Results for 'epistemic instrumentalism'

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  1. Epistemic instrumentalism, permissibility, and reasons for belief.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2018 - In Conor McHugh, Jonathan Way & Daniel Whiting (eds.), Normativity: Epistemic and Practical. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 260-280.
    Epistemic instrumentalists seek to understand the normativity of epistemic norms on the model practical instrumental norms governing the relation between aims and means. Non-instrumentalists often object that this commits instrumentalists to implausible epistemic assessments. I argue that this objection presupposes an implausibly strong interpretation of epistemic norms. Once we realize that epistemic norms should be understood in terms of permissibility rather than obligation, and that evidence only occasionally provide normative reasons for belief, an instrumentalist account (...)
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  2. Epistemic instrumentalism and the reason to believe in accord with the evidence.Nathaniel Sharadin - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):3791-3809.
    Epistemic instrumentalists face a puzzle. In brief, the puzzle is that if the reason there is to believe in accord with the evidence depends, as the instrumentalist says it does, on agents’ idiosyncratic interests, then there is no reason to expect that this reason is universal. Here, I identify and explain two strategies instrumentalists have used to try and solve this puzzle. I then argue that we should find these strategies wanting. Faced with the failure of these strategies, I (...)
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  3. Two types of epistemic instrumentalism.Charles Côté-Bouchard - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5455-5475.
    Epistemic instrumentalism views epistemic norms and epistemic normativity as essentially involving the instrumental relation between means and ends. It construes notions like epistemic normativity, norms, and rationality, as forms of instrumental or means-end normativity, norms, and rationality. I do two main things in this paper. In part 1, I argue that there is an under-appreciated distinction between two independent types of epistemic instrumentalism. These are instrumentalism about epistemic norms and instrumentalism (...)
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  4. (1 other version)An instrumentalist unification of zetetic and epistemic reasons.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, (...)
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  5. An Instrumentalist Account of How to Weigh Epistemic and Practical Reasons for Belief.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Mattias Skipper - 2019 - Mind 129 (516):1071-1094.
    When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. (...)
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  6. Instrumentalism, Moral Encroachment, and Epistemic Injustice.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - forthcoming - Philosophical Topics.
    According to the thesis of pragmatic encroachment, practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is epistemically rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open on Saturdays, can depend not only on the strength of the person’s evidence, but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open on Saturdays. In recent years, philosophers (...)
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  7. The Construction of Epistemic Normativity.Michael Hannon & Elise Woodard - manuscript
    This paper aims to solve a puzzle for instrumental conceptions of epistemic normativity. The puzzle is this: if the usefulness of epistemic norms explains their normative grip on us, why does it seem improper to violate these norms even when doing so would benefit us? To solve this puzzle, we argue that epistemic instrumentalists must adopt a more social approach to normativity. In particular, they should not account for the nature of epistemic normativity by appealing to (...)
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  8. Epistemic Normativity is Independent of our Goals.Alex Worsnip - 2024 - In Blake Roeber, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
    In epistemology and in ordinary life, we make many normative claims about beliefs. As with all normative claims, philosophical questions arise about what – if anything – underwrites these kinds of normative claims. On one view, epistemic instrumentalism, facts about what we (epistemically) ought to believe, or about what is an (epistemic, normative) reason to believe what, obtain at least partly in virtue of our goals (or aims, ends, intentions, desires, etc.). The converse view, anti-instrumentalism, denies (...)
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  9. Are There Any Epistemic Consequentialists?Tsung-Hsing Ho - 2022 - Episteme 19 (2):220-230.
    Selim Berker argues that epistemic consequentialism is pervasive in epistemology and that epistemic consequentialism is structurally flawed. is incorrect, however. I distinguish between epistemic consequentialism and epistemic instrumentalism and argue that most putative consequentialists should be considered instrumentalists. I also identify the structural problem of epistemic consequentialism Berker attempts to pinpoint and show that epistemic instrumentalism does not have the consequentialist problem.
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  10. Epistemic practices: A unified account of epistemic and zetetic normativity.Will Fleisher - forthcoming - Noûs.
