SOCIAL (DISTANCE) EPISTEMOLOGY series
As of 21 September, 2020, the Social (Distance) Epistemology series is going on hiatus. It will return if and when the need that motivated it goes unmet.
Meeting 19: Friday 18 September, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
"Spell it out" Lecture on epistemic injustice with Emmalon Davis (University of Michigan)
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Meeting 18: Friday 4 September, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
"Spell it out" Lecture on the theory of judgment aggregation with Christian List (LSE)
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Meeting 17: Friday 21 August, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Shared Information and Disagreement
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Presenters:
Mark Alfano, Macquarie University (co-authored by Emily Sullivan)
TITLE: “A normative framework for sharing information online”
ABSTRACT: People have always shared information through chains and networks of testimony. It’s arguably part of what makes us human and enables us to live in cooperative communities with populations greater than the Dunbar number. The invention of the Internet and the rise of social media have turbo-charged our ability to share information. In this chapter, we develop a normative framework for sharing information online. This framework takes into account both ethical and epistemic considerations that are intertwined in typical cases of online testimony. We argue that, while the current state of affairs is not entirely novel, recent technological developments call for a rethinking of the norms of testimony, as well as the articulation of a set of virtuous dispositions that people would do well to cultivate in the capacity as conduits (not just sources or receivers) of information.
Liz Jackson Withorn, Ryerson University
TITLE: “Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism”
ABSTRACT: This paper introduces and motivates a solution to a dilemma from peer disagreement. Following Buchak (forthcoming), I argue that peer disagreement puts us in an epistemic dilemma: there is reason to think that our opinions should both change and not change when we encounter disagreement with our epistemic peers. I argue that we can solve this dilemma by changing our credences, but not our beliefs in response to disagreement. I explain how my view solves the dilemma in question, and then offer two additional arguments for it: one related to contents and attitudes, and another related to epistemic peerhood.
John Greco, Georgetown University
TITLE: “Knowledge Transmission as Joint Achievement: A response to the individualism charge against virtue epistemology.”
ABSTRACT: Traditional virtue theories view knowledge as a success attributable to the knower’s own cognitive ability, and in that sense an individual achievement. Critics have charged that such a view is overly “individualistic,” especially regarding testimonial knowledge. This presentation tries to answer the charge by conceiving a sub-class of testimonial exchanges in terms of joint agency, and a sub-class of testimonial knowledge—transmitted knowledge—as a joint achievement. It is argued that the new view accommodates both Goldberg’s categories of “direct” and “diffuse” epistemic dependence, as well as his claim that “we stand in a fundamentally different relation to other epistemic subjects than we do to the rest of the items in our environment.
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Meeting 16: Friday 7 August, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Epistemological Dimensions of Science
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Presenters:
Kareem Khalifa, Middlebury College
TITLE: “Coherence in Science: A Social Approach”
ABSTRACT: The following claims are all plausible, but do not sit happily with each other: (1) In science, the justification of theories, auxiliary hypotheses, and descriptions of data and phenomena requires that these different elements cohere. (2) Theories, hypotheses, and descriptions of data and phenomena are not beliefs. (3) Coherence is a relation between an individual person's beliefs. A social conception of coherence, in which the third of these claims is rejected, is proposed as a way of resolving this tension.
Dunja Šešelja, Eindhoven University of Technology (together with Will Fleisher)
TITLE: “Collective Epistemic Responsibility: a Preventionist Account ”
ABSTRACT: If a given scientific community faces an epistemic harm that could be prevented only by a collective action, what kind of epistemic duties fall on each of the given scientists? In this paper we propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility, which addresses this and related questions. Building on Hindriks’ (2018) account of collective moral responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic Duty to Join Forces as a norm consisting of two sub-norms: first, a duty of individuals to approach other relevant agents raising awareness about the epistemic harm, expressing willingness to prevent it, and encouraging others to do the same; and second, a duty of those who have expressed their commitment to join forces, to prevent the given epistemic harm. We argue that our account has a distinctly epistemic character, irreducible to the accounts of collective moral responsibility. As such, it fills an important gap in the literature on epistemic responsibility. In contrast to previous accounts of epistemic responsibility, which have been concerned with the actions directly impacting belief-formation, our approach concerns responsibility for other kinds of performances, specifically those aimed at preventing epistemic harms.
Kevin Elliot, Michigan State University
TITLE: “Responding to the Value-Ladenness of Transparency in Science”
ABSTRACT: Both philosophers and scientists have recently promoted transparency as an important element of responsible scientific practice. Philosophers have placed particular emphasis on the ways that transparency can assist with efforts to manage value judgments in science responsibly. This paper examines a potential challenge to this approach. It shows how efforts to promote transparency can themselves be value-laden. In other words, those who communicate scientific information typically face second-order value judgments about how best to achieve appropriate transparency about other elements of science, including first-order value judgments. I argue that in many cases, this value-ladenness is unlikely to block transparency’s important role in managing value judgments responsibly, but it may pose a challenge in some cases. I conclude by offering some reflections on how to handle these difficult cases.
Miriam Solomon, Temple University
TITLE: “On Pluralism in Psychiatry”
ABSTRACT: I have argued that pluralism about methods and/or theories is good for science, because it can increase empirical success, but bad for scientific authority, because it hinders consensus. Psychiatry has been dominated by a single conceptual framework for the last forty years (the DSM framework) and enjoyed considerable professional authority. Because of the “crisis of validity,” this dominance has recently given way to a pluralist situation in which several different approaches to disease nosology are being developed. In addition to the DSM framework, there is the RDoC program, the HiTOP framework, the network approach, the mechanistic property cluster approach, and others. My talk will explore the challenges and difficulties of working with pluralism in psychiatry, making constructive suggestions for future research.
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Meeting 15: Friday 24 July, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Virtues, Vices, and the Autonomous Subject
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Presenters:
Alexandra Lloyd, University of Colorado
TITLE: “#MeToo, Moral Encroachment & the Evidential Threshold”
ABSTRACT: I propose and defend an amendment to moral encroachment. I argue that the evidential threshold for outright belief should be sensitive not only to the moral costs of falsely believing, but also the moral costs of failing to believe truly. I focus on #MeToo cases and argue that women are harmed when their allegations of sexual misconduct are not truly believed. Consistency with what motivated moral encroachment in the first place therefore demands that the high stakes of failing to truly believe can lower the evidential threshold for outright belief.
Chris Ranalli, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
TITLE: “Socializing Epistemic Autonomy”
ABSTRACT: Epistemic autonomy has traditionally been linked to rational self-governance which fails to rely on others. In this way, it seems to be at odds with social epistemology, which takes it as a basic datum that reliance on others is necessary for most epistemic goods. In this paper, I develop and defend a social account of epistemic autonomy, the thesis that epistemic autonomy is relational; that it constitutively depends upon social-epistemic conditions. I show how autonomy can be constrained by ideology and how it requires freedom from one’s own thinking, so that it is a kind of negative social-epistemic freedom.
Lara Jost, University of St. Andrews
TITLE: “Source Based Epistemic Injustice”
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I present a new type of epistemic injustice, source based epistemic injustice, which is a loss of credibility due to a prejudice towards the epistemic methods used by the knower in order to obtain knowledge, because those epistemic methods are linked to currently unapproved sources of knowledge. I defend that those sources of knowledge and the epistemic methods building on such sources have been denied credibility, because the sources have been associated with oppressed groups, therefore leading to the permeation of the bias into the epistemic methods.
Jacob Smith, University of Tennessee
TITLE: “Virtues, Situationism, and Character Evidence: A Virtue Theoretical Defense of Federal Rule of Evidence 404”
ABSTRACT: The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) govern the admissibility of evidence in legal procedure. FRE 404 controversially prohibits the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove conduct. Detractors argue character evidence should be admissible because characterological judgments are ubiquitous. In response, situationists defend FRE 404 by arguing character doesn’t determine conduct. I show that even if situationism is false, FRE 404 is epistemically defensible from a virtue theoretical standpoint. I show how three rebuttals against situationism (the Narrow Traits, Competing Traits, and Rarity Arguments) entail that character evidence is generally unreliable and, accordingly, FRE 404 is epistemically justifiable.
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Meeting 14: Friday, 10 July, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Trust and Deference
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Presenters:
Michael Bruckner, University of Wisconsin
TITLE: “From Expert Deference to Peer Deference”
The paradigm example of rational deference is deference to experts. I wish to explore three (pro tanto) reasons for deference to one’s epistemic peers. (1) Division of epistemic labor: Ceteris paribus, if it is generally rational to divide labor under conditions of equal aptitude, then it is rational to divide epistemic labor under conditions of equal epistemic aptitude. (2) Cultivation of epistemic virtue: Peer deference is more conducive to the cultivation of, e.g., intellectual modesty than autonomous judgment is. (3) Avoidance of peer disagreement: Peer deference about p forestalls peer disagreement about p, which in turn forestalls rational apraxia.
Tim Kenyon, Brock University
TITLE: “Repairing the Acceptance Principle”
The Acceptance Principle for Testimony (APT): "A person is entitled to accept as true something that is presented as true and that is intelligible to them, unless there are stronger reasons not to do so." Influential but wrongly formulated! Its defeater clause is supposed to mean that general entitlement epistemology for testimony doesn’t imply abject credulity. But it crucially confuses (i) whether there exists an entitlement; and (ii) whether one should rely on the entitlement. A repaired version clarifies what’s always seemed a bit slippery about APT, and points to what a general entitlement could and couldn’t be, here.
Gloria Origgi, CNRS and Institute Jean Nicod
TITLE: “Social indicators of trust in experts”
Trust in experts is not blind trust. When we are not competent enough to evaluate scientific information we use various social indicators of trust and reputation of an expert to come up with a reasoned trust. I will present an outline of the formal and informal social indicators of trust that lay people use to evaluate the reputation of an expert and discuss their reliability. I will focus on indicators such as: status, epistemic authority, influence, popularity and values and the way in which they influence our trust in experts. I will also distinguish between a personal vs. an institutional dimension of these indicators and argue that some metacognitive capacities are needed in order to use these indicators in a reasonable way.
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Meeting 13: Friday, 3 July, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Epistemic Responsibility, Blame, and Forgiveness
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Presenters:
Andrew MacFarlane, LaGuardia Community College
TITLE: “Epistemic Scapegoating”
ABSTRACT: Epistemic scapegoating occurs when someone claims that someone “should have known”, but this claim is in some sense illegitimate. In this mini talk I try to situate the phenomenon of epistemic scapegoating into the discussion of epistemic blame. I then discuss how I believe the phenomenon to be pervasive, particularly in our social practices, and I provide a list of some of the mechanisms whereby epistemic scapegoating takes place. I conclude by suggesting that part of the problem stems from a failure to recognize the difference between epistemic blame on the one hand, and being epistemically blameworthy on the other.
Adam Green, Azusa Pacific University
TITLE: “Forgiveness and the Repairing of Epistemic Trust”
ABSTRACT: Within social epistemology, we tend to treat trust as a fixed response to the intellectual character of another person. In light of the reliability of another person’s beliefs and his or her general state of trustworthiness, one should assign them the corresponding level of epistemic trust. Yet, all relationships stand in need of periodic repair, not just those that involve persons given to intellectual vice. Wrongs committed against us, both those that are distinctively epistemic and those that are not, have epistemic implications, and so it turns out that forgiveness is much more epistemically important than has hitherto been appreciated.
