This contribution discusses two aspects of Watson’s account of epistemic rights: namely, the nature of epistemic rights, and a particular form of epistemic rights violation that Watson calls the abuse of perceived epistemic authority. It is argued that Watson’s take on both aspects is unsatisfactory, and some suggestions for an alternative view are offered.

According to many theories of testimony, acts of testimony confer certain epistemic rights upon recipients, e.g., the right for the recipient to complain or otherwise hold the testifier responsible should the content of that testimony turn out to be false, and the right to “pass the epistemic buck”, such that the recipient can redirect relevant challenges they may encounter back to the testifier. While these discussions do not explicitly exclude testimonial acts that occur online, they do not (...) specifically address them, either. Here, then, I will ask the following questions: do the differences between communicating in online and offline spaces affect our testimonial epistemic rights, and if so, how? While there is no singular “online space”, here I will focus on such spaces in which users communicate with one another, and in which communicated information can be vetted by other users (for example, social media). I argue that the characteristics of online testimony should make us think about testimonial epistemic rights differently, in two ways. First, whereas such rights have traditionally been conceived of as existing between the recipient and testifier, in many different types of online communication these rights exist between the recipient and a community. This is a result of the fact that online testimony is mediated, and in some cases partially determined by, a community of users. As such, testimonial epistemic rights in online spaces may be widely extended: while the original testifier still bears the brunt of responsibility for challenges, and is the primary buck-passee, all other members of the relevant community will also bear some such responsibilities. Second, the grounds of testimonial epistemic rights may differ in online spaces. Existing theories tend to ground such rights either in assurances provided by the testifier, or else norms that govern speech acts. I argue that testimony in online spaces should cause us to look to a third option, what I call norms of information sharing. The idea is that, given the highly social nature of online communication, a recipient acquires testimonial epistemic rights in virtue of having a reasonable expectation that information that is shared and vetted by the community meets certain standards. The grounds of online testimonial epistemic rights, then, is not primarily interpersonal or norms-based, but social. (shrink)

This paper provide the first extended discussion in the philosophical literature of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations of the “right to know,” it is argued that victims of gross violations and injustices not only have the right to know what happened, but also the right to be known—to be a giver of knowledge to others (...) about their own experiences. It is shown that such victims can suffer epistemic wrongs by being rendered invisible, vilified or demonized, or systematically distorted, and that these ways of not being known demand epistemic reparations. While there are traditional reparations that are epistemic in nature, such as memorialization and education, it is argued that there is a prior and arguably more important epistemic reparation—knowing victims of gross violations and injustices in the sense of bearing witness. The paper concludes with a sketch of an epistemological picture to underwrite this notion of epistemic reparations, one that significantly expands the traditional picture by including epistemic duties that are imperfect in nature and concern actions in addition to beliefs. (shrink)

This article was developed as part of the forthcoming special issue on "Reparations" for the Journal of Social Philosophy and was accepted (with minor revisions) by the guest editors Christina Nick and Susan Stark in November 2021. The special issue article is available online open access for early view. -/- Abstract: The United Nations Commission on Human Rights acknowledges the Right to Know as part of state obligations to combat impunity and thereby protect and promote human rights in (...) the aftermath of “serious crimes under international law”. In light of such an institutionally acknowledged epistemic right of victims, this paper explores the normative foundations of the idea of epistemic reparation in the aftermath of genocide. I argue that such epistemic reparation requires not only fulfilment of the informational needs of victims, survivors and descendants, including access to knowledge about the violations. By taking into account epistemic injuries, which are part and parcel of genocide, it ought to also re-establish victims’ epistemic standing. This is because genocide is enabled, justified and even prescribed through a genocidal epistemology involving the propagation of falsehoods and misinformation about social reality as well as abuses of epistemic authority and epistemic authoritarianism. Hence, epistemic reparation ought to correct the dysfunctional epistemic practices that underlie and sustain a genocidal epistemology. It thereby provides victims, survivors and descendants with epistemic recognition that has been systematically withdrawn from them, making epistemic reparation a crucial element of restorative justice. (shrink)

This article focuses on the epistemic transition to testimonial justice. It argues that the recognition of testimonial injustice in the context of reproductive rights may play a central role in this transition. First, I show how testimonial injustice undermines women’s legal protection against sexual violence and rights triggered by it such as the right to abortion. Second, I argue that the epistemic transition initiated by the #MeToo and #YoSiTeCreo movements call for transitional justice. In support, I (...) review the circumstances of transitional justice for cases like the transition to testimonial justice. Finally, I focus on the area of reproductive rights. I argue that policies of recognition contribute to epistemic transitional justice and complement other strategies aimed to overcome testimonial injustice such as the virtue of the responsible hearer and institutional compensatory virtues. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, (...) in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)

The paper defends the thesis that our epistemic duty is the duty to proportion our beliefs to the evidence we possess. An inclusive view of evidence possessed is put forward on the grounds that it makes sense of our intuitions about when it is right to say that a person ought to believe some proposition P. A second thesis is that we have no epistemic duty to adopt any particular doxastic attitudes. The apparent tension between the two theses (...) is resolved by applying the concept of duty to belief indirectly. (shrink)