    This paper presents the epistemic practices account, a theory about the nature of epistemic normativity. The account aims to explain how the pursuit of epistemic values such as truth and knowledge can give rise to epistemic norms. On this account, epistemic norms are the internal rules of epistemic social practices. The account explains four crucial features of epistemic normativity while dissolving some apparent tensions between them. The account also provides a unified theory of (...)
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  11. An instrumentalist explanation of pragmatic encroachment.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (3):374-392.
    Many have found it plausible that practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open tomorrow can depend not only on the person's evidence but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open tomorrow. This supposed phenomenon is known as “pragmatic encroachment” on knowledge and (...)
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  12. (1 other version)The Epistemic Circumstances of Democracy.Fabienne Peter - 2016 - In Michael Brady & Miranda Fricker (eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 133 - 149.
    Does political decision-making require experts or can a democracy be trusted to make correct decisions? This question has a long-standing tradition in political philosophy, going back at least to Plato’s Republic. Critics of democracy tend to argue that democracy cannot be trusted in this way while advocates tend to argue that it can. Both camps agree that it is the epistemic quality of the outcomes of political decision-making processes that underpins the legitimacy of political institutions. In recent political philosophy, (...)
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  13. Instrumental reasons for belief: elliptical talk and elusive properties.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Mattias Skipper - 2020 - In Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 109-125.
    Epistemic instrumentalists think that epistemic normativity is just a special kind of instrumental normativity. According to them, you have epistemic reason to believe a proposition insofar as doing so is conducive to certain epistemic goals or aims—say, to believe what is true and avoid believing what is false. Perhaps the most prominent challenge for instrumentalists in recent years has been to explain, or explain away, why one’s epistemic reasons often do not seem to depend on (...)
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  14. Pure Epistemic Proceduralism.Fabienne Peter - 2008 - Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 5 (1):33-55.
    In this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism–the view that political equality is only (...)
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  15. The relational foundations of epistemic normativity.Cameron Boult - 2024 - Philosophical Issues 34 (1):285-304.
    Why comply with epistemic norms? In this paper, I argue that complying with epistemic norms, engaging in epistemically responsible conduct, and being epistemically trustworthy are constitutive elements of maintaining good epistemic relations with oneself and others. Good epistemic relations are in turn both instrumentally and finally valuable: they enable the kind of coordination and knowledge acquisition underpinning much of what we tend to associate with a flourishing human life; and just as good interpersonal relations with others (...)
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  16. Normativity in cases of Epistemic Indifference.Müller Basil & Rodrigo Diaz - forthcoming - Episteme.
    One of metaepistemology’s most central debates revolves around the question of what the source of epistemic normativity is. Epistemic instrumentalism claims that epistemic normativity is a species of means-ends normativity. One of the most prominent objections against epistemic instrumentalism features cases of epistemic indifference: Cases where there’s evidence that p yet believing that p wouldn’t promote any of the agent’s aims, wants, or needs. Still, there’s an epistemic reason for the agent to (...)
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  17. Explicating the Concept of Epistemic Rationality.Anna-Maria A. Eder - 2021 - Synthese 199:4975–5000.
    A characterization of epistemic rationality, or epistemic justification, is typically taken to require a process of conceptual clarification, and is seen as comprising the core of a theory of (epistemic) rationality. I propose to explicate the concept of rationality. -/- It is essential, I argue, that the normativity of rationality, and the purpose, or goal, for which the particular theory of rationality is being proposed, is taken into account when explicating the concept of rationality. My position thus (...)
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  18. The Procedural Value of Epistemic Virtues.Miljan Vasić - 2023 - In Nenad Cekić (ed.), Virtues and vices – between ethics and epistemology. Belgrade: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. pp. 91–118.
    The longstanding tension between the procedural and instrumental justification of democracy has been challenged by the theories that try to combine both approaches. These theories portray epistemic features of democracy in an instrumental framework and then try to reconcile them with procedural values. In this paper, I argue that it is possible to incorporate an epistemic dimension into a justification of democracy, without resorting to instrumentalism. On the view that I advance, Peircean epistemology, when combined with intrinsically (...)
