would distinguish this person from anyone else. The best explanation of how this is possible involves postulating linguistic norms which entail facts about the linguistic meanings of utterances. Now in some cases of testimony, a hearer acquires a belief whose content is the linguistic meaning of a speaker's utterance, where the linguistic meaning of this utterance is determined by linguistic norms. But linguistic norms might have been different from what they are even while the person's and her audience's non-relational properties remained unaltered. And in such a case, the hearer would have acquired a belief with a different content. Therefore, ‘Psychological facts such as believing that p do not supervene on the individualistic facts regarding the subject’ …. (shrink)

This book advances a theory of personal, public and political justification. Drawing on current work in epistemology and cognitive psychology, the work develops a theory of personally justified belief. Building on this account, it advances an account of public justification that is more normative and less "populist" than that of "political liberals." Following the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Kant, the work then argues that citizens have conclusive reason to appoint an umpire to resolve disputes arising from inconclusive (...) public justifications. The rule of law, liberal democracy and limited judicial review are defended as elements of a publicly justified umpiring procedure. (shrink)

This book reconceives virtue epistemology in light of the conviction that we are essentially social creatures. Virtue is normally thought of as something that allows individuals to accomplish things on their own. Although contemporary ethics is increasingly making room for an inherently social dimension in moral agency, intellectual virtues continue to be seen in terms of the computing potential of a brain taken by itself. Thinking in these terms, however, seriously misconstrues the way in which our individual flourishing hinges on (...) our collective flourishing. Green’s account of virtue epistemology is based on the extended credit view, which conceives of knowledge as an achievement and broadens that focus to include team achievements in addition to individual ones. He argues that this view does a better job than alternatives of answering the many conceptual and empirical challenges for virtue epistemology that have been based on cases of testimony. The view also allows for a nuanced interaction with situationist psychology, dual processing models in cognitive science, and the extended mind literature in philosophy of mind. This framework provides a useful conceptual bridge between individual and group epistemology, and it has novel applications to the epistemology of disagreement, prejudice, and authority. (shrink)

The approach set forth by Edward Craig in Knowledge and the State of Nature has a greater explanatory value than it has been granted to date, and his suitably modified project can resolve a number of puzzling issues regarding the value of knowledge. The paper argues that a novel theory that relates knowledge to testimony is capable of explaining why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief and why it has a distinctive value. Significantly, this theory avoids the recently (...) advanced revisionism regarding the focus of epistemological research. La aproximación de Edward Craig en Knowledge and the State of Nature tiene más poder explicativo del apreciado hasta ahora, y su proyecto, adecuadamente modificado, puede resolver un número de asuntos sobre el valor del conocimiento que parecen desconcertantes. Se argumenta que una novedosa teoría de conocimiento que lo relaciona con el testimonio puede explicar por qué el conocimiento es más valioso que la mera creencia verdadera, y por qué tiene un valor distintivo. Significativamente, la teoría evita un revisionismo, recientemente avanzado, con respecto al foco de la investigación epistemológica. (shrink)

This paper motivates an account of knowledge as a social kind, following a cue by Edward Craig, which captures two major insights behind social and feminist epistemologies, in particular our epistemic interdependence concerning knowledge and the role of social regulative practices in understanding knowledge.

Our trust in the word of others is often dismissed as unworthy, because the illusory ideal of "autonomous knowledge" has prevailed in the debate about the nature of knowledge. Yet we are profoundly dependent on others for a vast amount of what any of us claim to know. Coady explores the nature of testimony in order to show how it might be justified as a source of knowledge, and uses the insights that he has developed to challenge certain widespread assumptions (...) in the areas of history, law, mathematics, and psychology. (shrink)

This paper investigates the epistemic powers of democratic institutions through an assessment of three epistemic models of democracy: the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem, and Dewey's experimentalist model. Dewey's model is superior to the others in its ability to model the epistemic functions of three constitutive features of democracy: the epistemic diversity of participants, the interaction of voting with discussion, and feedback mechanisms such as periodic elections and protests. It views democracy as an institution for pooling widely (...) distributed information about problems and policies of public interest by engaging the participation of epistemically diverse knowers. Democratic norms of free discourse, dissent, feedback, and accountability function to ensure collective, experimentally-based learning from the diverse experiences of different knowers. I illustrate these points with a case study of community forestry groups in South Asia, whose epistemic powers have been hobbled by their suppression of women's participation. (shrink)

Th is paper investigates the epistemic powers of democratic institutions through an assessment of three epistemic models of democracy : the Condorcet Jury Th eorem, the Diversity Trumps Ability Th eorem, and Dewey's experimentalist model. Dewey's model is superior to the others in its ability to model the epistemic functions of three constitutive features of democracy : the epistemic diversity of participants, the interaction of voting with discussion, and feedback mechanisms such as periodic elections and protests. It views democracy as (...) an institution for pooling widely distributed information about problems and policies of public interest by engaging the participation of epistemically diverse knowers. Democratic norms of free discourse, dissent, feedback, and accountability function to ensure collective, experimentallybased learning from the diverse experiences of diff erent knowers. I illustrate these points with a case study of community forestry groups in South Asia, whose epistemic powers have been hobbled by their suppression of women's participation. (shrink)