Cameron Boult, Brandon University
TITLE: “Epistemic Blame and The Business Condition on Standing to Blame”
ABSTRACT: This paper examines an underexplored tension between the so-called “business condition” on standing to blame, and the currently prominent idea that people can be appropriately blamed for their beliefs in a distinctively epistemic kind of way. The tension arises when we consider that many cases of “epistemic blame” discussed in the literature do not involve wrongdoings that are in any obvious sense the business of other people. In this paper, I do two things: first, I suggest that the business condition gives us reason to consider whether epistemic blame is as prevalent in everyday life as the epistemology literature makes it seem. Second, assuming that there are at least some genuine cases of epistemic blame, I aim to resolve the tension between the business condition and epistemic blame. I draw on a familiar point from the moral domain—namely, that some instances of moral blame are appropriate despite the fact that the blamer does not stand in a special relationship with the wrongdoer, nor is the direct recipient of harm from the wrongdoing. I argue that epistemic failings have properties that enable us to extend this idea, and thereby resolve the tension between the business condition and epistemic blame. An interesting additional upshot is that this solution implies certain constraints on our understanding of the nature of epistemic blame.
Miriam McCormick, University of Richmond
TITLE: “Engaging with Fringe Beliefs”
ABSTRACT: As “fringe” beliefs like debunked conspiracy theories become more widely embraced, the question arises of whether and how to engage with such believers. I argue that what Jeremy Fantl has termed “closed-minded” engagement is often the best approach. The worry is that such approach includes a problematic insincerity. But if our goal is to change people’s beliefs, if we think of altering beliefs as importantly similar to altering emotions, then this worry loses its force.
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Meeting 12: Friday, 26 June, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Topics in Collective Epistemology
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Boaz Miller, Zefat Academic College
TITLE: “I know, we know: Unifying individual and collective knowledge”
ABSTRACT: I give a unified account of individual and non-agential collective scientific knowledge. I address the question of what an individual subject’s standing needs to be of vis-à-vis her epistemic community for her to personally know. I argue that a subject knows when she responsibly does what is practicably possible to have a true belief. Additionally, the available evidence within the subject’s scientific community must support her belief, in light of a legitimate weighing of inductive risks. Last, the belief must be justified in the objective situation. My account gives a consistent unified explanation of Gettier cases and skeptical scenarios. It explains a common way scientists think of scientific knowledge, which the current philosophical analyses of knowledge fail to account for, and it draws attention to a neglected issue in philosophy of science, which is true yet undersupported scientific claims.
Haixin Dang, University of Leeds
TITLE: “Scientific Consensus and the IPCC Report”
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I argue that consensus building should be not the ideal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and perhaps for epistemic groups in general. Consensus building leads to a minimum of what can be accepted by everyone or the “lowest common denominator” (Beck, Borie et al., 2014), which may not be truly representative of what total evidence the group holds as a collective. In addition, I argue that consensus building obscures how members of the IPCC actually weigh risks and uncertainties. Furthermore, by focusing on consensus, the IPCC makes itself vulnerable to criticisms on issues where no consensus exists. By emphasizing consensus building, we are actually making the IPCC less scientific.
Henry Schiller, University of Texas at Austin
TITLE: “Knowledge and Discourse”
ABSTRACT: Discourse participation involves making contributions to a collective body of information, typically with the aim of figuring out 'the way things are' (Roberts 2012, Stalnaker 1978). Work in epistemology has largely focused on questions concerning what we can do to make sure that our discourse contributions - specifically assertions - are epistemically valuable. But what about the discourse itself? I argue that discourses - and not just assertions - are subject to a wide variety of epistemic norms, governing both their creation and their deployment. Interestingly, these seem to come at the expensive of epistemic norms of assertion.
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Meeting 11: Friday, 19 June, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Epistemology and/in Philosophy of Race
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Lacey Davidson, California Lutheran University
TITLE: “What's Wrong with Epistemic Appropriation?”
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, I seek to give an analysis of epistemic appropriation. Epistemic appropriation occurs when an individual who embodies a socially dominant identity uses the epistemic resources developed by those who embody socially marginalized identities to understand their experiences. Second, I will argue that epistemic appropriation is wrong in two senses. It is wrong in a moral sense—it violates reasonable normative standards, and it is wrong in an epistemic sense—we get the world wrong rather than right. Third, I provide an alternative to epistemic appropriation that is better morally and epistemically.
Vanessa Wills, George Washington University
TITLE: "What should 'we' know about race?"
ABSTRACT: One of the ways marginalization appears, is in groups of people relegated to the status of “things known about” and excluded from recognition as knowers. How does the struggle for epistemic recognition echo, reinforce, and advance the struggle for political recognition? How and why do claims of objective validity matter in critical philosophy of race?
Charles Mills, City University of the City of New York
TITLE: "The 'White' Problem: American Sociology and Epistemic Injustice"
ABSTRACT: In this essay, forthcoming as a chapter in Jennifer Lackey and Lauren Leydon-Hardy, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Applied Epistemology, I look at the historic framing of race as “the Negro Problem” in the white American popular mind and in the white American academy, and its implications for the development of American sociology in particular. As black American (and some progressive white American) theorists of the socio-political order have always insisted: to the extent that there is a Negro Problem, it has to be contextualized within the larger structural matrix of the White Problem. But the failure to recognize white oppression as the environing and shaping causal background has necessarily ramified detrimentally throughout the formal study of American society, a “white racial frame” (Joe Feagin) that has misoriented inquiry from the start. Invoking the recently resurrected concept of “ideology,” and drawing as resource material on two prizewinning American anti-racist sociological texts, Stephen Steinberg’s Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995) and Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (2015), I argue that “epistemic injustice” as a concept has to be expanded to include possible foundational distortions in the structure of the disciplines themselves.
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Meeting 10: Friday, 12 June, 1:30-2:45 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Topics in Legal Epistemology
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Presenters:
David Enoch, Hebrew University
TITLE: “Does Legal Epistemology Rest on a Mistake?”
ABSTRACT: Is it important that legal decisions only based on what the fact-finders know, or on some other positive epistemic status of such findings and decisions? If you answer in the positive, a legal system should be willing to pay a price in other values, in order to secure such a status for its findings. But I think knowledge (and other epistemic statuses) should never be secured at the price of any other goods a legal system can provide. In this talk, I expand on this thought, address a couple of thoughts to the contrary, and suggest a way of accommodating intuitions on both sides.
Renee Bolinger, Princeton University
TITLE: “#BelieveWomen and the Ethics of Belief”
ABSTRACT: The call to #BelieveWomen is often rebuffed on the grounds that to believe accusations (in particular accusations of sexual assault) conflicts with due process and the presumption of innocence. I argue that we should interpret the hashtag as emphasizing an ethical and political obligation to trust women as a source of testimony, but that the epistemic content of this obligation is actually quite minimal—it does not require us to form full beliefs uncritically, go against our total evidence, or be more trusting than we have evidential justification to be. It simply requires taking women’s testimony that p as providing evidence supporting the truth of p. While this conflicts with pragmatic implicatures generated by appeals to the presumption of innocence, it is actually consistent with any plausible interpretation of the presumption itself. Finally, I suggest that the hashtag is not just an epistemic instruction to individuals, but also an attempt to unseat a pernicious striking-property generic that undermines justified trust.
Richard Miller, East Carolina University
TITLE: “The Epistemology of Rules of Evidence”
ABSTRACT: Societies create epistemic systems whose function is to find truth. The criminal justice system is in part an epistemic system. It must determine whether violations of laws have occurred before determining just punishment. In a recent paper I explored the effect of the massive increase in plea bargaining that has taken over the American criminal justice system. I conclude that the search for truth has been significantly harmed by this practice. In this talk I would explore the rules by which evidence is evaluated in the legal system.
Alex Guerrero, Rutgers University
TITLE: “Holistic Legal Epistemology: A Plea for Institutions”
ABSTRACT: There has been a surge of interest in legal epistemology recently, including interest in standards and norms of legal proof, the use of statistical evidence and proof paradoxes, expert testimony, and attempts to offer probabilistic and quantitative accounts of legal evidence and legal proof. This is all very exciting! But much of this work focuses on evidence and proof understood in abstract, idealized ways. And much of this work focuses only on a particular, decontextualized relatively narrow bit of the rules or procedure that takes place prior to the State acting against particular individuals or supporting a particular judgment about how a dispute between private individuals should be resolved. This is a plea for more work in legal epistemology focused on institutional epistemic evaluation, treating legal procedural rules as a holistic, integrated epistemic system, and engaging in evaluation of epistemic structural quality. The version of this approach that I favor focuses on veritistic structural quality, which concerns the extent to which the institutional structure ensures that the effective or factual predicate beliefs of the institution that authorize action against particular individuals (including the beliefs of the legally empowered institutional actors) are true. To what extent does the institutional structure ensure that the effective institutional beliefs about the underlying factual triggering conditions of particular cases in which the State acts are true? Answering this question requires a more expansive, institutional, non-ideal legal epistemology, turning our attention to investigation and inquiry; legal representation; rules governing the roles and selection of officials such as police officers, prosecutors, and judges; plea bargaining; jury instructions; rules regarding appeals; and much else beyond just rules of evidence and standards and burdens of proof. In addition to there being important additional questions to answer, I will suggest that failing to engage in holistic evaluation of these integrated epistemic systems may result in implausible views and arguments regarding various subparts of those systems.
Sarah Moss, University of Michigan
TITLE: “Knowledge, Proof, and Bifurcated Trials”
ABSTRACT: A number of state legislatures and courts require trials to be divided into two stages. The first stage merely determines whether the defendant is guilty or liable. The consequences of this verdict are determined at a second stage, in which civil damages are awarded or a convicted person is sentenced. In some jurisdictions, the first stage is sharply shielded from the second. For instance, judges may be prohibited from informing juries of the potential sentences faced by a defendant, even in some cases where minimum sentences are mandatory. A common justification for this practice is that informing juries about sentences “would inject irrelevant considerations into the jury’s deliberations as to guilt.”
In this talk, I argue that this practice of concealing sentences is deeply flawed. I begin by defending a knowledge norm of legal proof. According to this norm, a jury can properly convict a defendant only if they know he is guilty. Second, I argue that in order to be properly guided by this norm, juries should know what is at stake for a criminal defendant if they vote to convict. Informing juries of potential sentences should not only be allowed; it should be required as a matter of procedural due process.
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Meeting 9: Friday, 5 June, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: FORMAL SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY
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Presenters:
Kevin Zollman, Carnegie Mellon University
TITLE: “Wisdom of the crowds and information cascades: modeling the boundary”
ABSTRACT: Two famous mathematical results stand as antipodes in the discussion of group rationality. The Condorcet Jury Theorem establishes that crowds can be wise under appropriate conditions. Models of information cascades show how even perfectly rational individuals can collectively ignore most of the available information. The difference between the two models are small, but critical. In the information cascades model each individual sees the “vote” of others. In the Condorcet Jury Theorem, they do not. In this talk I explore the middle ground between these two. In doing so we find several examples where what is epistemically good for the individual is not epistemically good for the group.