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  19. Re-enchanting Realism in Debate with Kyle Stanford.Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem - 2013 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44 (1):201-224.
    In this article, against the background of a notion of ‘assembled’ truth, the evolutionary progressiveness of a theory is suggested as novel and promising explanation for the success of science. A new version of realism in science, referred to as ‘naturalised realism’ is outlined. Naturalised realism is ‘fallibilist’ in the unique sense that it captures and mimics the self-corrective core of scientific knowledge and its progress. It is argued that naturalised realism disarms Kyle Stanford’s anti-realist ‘new induction’ threats by showing (...)
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  20. Plausible Permissivism.Michael G. Titelbaum & Matthew Kopec - manuscript
    Abstract. Richard Feldman’s Uniqueness Thesis holds that “a body of evidence justifies at most one proposition out of a competing set of proposi- tions”. The opposing position, permissivism, allows distinct rational agents to adopt differing attitudes towards a proposition given the same body of evidence. We assess various motivations that have been offered for Uniqueness, including: concerns about achieving consensus, a strong form of evidentialism, worries about epistemically arbitrary influences on belief, a focus on truth-conduciveness, and consequences for peer disagreement. (...)
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  21. La funzione morale della democrazia deliberativa.Christoph Lumer - 1996 - In Raffaela Giovagnoli (ed.), Etica E Politica. Clarendon Press. pp. 185-199.
    The article develops and defends, with a detailed argument, a certain moral-instrumentalist conception of deliberative democracy according to which, so the main thesis, a certain form of deliberative democracy is the best means for the binding realisation of moral values. This conception combines an epistemic component, according to which deliberation serves to determine which measures most serve the general good, with a participatory component, according to which democratic voting serves to give moral insight social power. Because of the dispute (...)
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  22. Veritism Unswamped.Kurt Sylvan - 2018 - Mind 127 (506):381-435.
    According to Veritism, true belief is the sole fundamental epistemic value. Epistemologists often take Veritism to entail that all other epistemic items can only have value by standing in certain instrumental relations—namely, by tending to produce a high ratio of true to false beliefs or by being products of sources with this tendency. Yet many value theorists outside epistemology deny that all derivative value is grounded in instrumental relations to fundamental value. Veritists, I believe, can and should follow (...)
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  23. Scientific Realism vs. Anti-Realism: Toward a Common Ground.Hanti Lin - manuscript
    The debate between scientific realism and anti-realism remains at a stalemate, making reconciliation seem hopeless. Yet, important work remains: exploring a common ground, even if only to uncover deeper points of disagreement and, ideally, to benefit both sides of the debate. I propose such a common ground. Specifically, many anti-realists, such as instrumentalists, have yet to seriously engage with Sober's call to justify their preferred version of Ockham's razor through a positive account. Meanwhile, realists face a similar challenge: providing a (...)
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  24. Unconceived alternatives and the cathedral problem.Samuel Ruhmkorff - 2019 - Synthese 196 (10):3933-3945.
    Kyle Stanford claims we have historical evidence that there likely are plausible unconceived alternatives in fundamental domains of science, and thus evidence that our best theories in these domains are probably false. Accordingly, we should adopt a form of instrumentalism. Elsewhere, I have argued that in fact we do not have historical evidence for the existence of plausible unconceived alternatives in particular domains of science, and that the main challenge to scientific realism is rather to provide evidence that there (...)
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  25. Cleaning up, and Moving Past, Simple Swamping.Timothy Perrine - 2021 - Theoria 87 (6):1548-1561.
    Many philosophers believe that true belief is of epistemic value, but that knowledge is of even more epistemic value. Some claim that this surplus value is instrumentally valuable to the value of true belief. I call the conjunction of these claims the Instrumentalist’s Conjunction. The so-called “Swamping Problem” is meant to show that Instrumentalist’s Conjunction is inconsistent. Crudely put, the problem is that if knowledge only has surplus value to the value of true belief, and a belief is (...)
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  26. Realism, method and truth.Howard Sankey - 2002 - In Michele Marsonet (ed.), The Problem of Realism. Ashgate. pp. 64-81.
