Results for 'epistemic environment'

961 found
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  1. Fake News, Relevant Alternatives, and the Degradation of Our Epistemic Environment.Christopher Blake-Turner - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.
    This paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire (...)
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  2. How to Do Things with Information Online. A Conceptual Framework for Evaluating Social Networking Platforms as Epistemic Environments.Lavinia Marin - 2022 - Philsophy and Technology 35 (77).
    This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle inspired by the ethics of self-driving cars, I operationalise (...)
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  3. Bubbles and Chambers: Post-Truth and Belief Formation in Digital Social-Epistemic Environments.Massimiliano Badino - 2022
    It is often claimed that epistemic bubbles and echo chambers foster post-truth by filtering our access to information and manipulating our epistemic attitude. In this paper, I try to add a further level of analysis by adding the issue of belief formation. Building on cognitive psychology work, I argue for a dual-system theory according to which beliefs derive from a default system and a critical system. One produces beliefs in a quasi-automatic, effortless way, the other in a slow, (...)
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  4. Epistemic Arrogance and Political Dissent.Michael Lynch - forthcoming - In Lynch Michael (ed.), Voicing Dissent. Routledge.
    In this essay, I examine four different reasons for thinking that political dissent has epistemic value. The realization of this epistemic value hinges in part on what I’ll loosely call the epistemic environment, or the environment in which individuals come to believe, reason, inquire, and debate. In particular, to the degree that our social practices encourage and even embody an attitude of epistemic arrogance, the epistemic value of dissent will be difficult to realize. (...)
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  5. Epistemic Landscapes, Optimal Search, and the Division of Cognitive Labor.Jason McKenzie Alexander, Johannes Himmelreich & Christopher Thompson - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (3):424-453,.
    This article examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor”, that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors (...)
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  6. Epistemic Paternalism Online.Clinton Castro, Adam Pham & Alan Rubel - 2020 - In Guy Axtell & Amiel Bernal (eds.), Epistemic Paternalism: Conceptions, Justifications and Implications. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 29-44.
    New media (highly interactive digital technology for creating, sharing, and consuming information) affords users a great deal of control over their informational diets. As a result, many users of new media unwittingly encapsulate themselves in epistemic bubbles (epistemic structures, such as highly personalized news feeds, that leave relevant sources of information out (Nguyen forthcoming)). Epistemically paternalistic alterations to new media technologies could be made to pop at least some epistemic bubbles. We examine one such alteration that Facebook (...)
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  7. Binding bound variables in epistemic contexts.Brian Rabern - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (5-6):533-563.
    ABSTRACT Quine insisted that the satisfaction of an open modalised formula by an object depends on how that object is described. Kripke's ‘objectual’ interpretation of quantified modal logic, whereby variables are rigid, is commonly thought to avoid these Quinean worries. Yet there remain residual Quinean worries for epistemic modality. Theorists have recently been toying with assignment-shifting treatments of epistemic contexts. On such views an epistemic operator ends up binding all the variables in its scope. One might worry (...)
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  8. The epistemic significance of collaborative research.K. Brad Wray - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (1):150-168.
    I examine the epistemic import of collaborative research in science. I develop and defend a functional explanation for its growing importance. Collaborative research is becoming more popular in the natural sciences, and to a lesser degree in the social sciences, because contemporary research in these fields frequently requires access to abundant resources, for which there is great competition. Scientists involved in collaborative research have been very successful in accessing these resources, which has in turn enabled them to realize the (...)
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  9. Building Epistemically Healthier Platforms.Dallas Amico-Korby, Maralee Harrell & David Danks - forthcoming - Episteme.
    When thinking about designing social media platforms, we often focus on factors such as usability, functionality, aesthetics, ethics, and so forth. Epistemic considerations have rarely been given the same level of attention in design discussions. This paper aims to rectify this neglect. We begin by arguing that there are epistemic norms that govern environments, including social media environments. Next, we provide a framework for applying these norms to the question of platform design. We then apply this framework to (...)
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  10. Understanding epistemic relevance.Luciano Floridi - 2008 - Erkenntnis 69 (1):69-92.
    Agents require a constant flow, and a high level of processing, of relevant semantic information, in order to interact successfully among themselves and with the environment in which they are embedded. Standard theories of information, however, are silent on the nature of epistemic relevance. In this paper, a subjectivist interpretation of epistemic relevance is developed and defended. It is based on a counterfactual and metatheoretical analysis of the degree of relevance of some semantic information i to an (...)
