ABSTRACT It has become standard to conceive of metalinguistic disagreement as motivated by a form of negotiation, aimed at reaching consensus because of the practical consequences of using a word with one content rather than another. This paper presents an alternative motive for expressing and pursuing metalinguistic disagreement. In using words with given criteria, we betray our location amongst social categories or groups. Because of this, metalinguistic disagreement can be used as a stage upon which to perform a social identity. (...) The ways in which metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way diverge in character from metalinguistic negotiations are described, as are several consequences of the existence of metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzle.

It is often suggested that disagreement among scientific experts is a reason not to trust those experts, even about matters on which they are in agreement. In direct opposition to this view, I argue here that the very fact that there is disagreement among experts on a given issue provides a positive reason for non-experts to trust that the experts really are justified in their attitudes towards consensus theories. I show how this line of thought can be spelled out in (...) three distinct frameworks for non-deductive reasoning: namely, Bayesian Confirmation Theory, Inference to the Best Explanation, and Inferential Robustness Analysis. (shrink)

This is an important book precisely because there is none other quite like it.

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. -/- Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and (...) scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. -/- Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era. (shrink)

Responsible public policy making in a technological society must rely on complex scientific reasoning. Given that ordinary citizens cannot directly assess such reasoning, does this call the democratic legitimacy of technical public policies in question? It does not, provided citizens can make reliable second-order assessments of the consensus of trustworthy scientific experts. I develop criteria for lay assessment of scientific testimony and demonstrate, in the case of claims about anthropogenic global warming, that applying such criteria is easy for anyone of (...) ordinary education with access to the Web. However, surveys show a gap between the scientific consensus and public opinion on global warming in the U.S. I explore some causes of this gap and argue that democratic reforms of our culture of political discourse may be able to address it. (shrink)

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.

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)

Ruth Millikan is well known for having developed a strikingly original way for philosophers to seek understanding of mind and language, which she sees as biological phenomena. She now draws together a series of groundbreaking essays which set out her approach to language. Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive normative rules. Millikan offers a fundamentally different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, comparing them (...) to biological norms that emerge from natural selection. This yields novel and quite radical consequences for our understanding of the nature of public linguistic meaning, the process of language understanding, how children learn language, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Sperber provides the following analysis of the phenomenon of ill-understood belief (or 'quasi-belief', as I call it): (i) the quasi-believer has a validating meta-belief, to the effect that a certain representation is true; yet (ii) that representation does not give rise to a plain belief, because it is 'semi-propositional'. In this paper I discuss several aspects of this treatment. In particular, I deny that the representation accepted by the quasi-believer is semantically indeterminate, and I reject (...) Sperber's claim that quasi-belief is a credal attitude distinct from plain belief. (shrink)

We are constantly called upon to evaluate the evidential weight of testimony, and to balance its deliverances against our own independent thinking. ‘Intellectual autonomy’ is the virtue that is supposed to be displayed by those who engage in cognition in this domain well. I argue that this is at best a misleading label for the virtue, because virtuous cognition in this domain consists in thinking with others, and intelligently responding to testimony. I argue that the existing label supports an excessively (...) individualistic conception of good thinking, both within and outside philosophy. I propose replacing ‘intellectual autonomy’ with ‘intellectual interdependence’, which properly emphasises the depth of our reliance on one another, without suggesting we ought ever to be epistemically servile. (shrink)

Distrust in scientific experts can be surprisingly stubborn, persisting despite evidence supporting the experts’ views, demonstrations of their competence, or displays of good will. This stubborn distrust is often viewed as a manifestation of irrationality. By contrast, this article proposes a logic of “status distrust”: low-status individuals are objectively vulnerable to collective decision-making, and can justifiably distrust high-status scientific experts if they are not confident that the experts do not have their best interests at heart. In phenomena of status distrust, (...) social status is thus an indicator of distrust, and this has wider implications for the literatures on trust in science and on expert communication. (shrink)