Here I will re-purpose Nozick’s (1974) “Experience Machine” thought experiment against hedonism into an argument against Veritic Epistemic Consequentialism. According to VEC, the right action, epistemically speaking, is the one that results in at least as favorable a ratio of true to false belief as any other action available. A consequence of VEC is that it would be epistemically right to outsource all your cognitive endeavors to a matrix-like “True Belief Machine” that uploads true beliefs through artificial stimulation. Rather (...) than reflecting, inferring or inquiring, all of your beliefs would be the product of updates coming from the machine. This implication of VEC is counter intuitive. I will spend much of the paper considering defensive maneuvers and showing them to be lacking. The problem with going in for the True Belief Machine seems to be that the subject forfeits her autonomy. There has been much work lately on the virtue of intellectual autonomy and some of it has the potential to explain what is epistemically amiss about plugging into the machine. However, I will argue that the proponent of VEC cannot appeal to it without abandoning her preferred order of explanation. (shrink)

Consequentialist positions in philosophy spell out normative notions by recourse to final aims. Hedonistic versions of ETHICAL consequentialism spell out what is MORALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain. Veritistic versions of EPISTEMIC consequentialism spell out what is EPISTEMICALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing the number of true beliefs and decreasing the number of false ones. Even though these theories are in many respects structurally analogous, there are also interesting disanalogies. (...) For example, popular versions of epistemic consequentialism implicitly endorse the truth-indication principle (which claims that a belief is epistemically justified only if there are factors indicating that the belief itself is true), whereas popular versions of ethical consequentialism do not subscribe to an analogous pleasure-indicating principle (which claims that an act is morally justified only if there are factors indicating that performing the act itself is pleasurable). In a first step I will argue that this difference rests on the fact that plausible versions of epistemic consequentialism have to meet certain constraints, which versions of ethical consequentialism do not have to satisfy. As these constraints can be easily met by incorporating the truth-indication principle, epistemic consequentialists tend to subscribe to it. In a second step I will investigate whether the identified constraints can also be met independent from the truth-indication principle. Are there plausible versions of veritistic epistemic consequentialism that reject the principle, thereby allowing that some beliefs can be epistemically justified even though no factors speak in favor of their truth? Building on ideas put forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Crispin Wright, and others, I will answer this question affirmatively. (shrink)

Consequentialist positions in philosophy spell out normative notions by recourse to final aims. Hedonistic versions of ETHICAL consequentialism spell out what is MORALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain. Veritistic versions of EPISTEMIC consequentialism spell out what is EPISTEMICALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing the number of true beliefs and decreasing the number of false ones. Even though these theories are in many respects structurally analogous, there are also interesting disanalogies. (...) For example, popular versions of epistemic consequentialism implicitly endorse the truth-indication principle (which claims that a belief is epistemically justified only if there are factors indicating that the belief itself is true), whereas popular versions of ethical consequentialism do not subscribe to an analogous pleasure-indicating principle (which claims that an act is morally justified only if there are factors indicating that performing the act itself is pleasurable). In a first step I will argue that this difference rests on the fact that plausible versions of epistemic consequentialism have to meet certain constraints, which versions of ethical consequentialism do not have to satisfy. As these constraints can be easily met by incorporating the truth-indication principle, epistemic consequentialists tend to subscribe to it. In a second step I will investigate whether the identified constraints can also be met independent from the truth-indication principle. Are there plausible versions of veritistic epistemic consequentialism that reject the principle, thereby allowing that some beliefs can be epistemically justified even though no factors speak in favor of their truth? Building on ideas put forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Crispin Wright, and others, I will answer this question affirmatively. (shrink)

The epistemic basic structure of a society consists of those institutions that have the greatest impact on individuals’ opportunity to obtain knowledge on questions they have an interest in as citizens, individuals, and public officials. It plays a central role in the production and dissemination of knowledge and in ensuring that people have the capability to assimilate this knowledge. It includes institutions of science and education, the media, search engines, libraries, museums, think tanks, and various government agencies. This article (...) identifies two demands of justice that apply specifically to the institutions that belong to it. First, the epistemic basic structure should serve all citizens fairly and reliably. It should provide them with the opportunity to acquire knowledge they need for their deliberations about the common good, their individual good, and how to pursue them. Second, the epistemic basic structure should produce and disseminate the knowledge that various experts and public officials need to successfully pursue justice and citizens need to effectively exercise their rights. After arguing for these duties, I discuss what policies follow from them and respond to the worry that these duties have illiberal implications. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that not all norms that govern belief and assertion are epistemic. But not enough attention has been paid to distinguishing epistemic norms from others. Norms in general differ from merely evaluative standards in virtue of the fact that it is fitting to hold subjects accountable for violating them, provided they lack an excuse. Different kinds of norm are most readily distinguished by their distinctive mode of accountability. My thesis is roughly that a norm is epistemic (...) if and only if its violation makes it fitting to reduce epistemic trust in the subject, even if there is no doubt about their sincerity, honesty, or other moral virtues. That is, violations of epistemic norms don’t merit resentment or other forms of blame, but rather deduction of credibility points in internal scorekeeping and related attitudinal and behavioral changes. As Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice shows, such distrust is undesirable from the point of view of an epistemic agent. Consequently, when one manifests epistemic distrust towards a subject in suitable circumstances, it amounts a way of holding her accountable. Since this form of accountability involves no opprobrium, there is good reason to think it is not linked to voluntary control in the same way as moral accountability. Finally, I make use of this account of what makes epistemic norms distinctive to point out some faulty diagnostics in debates about norms of assertion. My aim is not to defend any substantive view, however, but only to offer tools for identifying the right kind of evidence for epistemic norms. (shrink)