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  11. Epistemic Elitism and Other Minds.Elijah Chudnoff - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):276-298.
    Experiences justify beliefs about our environment. Sometimes the justification is immediate: seeing a red light immediately justifies believing there is a red light. Other times the justification is mediate: seeing a red light justifies believing one should brake in a way that is mediated by background knowledge of traffic signals. How does this distinction map onto the distinction between what is and what isn't part of the content of experience? Epistemic egalitarians think that experiences immediately justify whatever is (...)
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  12. (1 other version)Outward-facing epistemic vice.Keith Raymond Harris - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-16.
    The epistemic virtues and vices are typically defined in terms of effects or motivations related to the epistemic states of their possessors. However, philosophers have recently begun to consider _other-regarding_ epistemic virtues, traits oriented toward the epistemic flourishing of others. In a similar vein, this paper discusses _outward-facing_ epistemic vices, properties oriented toward the epistemic languishing of others. I argue for the existence of both reliabilist and responsibilist outward-facing vices, and illustrate how such vices (...)
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  13. Epistemic Democracy and the Truth Connection.Wes Siscoe - forthcoming - Public Reason.
    If political decision-making aims at getting a particular result, like identifying just laws or policies that truly promote the common good, then political institutions can also be evaluated in terms of how often they achieve these results. Epistemic defenses of democracy argue that democracies have the upper hand when it comes to truth, identifying the laws and policies that are truly just or conducive to the common good. A number of epistemic democrats claim that democracies have this beneficial (...)
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  14. (1 other version)Enacting Environments: From Umwelts to Institutions.Mog Stapleton - 2021 - In Karyn L. Lai (ed.), Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy: Epistemology Extended. Springer Nature. pp. 159-189.
    What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in order to (...)
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  15. Mathematical symbols as epistemic actions.Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz - 2013 - Synthese 190 (1):3-19.
    Recent experimental evidence from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience indicates that humans are equipped with unlearned elementary mathematical skills. However, formal mathematics has properties that cannot be reduced to these elementary cognitive capacities. The question then arises how human beings cognitively deal with more advanced mathematical ideas. This paper draws on the extended mind thesis to suggest that mathematical symbols enable us to delegate some mathematical operations to the external environment. In this view, mathematical symbols are not only used (...)
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  16. The Epistemic Value of Civil Disagreement in advance.Christopher W. Love - 2021 - Social Theory and Practice 47 (4):629-656.
    In this article, I argue that the practice of civil disagreement has robust epistemic benefits and that these benefits enable meaningful forms of reconciliation—across worldview lines and amid the challenging information environment of our age. I then engage two broad groups of objections: either that civil disagreement opposes, rather than promotes, clarity, or else that it does little to help it. If successful, my account gives us reason to include civil disagreement among what Mill calls “the real morality (...)
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  17. Institutions of Epistemic Vigilance: The Case of the Newspaper Press.Ákos Szegőfi & Christophe Heintz - 2022 - Social Epistemology 36 (5):613-628.
    Can people efficiently navigate the modern communication environment, and if yes, how? We hypothesize that in addition to psychological capacities of epistemic vigilance, which evaluate the epistemic value of communicated information, some social institutions have evolved for the same function. Certain newspapers for instance, implement processes, distributed among several experts and tools, whose function is to curate information. We analyze how information curation is done at the institutional level and what challenges it meets. We also investigate what (...)
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  18. Should CSR Give Atheists Epistemic Assurance? On Beer-Goggles, BFFs, and Skepticism Regarding Religious Beliefs.Justin L. Barrett & Ian M. Church - 2013 - The Monist 96 (3):311-324.
    Recent work in cognitive science of religion (CSR) is beginning to converge on a very interesting thesis—that, given the ordinary features of human minds operating in typical human environments, we are naturally disposed to believe in the existence of gods, among other religious ideas (e.g., seeAtran [2002], Barrett [2004; 2012], Bering [2011], Boyer [2001], Guthrie [1993], McCauley [2011], Pyysiäinen [2004; 2009]). In this paper, we explore whether such a discovery ultimately helps or hurts the atheist position—whether, for example, it lends (...)