Cailin O’Connor, University of California at Irvine (co-authors Travis LaCroix and Anders Geil)
TITLE: “The Dynamics of Retraction”
ABSTRACT: Sometimes retracted or thoroughly refuted scientific information is used and propagated long after it is understood to be misleading. Likewise, sometimes retracted news items spread and persist, even after it has been publicly established that they are false. In this paper, we use agent-based models of epistemic networks to explore the dynamics of retraction. In particular, we focus on why false beliefs might persist, even in the face of retraction.
Richard Pettigrew, University of Bristol
TITLE: “Radical Epistemology”
ABSTRACT: When is a belief justified? I consider three sorts of arguments for different accounts of justification on the spectrum from extreme internalism to extreme externalism: arguments from intuitive responses to examples; arguments from the theoretical role of the term in epistemology; and arguments from the practical, moral, and political uses to which we wish to use the term. I focus particularly on the third sort, considering arguments from Clayton Littlejohn (2014) and Amia Srinivasan (2018) in favour of different versions of externalism. I offer counterarguments in the same vein for internalism. I conclude that we should adopt an Alstonian pluralism about the concept of justification.
Julia Staffel, University of Colorado at Boulder
TITLE: “Disagreement and Transitional Attitudes”
ABSTRACT: My goal in this talk is to propose a novel solution to the problem of misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. My view builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning. I argue that when an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly, they can no longer consider their attitude a justified conclusion of their reasoning. They should respond by reopening their deliberation in order to secure a justified conclusion. This view, which I call the unsettling view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation.
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Meeting 8: Friday, 29 May, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: EPISTEMOLOGY, IDEOLOGY, AND SOCIAL MEDIA
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Presenters:
Ken Boyd, University of Southern Denmark
TITLE: “Endorsement as Online Group Assertion”
ABSTRACT: Online groups – like social media groups, message board groups, etc. – seem to make assertions. I think that one way such groups make assertions is via member endorsement mechanisms, such as “likes”, “hearts”, and “upvotes”. However, I also think that standard theories of group assertion don’t adequately capture how member endorsement can lead to online group assertion, as endorsing seems to be much weaker than asserting or even committing to the truth of something. So I will look more at what it means when someone endorses something online, and then propose an endorsement-based view of online group assertion.
Nathaniel Smith, University of Rochester
TITLE: “Ideology and Deep Disagreement”
ABSTRACT: Extant accounts usually construe deep disagreements in terms of Wittgensteinian hinges or by appeal to fundamental epistemic principles. But a third option remains unexplored, one which construes deep disagreements as ultimately explicable in terms of agents’ divergent ideological commitments. My plan is to first outline a theory of ideology, then argue that this approach I then argue that treating deep disagreements as rooted in ideological difference best explains the phenomenon of deep disagreement. I conclude by offering several additional reasons why such an account might be preferable over competitors.
Leonie Smith, University of Manchester
TITLE: “Asylum seekers and media discrimination”
ABSTRACT: The main regulatory body for the UK press asserts that articles describing asylum-seekers as ‘a plague of feral humans’, are not even investigable on grounds of discrimination, let alone punishable (Greer v The Sun). Both opponents and proponents of this policy typically frame debate in terms of ‘free speech vs harm’. At least one ground for the press’ freedom to report pejoratively is their right (as journalists and corporate news agents) to agential epistemic participation. Here, I demonstrate that any defence grounded in this right faces a contradiction in upholding that value while also allowing pejorative reporting against asylum-seekers.
Mark Satta, Wayne State University
TITLE: “Epistemic Chaos and Epistemic Exhaustion”
ABSTRACT: Pulling from previously developed theorizing about authoritarianism, I coin two new terms: epistemic chaos and epistemic exhaustion. Epistemic chaos is a social condition in which widespread disagreement over who or what can be trusted as a source of knowledge eliminates a society’s previously generally agreed upon touchstones for truth. Epistemic exhaustion is a personal condition in which cognitive fatigue develops in response to long term exposure to many high-impact attacks on facts, truth, and knowledge. In this talk, I seek to develop these two concepts and to explore their interrelationship.
Our musical guest this week will be Pinc Louds.
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Please note that there is no meeting on Friday, 22 May. Instead, we encourage you to attend the Formal Epistemology Workshop (FEW), running from 22-24 May, many of whose papers have substantial social epistemology content. We will resume our meetings of the Social (Distance) Epistemology series on Friday, 29 May, 1:30 p.m. US Central Time.
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Meeting 7: Friday, 15 May, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: SOCIAL APPROACHES TO TRADITIONAL EPISTEMIC QUESTIONS
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Presenters:
Michael Hannon, University of Nottingham
TITLE: "Skepticism, Fallibilism, and Rational Evaluation"
ABSTRACT: This paper outlines a new type of skepticism that is both compatible with fallibilism and supported by recent work in psychology. In particular, I will argue that we often cannot properly trust our ability to rationally evaluate reasons, arguments, and evidence (a fundamental knowledge-seeking faculty). We humans are just too cognitively impaired to achieve even fallible knowledge, at least for many beliefs.
Chloe Wall, University of Otago
TITLE: " Memory and Social Epistemology"
ABSTRACT: Social epistemologists are interested in the ways that knowledge is influenced by social factors and interactions. So, it's unsurprising that they have long focused on testimony. Memory, on the other hand, is often taken to be a paradigmatically "internal" and "individual" source of knowledge. I argue that this assumption is incorrect. This leads me to conclude that social epistemologists' focus on testimony is too narrow, and that a lot of the epistemological and epistemic considerations that apply to testimony will also apply to memory. For this reason, social epistemologists should take memory seriously.
Sushruth Ravith, Indian Institute of Technology
TITLE: “Salvaging Reflective Equilibrium: A Social Epistemological Approach”
ABSTRACT: Reflective equilibrium (RE) is often considered the de-facto method for moral inquiry. However, the conceptualisation of (RE) as an individual, contemplative affair makes it vulnerable to strong objections both from methodological and empirical standpoints. A recognition of the sociality of moral knowledge, nevertheless, could offer a way to make RE viable. In the acquisition of moral knowledge, the notion of moral progress, as well as in understanding how social practices make positive/negative contributions to veritistic goals, to name a few, a social epistemological account is essential for moral epistemology. Such a revised RE can be both natural and normative.
Rafaella Giovagnoli, Pontificia Università Lateranense
TITLE: "A Pragmatic Model of Justification for Social Epistemology"
ABSTRACT: To present a pragmatic model of justification for social epistemology /retaining a connection with classical epistemology) , I'll refer to a notion of “material inference” embedding commitments and entitlements implicit in the use of language, that favors the recognition of the social source of shared knowledge.
Our musical guests this week will be John MacFarlane (UC-Berkeley) and his daughter Claire.
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Meeting 6: Friday, 8 May, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: ISSUES IN POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY
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Q&A
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Presenters:
Jay Carlson, Loyola University of Chicago
TITLE: "Epistemology of political disagreement and political liberalism: a response to van Wietmarschen"
ABSTRACT: I will discuss a novel approach to the epistemology of political disagreement and how it answers a skeptical problem for political liberalism. Han van Wietmarschen argues that political liberalism is epistemically incoherent to say citizens can maintain their respective private beliefs while also claiming that they have an epistemic duty to countenance those beliefs as unjustified. I argue this confuses the different levels at which we can respond to political disagreements. Some political disagreements may require citizens taking a humbler attitude toward their beliefs, but that is consistent with citizens maintaining many of their “sectarian” beliefs.
Aviv Barnoy, Zefat Academic College/University of Haifa
TITLE: "Combating the spread of false and damaging information about the Corona Pandemic"
ABSTRACT: In times of crisis, users share information more often, including what we define as “epistemically toxic content” (ETC), namely, information that is false, unsubstantiated or misleading. The proposed talk is based on an ongoing research about ETC-sharing on social media, refocused on Corona-related posts. The first stages (completed), included content analysis of 250 ETC posts and qualitative reconstruction interviews with 35 citizens who shared ETC. The preliminary finding yielded two hypotheses about the effects of contextual information embedded in the message, and of social-epistemic norms, on user’s propensity to share ETC, which will be tested in an online survey-experiments.
Daniel Muñoz, Monash University
TITLE: " Going Viral: How Should We Talk About Pandemics?"
ABSTRACT: As the crisis of COVID-19 escalates, journalists have documented new and disturbing ways in which bogus information has "gone viral" through our social networks: deceptive memes in WhatsApp group chats, alleged Russian disinformation campaigns in the EU, CCP propaganda. What is the best advice that we, as social epistemologists, can give to individual thinkers trying to navigate the mess? To the firms that control the platforms of our social networks? And what can these questions teach us about the nature and aims of social epistemology? (Note: this piece will be written primarily for a non-academic audience.)
Eleonora Cresto, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella/ National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Buenos Aires)
TITLE: “A Constructivist Condorcet Jury Theorem”
ABSTRACT: The Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) tells us that a group deciding on a yes or no issue by majority voting will be more reliable than any of its members, and virtually infallible when the number of members tends to infinity, provided a number of conditions are in place. I suggest an application of the CJT in which the truth/correctness of a state of affairs is a direct result of the action of voting. By this I hope to draw some morals on what we may call ‘epistemic optimism’, and establish links between epistemic and procedural conceptions of voting.
Special appearance by musical guest Eduardo Paiva (Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brasil).
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Meeting 5: Friday, 1 May, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: NEW WORK IN THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF TESTIMONY
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Presenters:
Arnel Blake Batoon, University of California at Santa Barbara
TITLE: "Epistemic Entitlement and the Linguistic Basis for Truthfulnessive"
ABSTRACT: Non-reductionists say that our testimony based beliefs are default, fallibly justified. However, whether it is rational to assert truth depends on the speaker’s practical context. If that is so, it is unclear how testimony based beliefs are default justified. Many non-reductionists respond that the nature of assertion engenders a rational asymmetry favoring truthfulness over deceitfulness. I argue that these responses fail conflate a method’s functioning normally with its functioning properly; proper function explanations of warranted assertion must account for what is optimal given the speaker’s practical context.
Jonathan Reibsamen, Columbia International University
TITLE: "Child Safety Epistemology"
ABSTRACT: My argument begins with an observation about how children rely on testimony from primary caregivers in a relatively indiscriminate way to acquire knowledge about the world. I then note that this method doesn't seem to satisfy plausible safety conditions on knowledge--even to the point of being "Gettier-proof." I use this to argue for the epistemic significance of social norms and normative expectations associated with social roles.
Joey Pollock, University of Oslo
TITLE: "Testimony is not paradigmatically content preserving"
ABSTRACT: The dominant view of the semantic dimension testimony maintains both that (a) testimonial exchanges (either always or typically) preserve content and (b) the contents so preserved are rich enough to serve as appropriate contents of testimonial knowledge. I argue, based on considerations from the debate between minimalists and relevance theorists in philosophy of language, that no notion of utterance content can play both of these roles simultaneously. Thus, if we think that testimonial exchanges are frequently successful (and that the content recovered is sufficiently rich or informative), we must accept that they are not often content preserving.
Ori Freiman, Bar-Ilan University
TITLE: "Knowledge from Algorithms: Trust, Testimony, and Technology"
ABSTRACT: Humans gradually acquire more knowledge by interacting with algorithms. Chatbots, digital personal assistants, and robots exemplify how intuitive the interface of natural language is. However, the received view of testimony categorically rejects the possibility of a non-human testifier, holding commitments to assumptions about intentionality, normative assessment, and trust relations. I suggest an account that successfully analyses a subject’s acquisition of knowledge or justified belief from algorithms, without undermining the received assumptions. I describe two conditions: the verbal output that p is generated by algorithms; and p is anthropomorphically delivered, perceived as phenomenologically similar as if a human expressed it.