Epistemic consequentialism is the view that epistemic goodness is more fundamental than epistemic rightness. This paper examines the relationship between epistemic consequentialism and theistic belief. I argue that, in an epistemic consequentialist framework, there is an epistemic reason to believe in God. Imagine having an unlimited amount of time to ask an omniscient being anything you wanted. The potential epistemic benefits would be enormous. Considerations like these point to an epistemic version of (...) Pascal’s wager. I compare and contrast the epistemic wager with the traditional wager, and argue that the epistemic wager has several notable advantages. (shrink)

Our paper consists of four parts. In the first part, we describe the challenge of the pervasive and permanent philosophical disagreement over philosophers’ epistemic self-esteem. In the second part, we investigate the attitude of philosophers who have high epistemic self-esteem even in the face of philosophical disagreement and who believe they have well-grounded philosophical knowledge. In the third section, we focus on the attitude of philosophers who maintain a moderate level of epistemic self-esteem because they do not (...) attribute substantive philosophical knowledge to themselves but still believe that they have epistemic right to defend substantive philosophical beliefs. In the fourth section, we analyse the attitude of philosophers who have a low level of epistemic self-esteem in relation to substantive philosophical beliefs and make no attempt to defend those beliefs. We argue that when faced with philosophical disagreement philosophers either have to deny that the dissenting philosophers are their epistemic peers or have to admit that doing philosophy is less meaningful than it seemed before. In this second case, philosophical activity and performance should not contribute to the philosophers’ overall epistemic self-esteem to any significant extent. (shrink)

Many theories of rational action are predicated on the idea that what it is rational to do in a given situation depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe in that situation. In short: they treat epistemic rationality as explanatorily prior to practical rationality. If they are right in doing so, it follows, on pain of explanatory circularity, that epistemic rationality cannot itself be a form of practical rationality. Yet, many epistemologists have defended just such a (...) view of epistemic rationality. According to them, there is no such thing as a distinctively epistemic form of rationality which could be explanatorily prior to practical rationality. Rather, they maintain, there is just one form of rationality—practical rationality—of which epistemic rationality is a species. What to make of this conflict? The aim of this paper is to motivate a view about the relationship between epistemic and practical rationality which resolves the conflict in a way that should be attractive to both sides. The central idea is to ground both epistemic and practical rationality in an independently motivated notion of evidential probability which is itself to be understood in non-normative terms. Doing so, I argue, allows us to unify epistemic and practical rationality in a way that does justice to the idea that what it is rational to do depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe; and to do so in a way that avoids explanatory circularity. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that certain theoretical conceptions of health, particularly those described as ‘biomedical’ or ‘naturalistic’, are viciously epistemically unjust. Drawing on some recent work in vice epistemology, we identity three ways that abstract objects (such as theoretical conceptions, doctrines, or stances) can be legitimately described as epistemically vicious. If this is right, then robust reform of individuals, social systems, and institutions would not be enough to secure epistemic justice: we must reform the deeper conceptions of health (...) that underlie them. (shrink)

The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People’s political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is (...) anti-reliable with respect to a host of orthogonal political issues. Yet, it is difficult to find a psychologically plausible explanation for why one side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues. While this project’s empirical discussion focuses on the US context, the argument generalizes to any situation where political polarization exists on a sufficiently large number of orthogonal claims. (shrink)

Very plausibly, there is something important missing in our lives if we are thoroughly ignorant or misled about reality – even if, as in a kind of Truman Show scenario, intervention or fantastic luck prevents unhappiness and practical failure. But why? I argue that perfectionism about well-being offers the most promising explanation. My version says, roughly, that we flourish when we exercise our self-defining capacities successfully according to their constitutive standards. One of these self-defining capacities, or capacities whose exercise reveals (...) who we are, is Reason, our capacity for normative self-governance. I argue that in its practical use, Reason formally aims at competently realizing self-chosen valuable ends that are in harmony with each other, or valuable achievements. In its theoretical use, it formally aims at competently grasping fundamental enough subject matters, or a kind of understanding. Because success by reason’s own standards requires many things to go right, there are many different ways in which we can fall short. Some of them amount to partial success. But some, like incompetent inquiry that fails to yield understanding of its target, or taking inefficient means to a worthless end, are robust failures that amount to epistemic or agential unflourishing, and thus to a form of ill-being. (shrink)

When it comes to epistemic normativity, should we take the good to be prior to the right? That is, should we ground facts about what we ought and ought not believe on a given occasion in facts about the value of being in certain cognitive states (such as, for example, the value of having true beliefs)? The overwhelming answer among contemporary epistemologists is “Yes, we should.” This essay argues to the contrary. Just as taking the good to be prior (...) to the right in ethics often leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what an agent should do, so too, this essay argues, taking the good to be prior to the right in epistemology leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what a subject should believe. Epistemic value—and, by extension, epistemic goals—are not the explanatory foundation upon which all other normative notions in epistemology rest. (shrink)

