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)

This book challenges the view that bad beliefs - beliefs that blatantly conflict with easily available evidence - can largely be explained by widespread irrationality, instead arguing that ordinary people are rational agents whose beliefs are the result of their rational response to the evidence they're presented with.

There is a large gap between the specialized knowledge of scientists and laypeople’s understanding of the sciences. The novice-expert problem arises when non-experts are confronted with (real or apparent) scientific disagreement, and when they don’t know whom to trust. Because they are not able to gauge the content of expert testimony, they rely on imperfect heuristics to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientists. This paper investigates why some bodies of scientific knowledge become polarized along political fault lines. Laypeople navigate conflicting epistemic (...) and social demands in their acceptance of scientific testimony; this might explain their deference to scientific fringe theories, which often goes together with denying established scientific theories. I evaluate three approaches to mitigate denialism: improving the message, improving the messenger, and improving the environment in which the message is conveyed. (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)

Did you know that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Or that Mike Pence called Michelle Obama “the most vulgar First Lady we’ve ever had”? No, you didn’t know these things. You couldn’t know them, because these claims are false.1 But many American voters believed them.One of the most distinctive features of the 2016 campaign was the rise of “fake news,” factually false claims circulated on social media, usually via channels of partisan camaraderie. Media analysts and social scientists are still (...) debating what role fake news played in Trump’s victory.2 But whether or not it drove the outcome, fake news certainly affected the choices of some individual voters.Why were people willing to believe easily... (shrink)

There is a robust scientific consensus concerning climate change and evolution. But many people reject these expert views, in favour of beliefs that are strongly at variance with the evidence. It is tempting to try to explain these beliefs by reference to ignorance or irrationality, but those who reject the expert view seem often to be no worse informed or any less rational than the majority of those who accept it. It is also tempting to try to explain these beliefs (...) by reference to epistemic overconfidence. However, this kind of overconfidence is apparently ubiquitous, so by itself it cannot explain the difference between those who accept and those who reject expert views. Instead, I will suggest that the difference is in important part explained by differential patterns of epistemic deference, and these patterns, in turn, are explained by the cues that we use to filter testimony. We rely on cues of benevolence and competence to distinguish reliable from unreliable testifiers, but when debates become deeply politicized, asserting a claim may itself constitute signalling lack of reliability. (shrink)

To the consequentialist, virtues are dispositions producing beneficial consequences. After outlining a consequentialist theory of epistemic virtue, I offer an account of an epistemic virtue of deference, manifested to the extent that we are disposed to defer to, and only to, people who speak the truth. I then look at what informed sources can do to instill such virtues of deference, in light of social-psychological evidence on compliance. It turns out that one way of doing so is through a complementary (...) epistemic virtue of lending an ear, that I then relate to philosophical work on open-mindedness. Finally, I respond to two concerns about the present account to the effect that it sanctions gullibility and is manipulative. (shrink)

Public support for responses to the coronavirus pandemic has sharply diverged on partisan lines in many countries, with conservatives tending to oppose lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates and vaccines, and liberals far more supportive. This polarization may arise from the way in which the attitudes of each side is echoed back to them, especially on social media. In this paper, I argue that echo chambers are not to blame for this polarization, even if they are causally responsible for it. They (...) are not to blame, because belief calibration in an echo chamber is a rational process; moreover, the epistemically constitutive properties of echo chambers are not optional for epistemically social animals like us. There is no special problem of echo chambers; rather, there is a problem of misleading evidence (especially higher-order evidence). Accordingly, we ought to respond to misinformation about COVID neither by attempting to dismantle echo chambers nor by attempting to make people more rational, but rather by attempting to supplant unreliable higher-order evidence with better evidence. (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.

In this paper, I argue that epistemic trust is an intellectual virtue. First, I offer a brief analysis of what it means to place epistemic trust in someone involving several components: belief, communication, dependence, and confidence. I show this account of trust fits a major approach to virtue in the second section. Next, I argue that epistemic trust both contributes to the epistemic good life and that the paradigmatically rational or virtuous agent will include trust in her motivational structure. Considerations (...) from both the structure and meta-epistemology of virtues give us excellent grounds to accept that such a trait is an epistemic virtue. Following these arguments, I discuss a few implications of the view. Epistemic trust will be a mean between two vices of credulity and suspiciousness but that mean will be sensitive to the agent’s particular epistemic context. The view is not evidentialist (for good trust is not defined solely in terms of evidence) but it does account for the role evidence often plays in good epistemic trust (since other virtues relevant to the obtaining and weighing of evidence must be in operation). Finally, I apply the view to three issues in epistemology: the problem of easy or low grade knowledge, testimony, and disagreement; arguing that we’re provided with interesting, fruitful ways of approaching them. (shrink)