    What is the relation between method and truth? Are we justified in accepting a theory that satisfies the rules of scientific method as true? Such questions divide realism from anti-realism in the philosophy of science. Scientific realists take the methods of science to promote the realist aim of correspondence truth. Anti-realists either claim that the methods of science promote lesser epistemic goals than realist truth, or else they reject the realist conception of truth altogether. In this paper, I propose (...)
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  27. Fictional singular imaginings.Manuel Garcia-Carpintero - 2010 - In Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 273--299.
    In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion has forcefully criticized both Donnellan's and Evans’ claims on the contingent a priori, and she has developed an “acquaintanceless” account of singular thoughts as an alternative view. Jeshion claims that one can fully grasp a singular thought expressed by a sentence including a proper name, even if its reference has been descriptively fixed and one’s access to the referent is “mediated” by that description. But she still wants to reject “semantic instrumentalism”, the (...)
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  28. Realisms and their opponents.Uskali Mäki - 2001 - In Neil J. Smelser & Paul B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier. pp. 19--12815.
    In everyday usage, ‘realism’ is often used as a name for a practically or epistemically low-ambition attitude, while ‘idealism’ is often taken to denote a highambition—if not utopian—attitude. In philosophcal usage, mostly, it is the other way around: those who are called realists tend to claim more than their opponents—they are the philosophical optimists. Within philosophy itself, ‘realism’ adopts a variety of interrelated and contested meanings. It is used as the name for doctrines about issues such as perceptual access to (...)
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  29. Markov blankets: Realism and our ontological commitments.Danielle J. Williams - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e217.
    The authors argue that their target is orthogonal to the realism and instrumentalist debate. I argue that it is born directly from it. While the distinction is helpful in illuminating how some ontological commitments demand a theory of implementation, it's less clear whether different views cleanly map onto the epistemic and metaphysical uses defined in the paper.
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  30. Symmetry and Reformulation: On Intellectual Progress in Science and Mathematics.Josh Hunt - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Michigan
    Science and mathematics continually change in their tools, methods, and concepts. Many of these changes are not just modifications but progress---steps to be admired. But what constitutes progress? This dissertation addresses one central source of intellectual advancement in both disciplines: reformulating a problem-solving plan into a new, logically compatible one. For short, I call these cases of compatible problem-solving plans "reformulations." Two aspects of reformulations are puzzling. First, reformulating is often unnecessary. Given that we could already solve a problem using (...)
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  31. Repositioning Realism.Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem - 2015 - Philosophia Scientiae 19:85-98.
    Naturalised realism’ is presented as a version of realism which is more compatible with the history of science than convergent or explanationist forms of realism. The account is unpacked according to four theses: 1) Whether realism is warranted with regards to a particular theory depends on the kind and quality of evidence available for that theory; 2) Reference is about causal interaction with the world; 3) Most of science happens somewhere in between instrumentalism and scientific realism on a continuum (...)
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  32. (1 other version)Conceptual Construction: Why the Content of Our Folk Terms Has Only Limited Significance.Thomas Grundmann - 2020 - In Masaharu Mizumoto & Jonardon Ganeri (eds.), Ethno-Epistemology: New Directions for Global Epistemology. New York: Routledge.
    Standard Analytic Epistemology typically relies on conceptual analysis of folk epistemic terms such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘justification’. A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective on this method leads to the worry that there might not be universally shared epistemic concepts, and that different languages might use folk notions that have different extensions. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that our epistemic common-sense terms pick out what is epistemically most significant or valuable. In my paper, I take these issues (...)
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    Epistocracy and populism: second-order ideologies challenging democracy.Meos Holger Kiik - 2024 - Political Research Exchange 6 (1):1-19.
    Epistocracy and populism are usually seen as opposites. The first finds error in democracy’s reliance on the sub-optimal decisions by the supposedly incompetent masses, and argues that political decisions should be tied to epistemic merit, not popularity. The populist critique of democracy, contrarily, finds that there is not enough political confrontation in standard representative democracies where the ‘real people’ are not properly embodied, and thus pits an imagined direct will of the unified and virtuous people against a self-serving establishment. (...)