What form must a theory of epistemic injustice take in order to successfully illuminate the epistemic dimensions of struggles that are primarily political? How can such struggles be understood as involving collective struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination that seek to improve practices of knowledge production and make lives more liveable? In this paper, I argue that currently dominant, Fricker-inspired approaches to theorizing epistemic wrongs and remedies make it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the (...) class='Hi'>epistemic dimensions of historic and ongoing political struggles. Recent work in the theory of recognition— particularly the work of critical, feminist, and decolonial theorists—can help to identify and correct the shortcomings of these approaches. I offer a critical appraisal of recent conversation concerning epistemic injustice, focusing on three characteristics of Frickerian frameworks that obscure the epistemic dimensions of political struggles. I propose that a theory of epistemic injustice can better illuminate the epistemic dimensions of such struggles by acknowledging and centering the agency of victims in abusive epistemic relations, by conceptualizing the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice relationally, and by explaining epistemic injustice as rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional epistemic norms undergirding actual communities and institutions. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the value of epistemic justification cannot be adequately explained as being instrumental to truth. I intend to show that false belief, which is no means to truth, can nevertheless still be of epistemic value. This in turn will make a good prima facie case that justification is valuable for its own sake. If this is right, we will have also found reason to think that truth value monism is false: assuming that true (...) belief does have value, there is more of final epistemic value than mere true belief. (shrink)

Modal knowledge accounts like sensitivity or safety face a problem when it comes to knowing propositions that are necessarily true because the modal condition is always fulfilled no matter how random the belief forming method is. Pritchard models the anti-luck condition for knowledge in terms of the modal principle safety. Thus, his anti-luck epistemology faces the same problem when it comes to logical necessities. Any belief in a proposition that is necessarily true fulfills the anti-luck condition and, therefore, qualifies as (...) knowledge. Miščević shares Pritchard’s take on epistemic luck and acknowledges the resulting problem. In his intriguing article “Armchair Luck: Apriority, Intellection and Epistemic Luck” Miščević suggests solving the problem by supplementing safety with a virtue theoretic condition-“agent stability”-which he also spells out in modal terms. I will argue that Miščević is on the right track when he suggests adding a virtue-theoretic component to the safety condition. However, it should not be specified modally but rather in terms of performances that manifest competences. (shrink)

There has been considerable discussion recently of consequentialist justifications of epistemic norms. In this paper, I shall argue that these justifications are not justifications. The consequentialist needs a value theory, a theory of the epistemic good. The standard theory treats accuracy as the fundamental epistemic good and assumes that it is a good that calls for promotion. Both claims are mistaken. The fundamental epistemic good involves accuracy, but it involves more than just that. The fundamental (...) class='Hi'>epistemic good is knowledge, not mere true belief, because the goodness of an epistemic state is connected to that state's ability to give us reasons. If I'm right about the value theory, this has a number of significant implications for the consequentialist project. First, the good-making features that attach to valuable full beliefs are not features of partial belief. The resulting value theory does not give us the values we need to give consequentialist justifications of credal norms. Second, the relevant kind of good does not call for promotion. It is good to know, but the rational standing of a belief is not determined by the belief's location in a ranked set of options. In the paper's final section, I explain why the present view is a kind of teleological non-consequentialism. There is a kind of good that is prior to the right, but as the relevant kind of good does not call for promotion the value theory shows us what is wrong with the consequentialist project. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice consists in a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. I focus on epistemic injustice—more specifically, testimonial injustice—as it arises in the Qur’an. Verse 2:282 implies that the worth of a man’s testimony is twice that of a woman’s testimony. The divine norm suggested by the verse is in direct conflict with the norms that govern testimonial justice. These norms require that women should not be judged less reliable simply because they are women. (...) But a divine norm that says that a woman’s testimony is worth less than a man’s also generates a puzzle for the norms that govern testimonial justice: when the divine norm that says that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s testimony is endorsed and internalised by Muslim women who then assert it, testimonial justice seems to require that we should take these women’s testimony to be less reliable than men’s testimony. I will argue that the solution to the puzzle lies in recognizing that the application of Quranic norms to a given situation requires getting some relevant facts right, and is not purely a matter of one’s values. As such, asserted Quranic norms are not subject to the deference characteristically demanded by testimonial justice. (shrink)

Although critics often argue that the new atheists are arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded and so on, there is currently no philosophical analysis of this complaint - which I will call 'the vice charge' - and no assessment of whether it is merely a rhetorical aside or a substantive objection in its own right. This Chapter therefore uses the resources of virtue epistemology to articulate this ' vice charge' and to argue that critics are right to imply that new atheism is intrinsically (...) epistemically vicious, and it ends with some remarks about the rationality of allowing such intrinsically vicious doctrines to feature within public debate about important matters concerning science, religion, and politics. (shrink)

Addressing the ‘virtue conflation’ problem requires the preservation of intuitive distinctions between virtue types, that is, between intellectual and moral virtues. According to one influential attempt to avoid this problem proposed by Julia Driver, moral virtues produce benefits to others—in particular, they promote the well-being of others—while the intellectual virtues, as such, produce epistemic good for the agent. We show that Driver's demarcation of intellectual virtue, by adverting to the self-/other distinction, leads to a reductio, and ultimately, that the (...) prospects for resolving the virtue conflation problem look dim within an epistemic consequentialist approach to the epistemic right and the epistemic good. (shrink)