Our musical guest this week will be Jenny Judge (New York University).
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Meeting 4: Friday, 24 April, 1:30-2:45 p.m. US Central Time
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Q&A
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Theme: EPISTEMIC DIMENSIONS OF POLARIZATION AND PARTIALITY
Presenters:
Zach Barnett, National University of Singapore
TITLE: "Five Roles for Inclination"
ABSTRACT: You shouldn't ignore what others think. But sometimes, you should reason in a way that is insulated from all others’ opinions. My paper outlines five roles these ‘insulated judgments’ are able to play: They can enhance the accuracy of truth-seeking voting groups; they carry information about the independent judgments of individuals; they are tightly connected to understanding (in a way belief isn’t); they can underpin sincere and proper participation within disagreement-laden fields such as philosophy; and finally, they enable us to answer a challenge purporting to show that “critical thinking” tends to reduce expected accuracy and hence should not be promoted.
Kevin Dorst, Oxford University/University of Pittsburgh
TITLE: "Pandemic Polarization is Reasonable"
ABSTRACT: There is a substantial partisan divide in reactions to Covid-19. I argue that we can explain it through rational mechanisms. First, the fact that publicly available information on the issue is so complex implies that what individuals should think is largely determined by their social circle’s reactions to that information, through the evidential effects of peer (dis)agreement. When combined with the well-known social divides between Democrats and Republicans, this means we should expect reasonable partisans to polarize in situation like this.
Rima Basu, Claremont McKenna College
TITLE: "The Parent Trap: How Doxastic Wronging Start at Home"
ABSTRACT: Doxastic obligations and wronging look different when we consider our parents. To both the racist and to our parents we may find ourselves saying, "You don't know me." With respect to the racist this response makes sense, but there are very few people who know us better than our parents. If there were anyone justified in forming expectations about us surely it'd be our parents. It is puzzling how the expectations our parents place upon us wrong us and it is unclear whether we are justified in these feelings of hurt and resentment. I'll argue that we are wronged.
Finnur Dellsén, University of Iceland
TITLE: "Interthematic Polarization"
ABSTRACT:In epistemology, ‘polarization’ is often defined rather narrowly as the process by which disagreement on a single proposition becomes more extreme over time. Outside of the philosophical literature, however, ‘polarization’ is often used for a different epistemic phenomenon, viz. the process by which people’s beliefs on different topics become increasingly correlated over time. This paper provides a definition of this second sense of ‘polarization’ and argues that it is often a completely rational process from each individual’s point of view.
Jennifer Lackey, Northwestern University
TITLE: "Criminal Testimonial Injustice"
ABSTRACT: At many layers of the criminal justice system in the United States, testimony is extracted from individuals through processes that are coercive, manipulative, or deceptive, and is then unreasonably regarded as representing the testifiers’ truest or most reliable selves. In this talk, I coin and develop this notion of agential testimonial injustice: a speaker is the victim of agential testimonial injustice when her testimony has been extracted in a way that undermines or bypasses her epistemic agency and is then afforded an unwarranted credibility excess. I then offer an analysis of two phenomena in the criminal justice system where this practice is most vivid: confession evidence and eyewitness testimony. Testimonial injustice is one of the most important concepts in contemporary philosophy, yet much of the work on it has been guided by the claim that only credibility deficits can wrong people in their capacity as testifiers. Agential testimonial justice shows not only that a critical expansion of this concept is needed, but also that it is importantly operative in one of the most life-altering systems of our social lives. Work in the law and the social sciences aids philosophy’s expansion here. At the same time, the normative framework provided by agential testimonial injustice reveals one of the central causes of miscarriages of justice in the United States legal system. Because testimony in these cases is given an unwarranted excess of credibility, it often swamps, distorts, and is resistant to other forms of evidence. That this iscarried out by institutions in which we place our trust cries out for a radical change in the epistemic lens through which we view testimony in the criminal justice system. Work in philosophy aids the law and social sciences here by identifying, explaining, and providing solutions to one of the distinctive wrongs suffered by victims of agential testimonial injustice.
Guest appearance by philosopher/musician Richard Greene (Weber State University)
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Meeting 3: Friday, 17 April, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Video here
Record of Chat here
Record of Q&A
Theme: SOCIAL EPISTEMIC VIRTUE AND VICE
Presenters:
Annalisa Coliva, University of California-Irvine
TITLE: “Hysteria. Hermeneutical injustice and conceptual engineering rehinged”
ABSTRACT: Based on a brief survey of the history of the concept of hysteria as a diagnostic tool, I propose a new account of the notion of hermeneutical injustice. I then turn to a discussion of the use of "hysteria" in everyday contexts and argue that it should be regimented, to avoid perpetrating forms of epistemic injustice against women.I connect the discussion to recent debates about conceptual engineering and show how hinge epistemology can be brought to bear on them.
Ravit Dotan, University of California-Berkeley
TITLE: “Resistance to Evidence”
ABSTRACT: Sometimes people resist evidence in the following sense: they are aware of something that merits changing their beliefs and yet refuse to do it. We see it in public life when people resist evidence on topics such as climate change or vaccines, and also in science when scientists refuse to give up on their struggling research programs. I argue that theorizing about resistance requires a social conception of evidence, on which evidence is constituted via proper group deliberation. Unlike other conceptions of evidence, social evidence can explain why some cases of resistance are rational, or otherwise norm-conforming, while others aren’t.
Will Fleisher, Washington University in St Louis
TITLE: “Intellectual Courage and Inquisitive Reasons”
ABSTRACT: Sometimes, intellectual courage involves inquirers who aim to promote successful collective inquiry. I argue that the proper account of such courage requires recognition of what I call inquisitive reasons. Inquisitive reasons are a distinct category of epistemic reasons which concern successful collective inquiry. Reasons to think a theory is promising are inquisitive reasons. So are social epistemic reasons such as avoiding premature consensus and properly distributing cognitive labor. On my account, intellectual courage during inquiry can require competences to successfully act in a way that is sensitive to inquisitive reasons.
We will also have singer/songwriter/musician Rachel Lark as our guest musician.
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Meeting 2: Friday, 10 April, 1:30-2:45 p.m. US Central Time
Theme:
EPISTEMIC DIMENSIONS OF DISCOURSE
Video here.
Record of chat here.
Record of Q&A .
Presenters:
Gabriele Contessa, Carleton University
TITLE: "Should We Trust Science More?"
ABSTRACT: According to many commentators, public trust in science is currently at a low ebb and that this a bad thing. In this talk, I argue that the problem is not that the public does not trust scientists enough, but that they trust other, less reliable sources (from friends to politicians, from co-workers to journalists) too much. I argue that limited epistemic trust is part of the epistemic ethos of science and that the real problem arises when people place more epistemic trust in other sources than in science, as science is more reliable than most other sources on social-epistemological grounds.
Karen Frost-Arnold, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
TITLE: "Epistemically and Ethically Responsible Methodologies for Social Epistemology of the Internet"
ABSTRACT: Responsible research in social epistemology of the internet requires making difficult decisions regarding privacy and epistemic appropriation (cf. Davis 2018). First, I argue against the ‘public data presumption’—the assumption that it is permissible to cite online content without seeking permission of the author because the internet is a public space. Second, I show that philosophers need to attend to the power dynamics of online knowledge production so that we can avoid exploiting the work of marginalized people.
Josh Habgood-Coote, University of Bristol
TITLE: "Knowledge is the Norm of Publication"
ABSTRACT: What is the epistemic significance of a scientific publication? In this paper I will consider what epistemic standing the author(s) of a scientific publication ought to be in, and argue that knowledge is the norm of scientific publication. First, I will argue i) that publication is a kind of assertion, and ii) that the case for thinking that knowledge is the norm of publication is at least as strong as in the general case of assertion. Secondly, I will explain how publishing unknown claims can be valuable for scientific progress. Thirdly, I will consider how to think about the knowledge norm in cases of co-authored publication.
Thi Nguyen, Utah Valley University/University of Utah
TITLE: "The Gamification of Discourse"
ABSTRACT: Twitter gamifies public discourse with points — Likes, Retweets. By quantifying success, Twitter offers its users the pleasures of a game. But games are pleasurable because their goals are artificially narrow. Gamified systems offer more fun, in exchange for simplifying our values. Twitter invites us to shift our goals for discourse from communication and connection to going viral. This is part of a larger phenomenon, “value capture”, which occurs when clear quantified systems shift our values. Another example: when the professional environment shifts academics’ goals from understanding to maximizing their citation rates. This invites knowledge production in bad faith.
Jennifer Nagel, University of Toronto
TITLE: “Choosing the form of a question”
ABSTRACT: There are many ways of asking a question. For example, one might ask a yes/no question about a zoom meeting by using interrogative syntax (“Will the meeting be recorded?”), declarative syntax with a tag question (“The meeting will be recorded, won’t it?”), or straight declarative syntax (“The meeting will be recorded?”). In live conversations, what governs the choice of one of these formulations over the others, and why should epistemologists find this type of choice interesting?
Guest appearance by the philosopher and singer/guitar player Tim Kenyon (Brock University).
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Meeting 1: Friday, 3 April, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme:
NEW WORK IN EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE
Video here.
Record of Chat here.
Presenters:
Alessandra Tanesini, University of Cardiff:
TITLE: "Speech Extraction and Epistemic Injustice"
ABSTRACT: Some cases of epistemic injustice (e.g., false confessions) are the result of speech extraction (which is the wrongful elicitation of speech- cf.McKinney). I argue that Moran's distinction between believing a speaker and believing what a speaker says helps us to see that contra Lackey, these cases are not best thought as involving credibility excesses. On the contrary, these are genuinely cases where speakers are manipulated into sources of information as opposed to informants. This is unlike the paradigmatic cases of Marge and Tom Robinson where victims of injustice are nevertheless still treated as (perhaps derivative, and inferiorised) agents.
Amy Floweree, Texas Tech University
TITLE: "When to Psychologize?"
ABSTRACT: Political discourse is rife with psychologizing. When we psychologize, we dismiss the other person’s professed reasons and instead endorse an alternative explanation of their beliefs and actions (e.g. “Person endorses this policy because they are racist!”). In this paper, I show that psychologizing is corrosive and insulting, and silences one’s sincere interlocutors. Respecting persons requires that we respect their right to put forward reasons. I argue that we ought to psychologize only when we are in a position to know that the other person is wrong about their reasons. My argument has profound epistemological implications for political discourse.
Georgi Gardiner, University of Tennessee
TITLE: "She Said, He Said': Sexual Assault Accusations and the Preponderance of the Evidence"
ABSTRACT: A ‘she-said-he-said’ case is when a third-party evaluator hears of a rape accusation and denial, but lacks other significant individualised evidence corroborating either assertion. There is no further witness, alibi, etc. In such cases, I argue, probably the accusation is true. A ‘she-said-he-said’ case is when a third-party evaluator hears of a rape accusation and denial, but lacks other significant individualised evidence corroborating either assertion. There is no further witness, alibi, etc. In such cases, I argue, probably the accusation is true. This epistemic asymmetry underwrites a paradox. The ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard formerly governed Title IX sexual misconduct investigations at US universities. I articulate four plausible claims that, if true, show the ‘preponderance’ standard is too low for such proceedings. Advocates of the ‘preponderance’ standard—and I count myself amongst them—must deny at least one of the claims.