In a single volume intended for philosophy students of all levels as well as their teachers, this reader provides modern, accurate translations of the texts necessary for a careful study of most aspects of Aristotle's philosophy. Professor Ackrill has drawn on his broad experience of teaching graduate classes in selecting the texts, and his choice reflects issues of current philosophical interest as well as the perennial themes. Only recent translations which achieve a high level of accuracy have been chosen: the (...) aim is to place the reader without Greek, as nearly as possible, in the position of a reader of Greek. As an aid to study, a valuable guide to the key topics covered is also suppied, giving references to works or passages contained in the reader, an indication of their interrelation, and a currnet bibliography. (shrink)

In this strikingly original book, one of the leading scholars in the field focuses on the influential idea of deliberative democracy. Goodin examines the great challenge of how to implement the deliberative ideal among millions of people at once and comes up with a novel solution: 'democratic deliberation within'.

Two intellectual vices seem to always tempt us: arrogance and diffidence. Regarding the former, the world is permeated by dogmatism and table-thumping close-mindedness. From politics, to religion, to simple matters of taste, zealots and ideologues all too often define our disagreements, often making debate and dialogue completely intractable. But to the other extreme, given a world with so much pluralism and heated disagreement, intellectual apathy and a prevailing agnosticism can be simply all too alluring. So the need for intellectual humility, (...) open-mindedness, and a careful, humble commitment to the truth are apparent. In this book, Dr Church and Dr Samuelson explicate a robust and vibrant account of the philosophy and science of this most valuable virtue, and they highlight how it can be best applied and personally developed. (shrink)

Volumes I and II provided a completely new translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. Volume III contains 207 of Descartes' letters, over half of which have previously not been translated into English. It incorporates, in its entirety, Anthony Kenny's celebrated translation of selected philosophical letters, first published in 1970. In conjunction with Volumes I and II it is designed to meet the widespread demand for a comprehensive, authoritative and accurate edition (...) of Descartes' philosophical writings in clear and readable modern English. (shrink)

Democracy is not naturally plausible. Why turn such important matters over to masses of people who have no expertise? Many theories of democracy answer by appealing to the intrinsic value of democratic procedure, leaving aside whether it makes good decisions. In Democratic Authority, David Estlund offers a groundbreaking alternative based on the idea that democratic authority and legitimacy must depend partly on democracy's tendency to make good decisions.Just as with verdicts in jury trials, Estlund argues, the authority and legitimacy of (...) a political decision does not depend on the particular decision being good or correct. But the "epistemic value" of the procedure--the degree to which it can generally be accepted as tending toward a good decision--is nevertheless crucial. Yet if good decisions were all that mattered, one might wonder why those who know best shouldn't simply rule.Estlund's theory--which he calls "epistemic proceduralism"--avoids epistocracy, or the rule of those who know. He argues that while some few people probably do know best, this can be used in political justification only if their expertise is acceptable from all reasonable points of view. If we seek the best epistemic arrangement in this respect, it will be recognizably democratic--with laws and policies actually authorized by the people subject to them. (shrink)

Argues that the key distinction between human and nonhuman social cognition consists in our complex, diverse and flexible capacities to shape each other's minds in ways that make them easier to interpret.

By exploring diverse and sometimes positive roles for ignorance, A Defense of Ignorance offers a revisionary approach to epistemology that challenges core assumptions about epistemic values. Townley contributes innovative ways of thinking about the practicalities and politics of knowledge and argues for an expanded domain of responsible epistemic conduct. All social scientists, especially those interested in knowledge and in feminist scholarship, stand to benefit from Townley's arguments.

Argues that the key distinction between human and nonhuman social cognition consists in our complex, diverse and flexible capacities to shape each other's minds in ways that make them easier to interpret.

Why We Argue : A Guide to Political Disagreement presents an accessible and engaging introduction to the theory of argument, with special emphasis on the way argument works in public political debate. The authors develop a view according to which proper argument is necessary for one’s individual cognitive health; this insight is then expanded to the collective health of one’s society. Proper argumentation, then, is seen to play a central role in a well-functioning democracy. Written in a lively style and (...) filled with examples drawn from the real world of contemporary politics, and questions following each chapter to encourage discussion, Why We Argue : A Guide to Political Disagreement reads like a guide for the participation in, and maintenance of, modern democracy. An excellent student resource for courses in critical thinking, political philosophy, and related fields, Why We Argue : A Guide to Political Disagreement is an important contribution to reasoned debate. (shrink)

In this book Zagzebski gives an extended argument that the self-reflective person is committed to belief on authority. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic self-reliance is incoherent. She argues that epistemic and emotional self-trust are rational and inescapable, that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others, and that among those we are committed to trusting are some whom we ought to treat as epistemic authorities, modeled on the well-known principles of authority of Joseph Raz. These principles apply (...) to authority in the moral and religious domains. (shrink)