In trying to distinguish the right kinds of reasons from the wrong, epistemologists often appeal to the connection to truth to explain why practical considerations cannot constitute reasons. The view they typically opt for is one on which only evidence can constitute a reason to believe. Talbot has shown that these approaches don’t exclude the possibility that there are non-evidential reasons for belief that can justify a belief without being evidence for that belief. He thinksthat there are indeed such reasons (...) and that they are theright kind of reasons to justify belief. The existence of such truth promoting non-epistemic reasons is said tofollow from the fact that we have an epistemic end that involves the attainment of true belief. I shall argue thatthere are no such reasons precisely because there is anepistemic end that has normative authority. (shrink)

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs (...) as well. Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other. (shrink)

The standard view says that epistemic normativity is normativity of belief. If you’re an evidentialist, for example, you’ll think that all epistemic reasons are reasons to believe what your evidence supports. Here we present a line of argument that pushes back against this standard view. If the argument is right, there are epistemic reasons for things other than belief. The argument starts with evidentialist commitments and proceeds by a series of cases, each containing a reason. As the (...) cases progress, the reasons change from counting in favor of things like having a belief to things like performing ordinary actions. We argue that each of those reasons is epistemic. If the argument succeeds, we should think there are epistemic reasons to consider hypotheses, conduct thought and physical experiments, extend one’s evidence, and perform mundane tasks like eating a sandwich, just as there are epistemic reasons to believe what one’s evidence supports. (shrink)

A number of philosophers argue that because of its history of systematic disagreement, philosophy has made little to no epistemic progress – especially in comparison to the hard sciences. One argument for this conclusion contends that the best explanation for systematic disagreement in philosophy is that at least some, potentially all, philosophers are unreliable. Since we do not know who is reliable, we have reason to conclude that we ourselves are probably unreliable. Evidence of one’s potential unreliability in a (...) domain purportedly defeats any first-order support one has for any judgments in that domain. This paper defends philosophy. First, accepting that science is rightfully treated as the benchmark of epistemic progress, I contend that a proper conception of epistemic progress highlights that philosophy and science are relevantly similar in terms of such progress. Secondly, even granting that systematic disagreement is a mark of unreliability and that it does characterize philosophy, this paper further argues that evidence of unreliability is insufficient for meta-level, domain-wide, defeat of philosophical judgments more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epistemic Leaks and Epistemic Meltdowns: A Response to William Morris on Scepticism with Regard to Reason Mikael M. Karlsson I. In an excellent paper which appeared in the April, 1989 issue of this journal,2 William Morris attemptsto demonstrate thatthe arguments which make up Hume's notorious chapter, "Of scepticism with regard to reason, are, in the first place, coherent—both internally and with the overall strategy of the Treatise—and, (...) in the second place, successful. Morris' paper is an exercise in the noble art of what I style constructive exegesis, an enterprise to which many readers of Hume Studies, and myself as much as any, are committed. It is a guiding principle ofthis art that we donotunderstandaphilosophical textuntil we can interpret it in such a way as to render it both coherent and correct. From this point ofview, coherence and correctness are not as independent of one another as they may seem to be to others who are differently committed. Some texts, such as Hume's chapter, "Ofscepticism with regard to reason," are notoriously resistant to constructive exegesis, despite the formidable bag of tricks which scholars and interpreters have developed; so resistant, that in gloomier moments we may be brought to wonder about our interpretative enterprise itself. Constructive exegesis is indeed a strange, and peculiarly optimistic, enterprise. Someday, I imagine, in a leisurely moment, I will think more reflectively about the principles ofour art. But not now.6 As a fellow practitioner of constructive exegesis, I am in full sympathy with what Morris tries to do in his paper; and I think that he does contribute substantially to our understanding of what Hume is up to in the chapter, "Ofscepticism with regard to reason." The third section of Morris' paper is, in my judgement, particularly successful in showing how Hume's chapter fits into the larger framework of the Treatise: Hume is, we see, attacking both what Morris labels "intellectualist rationalism" and its counterpart, which we may call 'unmitigated scepticism', although the chapter's two main arguments go primarily to the former. I also think that Morris gives very helpful, Volume XVI Number 2 121 MIKAEL M. KARLSSON and to my mind accurate, accounts of these two arguments, which I dub, respectively, the epistemic leak argument, and the epistemic meltdown argument. However, I have personally never found either of these arguments remotely convincing; and I still do not, despite Morris' clarification and defense. In what follows, I shall indicate some ofthe reasons for my dissatisfaction.?. Theepistemicleakargumentpurportsto"prove"(in Hume's sense)that reason or demonstration cannot support knowledge. Morris rightlyreminds us that whatHume meansby knowledge is perfect assurance or conviction: Knowledge is, in short, subjective certainty. This has caused confusion, for this is not what we usually mean nowadays by knowledge; nor was it what people, philosophers included, generally meant prior to Descartes. In Hume itis the product ofthe attempttoresolve all epistemic statesintomental eventsorwhat he calls "perceptions." In any case, we must—as Morris rightly explains—be clear that the epistemic leak argument is aimed at showing that demonstration cannot supportperfect conviction. Inoutline, the argumentissimple: Itworks, asMorrismakes clear, by shifting attention away from the subject-matter or "objects" of demonstration, that is, relations of ideas, to the exercise of demonstrative reason by human agents. The necessity of relations of ideas may suggest to us that we can be certain about them. Against this, one may point out that people do err in the conclusions arrived at by demonstration; this presumably shows that our (rational) understandingis fallible. And once we recognize this, our confidence in any conclusion produced by exercising this facultyislessened—thus do we move from knowledge, or subjective certainty, toprobability: belief, or imperfect conviction. Arguments ofthis general type (we can call them, using Descartes' famous figure, Totten-apple arguments ) were around long before Hume, although they were more commonly directed against the senses than against reason. We find them in antiquity—in Plato and Sextus Empiricus, for instance —and in Descartes, in parallel passages in the Discourse on Method, the First Meditation and the Principles of Philosophy, wherein one can discern a version directed precisely against reason and demonstration.12 To find out what, if anything, Hume has... (shrink)