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  19. Adapting the Environment instead of Oneself.David Kirsh - 1996 - Adaptive Behavior 4 (3-4):415-452.
    This paper examines some of the methods animals and humans have of adapting their environment. Because there are limits on how many different tasks a creature can be designed to do well in, creatures with the capacity to redesign their environments have an adaptive advantage over those who can only passively adapt to existing environmental structures. To clarify environmental redesign I rely on the formal notion of a task environment as a directed graph where the nodes are states (...)
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  20. Re-assessing Google as Epistemic Tool in the Age of Personalisation.Tanya de Villiers-Botha - 2022 - The Proceedings of SACAIR2022 Online Conference, the 3rd Southern African Conference for Artificial Intelligence Research.
    Google Search is arguably one of the primary epistemic tools in use today, with the lion’s share of the search-engine market globally. Scholarship on countering the current scourge of misinformation often recommends “digital lit- eracy” where internet users, especially those who get their information from so- cial media, are encouraged to fact-check such information using reputable sources. Given our current internet-based epistemic landscape, and Google’s dominance of the internet, it is very likely that such acts of epistemic (...)
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  21. Nonhuman Animals and Epistemic Injustice.Andrew Lopez - 2023 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 25 (1).
    In this paper, I argue that nonhuman animals can be subject to epistemic injustice. I consider Miranda Fricker’s (2007) account of the nature of the harm of epistemic injustice and highlight that it requires that a knower be invested in being recognized as a knower. I argue that a focus on know-how, rather than testimony or concepts for self-understanding and communication, can serve to highlight how nonhuman animals can suffer epistemic injustice without an investment in recognition, by (...)
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  22. Epistemic virtues a prerequisite for the truth-seeking and constructor of intellectual identity.Zahra Khazaei & Mohsen Javadi Hossein Hemmatzadeh - 2018 - Theology 9 (19):123-146.
    Abstract The present paper examines the role of epistemic virtues in the formation of intellectual identity and its impact on improving our truth-seeking behaviors. A epistemic virtue is a special faculty or trait of a person whose operation makes that person a thinker, believer, learner, scholar, knower, cognizer, perceiver, etc., or causes his intellectual development and perfection, and improves his truth-seeking and knowledge-acquiring behaviours and places him on the path to attain understanding, perception and wisdom. Virtue epistemology is (...)
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  23. Introduction [to Logos & Episteme, Special Issue: Intellectual Humility].J. Adam Carter, Jesper Kallestrup & Duncan Pritchard - 2016 - Logos and Episteme 7 (7): 409-411.
    While it is widely regarded that intellectual humility is among the intellectual virtues, there is as of yet little consensus on the matter of what possessing and exercising intellectual humility consists in, and how it should be best understood as advancing our epistemic goals. For example, does intellectual humility involve an underestimation of one’s intellectual abilities, or rather, does it require an accurate conception? Is intellectual humility a fundamentally interpersonal/social virtue, or might it be valuable to exercise in isolation? (...)
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  24. Epistemic Sanity or Why You Shouldn't be Opinionated or Skeptical.Danilo Fraga Dantas - 2022 - Episteme 20 (3):647-666.
    I propose the notion of ‘epistemic sanity’, a property of parsimony between the holding of true but not false beliefs and the consideration of our cognitive limitations. Where ‘alethic value’ is the epistemic value of holding true but not false beliefs, the ‘alethic potential’ of an agent is the amount of extra alethic value that she is expected to achieve, given her current environment, beliefs, and reasoning skills. Epistemic sanity would be related to the holding of (...)
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  25. A Dynamic Epistemic Logic with a Knowability Principle.Michael Cohen - 2015 - In Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer. pp. 406-410.
    A dynamic epistemic logic is presented in which the single agent can reason about his knowledge stages before and after announcements. The logic is generated by reinterpreting multi agent private announcements in a single agent environment. It is shown that a knowability principle is valid for such logic: any initially true ϕ can be known after a certain number of announcements.
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  26. What is the environment in environmental health research? Perspectives from the ethics of science.David M. Frank - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (C):172-180.
    Environmental health research produces scientific knowledge about environmental hazards crucial for public health and environmental justice movements that seek to prevent or reduce exposure to these hazards. The environment in environmental health research is conceptualized as the range of possible social, biological, chemical, and/or physical hazards or risks to human health, some of which merit study due to factors such as their probability and severity, the feasibility of their remediation, and injustice in their distribution. This paper explores the ethics (...)