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  34. Strengthening Weak Emergence.Nora Berenstain - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (5):2457-2474.
    Bedau's influential (1997) account analyzes weak emergence in terms of the non-derivability of a system’s macrostates from its microstates except by simulation. I offer an improved version of Bedau’s account of weak emergence in light of insights from information theory. Non-derivability alone does not guarantee that a system’s macrostates are weakly emergent. Rather, it is non-derivability plus the algorithmic compressibility of the system’s macrostates that makes them weakly emergent. I argue that the resulting information-theoretic picture provides a metaphysical account of (...)
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  35. Retweeting: its linguistic and epistemic value.Neri Marsili - 2021 - Synthese 198:10457–10483.
    This paper analyses the communicative and epistemic value of retweeting (and more generally of reposting content on social media). Against a naïve view, it argues that retweets are not acts of endorsement, motivating this diagnosis with linguistic data. Retweeting is instead modelled as a peculiar form of quotation, in which the reported content is indicated rather than reproduced. A relevance-theoretic account of the communicative import of retweeting is then developed, to spell out the complex mechanisms by which retweets achieve (...)
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  36. The Harm of Ableism: Medical Error and Epistemic Injustice.David M. Peña-Guzmán & Joel Michael Reynolds - 2019 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29 (3):205-242.
    This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity- based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism. There are (...)
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  37. Justice in epistemic gaps: The ‘proof paradox’ revisited.Lewis Ross - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):315-333.
    This paper defends the heretical view that, at least in some cases, we ought to assign legal liability based on purely statistical evidence. The argument draws on prominent civil law litigation concerning pharmaceutical negligence and asbestos-poisoning. The overall aim is to illustrate moral pitfalls that result from supposing that it is never appropriate to rely on bare statistics when settling a legal dispute.
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  38. The significance of epistemic blame.Cameron Boult - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):807-828.
    One challenge in developing an account of the nature of epistemic blame is to explain what differentiates epistemic blame from mere negative epistemic evaluation. The challenge is to explain the difference, without invoking practices or behaviors that seem out of place in the epistemic domain. In this paper, I examine whether the most sophisticated recent account of the nature of epistemic blame—due to Jessica Brown—is up for the challenge. I argue that the account ultimately falls (...)
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  39. Selective Permeability, Social Media and Epistemic Fragmentation (corrected).Matthew Crippen - forthcoming - Topoi.
    This article examines epistemic impacts of social media, merging Gibson’s affordance theory with the notion of selective permeability, which holds people encounter objective differences in a setting because of their distinct capacities, only here applying the idea to online spaces. I start by circumscribing my deployment of “affordances,” taking care not to totally divorce the term from Gibson’s intent, as often happens in information technologies research. I next detail ways that selective permeability characterizes online epistemic landscapes, focusing on (...)
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  40. Justice without Retribution: An Epistemic Argument against Retributive Criminal Punishment.Gregg D. Caruso - 2018 - Neuroethics 13 (1):13-28.
    Within the United States, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible (...)
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  41. Expert-oriented abilities vs. novice-oriented abilities: An alternative account of epistemic authority.Michel Croce - 2018 - Episteme 15 (4):476-498.
    According to a recent account of epistemic authority proposed by Linda Zagzebski (2012), it is rational for laypersons to believe on authority when they conscientiously judge that the authority is more likely to form true beliefs and avoid false ones than they are in some domain. Christoph Jäger (2016) has recently raised several objections to her view. By contrast, I argue that both theories fail to adequately capture what epistemic authority is, and I offer an alternative account grounded (...)
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  42. Are There Indefeasible Epistemic Rules?Darren Bradley - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    What if your peers tell you that you should disregard your perceptions? Worse, what if your peers tell you to disregard the testimony of your peers? How should we respond if we get evidence that seems to undermine our epistemic rules? Several philosophers have argued that some epistemic rules are indefeasible. I will argue that all epistemic rules are defeasible. The result is a kind of epistemic particularism, according to which there are no simple rules connecting (...)