This essay develops a model of democratic representation from the standpoint of epistemic theories of democracy. Such theories justify democracy in terms of its tendency to yield decisions that “track the truth” by integrating asymmetrically dispersed knowledge. From an epistemic point of view, I suggest, democratic representatives are best modeled as epistemic intermediaries who facilitate the vertical integration of knowledge between policy experts and non-experts, and the horizontal integration of knowledge among diverse non-experts. The primary analytical payoff (...) of this model is that it provides a clear rationale for variation in the norms and institutionalization of representative behavior. Sometimes a delegate-like approach is the right one, and sometimes a trustee-like approach is better. The key determinant is the effect of these models on the epistemic quality of outcomes under different circumstances. Towards the end of the essay, I apply the model to the present revival of populism and consider its implications in that context. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss whether intuitive moral judgements have epistemic value. Are they mere expressions of irrational feelings that should be disregarded or should they be taken seriously? In section 2, I discuss the view of some social psychologists that moral intuitions are, like other social intuitions, under certain conditions more reliable than conscious deliberative judgements. In sections 3 and 4, I examine whether intuitive moral judgements can be said not to need inferential justification. I outline a concept (...) of moral intuition as a seeming whose seemingness resides in special, phenomenological features such as a felt veridicality, appropriateness, familiarity, or confidence, and whose justificatory force is influenced by the reliability of the belief-producing procedures and by a subject's competence in applying moral concepts. I argue that subjects can come to realise that the beliefs expressed in their intuitive judgements evoke a sense of non-inferential credibility. In section 5, I first discuss the contribution of moral expertise to the non-inferential credibility of a person's intuitions. Subsequently, I discuss whether Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is right in saying that we can never claim non-inferential justification for our intuitions because they are subject to all kinds of distorting influences. (shrink)

Klaming and Vedder (2010) have argued that enhancement technologies that improve the epistemic efficiency of the legal system (“epistemic enhancements”) would benefit the common good. But there are two flaws to Klaming and Vedder’s argument. First, they rely on an under-theorised and under-specified conception of the common good. When theory and specification are supplied, their CGJ for enhancing eyewitness memory and recall becomes significantly less persuasive. And second, although aware of such problems, they fail to give due weight (...) and consideration to the tensions between the individual and common good. Taking these criticisms onboard, this article proposes an alternative, and stronger, CGJ for epistemic enhancements. The argument has two prongs. Drawing from the literature on social epistemology and democratic legitimacy, it is first argued that there are strong grounds for thinking that epistemic enhancements are a desirable way to improve the democratic legitimacy of the legal system. This gives prima facie but not decisive weight to the CGJ. It is then argued that due to the ongoing desire to improve the way in which scientific evidence is managed by the legal system, epistemic enhancement is not merely desirable but perhaps morally necessary. Although this may seem to sustain tensions between individual and common interests, I argue that in reality it reveals a deep constitutive harmony between the individual good and the common good, one that is both significant in its own right and one that should be exploited by proponents of enhancement. (shrink)

De Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the (...) reasons an agent is responsive to, but rather whether she is responsive to the reasons it is reasonable to expect her to be responsive to, irrespective of their content. I argue that this account does a better job of dealing with neuroatypical agents, while agreeing with the De Re Significance accounts on more ordinary cases. (shrink)

Epistemic Permissivists face a special problem about the relationship between our first- and higher-order attitudes. They claim that rationality often permits a range of doxastic responses to the evidence. Given plausible assumptions about the relationship between your first- and higher-order attitudes, it can't be rational to adopt a credence on the edge of that range. But Permissivism says that, for some such range, any credence in that range is rational. Permissivism, in its traditional form, cannot be right. I consider (...) some new ways of developing Permissivism to avoid this argument, but each has problems of its own. (shrink)

If you love someone, is it good to believe better of her than epistemic norms allow? The partiality view says that it is: love, on this view, issues norms of belief that clash with epistemic norms. The partiality view is supposedly supported by an analogy between beliefs and actions, by the phenomenology of love, and by the idea that love commits us to the loved one’s good character. I argue that the partiality view is false, and defend what (...) I call the epistemic view. On the epistemic view, love also issues norms of belief. But these say simply that you should adhere to epistemic norms in forming and maintaining beliefs about loved ones. I offer two arguments for the epistemic view. The first appeals to the emotional responses of love, which, when sensitive to what the loved one is really like, can make love great and be morally transformative. The second is a new argument for why caring for a loved one requires true beliefs about him. We see that there may be some boundaries, such as stuffy traditions, that love is right to defy, but that epistemic boundaries are not among them. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that there are (at least) two different kinds of ‘epistemic normativity’ in epistemology, which can be scrutinized and revealed by some comparison with some naturalistic studies of ethics. The first kind of epistemic normativity can be naturalized, but the other not. The doctrines of Quine’s naturalized epistemology is firstly introduced; then Kim’s critique of Quine’s proposal is examined. It is argued that Quine’s naturalized epistemology is able to save some room for the (...) concept of epistemic normativity and therefore his doctrine can be protected against Kim’s critique. But, it is the first kind of epistemic normativity that can be naturalized in epistemology. With the assistance of Goldman’s fake barn case, it is shown that the concept of epistemic normativity that is involved in the concept of knowing, which cannot be fully naturalized. The Gettier problem indicates that Quine only gets partially right idea concerning whether epistemology can (and should) be natualized. (shrink)