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  27. Some Epistemic Benefits of Action-Tetris, a Case Study.David Kirsh & P. Maglio - 1992 - Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
    We present data and argument to show that in Tetris—a real-time interactive video game—certain cognitive and perceptual problems are more quickly, easily, and reliably solved by performing actions in the world rather than by performing computational actions in the head alone. We have found that some translations and rotations are best understood as being used to implement a plan, or to implement a reaction. To substantiate our position we have implemented a computational laboratory that lets us record keystrokes and game (...)
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  28. (1 other version)Epistemic Complementarity: Steps to a Second Wave Extended Epistemology.Gloria Andrada - 2021 - In Inês Hipólito, Robert William Clowes & Klaus Gärtner (eds.), The Mind-Technology Problem : Investigating Minds, Selves and 21st Century Artefacts. Springer Verlag. pp. 253-274.
    In this chapter, I propose a new framework for extended epistemology, based on a second-wave approach to extended cognition. The framework is inclusive, in that it takes into account the complex interplay between the diverse embodiments of extended knowers and the salient properties of technological artifacts, as well as the environment in which they are embedded. Thus it both emphasizes and exploits the complementary roles played by these different elements. Finally, I motivate and explain this framework by applying it (...)
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  29. Online Echo Chambers, Online Epistemic Bubbles, and Open-Mindedness.Cody Turner - 2023 - Episteme 21:1-26.
    This article is an exercise in the virtue epistemology of the internet, an area of applied virtue epistemology that investigates how online environments impact the development of intellectual virtues, and how intellectual virtues manifest within online environments. I examine online echo chambers and epistemic bubbles (Nguyen 2020, Episteme 17(2), 141–61), exploring the conceptual relationship between these online environments and the virtue of open-mindedness (Battaly 2018b, Episteme 15(3), 261–82). The article answers two key individual-level, virtue epistemic questions: (Q1) How (...)
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  30. The Information Environment and Blameworthy Beliefs.Boyd Millar - 2019 - Social Epistemology 33 (6):525-537.
    Thanks to the advent of social media, large numbers of Americans believe outlandish falsehoods that have been widely debunked. Many of us have a tendency to fault the individuals who hold such beliefs. We naturally assume that the individuals who form and maintain such beliefs do so in virtue of having violated some epistemic obligation: perhaps they failed to scrutinize their sources, or failed to seek out the available competing evidence. I maintain that very many ordinary individuals who acquire (...)
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  31. Audre Lorde’s Erotic as Epistemic and Political Practice.Caleb Ward - 2023 - Hypatia 38 (4):896–917.
    Audre Lorde’s account of the erotic is one of her most widely celebrated contributions to political theory and feminist activism, but her explanation of the term in her brief essay “Uses of the Erotic” is famously oblique and ambiguous. This article develops a detailed, textually grounded interpretation of Lorde’s erotic, based on an analysis of how Lorde’s essay brings together commitments expressed across her work. I describe four integral elements of Lorde’s erotic: feeling, knowledge, power, and concerted action. The erotic (...)
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  32. Seeing and understanding epistemic actions.Sholei Croom, Hanbei Zhou & Chaz Firestone - 2023 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120:e2303162120.
    Many actions have instrumental aims, in which we move our bodies to achieve a physical outcome in the environment. However, we also perform actions with epistemic aims, in which we move our bodies to acquire information and learn about the world. A large literature on action recognition investigates how observers represent and understand the former class of actions; but what about the latter class? Can one person tell, just by observing another person’s movements, what they are trying to (...)
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  33. Loss of Epistemic Self-Determination in the Anthropocene.Ian Werkheiser - 2017 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 20 (2):156-167.
    One serious harm facing communities in the Anthropocene is epistemic loss. This is increasingly recognized as a harm in international policy discourses around adaptation to climate change. Epistemic loss is typically conceived of as the loss of a corpus of knowledge, or less commonly, as the further loss of epistemic methodologies. In what follows, I argue that epistemic loss also can involve the loss of epistemic self-determination, and that this framework can help to usefully examine (...)
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  34. Grounded knowledge, place and epistemic virtue.Jason Kawall - 2005 - Ethics, Place and Environment 8 (3):361 – 371.