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  43. Rational supererogation and epistemic permissivism.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (2):571-591.
    A number of authors have defended permissivism by appealing to rational supererogation, the thought that some doxastic states might be rationally permissible even though there are other, more rational beliefs available. If this is correct, then there are situations that allow for multiple rational doxastic responses, even if some of those responses are rationally suboptimal. In this paper, I will argue that this is the wrong approach to defending permissivism—there are no doxastic states that are rationally supererogatory. By the lights (...)
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  44. Strategic Conceptual Engineering for Epistemic and Social Aims.Ingo Brigandt & Esther Rosario - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 100-124.
    Examining previous discussions on how to construe the concepts of gender and race, we advocate what we call strategic conceptual engineering. This is the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept (e.g., of race) for other purposes. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept (...)
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  45. A Theory of Epistemic Supererogation.Han Li - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (2):349-367.
    Though there is a wide and varied literature on ethical supererogation, there has been almost nothing written about its epistemic counterpart, despite an intuitive analogy between the two fields. This paper seeks to change this state of affairs. I will begin by showing that there are examples which intuitively feature epistemically supererogatory doxastic states. Next, I will present a positive theory of epistemic supererogation that can vindicate our intuitions in these examples, in an explanation that parallels a popular (...)
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  46. Identity criteria: an epistemic path to conceptual grounding.Massimiliano Carrara & Ciro De Florio - 2020 - Synthese 197 (7):3151-3169.
    Are identity criteria grounding principles? A prima facie answer to this question is positive. Specifically, two-level identity criteria can be taken as principles related to issues of identity among objects of a given kind compared with objects of a more basic kind. Moreover, they are grounding metaphysical principles of some objects with regard to others. In the first part of the paper we criticise this prima facie natural reading of identity criteria. This result does not mean that identity criteria could (...)
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  47. Iris Murdoch and the Epistemic Significance of Love.Cathy Mason - 2021 - In Simon Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 39-62.
    Murdoch makes some ambitious claims about love’s epistemic significance which can initially seem puzzling in the light of its heterogeneous and messy everyday manifestations. I provide an interpretation of Murdochian love such that Murdoch’s claims about its epistemic significance can be understood. I argue that Murdoch conceives of love as a virtue, and as belonging at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of the virtues, and that this makes sense of the epistemic role Murdochian love fulfills. Moreover, I (...)
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  48. The Virtue of Epistemic Autonomy.Jonathan Matheson - 2021 - In Jonathan Matheson & Kirk Lougheed (eds.), Epistemic Autonomy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 173-194.
    In this chapter I develop and motivate and account of epistemic autonomy as an intellectual character virtue. In Section one, I clarify the concept of an intellectual virtue and character intellectual virtues in particular. In Section two, I clear away some misconceptions about epistemic autonomy to better focus on our target. In Section three, I examine and evaluate several extant accounts of the virtue of epistemic autonomy, noting problems with each. In Section four, I provide my positive (...)
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  49. Intellectual autonomy, epistemic dependence and cognitive enhancement.J. Adam Carter - 2017 - Synthese:1-25.
    Intellectual autonomy has long been identified as an epistemic virtue, one that has been championed influentially by Kant, Hume and Emerson. Manifesting intellectual autonomy, at least, in a virtuous way, does not require that we form our beliefs in cognitive isolation. Rather, as Roberts and Wood note, intellectually virtuous autonomy involves reliance and outsourcing to an appropriate extent, while at the same time maintaining intellectual self-direction. In this essay, I want to investigate the ramifications for intellectual autonomy of a (...)
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  50. An Open and Shut Case: Epistemic Closure in the Manifest Image.John Turri - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15.
    The epistemic closure principle says that knowledge is closed under known entailment. The closure principle is deeply implicated in numerous core debates in contemporary epistemology. Closure’s opponents claim that there are good theoretical reasons to abandon it. Closure’s proponents claim that it is a defining feature of ordinary thought and talk and, thus, abandoning it is radically revisionary. But evidence for these claims about ordinary practice has thus far been anecdotal. In this paper, I report five studies on the (...)
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