Faced with current urgent calls for more trust in experts, especially in high impact and politically sensitive domains, such as climate science and COVID-19, the complex and problematic nature of public trust in experts and the need for a more critical approach to the topic are easy to overlook. Scepticism – at least in its Humean mitigated form that encourages independent, questioning attitudes – can prove valuable to democratic governance, but stands in opposition to the cognitive dependency entailed by epistemic (...) trust. In this paper, we investigate the tension between the value of mitigated scepticism – understood as the exercise of reason-based doubt in a particular domain – and the need for trust in experts. We offer four arguments in favour of mitigated scepticism: the argument from loss of intellectual autonomy; the argument from democratic deficit; the argument from the normative failures of science; and the argument from past and current injustices. These arguments highlight the tension between the requirements for trust and justified scepticism about the role of experts. One solution, which we reject, is the idea that reliance, rather than trust, is sufficient for the purposes of accommodating experts in policy matters. The solution we endorse is to create a ‘climate of trust’, where questioning experts and expertise is welcomed, but the epistemic trust necessary for action upon information which the public cannot obtain first-hand is enabled and encouraged through structural, institutional, and justice-based measures. (shrink)

François Recanati describes a metarepresentation as a representation of linguistic and mental representations. Two levels of content are involved, that of a metarepresentation dS, and that of the object representation S. According to Recanati’s “iconicity thesis,” dS contains S semantically as well as syntactically, so that one cannot entertain dS without also entertaining S. Iconicity “suggests” the doctrine of semantic innocence, whereby an embedded object-representation has the same content it would have when uttered in isolation—its “normal” semantic value—and one of (...) Recanati’s principal aims is to show how the opacity of oratio obliqua and oratio recta constructions can be explained without sacrificing innocence. His treatment is set firmly within the framework of Kaplan 1989 and is inspired by the account of quotation in Davidson 1968. Though devoid of technical and metaphysical encumbrance, his book is not a lean display of a single vision, since Recanati spends considerable time on proposals that he ends up rejecting or modifying. Some readers might become impatient with the detailed comparisons, but the dedicated student will welcome the learned discussion of alternatives. In all, Recanati has given us an excellent study of metarepresentation, enlivened by state-of-the-art pragmatics and at the forefront of the latest discourse on attitudinal ascriptions. (shrink)

Recent years have seen recurring episodes of tension between proponents of freedom of speech and advocates of the disenfranchised. Recent survey research attests to the ideological division in attitudes toward free speech, whereby conservatives report greater support for free speech than progressives do. Intrigued by the question of whether “canceling” is indeed a uniquely progressive tendency, we conducted a vignette-based experiment examining judgments of offensiveness among progressives and conservatives. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of progressives and conservatives, our study documented (...) ideological symmetry in their evaluations of offensive speech. When faced with utterances whose content matters to them, both conservatives and progressives viewed outgroup speakers as more offensive than ingroup speakers. A second contribution of this chapter is to provide a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanism implicated in evaluating outgroup speech as more offensive than ingroup speech. Our results suggest that perception of offensiveness is mediated by ascriptions of intent: we tend to attribute negative intent to the speaker whenever we deem their utterances to be offensive, even against the explicitly stated speaker’s background attitudes. (shrink)

Quassim Cassam introduces the idea of epistemic vices, character traits that get in the way of knowledge, such as closed-mindedness, intellectual arrogance, wishful thinking, and prejudice. Using examples from politics to illustrate the vices at work, he considers whether we are responsible for such failings, and what we can do about them.

Why do people share or publicly engage with fake stories? Two possible answers come to mind: (a) people are deeply irrational and believe these stories to be true; or (b) they intend to deceive their audience. Both answers presuppose the idea that people put the stories forward as true. But I argue that in some cases, these outlandish (yet also very popular) stories function as signals of one's group membership. This signaling function can make better sense of why, despite their (...) unusual nature or lack of a factual basis, some of these stories are so widespread. (shrink)

This commentary uses the dynamic of identity-protective cognition to pose a friendly challenge to Jussim (2012). Like other forms of information processing, this one is too readily characterized as a bias. It is no mistake, however, to view identity-protective cognition as generating inaccurate perceptions. The “bounded rationality” paradigm incorrectly equates rationality with forming accurate beliefs. But so does Jussim's critique.

According to Putnam, meaning and reference depend on acts of structured cooperation between language‐users. For example, laypeople defer to experts regarging the conditions under which something may be called ’gold’. A modest expert may defer to a greater expert. Question: can deference be never‐ending? Two theories say no. I expound these, then criticize them. The theories deal with semantic processes bound by a ’stopping’ constraint which are not cases of ordimary deferring. Deferring is normally done for a reason, and a (...) rational person is always disposed to defer if there is good reason. (shrink)