Dennis Whitcomb, Western Washington University
TITLE: "Epistemic Injustice and Question-Asking"
ABSTRACT: My project is to build a theory of “interrogative injustice”: the analogue of testimonial injustice, for cases where the speaker is not asserting but instead asking questions. In these cases, a hearer would prejudicially reject, not an assertion, but a question-asking. But what is to reject a question-asking? This issue turns out to be trickier than it might at first appear. I’ll explore some attempts to resolve it. These attempts are designed to help us theorize about interrogative injustice, a kind of epistemic injustice that stands to question-asking as testimonial injustice stands to asserting.
Guest appearance by philosopher and singer/songwriter Nomy Arpaly (Brown University).
As of 21 September, 2020, the Social (Distance) Epistemology series is going on hiatus. It will return if and when the need that motivated it goes unmet.
Meeting 19: Friday 18 September, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
"Spell it out" Lecture on epistemic injustice with Emmalon Davis (University of Michigan)
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Meeting 18: Friday 4 September, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
"Spell it out" Lecture on the theory of judgment aggregation with Christian List (LSE)
Video here
Q&A
Slides
Paper
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Meeting 17: Friday 21 August, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Shared Information and Disagreement
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Q&A
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Presenters:
Mark Alfano, Macquarie University (co-authored by Emily Sullivan)
TITLE: “A normative framework for sharing information online”
ABSTRACT: People have always shared information through chains and networks of testimony. It’s arguably part of what makes us human and enables us to live in cooperative communities with populations greater than the Dunbar number. The invention of the Internet and the rise of social media have turbo-charged our ability to share information. In this chapter, we develop a normative framework for sharing information online. This framework takes into account both ethical and epistemic considerations that are intertwined in typical cases of online testimony. We argue that, while the current state of affairs is not entirely novel, recent technological developments call for a rethinking of the norms of testimony, as well as the articulation of a set of virtuous dispositions that people would do well to cultivate in the capacity as conduits (not just sources or receivers) of information.
Liz Jackson Withorn, Ryerson University
TITLE: “Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism”
ABSTRACT: This paper introduces and motivates a solution to a dilemma from peer disagreement. Following Buchak (forthcoming), I argue that peer disagreement puts us in an epistemic dilemma: there is reason to think that our opinions should both change and not change when we encounter disagreement with our epistemic peers. I argue that we can solve this dilemma by changing our credences, but not our beliefs in response to disagreement. I explain how my view solves the dilemma in question, and then offer two additional arguments for it: one related to contents and attitudes, and another related to epistemic peerhood.
John Greco, Georgetown University
TITLE: “Knowledge Transmission as Joint Achievement: A response to the individualism charge against virtue epistemology.”
ABSTRACT: Traditional virtue theories view knowledge as a success attributable to the knower’s own cognitive ability, and in that sense an individual achievement. Critics have charged that such a view is overly “individualistic,” especially regarding testimonial knowledge. This presentation tries to answer the charge by conceiving a sub-class of testimonial exchanges in terms of joint agency, and a sub-class of testimonial knowledge—transmitted knowledge—as a joint achievement. It is argued that the new view accommodates both Goldberg’s categories of “direct” and “diffuse” epistemic dependence, as well as his claim that “we stand in a fundamentally different relation to other epistemic subjects than we do to the rest of the items in our environment.
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Meeting 16: Friday 7 August, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Epistemological Dimensions of Science
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Q&A
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Presenters:
Kareem Khalifa, Middlebury College
TITLE: “Coherence in Science: A Social Approach”
ABSTRACT: The following claims are all plausible, but do not sit happily with each other: (1) In science, the justification of theories, auxiliary hypotheses, and descriptions of data and phenomena requires that these different elements cohere. (2) Theories, hypotheses, and descriptions of data and phenomena are not beliefs. (3) Coherence is a relation between an individual person's beliefs. A social conception of coherence, in which the third of these claims is rejected, is proposed as a way of resolving this tension.
Dunja Šešelja, Eindhoven University of Technology (together with Will Fleisher)
TITLE: “Collective Epistemic Responsibility: a Preventionist Account ”
ABSTRACT: If a given scientific community faces an epistemic harm that could be prevented only by a collective action, what kind of epistemic duties fall on each of the given scientists? In this paper we propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility, which addresses this and related questions. Building on Hindriks’ (2018) account of collective moral responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic Duty to Join Forces as a norm consisting of two sub-norms: first, a duty of individuals to approach other relevant agents raising awareness about the epistemic harm, expressing willingness to prevent it, and encouraging others to do the same; and second, a duty of those who have expressed their commitment to join forces, to prevent the given epistemic harm. We argue that our account has a distinctly epistemic character, irreducible to the accounts of collective moral responsibility. As such, it fills an important gap in the literature on epistemic responsibility. In contrast to previous accounts of epistemic responsibility, which have been concerned with the actions directly impacting belief-formation, our approach concerns responsibility for other kinds of performances, specifically those aimed at preventing epistemic harms.
Kevin Elliot, Michigan State University
TITLE: “Responding to the Value-Ladenness of Transparency in Science”
ABSTRACT: Both philosophers and scientists have recently promoted transparency as an important element of responsible scientific practice. Philosophers have placed particular emphasis on the ways that transparency can assist with efforts to manage value judgments in science responsibly. This paper examines a potential challenge to this approach. It shows how efforts to promote transparency can themselves be value-laden. In other words, those who communicate scientific information typically face second-order value judgments about how best to achieve appropriate transparency about other elements of science, including first-order value judgments. I argue that in many cases, this value-ladenness is unlikely to block transparency’s important role in managing value judgments responsibly, but it may pose a challenge in some cases. I conclude by offering some reflections on how to handle these difficult cases.
Miriam Solomon, Temple University
TITLE: “On Pluralism in Psychiatry”
ABSTRACT: I have argued that pluralism about methods and/or theories is good for science, because it can increase empirical success, but bad for scientific authority, because it hinders consensus. Psychiatry has been dominated by a single conceptual framework for the last forty years (the DSM framework) and enjoyed considerable professional authority. Because of the “crisis of validity,” this dominance has recently given way to a pluralist situation in which several different approaches to disease nosology are being developed. In addition to the DSM framework, there is the RDoC program, the HiTOP framework, the network approach, the mechanistic property cluster approach, and others. My talk will explore the challenges and difficulties of working with pluralism in psychiatry, making constructive suggestions for future research.
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Meeting 15: Friday 24 July, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Virtues, Vices, and the Autonomous Subject
Video here
Q&A
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Presenters:
Alexandra Lloyd, University of Colorado
TITLE: “#MeToo, Moral Encroachment & the Evidential Threshold”
ABSTRACT: I propose and defend an amendment to moral encroachment. I argue that the evidential threshold for outright belief should be sensitive not only to the moral costs of falsely believing, but also the moral costs of failing to believe truly. I focus on #MeToo cases and argue that women are harmed when their allegations of sexual misconduct are not truly believed. Consistency with what motivated moral encroachment in the first place therefore demands that the high stakes of failing to truly believe can lower the evidential threshold for outright belief.
Chris Ranalli, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
TITLE: “Socializing Epistemic Autonomy”
ABSTRACT: Epistemic autonomy has traditionally been linked to rational self-governance which fails to rely on others. In this way, it seems to be at odds with social epistemology, which takes it as a basic datum that reliance on others is necessary for most epistemic goods. In this paper, I develop and defend a social account of epistemic autonomy, the thesis that epistemic autonomy is relational; that it constitutively depends upon social-epistemic conditions. I show how autonomy can be constrained by ideology and how it requires freedom from one’s own thinking, so that it is a kind of negative social-epistemic freedom.
Lara Jost, University of St. Andrews
TITLE: “Source Based Epistemic Injustice”
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I present a new type of epistemic injustice, source based epistemic injustice, which is a loss of credibility due to a prejudice towards the epistemic methods used by the knower in order to obtain knowledge, because those epistemic methods are linked to currently unapproved sources of knowledge. I defend that those sources of knowledge and the epistemic methods building on such sources have been denied credibility, because the sources have been associated with oppressed groups, therefore leading to the permeation of the bias into the epistemic methods.
Jacob Smith, University of Tennessee
TITLE: “Virtues, Situationism, and Character Evidence: A Virtue Theoretical Defense of Federal Rule of Evidence 404”
ABSTRACT: The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) govern the admissibility of evidence in legal procedure. FRE 404 controversially prohibits the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove conduct. Detractors argue character evidence should be admissible because characterological judgments are ubiquitous. In response, situationists defend FRE 404 by arguing character doesn’t determine conduct. I show that even if situationism is false, FRE 404 is epistemically defensible from a virtue theoretical standpoint. I show how three rebuttals against situationism (the Narrow Traits, Competing Traits, and Rarity Arguments) entail that character evidence is generally unreliable and, accordingly, FRE 404 is epistemically justifiable.
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Meeting 14: Friday, 10 July, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Trust and Deference
Video here
Q&A
Presenters:
Michael Bruckner, University of Wisconsin
TITLE: “From Expert Deference to Peer Deference”
The paradigm example of rational deference is deference to experts. I wish to explore three (pro tanto) reasons for deference to one’s epistemic peers. (1) Division of epistemic labor: Ceteris paribus, if it is generally rational to divide labor under conditions of equal aptitude, then it is rational to divide epistemic labor under conditions of equal epistemic aptitude. (2) Cultivation of epistemic virtue: Peer deference is more conducive to the cultivation of, e.g., intellectual modesty than autonomous judgment is. (3) Avoidance of peer disagreement: Peer deference about p forestalls peer disagreement about p, which in turn forestalls rational apraxia.
Tim Kenyon, Brock University
TITLE: “Repairing the Acceptance Principle”
The Acceptance Principle for Testimony (APT): "A person is entitled to accept as true something that is presented as true and that is intelligible to them, unless there are stronger reasons not to do so." Influential but wrongly formulated! Its defeater clause is supposed to mean that general entitlement epistemology for testimony doesn’t imply abject credulity. But it crucially confuses (i) whether there exists an entitlement; and (ii) whether one should rely on the entitlement. A repaired version clarifies what’s always seemed a bit slippery about APT, and points to what a general entitlement could and couldn’t be, here.
Gloria Origgi, CNRS and Institute Jean Nicod
TITLE: “Social indicators of trust in experts”
Trust in experts is not blind trust. When we are not competent enough to evaluate scientific information we use various social indicators of trust and reputation of an expert to come up with a reasoned trust. I will present an outline of the formal and informal social indicators of trust that lay people use to evaluate the reputation of an expert and discuss their reliability. I will focus on indicators such as: status, epistemic authority, influence, popularity and values and the way in which they influence our trust in experts. I will also distinguish between a personal vs. an institutional dimension of these indicators and argue that some metacognitive capacities are needed in order to use these indicators in a reasonable way.
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Meeting 13: Friday, 3 July, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Epistemic Responsibility, Blame, and Forgiveness
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Q&A
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Presenters:
Andrew MacFarlane, LaGuardia Community College
TITLE: “Epistemic Scapegoating”
ABSTRACT: Epistemic scapegoating occurs when someone claims that someone “should have known”, but this claim is in some sense illegitimate. In this mini talk I try to situate the phenomenon of epistemic scapegoating into the discussion of epistemic blame. I then discuss how I believe the phenomenon to be pervasive, particularly in our social practices, and I provide a list of some of the mechanisms whereby epistemic scapegoating takes place. I conclude by suggesting that part of the problem stems from a failure to recognize the difference between epistemic blame on the one hand, and being epistemically blameworthy on the other.