    A response to Christopher Preston's book "Grounding Knowledge" (2003). I first argue that Preston’s work strongly suggests that epistemologists would do well to re-examine and pay greater attention to ‘knowledge how’. Second, I briefly consider several of Preston’s proposals (concerning the importance of place to our cognitive lives) through the lens of contemporary virtue epistemology and suggest how Preston’s work might inform and shape theorizing in this area. Finally, I turn to a set of potential questions for Preston, focusing in (...)
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  35. What does it mean to be an American? American Ignorance and Social Imagination of Citizenship.Fatima Saba - 2023 - Hypatia 38 (4):760–78.
    In its war on terror, the United States tortured and abused individuals in its custody over a decade. This article examines a specific sort of epistemic response by Americans to the use of torture by their government, the sort of response that enables Americans to operate with epistemic ignorance to maintain a favorable construction of their identity as Americans. I lay out the concept of American ignorance as the active production of false and/or incomplete beliefs about what it (...)
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  36. Inclusive Education and Epistemic Value in the Praxis of Ethical Change.Ignace Haaz - 2019 - In Obiora F. Ike, Justus Mbae & Chidiehere Onyia (eds.), Mainstreaming Ethics in Higher Education Research Ethics in Administration, Finance, Education, Environment and Law Vol. 1. Globethics. net. pp. 259-290.
    In many universities and related knowledge transmission organisations, professional focus on empirical data shows as in vocational education that preparation for real life technical work is important, as one would expect from “career education”. University is as the name shows on the contrary focusing on the universality of some sort of education, which is neither a technical one, nor much concerned by preparing oneself for a career. The scope of this chapter is to propose an analysis of inclusion as the (...)
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  37. Skepticism and the Digital Information Environment.Matthew Carlson - 2021 - SATS 22 (2):149-167.
    Deepfakes are audio, video, or still-image digital artifacts created by the use of artificial intelligence technology, as opposed to traditional means of recording. Because deepfakes can look and sound much like genuine digital recordings, they have entered the popular imagination as sources of serious epistemic problems for us, as we attempt to navigate the increasingly treacherous digital information environment of the internet. In this paper, I attempt to clarify what epistemic problems deepfakes pose and why they pose (...)
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  38. The Structural Links Between Ecology, Evolution and Ethics: The Virtuous Epistemic Circle.Donato Bergandi (ed.) - 2013 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    Abstract - Evolutionary, ecological and ethical studies are, at the same time, specific scientific disciplines and, from an historical point of view, structurally linked domains of research. In a context of environmental crisis, the need is increasingly emerging for a connecting epistemological framework able to express a common or convergent tendency of thought and practice aimed at building, among other things, an environmental policy management respectful of the planet’s biodiversity and its evolutionary potential. -/- Evolutionary biology, ecology and ethics: at (...)
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  39. The philosophy of presence: from epistemic failure to successful observability.Luciano Floridi - 2005 - Presence Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 14 (6):656–667.
    The paper introduces a new model of telepresence. First, it criticises the standard model of presence as epistemic failure, showing it to be inadequate. It then replaces it with a new model of presence as successful observability. It further provides reasons to distinguish between two types of presence, backward and forward. The new model is then tested against two ethical issues whose nature has been modified by the development of digital information and communication technologies, namely pornography and privacy, and (...)
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  40. The multifaceted role of imagination in science and religion. A critical examination of its epistemic, creative and meaning-making functions.Ingrid Malm Lindberg - 2021 - Dissertation, Uppsala University
    The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine critically and discuss the role of imagination in science and religion, with particular emphasis on its possible epistemic, creative, and meaning-making functions. In order to answer my research questions, I apply theories and concepts from contemporary philosophy of mind on scientific and religious practices. This framework allows me to explore the mental state of imagination, not as an isolated phenomenon but, rather, as one of many mental states that co-exist and (...)
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  41. Comparing Lives and Epistemic Limitations: A Critique of Regan's Lifeboat from An Unprivileged Position.C. E. Abbate - 2015 - Ethics and the Environment 20 (1):1-21.
    In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of lives. According to Regan, lives that have the highest value are lives which have more possible sources of satisfaction. Regan claims that the highest source of satisfaction, which is available to only rational beings, is the satisfaction associated with thinking impartially about moral choices. Since rational beings can bring impartial reasons to bear on decision making, (...)