Suppose we have a persistent disagreement about a particular set of policy options, not because of an underlying moral disagreement, or a mere conflict of interest, but rather because we disagree about a crucial non-normative factual assumption underlying the justification of the policy choices. The main question in the paper is what political legitimacy requires in such cases, or indeed whether there are defensible answers to that question. The problem of political legitimacy in fact-dependent policy disagreements has received almost no (...) attention in political philosophy, which has focused mostly on value disagreements and proposed theories of legitimate coercive legislation in valuedependent disagreements. The paper presents an argument showing that under certain plausible assumptions regarding legitimacy, there are serious difficulties in identifying legitimate choices in fact-dependent policy disagreements. This may be unsurprising to political philosophers preoccupied with value-based disagreements, perhaps because it has been assumed that legitimacy-related concerns are irrelevant to fact-dependent policy disagreements. The paper argues that this response is premature. If we should care about legitimacy et al.l, then it is by no means clear why we should ignore issues of legitimacy in policy-disputes that depend on factual disagreements. The paper ends by defining a set of possibilities that merit further exploration in search of a theory of legitimacy in fact-dependent policy disagreements. (shrink)

Following Goldman’s seminal work, most contemporary philosophical contributions on the novice-expert relation have adopted a normative, expert-focused approach. In this paper, we aim to shift the focus of the philosophical analysis towards the characteristics of the novices, and how they might determine the choices that experts make. On the bases of recent empirical evidence from social psychology, we discuss how novices evaluate the messages that they receive and distinguish diverse kinds of novices according to their competence in message assessment. Building (...) on that analysis, we discuss the difficulties of approaches to expertise that focus only on the standpoint of novices or assume novices are homogeneous. In our analysis, we introduce the standpoint of experts, and we pay special attention to the heterogeneity of novices. This approach allows us to identify and address the difficulties faced by experts in the context of science communication. In the last part of the paper, we characterise and discuss the problem of experts when choosing a strategy in the issuing of a public campaign to advise or inform certain populations of novices. (shrink)

Theoretical tools aimed at making explicit the injustices suffered by certain socially disadvantaged groups might end up serving purposes which were not foreseen when the tools were first introduced. Nothing is inherently wrong with a shift in the scope of a theoretical tool: the popularization of a concept opens up the possibility of its use for several strategic purposes. The thesis that we defend in this paper is that some public figures cultivate a public persona for whom the conditions of (...) the notion of testimonial injustice might be taken to apply, and this situation is exploited to their advantage, as a means to advance their political agendas. More specifically, they take advantage of this to generate situations of crossed disagreements, which in turn foster polarization. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch a general framework for theorizing about bias and bias attributions. According to the account, paradigmatic cases of bias involve systematic departures from genuine norms. I attempt to show that the account illuminates a number of important psychological phenomena, including: the fact that accusations of bias frequently inspire not only denials but also countercharges of bias (“you only think that I'm biased because you're biased!”); the fact that we tend to see ourselves as less biased than (...) our peers (the so‐called ‘bias blind spot’); and the fact that we tend to see people who share our views as less biased than people who don't. I explore the circumstances in which we're committed to believing that those who disagree with us are not only mistaken but also biased simply because they disagree with us in the way that they do. In addition, the account also sheds light on another notorious and well‐documented psychological phenomenon: the fact that introspection is an unreliable way of detecting our biases. On the account that I offer, the unreliability of introspection for this purpose isn't a contingent fact that depends on the finer details of human psychology but rather holds of necessity: even God could not have made us creatures who reliably detect our own biases by way of introspection. (shrink)

Democracies, Dewey and others have argued, are ideally spaces of reasons – they allow for an exchange of reasons both practical and epistemic by those willing to engage in that discourse. That requires that citizens have convictions they believe in, but it also requires that they be willing to listen to each other. This paper examines how a particular psychological attitude, “epistemic arrogance,” can undermine the achievement of these goals. The paper presents an analysis of this attitude and then examines (...) four arguments for how its adoption – especially by the powerful – undermines the ideal of democracy as a space of reasons. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between expressivism and disagreement. More in particular, the aim is to defend that one of the desiderata that can be derived from the study of disagreement, the explanation of ‘crossed disagreements’, can only be accommodated within a semantic theory that respects, at the meta-semantic level, certain expressivistic restrictions. We will compare contemporary dynamic expressivism with three different varieties of contextualist strategies to accommodate the specificities of evaluative language –indexical contextualism – (...) truth-conditional pragmatics –, pragmatic strategies using implicatures, and presuppositional accounts. Our conclusion will be that certain assumptions of expressivism are necessary in order to provide a semantic account of evaluative uses of language that can allow us to detect and prevent crossed disagreements. (shrink)