Adam Green, Azusa Pacific University
TITLE: “Forgiveness and the Repairing of Epistemic Trust”
ABSTRACT: Within social epistemology, we tend to treat trust as a fixed response to the intellectual character of another person. In light of the reliability of another person’s beliefs and his or her general state of trustworthiness, one should assign them the corresponding level of epistemic trust. Yet, all relationships stand in need of periodic repair, not just those that involve persons given to intellectual vice. Wrongs committed against us, both those that are distinctively epistemic and those that are not, have epistemic implications, and so it turns out that forgiveness is much more epistemically important than has hitherto been appreciated.
Cameron Boult, Brandon University
TITLE: “Epistemic Blame and The Business Condition on Standing to Blame”
ABSTRACT: This paper examines an underexplored tension between the so-called “business condition” on standing to blame, and the currently prominent idea that people can be appropriately blamed for their beliefs in a distinctively epistemic kind of way. The tension arises when we consider that many cases of “epistemic blame” discussed in the literature do not involve wrongdoings that are in any obvious sense the business of other people. In this paper, I do two things: first, I suggest that the business condition gives us reason to consider whether epistemic blame is as prevalent in everyday life as the epistemology literature makes it seem. Second, assuming that there are at least some genuine cases of epistemic blame, I aim to resolve the tension between the business condition and epistemic blame. I draw on a familiar point from the moral domain—namely, that some instances of moral blame are appropriate despite the fact that the blamer does not stand in a special relationship with the wrongdoer, nor is the direct recipient of harm from the wrongdoing. I argue that epistemic failings have properties that enable us to extend this idea, and thereby resolve the tension between the business condition and epistemic blame. An interesting additional upshot is that this solution implies certain constraints on our understanding of the nature of epistemic blame.
Miriam McCormick, University of Richmond
TITLE: “Engaging with Fringe Beliefs”
ABSTRACT: As “fringe” beliefs like debunked conspiracy theories become more widely embraced, the question arises of whether and how to engage with such believers. I argue that what Jeremy Fantl has termed “closed-minded” engagement is often the best approach. The worry is that such approach includes a problematic insincerity. But if our goal is to change people’s beliefs, if we think of altering beliefs as importantly similar to altering emotions, then this worry loses its force.
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Meeting 12: Friday, 26 June, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Topics in Collective Epistemology
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Boaz Miller, Zefat Academic College
TITLE: “I know, we know: Unifying individual and collective knowledge”
ABSTRACT: I give a unified account of individual and non-agential collective scientific knowledge. I address the question of what an individual subject’s standing needs to be of vis-à-vis her epistemic community for her to personally know. I argue that a subject knows when she responsibly does what is practicably possible to have a true belief. Additionally, the available evidence within the subject’s scientific community must support her belief, in light of a legitimate weighing of inductive risks. Last, the belief must be justified in the objective situation. My account gives a consistent unified explanation of Gettier cases and skeptical scenarios. It explains a common way scientists think of scientific knowledge, which the current philosophical analyses of knowledge fail to account for, and it draws attention to a neglected issue in philosophy of science, which is true yet undersupported scientific claims.
Haixin Dang, University of Leeds
TITLE: “Scientific Consensus and the IPCC Report”
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I argue that consensus building should be not the ideal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and perhaps for epistemic groups in general. Consensus building leads to a minimum of what can be accepted by everyone or the “lowest common denominator” (Beck, Borie et al., 2014), which may not be truly representative of what total evidence the group holds as a collective. In addition, I argue that consensus building obscures how members of the IPCC actually weigh risks and uncertainties. Furthermore, by focusing on consensus, the IPCC makes itself vulnerable to criticisms on issues where no consensus exists. By emphasizing consensus building, we are actually making the IPCC less scientific.
Henry Schiller, University of Texas at Austin
TITLE: “Knowledge and Discourse”
ABSTRACT: Discourse participation involves making contributions to a collective body of information, typically with the aim of figuring out 'the way things are' (Roberts 2012, Stalnaker 1978). Work in epistemology has largely focused on questions concerning what we can do to make sure that our discourse contributions - specifically assertions - are epistemically valuable. But what about the discourse itself? I argue that discourses - and not just assertions - are subject to a wide variety of epistemic norms, governing both their creation and their deployment. Interestingly, these seem to come at the expensive of epistemic norms of assertion.
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Meeting 11: Friday, 19 June, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Epistemology and/in Philosophy of Race
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Lacey Davidson, California Lutheran University
TITLE: “What's Wrong with Epistemic Appropriation?”
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, I seek to give an analysis of epistemic appropriation. Epistemic appropriation occurs when an individual who embodies a socially dominant identity uses the epistemic resources developed by those who embody socially marginalized identities to understand their experiences. Second, I will argue that epistemic appropriation is wrong in two senses. It is wrong in a moral sense—it violates reasonable normative standards, and it is wrong in an epistemic sense—we get the world wrong rather than right. Third, I provide an alternative to epistemic appropriation that is better morally and epistemically.
Vanessa Wills, George Washington University
TITLE: "What should 'we' know about race?"
ABSTRACT: One of the ways marginalization appears, is in groups of people relegated to the status of “things known about” and excluded from recognition as knowers. How does the struggle for epistemic recognition echo, reinforce, and advance the struggle for political recognition? How and why do claims of objective validity matter in critical philosophy of race?
Charles Mills, City University of the City of New York
TITLE: "The 'White' Problem: American Sociology and Epistemic Injustice"
ABSTRACT: In this essay, forthcoming as a chapter in Jennifer Lackey and Lauren Leydon-Hardy, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Applied Epistemology, I look at the historic framing of race as “the Negro Problem” in the white American popular mind and in the white American academy, and its implications for the development of American sociology in particular. As black American (and some progressive white American) theorists of the socio-political order have always insisted: to the extent that there is a Negro Problem, it has to be contextualized within the larger structural matrix of the White Problem. But the failure to recognize white oppression as the environing and shaping causal background has necessarily ramified detrimentally throughout the formal study of American society, a “white racial frame” (Joe Feagin) that has misoriented inquiry from the start. Invoking the recently resurrected concept of “ideology,” and drawing as resource material on two prizewinning American anti-racist sociological texts, Stephen Steinberg’s Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995) and Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (2015), I argue that “epistemic injustice” as a concept has to be expanded to include possible foundational distortions in the structure of the disciplines themselves.
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Meeting 10: Friday, 12 June, 1:30-2:45 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: Topics in Legal Epistemology
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Presenters:
David Enoch, Hebrew University
TITLE: “Does Legal Epistemology Rest on a Mistake?”
ABSTRACT: Is it important that legal decisions only based on what the fact-finders know, or on some other positive epistemic status of such findings and decisions? If you answer in the positive, a legal system should be willing to pay a price in other values, in order to secure such a status for its findings. But I think knowledge (and other epistemic statuses) should never be secured at the price of any other goods a legal system can provide. In this talk, I expand on this thought, address a couple of thoughts to the contrary, and suggest a way of accommodating intuitions on both sides.
Renee Bolinger, Princeton University
TITLE: “#BelieveWomen and the Ethics of Belief”
ABSTRACT: The call to #BelieveWomen is often rebuffed on the grounds that to believe accusations (in particular accusations of sexual assault) conflicts with due process and the presumption of innocence. I argue that we should interpret the hashtag as emphasizing an ethical and political obligation to trust women as a source of testimony, but that the epistemic content of this obligation is actually quite minimal—it does not require us to form full beliefs uncritically, go against our total evidence, or be more trusting than we have evidential justification to be. It simply requires taking women’s testimony that p as providing evidence supporting the truth of p. While this conflicts with pragmatic implicatures generated by appeals to the presumption of innocence, it is actually consistent with any plausible interpretation of the presumption itself. Finally, I suggest that the hashtag is not just an epistemic instruction to individuals, but also an attempt to unseat a pernicious striking-property generic that undermines justified trust.
Richard Miller, East Carolina University
TITLE: “The Epistemology of Rules of Evidence”
ABSTRACT: Societies create epistemic systems whose function is to find truth. The criminal justice system is in part an epistemic system. It must determine whether violations of laws have occurred before determining just punishment. In a recent paper I explored the effect of the massive increase in plea bargaining that has taken over the American criminal justice system. I conclude that the search for truth has been significantly harmed by this practice. In this talk I would explore the rules by which evidence is evaluated in the legal system.
Alex Guerrero, Rutgers University
TITLE: “Holistic Legal Epistemology: A Plea for Institutions”
ABSTRACT: There has been a surge of interest in legal epistemology recently, including interest in standards and norms of legal proof, the use of statistical evidence and proof paradoxes, expert testimony, and attempts to offer probabilistic and quantitative accounts of legal evidence and legal proof. This is all very exciting! But much of this work focuses on evidence and proof understood in abstract, idealized ways. And much of this work focuses only on a particular, decontextualized relatively narrow bit of the rules or procedure that takes place prior to the State acting against particular individuals or supporting a particular judgment about how a dispute between private individuals should be resolved. This is a plea for more work in legal epistemology focused on institutional epistemic evaluation, treating legal procedural rules as a holistic, integrated epistemic system, and engaging in evaluation of epistemic structural quality. The version of this approach that I favor focuses on veritistic structural quality, which concerns the extent to which the institutional structure ensures that the effective or factual predicate beliefs of the institution that authorize action against particular individuals (including the beliefs of the legally empowered institutional actors) are true. To what extent does the institutional structure ensure that the effective institutional beliefs about the underlying factual triggering conditions of particular cases in which the State acts are true? Answering this question requires a more expansive, institutional, non-ideal legal epistemology, turning our attention to investigation and inquiry; legal representation; rules governing the roles and selection of officials such as police officers, prosecutors, and judges; plea bargaining; jury instructions; rules regarding appeals; and much else beyond just rules of evidence and standards and burdens of proof. In addition to there being important additional questions to answer, I will suggest that failing to engage in holistic evaluation of these integrated epistemic systems may result in implausible views and arguments regarding various subparts of those systems.
Sarah Moss, University of Michigan
TITLE: “Knowledge, Proof, and Bifurcated Trials”
ABSTRACT: A number of state legislatures and courts require trials to be divided into two stages. The first stage merely determines whether the defendant is guilty or liable. The consequences of this verdict are determined at a second stage, in which civil damages are awarded or a convicted person is sentenced. In some jurisdictions, the first stage is sharply shielded from the second. For instance, judges may be prohibited from informing juries of the potential sentences faced by a defendant, even in some cases where minimum sentences are mandatory. A common justification for this practice is that informing juries about sentences “would inject irrelevant considerations into the jury’s deliberations as to guilt.”
In this talk, I argue that this practice of concealing sentences is deeply flawed. I begin by defending a knowledge norm of legal proof. According to this norm, a jury can properly convict a defendant only if they know he is guilty. Second, I argue that in order to be properly guided by this norm, juries should know what is at stake for a criminal defendant if they vote to convict. Informing juries of potential sentences should not only be allowed; it should be required as a matter of procedural due process.