Twentieth century philosophers introduced the distinction between “objective rightness” and “subjective rightness” to achieve two primary goals. The first goal is to reduce the paradoxical tension between our judgments of (i) what is best for an agent to do in light of the actual circumstances in which she acts and (ii) what is wisest for her to do in light of her mistaken or uncertain beliefs about her circumstances. The second goal is to provide moral guidance to an agent who (...) may be uncertain about the circumstances in which she acts, and hence is unable to use her standard moral principle directly in deciding what to do. This paper distinguishes two important senses of “moral guidance”; proposes criteria of adequacy for accounts of subjective rightness; canvasses existing definitions for “subjective rightness”; finds them all deficient; and proposes a new and more successful account. It argues that each comprehensive moral theory must include multiple principles of subjective rightness to address the epistemic situations of the full range of moral decision-makers, and shows that accounts of subjective rightness formulated in terms of what it would reasonable for the agent to believe cannot provide that guidance. -/- . (shrink)

This paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call the degree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, (...) relationships, and the well-being of our social groups. These interests generate obligations against others to “do their homework” before closing inquiry. This alternate account makes better sense of puzzles that accounts of doxastic wronging fall prey to. (shrink)

Many interpretations of Kant’s first Critique fail to appreciate the revolutionary nature of his account of knowledge and its implications for skepticism, givenness and mind-independence, because they read Kant as holding a compositional account of knowledge. I contend that the reason for this is that this account is both naturally appealing in its own right, and fits an influential reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. On this reading, the Deduction aims to respond to a skeptical worry which issues from the empiricist (...) version of epistemic compositionalism and which questions the intelligibility of the claim to knowledge of our judgements. Against this, I argue that what Kant’s Deduction actually aims to address is a radicalization of this epistemic worry, which instead questions the intelligibility of the objective purport of our judgements. I contend that the compositional account is unable to respond to this more radical worry, thereby putting it into question both as a reading of Kant, and as an account of knowledge generally. To corroborate this, I provide a reading of the Deduction that overcomes epistemic compositionalism by thinking through its shortcomings in order to arrive at a more adequate successor account: the hylomorphic account of knowledge, which, I contend, is able to dissolve both the more radical and the epistemic worry. I suggest that this implies generally that the epistemic worry issuing from the compositional account is not self-contained, but must give way to Kant’s more radical worry, which I argue can only be addressed within the underappreciated framework of epistemic hylomorphism. (shrink)

Although epistemic possibility figures in several debates, those debates have had relatively little contact with one another. G. E. Moore focused squarely upon analyzing epistemic uses of the phrase, ‘It’s possible that p’, and in doing so he made two fundamental assumptions. First, he assumed that epistemic possibility statements always express the epistemic position of a community, as opposed to that of an individual speaker. Second, he assumed that all epistemic uses of ‘It’s possible that (...) p’ are analyzable in terms of knowledge, not belief. A number of later theorists, including Keith DeRose, provide alternative accounts of epistemic possibility, while retaining Moore’s two assumptions. Neither assumption has been explicitly challenged, but Jaakko Hintikka’s analysis provides a basis for doing so. Drawing upon Hintikka’s analysis, I argue that some epistemic possibility statements express only the speaker’s individual epistemic state, and that contra DeRose, they are not degenerate community statements but a class in their own right. I further argue that some linguistic contexts are belief- rather than knowledge-based, and in such contexts, what is possible for a speaker depends not upon what she knows, but upon what she believes. (shrink)

This paper expands on another which focussed on Socrates’s question: ‘How should one live?’. The present paper also focusses on the ‘meaning of life’ and ‘meaning in life’ issues, and more on rights. To fully rationally answer Socrates’s question, we need to answer the epistemic question: ‘How can one know how one should live?’. This paper attempts to answer both. And knowing how one should live fundamentally involves knowing what values one should live by. This includes which (...) class='Hi'>rights one should have and which rights others should have. So one’s values include how one should treat all persons (and (other) animals, the environment and so on.) All this relates to what one finds meaningful in life and the meaning or point of one’s life. In sum, all the notions in this paper’s title are interrelated. The issue of rationality is crucial here. Just one example here (qualified later) is that our rationality gives us cognitively meaningful notions. ‘Rationality’ here only concerns knowledge, e.g., ways to acquire scientific knowledge, and meta-knowledge concerning values. No values or rights as such are rational or knowledge. However:- Many factors are required for human rationality to exist and develop, e.g., life, mental health and evidence-based education. Human rationality’s need for those factors, hence their value to rationality, is rationally-unquestionable – and that applies to the practised values prescribing the prescribable factors. With this, there are rationally-unquestionable rights to those factors. Those prescribable factors require certain interrelated epistemic, moral, social, political, legal, educational and other values/rights to be practised. This implies a pro-rationality values-theory with one obligatory, general end – a uniquely rationally-unquestionable end. This end provides the basis for answering Socrates’s question as rationally (correctly) as is possible for values/rights. That end is fundamentally epistemic, namely ‘Be pro-rationality’, yet the theory has deeply-humanly-meaningful, universal applications. It has implications for current and all possible moral, social, political, legal, educational, environmental etc issues. E.g., the theory shows that human rationality crucially requires love and certain other emotions, health-care, education and upbringing. These require certain right to be respected and practised. With this, the paper discusses affection, free speech, journalism, psychotherapy, political and sexual consent, responsibilities, freedom and government. The theory’s general sub-values prescribe much prescribed by some other theories, e.g., broad and deep knowledge-acquisition (in certain areas), rationally-critical thinking, non-sexism, non-racism, general types of liberalism, holistic flourishing, happiness, unselfishness and fairness. However, all other values-theories lack pro-rationality theory’s maximum possible rational-unquestionability, internal coherence and coherence with rationality. The theory encourages (the right to) total freedom in a-rationality areas, areas irrelevant to its obligatory end. The theory inherently requires its advocates to be (self )critical, rationally viewing the theory’s necessarily human-suggested specifics as often fallible or unavoidably approximate. So the theory is a work-in-progress. (shrink)