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  42. The “Cartographic Impulse” and Its Epistemic Gains in the Process of Iteratively Mapping M87's Black Hole.Paula Muhr - 2023 - Media+Environment 5 (1).
    After the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released in April 2019 the first empirical images of a black hole, an astrophysical object previously thought “unseeable,” much of the public discourse has approached these images as straightforward visual depictions of a black hole. This article challenges this view by showing that the first images of a black hole went beyond merely making an invisible cosmic object visible and that the images published in April 2019 were just the first in a series of (...)
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  43. What is left of irrationality?Kathleen Murphy-Hollies & Chiara Caporuscio - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (4):808-818.
    In his recent book Bad Beliefs and Why They Happen to Good People, Neil Levy argues that conspiracy theories result from the same rational processes that underlie epistemic success. While we think many of Levy’s points are valuable, like his criticism of the myth of individual cognition and his emphasis on the importance of one’s social epistemic environment, we believe that his account overlooks some important aspects. We argue that social deference is an active process, and as (...)
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  44. Moral Encroachment, Wokeness, and the Epistemology of Holding.J. Spencer Atkins - 2023 - Episteme 20 (1):86-100.
    Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical tools available to (...)
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  45. Hostile Epistemology.C. Thi Nguyen - 2023 - Social Philosophy Today 39:9-32.
    Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and attention. But hostile forces can always game the gap between the heuristic and the (...)
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  46. Evidence in a Non-Ideal World: How Social Distortion Creates Skeptical Potholes.Catharine Saint-Croix - forthcoming - In Hilkje Hänel & Johanna Müller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory. Routledge.
    Our evidential environments are reflections of our social contexts. This is important because the evidence we encounter influences the beliefs we form. But, traditional epistemologists have paid little attention to the generation of this evidential environment, assuming that it is irrelevant to epistemic normativity. This assumption, I argue, is dangerous. Idealizing away the evidential environment obscures the ways that our social contexts distort its contents. Such social distortion can lead to evidential oppression, an epistemic injustice arising (...)
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  47. Bad beliefs: automaticity, arationality, and intervention.Stephen Gadsby - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (4):778-791.
    Levy (2021 Levy, N. (2021). Bad beliefs: Why they happen to good people. Oxford University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]) argues that bad beliefs predominately stem from automatic (albeit rational) updating in response to testimonial evidence. To counteract such beliefs, then, we should focus on ridding our epistemic environments of misleading testimony. This paper responds as follows. First, I argue that the suite of automatic processes related to bad beliefs extends well beyond the deference-based processes that Levy identifies. Second, I push (...)
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  48. What Does a Bee Know? A Teleosemantic Framework for Cognitive Ethologist.Petar Nurkić & Umeljić Ivan - 2022 - Theoria: Beograd 65 (4):33-59.
    Naturalistic epistemology is usually associated with Quine’s turn from an a priori and traditional to a descriptive understanding of knowledge. In this paper, however, we will look at theories developed from Quine’s ideas - Millikan’s teleosemantics and Kornblith’s cognitive ethology. We will answer three questions: (i) Can a bee know?; (ii) What can a bee know?; and (iii) Does the bee know? First, we will answer the question of animal cognitive capacities using Kornblith’s understanding of the epistemic environment (...)
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  49. Should measures be taken to address the spreading of false information on social media platforms? If so, should these measures be designed to make users more accountable for what they post, share, like, or re-tweet?Katie Lianne Bohun - manuscript
    The spreading of false information on social media platforms is becoming increasingly common and thus, is creating an epistemic environment where people don’t know what to believe. Within this essay, I will argue that measures should be taken to address and reduce the spreading of false information on social media platforms, furthermore, accountability mechanisms should be implicated in order to do so.
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  50. Social Evidence Tampering and the Epistemology of Content Moderation.Keith Harris - forthcoming - Topoi.
    Social media misinformation is widely thought to pose a host of threats to the acquisition of knowledge. One response to these threats is to remove misleading information from social media and to de-platform those who spread it. While content moderation of this sort has been criticized on various grounds—including potential incompatibility with free expression—the epistemic case for the removal of misinformation from social media has received little scrutiny. Here, I provide an overview of some costs and benefits of the (...)
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