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Meeting 9: Friday, 5 June, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: FORMAL SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY
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Presenters:
Kevin Zollman, Carnegie Mellon University
TITLE: “Wisdom of the crowds and information cascades: modeling the boundary”
ABSTRACT: Two famous mathematical results stand as antipodes in the discussion of group rationality. The Condorcet Jury Theorem establishes that crowds can be wise under appropriate conditions. Models of information cascades show how even perfectly rational individuals can collectively ignore most of the available information. The difference between the two models are small, but critical. In the information cascades model each individual sees the “vote” of others. In the Condorcet Jury Theorem, they do not. In this talk I explore the middle ground between these two. In doing so we find several examples where what is epistemically good for the individual is not epistemically good for the group.
Cailin O’Connor, University of California at Irvine (co-authors Travis LaCroix and Anders Geil)
TITLE: “The Dynamics of Retraction”
ABSTRACT: Sometimes retracted or thoroughly refuted scientific information is used and propagated long after it is understood to be misleading. Likewise, sometimes retracted news items spread and persist, even after it has been publicly established that they are false. In this paper, we use agent-based models of epistemic networks to explore the dynamics of retraction. In particular, we focus on why false beliefs might persist, even in the face of retraction.
Richard Pettigrew, University of Bristol
TITLE: “Radical Epistemology”
ABSTRACT: When is a belief justified? I consider three sorts of arguments for different accounts of justification on the spectrum from extreme internalism to extreme externalism: arguments from intuitive responses to examples; arguments from the theoretical role of the term in epistemology; and arguments from the practical, moral, and political uses to which we wish to use the term. I focus particularly on the third sort, considering arguments from Clayton Littlejohn (2014) and Amia Srinivasan (2018) in favour of different versions of externalism. I offer counterarguments in the same vein for internalism. I conclude that we should adopt an Alstonian pluralism about the concept of justification.
Julia Staffel, University of Colorado at Boulder
TITLE: “Disagreement and Transitional Attitudes”
ABSTRACT: My goal in this talk is to propose a novel solution to the problem of misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. My view builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning. I argue that when an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly, they can no longer consider their attitude a justified conclusion of their reasoning. They should respond by reopening their deliberation in order to secure a justified conclusion. This view, which I call the unsettling view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation.
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Meeting 8: Friday, 29 May, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: EPISTEMOLOGY, IDEOLOGY, AND SOCIAL MEDIA
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Presenters:
Ken Boyd, University of Southern Denmark
TITLE: “Endorsement as Online Group Assertion”
ABSTRACT: Online groups – like social media groups, message board groups, etc. – seem to make assertions. I think that one way such groups make assertions is via member endorsement mechanisms, such as “likes”, “hearts”, and “upvotes”. However, I also think that standard theories of group assertion don’t adequately capture how member endorsement can lead to online group assertion, as endorsing seems to be much weaker than asserting or even committing to the truth of something. So I will look more at what it means when someone endorses something online, and then propose an endorsement-based view of online group assertion.
Nathaniel Smith, University of Rochester
TITLE: “Ideology and Deep Disagreement”
ABSTRACT: Extant accounts usually construe deep disagreements in terms of Wittgensteinian hinges or by appeal to fundamental epistemic principles. But a third option remains unexplored, one which construes deep disagreements as ultimately explicable in terms of agents’ divergent ideological commitments. My plan is to first outline a theory of ideology, then argue that this approach I then argue that treating deep disagreements as rooted in ideological difference best explains the phenomenon of deep disagreement. I conclude by offering several additional reasons why such an account might be preferable over competitors.
Leonie Smith, University of Manchester
TITLE: “Asylum seekers and media discrimination”
ABSTRACT: The main regulatory body for the UK press asserts that articles describing asylum-seekers as ‘a plague of feral humans’, are not even investigable on grounds of discrimination, let alone punishable (Greer v The Sun). Both opponents and proponents of this policy typically frame debate in terms of ‘free speech vs harm’. At least one ground for the press’ freedom to report pejoratively is their right (as journalists and corporate news agents) to agential epistemic participation. Here, I demonstrate that any defence grounded in this right faces a contradiction in upholding that value while also allowing pejorative reporting against asylum-seekers.
Mark Satta, Wayne State University
TITLE: “Epistemic Chaos and Epistemic Exhaustion”
ABSTRACT: Pulling from previously developed theorizing about authoritarianism, I coin two new terms: epistemic chaos and epistemic exhaustion. Epistemic chaos is a social condition in which widespread disagreement over who or what can be trusted as a source of knowledge eliminates a society’s previously generally agreed upon touchstones for truth. Epistemic exhaustion is a personal condition in which cognitive fatigue develops in response to long term exposure to many high-impact attacks on facts, truth, and knowledge. In this talk, I seek to develop these two concepts and to explore their interrelationship.
Our musical guest this week will be Pinc Louds.
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Please note that there is no meeting on Friday, 22 May. Instead, we encourage you to attend the Formal Epistemology Workshop (FEW), running from 22-24 May, many of whose papers have substantial social epistemology content. We will resume our meetings of the Social (Distance) Epistemology series on Friday, 29 May, 1:30 p.m. US Central Time.
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Meeting 7: Friday, 15 May, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: SOCIAL APPROACHES TO TRADITIONAL EPISTEMIC QUESTIONS
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Presenters:
Michael Hannon, University of Nottingham
TITLE: "Skepticism, Fallibilism, and Rational Evaluation"
ABSTRACT: This paper outlines a new type of skepticism that is both compatible with fallibilism and supported by recent work in psychology. In particular, I will argue that we often cannot properly trust our ability to rationally evaluate reasons, arguments, and evidence (a fundamental knowledge-seeking faculty). We humans are just too cognitively impaired to achieve even fallible knowledge, at least for many beliefs.
Chloe Wall, University of Otago
TITLE: " Memory and Social Epistemology"
ABSTRACT: Social epistemologists are interested in the ways that knowledge is influenced by social factors and interactions. So, it's unsurprising that they have long focused on testimony. Memory, on the other hand, is often taken to be a paradigmatically "internal" and "individual" source of knowledge. I argue that this assumption is incorrect. This leads me to conclude that social epistemologists' focus on testimony is too narrow, and that a lot of the epistemological and epistemic considerations that apply to testimony will also apply to memory. For this reason, social epistemologists should take memory seriously.
Sushruth Ravith, Indian Institute of Technology
TITLE: “Salvaging Reflective Equilibrium: A Social Epistemological Approach”
ABSTRACT: Reflective equilibrium (RE) is often considered the de-facto method for moral inquiry. However, the conceptualisation of (RE) as an individual, contemplative affair makes it vulnerable to strong objections both from methodological and empirical standpoints. A recognition of the sociality of moral knowledge, nevertheless, could offer a way to make RE viable. In the acquisition of moral knowledge, the notion of moral progress, as well as in understanding how social practices make positive/negative contributions to veritistic goals, to name a few, a social epistemological account is essential for moral epistemology. Such a revised RE can be both natural and normative.
Rafaella Giovagnoli, Pontificia Università Lateranense
TITLE: "A Pragmatic Model of Justification for Social Epistemology"
ABSTRACT: To present a pragmatic model of justification for social epistemology /retaining a connection with classical epistemology) , I'll refer to a notion of “material inference” embedding commitments and entitlements implicit in the use of language, that favors the recognition of the social source of shared knowledge.
Our musical guests this week will be John MacFarlane (UC-Berkeley) and his daughter Claire.
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Meeting 6: Friday, 8 May, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: ISSUES IN POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY
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Presenters:
Jay Carlson, Loyola University of Chicago
TITLE: "Epistemology of political disagreement and political liberalism: a response to van Wietmarschen"
ABSTRACT: I will discuss a novel approach to the epistemology of political disagreement and how it answers a skeptical problem for political liberalism. Han van Wietmarschen argues that political liberalism is epistemically incoherent to say citizens can maintain their respective private beliefs while also claiming that they have an epistemic duty to countenance those beliefs as unjustified. I argue this confuses the different levels at which we can respond to political disagreements. Some political disagreements may require citizens taking a humbler attitude toward their beliefs, but that is consistent with citizens maintaining many of their “sectarian” beliefs.
Aviv Barnoy, Zefat Academic College/University of Haifa
TITLE: "Combating the spread of false and damaging information about the Corona Pandemic"
ABSTRACT: In times of crisis, users share information more often, including what we define as “epistemically toxic content” (ETC), namely, information that is false, unsubstantiated or misleading. The proposed talk is based on an ongoing research about ETC-sharing on social media, refocused on Corona-related posts. The first stages (completed), included content analysis of 250 ETC posts and qualitative reconstruction interviews with 35 citizens who shared ETC. The preliminary finding yielded two hypotheses about the effects of contextual information embedded in the message, and of social-epistemic norms, on user’s propensity to share ETC, which will be tested in an online survey-experiments.
Daniel Muñoz, Monash University
TITLE: " Going Viral: How Should We Talk About Pandemics?"
ABSTRACT: As the crisis of COVID-19 escalates, journalists have documented new and disturbing ways in which bogus information has "gone viral" through our social networks: deceptive memes in WhatsApp group chats, alleged Russian disinformation campaigns in the EU, CCP propaganda. What is the best advice that we, as social epistemologists, can give to individual thinkers trying to navigate the mess? To the firms that control the platforms of our social networks? And what can these questions teach us about the nature and aims of social epistemology? (Note: this piece will be written primarily for a non-academic audience.)
Eleonora Cresto, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella/ National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Buenos Aires)
TITLE: “A Constructivist Condorcet Jury Theorem”
ABSTRACT: The Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) tells us that a group deciding on a yes or no issue by majority voting will be more reliable than any of its members, and virtually infallible when the number of members tends to infinity, provided a number of conditions are in place. I suggest an application of the CJT in which the truth/correctness of a state of affairs is a direct result of the action of voting. By this I hope to draw some morals on what we may call ‘epistemic optimism’, and establish links between epistemic and procedural conceptions of voting.
Special appearance by musical guest Eduardo Paiva (Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brasil).
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Meeting 5: Friday, 1 May, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme: NEW WORK IN THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF TESTIMONY
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Presenters:
Arnel Blake Batoon, University of California at Santa Barbara
TITLE: "Epistemic Entitlement and the Linguistic Basis for Truthfulnessive"
ABSTRACT: Non-reductionists say that our testimony based beliefs are default, fallibly justified. However, whether it is rational to assert truth depends on the speaker’s practical context. If that is so, it is unclear how testimony based beliefs are default justified. Many non-reductionists respond that the nature of assertion engenders a rational asymmetry favoring truthfulness over deceitfulness. I argue that these responses fail conflate a method’s functioning normally with its functioning properly; proper function explanations of warranted assertion must account for what is optimal given the speaker’s practical context.
Jonathan Reibsamen, Columbia International University
TITLE: "Child Safety Epistemology"
ABSTRACT: My argument begins with an observation about how children rely on testimony from primary caregivers in a relatively indiscriminate way to acquire knowledge about the world. I then note that this method doesn't seem to satisfy plausible safety conditions on knowledge--even to the point of being "Gettier-proof." I use this to argue for the epistemic significance of social norms and normative expectations associated with social roles.