On Kratzer’s canonical account, modal expressions (like “might” and “must”) are represented semantically as quantifiers over possibilities. Such expressions are themselves neutral; they make a single contribution to determining the propositions expressed across a wide range of uses. What modulates the modality of the proposition expressed—as bouletic, epistemic, deontic, etc.—is context.2 This ain’t the canon for nothing. Its power lies in its ability to figure in a simple and highly unified explanation of a fairly wide range of language use. (...) Recently, though, the canon’s neat story has come under attack. The challenge cases involve the epistemic use of a modal sentence for which no single resolution of the contextual parameter appears capable of accommodating all our intuitions.3 According to these revisionaries, such cases show that the canonical story needs to be amended in some way that makes multiple bodies of information relevant to the assessment of such statements. Here I show that how the right canonical, flexibly contextualist account of modals can accommodate the full range of challenge cases. The key will be to extend Kratzer’s formal semantic account with an account of how context selects values for a modal’s.. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figure in decision-making only after (logically (...) and temporally) relevant ignorance has constrained the decision-maker’s menu of options. If this is right, then a person’s moral judgments in some set of circumstances should vary with their knowledge and ignorance of these circumstances. In this study, we test the hypothesis of the logical priority of the epistemic. We describe two experiments in which subjects’ knowledge and ignorance of relevant consequences were manipulated. In the second experiment, we also compared the effect of ignorance on moral judgments with that of personal force, a factor previously shown to influence moral judgments. We found broad empirical support for the armchair arguments that epistemic considerations are logically prior to normative considerations. (shrink)

Receiving information about threats to one’s health can contribute to anxiety and depression. In contemporary medical ethics there is considerable consensus that patient autonomy, or the patient’s right to know, in most cases outweighs these negative effects of information. Worry about the detrimental effects of information has, however, been voiced in relation to public health more generally. In particular, information about uncertain threats to public health, from—for example, chemicals—are said to entail social costs that have not been given due consideration. (...) This criticism implies a consequentialist argument for withholding such information from the public in their own best interest. In evaluating the argument for this kind of epistemic paternalism, the consequences of making information available must be compared to the consequences of withholding it. Consequences that should be considered include epistemic effects, psychological effects, effects on private decisions, and effects on political decisions. After giving due consideration to the possible uses of uncertain information and rebutting the claims that uncertainties imply small risks and that they are especially prone to entail misunderstandings and anxiety, it is concluded that there is a strong case against withholding of information about uncertain threats to public health. (shrink)

This is a reply to Howard Sankey’s comment (“Factivity or Grounds? Comment on Mizrahi”) on my paper, “You Can’t Handle the Truth: Knowledge = Epistemic Certainty,” in which I present an argument from the factivity of knowledge for the conclusion that knowledge is epistemic certainty. While Sankey is right that factivity does not entail epistemic certainty, the factivity of knowledge does entail that knowledge is epistemic certainty.

In assessing the veridicality of utterances, we normally seem to assess the satisfaction of conditions that the speaker had been concerned to get right in making the utterance. However, the debate about assessor-relativism about epistemic modals, predicates of taste, gradable adjectives and conditionals has been largely driven by cases in which seemingly felicitous assessments of utterances are insensitive to aspects of the context of utterance that were highly relevant to the speaker’s choice of words. In this paper, we offer (...) an explanation of why certain locutions invite insensitive assessments, focusing primarily on ’tasty’ and ’might’. We spell out some reasons why felicitous insensitive assessments are puzzling and argue briefly that recent attempts to accommodate such assessments (including attempts by John MacFarlane, Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies) all fail to provide more than hints at a solution to the puzzle. In the main part of the paper, we develop an account of felicitous insensitive assessments by identifying a number of pragmatic factors that influence the felicity of assessments. Before closing, we argue that the role of these factors extend beyond cases considered in the debate about assessor-relativism and fit comfortably with standard contextualist analyses of the relevant locutions. (shrink)

The following is an advertisement for scalar epistemic consequentialism. Benefits include an epistemic consequentialism that (i) is immune from the the no-positive-epistemic-duties objection and (ii) doesn’t require bullet-biting on the rightness of epistemic tradeoffs. The advertisement invites readers to think more carefully about both the definition and logical space of epistemic consequentialism.