Joey Pollock, University of Oslo
TITLE: "Testimony is not paradigmatically content preserving"
ABSTRACT: The dominant view of the semantic dimension testimony maintains both that (a) testimonial exchanges (either always or typically) preserve content and (b) the contents so preserved are rich enough to serve as appropriate contents of testimonial knowledge. I argue, based on considerations from the debate between minimalists and relevance theorists in philosophy of language, that no notion of utterance content can play both of these roles simultaneously. Thus, if we think that testimonial exchanges are frequently successful (and that the content recovered is sufficiently rich or informative), we must accept that they are not often content preserving.
Ori Freiman, Bar-Ilan University
TITLE: "Knowledge from Algorithms: Trust, Testimony, and Technology"
ABSTRACT: Humans gradually acquire more knowledge by interacting with algorithms. Chatbots, digital personal assistants, and robots exemplify how intuitive the interface of natural language is. However, the received view of testimony categorically rejects the possibility of a non-human testifier, holding commitments to assumptions about intentionality, normative assessment, and trust relations. I suggest an account that successfully analyses a subject’s acquisition of knowledge or justified belief from algorithms, without undermining the received assumptions. I describe two conditions: the verbal output that p is generated by algorithms; and p is anthropomorphically delivered, perceived as phenomenologically similar as if a human expressed it.
Our musical guest this week will be Jenny Judge (New York University).
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Meeting 4: Friday, 24 April, 1:30-2:45 p.m. US Central Time
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Theme: EPISTEMIC DIMENSIONS OF POLARIZATION AND PARTIALITY
Presenters:
Zach Barnett, National University of Singapore
TITLE: "Five Roles for Inclination"
ABSTRACT: You shouldn't ignore what others think. But sometimes, you should reason in a way that is insulated from all others’ opinions. My paper outlines five roles these ‘insulated judgments’ are able to play: They can enhance the accuracy of truth-seeking voting groups; they carry information about the independent judgments of individuals; they are tightly connected to understanding (in a way belief isn’t); they can underpin sincere and proper participation within disagreement-laden fields such as philosophy; and finally, they enable us to answer a challenge purporting to show that “critical thinking” tends to reduce expected accuracy and hence should not be promoted.
Kevin Dorst, Oxford University/University of Pittsburgh
TITLE: "Pandemic Polarization is Reasonable"
ABSTRACT: There is a substantial partisan divide in reactions to Covid-19. I argue that we can explain it through rational mechanisms. First, the fact that publicly available information on the issue is so complex implies that what individuals should think is largely determined by their social circle’s reactions to that information, through the evidential effects of peer (dis)agreement. When combined with the well-known social divides between Democrats and Republicans, this means we should expect reasonable partisans to polarize in situation like this.
Rima Basu, Claremont McKenna College
TITLE: "The Parent Trap: How Doxastic Wronging Start at Home"
ABSTRACT: Doxastic obligations and wronging look different when we consider our parents. To both the racist and to our parents we may find ourselves saying, "You don't know me." With respect to the racist this response makes sense, but there are very few people who know us better than our parents. If there were anyone justified in forming expectations about us surely it'd be our parents. It is puzzling how the expectations our parents place upon us wrong us and it is unclear whether we are justified in these feelings of hurt and resentment. I'll argue that we are wronged.
Finnur Dellsén, University of Iceland
TITLE: "Interthematic Polarization"
ABSTRACT:In epistemology, ‘polarization’ is often defined rather narrowly as the process by which disagreement on a single proposition becomes more extreme over time. Outside of the philosophical literature, however, ‘polarization’ is often used for a different epistemic phenomenon, viz. the process by which people’s beliefs on different topics become increasingly correlated over time. This paper provides a definition of this second sense of ‘polarization’ and argues that it is often a completely rational process from each individual’s point of view.
Jennifer Lackey, Northwestern University
TITLE: "Criminal Testimonial Injustice"
ABSTRACT: At many layers of the criminal justice system in the United States, testimony is extracted from individuals through processes that are coercive, manipulative, or deceptive, and is then unreasonably regarded as representing the testifiers’ truest or most reliable selves. In this talk, I coin and develop this notion of agential testimonial injustice: a speaker is the victim of agential testimonial injustice when her testimony has been extracted in a way that undermines or bypasses her epistemic agency and is then afforded an unwarranted credibility excess. I then offer an analysis of two phenomena in the criminal justice system where this practice is most vivid: confession evidence and eyewitness testimony. Testimonial injustice is one of the most important concepts in contemporary philosophy, yet much of the work on it has been guided by the claim that only credibility deficits can wrong people in their capacity as testifiers. Agential testimonial justice shows not only that a critical expansion of this concept is needed, but also that it is importantly operative in one of the most life-altering systems of our social lives. Work in the law and the social sciences aids philosophy’s expansion here. At the same time, the normative framework provided by agential testimonial injustice reveals one of the central causes of miscarriages of justice in the United States legal system. Because testimony in these cases is given an unwarranted excess of credibility, it often swamps, distorts, and is resistant to other forms of evidence. That this iscarried out by institutions in which we place our trust cries out for a radical change in the epistemic lens through which we view testimony in the criminal justice system. Work in philosophy aids the law and social sciences here by identifying, explaining, and providing solutions to one of the distinctive wrongs suffered by victims of agential testimonial injustice.
Guest appearance by philosopher/musician Richard Greene (Weber State University)
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Meeting 3: Friday, 17 April, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
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Record of Chat here
Record of Q&A
Theme: SOCIAL EPISTEMIC VIRTUE AND VICE
Presenters:
Annalisa Coliva, University of California-Irvine
TITLE: “Hysteria. Hermeneutical injustice and conceptual engineering rehinged”
ABSTRACT: Based on a brief survey of the history of the concept of hysteria as a diagnostic tool, I propose a new account of the notion of hermeneutical injustice. I then turn to a discussion of the use of "hysteria" in everyday contexts and argue that it should be regimented, to avoid perpetrating forms of epistemic injustice against women.I connect the discussion to recent debates about conceptual engineering and show how hinge epistemology can be brought to bear on them.
Ravit Dotan, University of California-Berkeley
TITLE: “Resistance to Evidence”
ABSTRACT: Sometimes people resist evidence in the following sense: they are aware of something that merits changing their beliefs and yet refuse to do it. We see it in public life when people resist evidence on topics such as climate change or vaccines, and also in science when scientists refuse to give up on their struggling research programs. I argue that theorizing about resistance requires a social conception of evidence, on which evidence is constituted via proper group deliberation. Unlike other conceptions of evidence, social evidence can explain why some cases of resistance are rational, or otherwise norm-conforming, while others aren’t.
Will Fleisher, Washington University in St Louis
TITLE: “Intellectual Courage and Inquisitive Reasons”
ABSTRACT: Sometimes, intellectual courage involves inquirers who aim to promote successful collective inquiry. I argue that the proper account of such courage requires recognition of what I call inquisitive reasons. Inquisitive reasons are a distinct category of epistemic reasons which concern successful collective inquiry. Reasons to think a theory is promising are inquisitive reasons. So are social epistemic reasons such as avoiding premature consensus and properly distributing cognitive labor. On my account, intellectual courage during inquiry can require competences to successfully act in a way that is sensitive to inquisitive reasons.
We will also have singer/songwriter/musician Rachel Lark as our guest musician.
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Meeting 2: Friday, 10 April, 1:30-2:45 p.m. US Central Time
Theme:
EPISTEMIC DIMENSIONS OF DISCOURSE
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Record of chat here.
Record of Q&A .
Presenters:
Gabriele Contessa, Carleton University
TITLE: "Should We Trust Science More?"
ABSTRACT: According to many commentators, public trust in science is currently at a low ebb and that this a bad thing. In this talk, I argue that the problem is not that the public does not trust scientists enough, but that they trust other, less reliable sources (from friends to politicians, from co-workers to journalists) too much. I argue that limited epistemic trust is part of the epistemic ethos of science and that the real problem arises when people place more epistemic trust in other sources than in science, as science is more reliable than most other sources on social-epistemological grounds.
Karen Frost-Arnold, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
TITLE: "Epistemically and Ethically Responsible Methodologies for Social Epistemology of the Internet"
ABSTRACT: Responsible research in social epistemology of the internet requires making difficult decisions regarding privacy and epistemic appropriation (cf. Davis 2018). First, I argue against the ‘public data presumption’—the assumption that it is permissible to cite online content without seeking permission of the author because the internet is a public space. Second, I show that philosophers need to attend to the power dynamics of online knowledge production so that we can avoid exploiting the work of marginalized people.
Josh Habgood-Coote, University of Bristol
TITLE: "Knowledge is the Norm of Publication"
ABSTRACT: What is the epistemic significance of a scientific publication? In this paper I will consider what epistemic standing the author(s) of a scientific publication ought to be in, and argue that knowledge is the norm of scientific publication. First, I will argue i) that publication is a kind of assertion, and ii) that the case for thinking that knowledge is the norm of publication is at least as strong as in the general case of assertion. Secondly, I will explain how publishing unknown claims can be valuable for scientific progress. Thirdly, I will consider how to think about the knowledge norm in cases of co-authored publication.
Thi Nguyen, Utah Valley University/University of Utah
TITLE: "The Gamification of Discourse"
ABSTRACT: Twitter gamifies public discourse with points — Likes, Retweets. By quantifying success, Twitter offers its users the pleasures of a game. But games are pleasurable because their goals are artificially narrow. Gamified systems offer more fun, in exchange for simplifying our values. Twitter invites us to shift our goals for discourse from communication and connection to going viral. This is part of a larger phenomenon, “value capture”, which occurs when clear quantified systems shift our values. Another example: when the professional environment shifts academics’ goals from understanding to maximizing their citation rates. This invites knowledge production in bad faith.
Jennifer Nagel, University of Toronto
TITLE: “Choosing the form of a question”
ABSTRACT: There are many ways of asking a question. For example, one might ask a yes/no question about a zoom meeting by using interrogative syntax (“Will the meeting be recorded?”), declarative syntax with a tag question (“The meeting will be recorded, won’t it?”), or straight declarative syntax (“The meeting will be recorded?”). In live conversations, what governs the choice of one of these formulations over the others, and why should epistemologists find this type of choice interesting?
Guest appearance by the philosopher and singer/guitar player Tim Kenyon (Brock University).
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Meeting 1: Friday, 3 April, 1:30-2:30 p.m. US Central Time
Theme:
NEW WORK IN EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE
Video here.
Record of Chat here.
Presenters:
Alessandra Tanesini, University of Cardiff:
TITLE: "Speech Extraction and Epistemic Injustice"
ABSTRACT: Some cases of epistemic injustice (e.g., false confessions) are the result of speech extraction (which is the wrongful elicitation of speech- cf.McKinney). I argue that Moran's distinction between believing a speaker and believing what a speaker says helps us to see that contra Lackey, these cases are not best thought as involving credibility excesses. On the contrary, these are genuinely cases where speakers are manipulated into sources of information as opposed to informants. This is unlike the paradigmatic cases of Marge and Tom Robinson where victims of injustice are nevertheless still treated as (perhaps derivative, and inferiorised) agents.
Amy Floweree, Texas Tech University
TITLE: "When to Psychologize?"
ABSTRACT: Political discourse is rife with psychologizing. When we psychologize, we dismiss the other person’s professed reasons and instead endorse an alternative explanation of their beliefs and actions (e.g. “Person endorses this policy because they are racist!”). In this paper, I show that psychologizing is corrosive and insulting, and silences one’s sincere interlocutors. Respecting persons requires that we respect their right to put forward reasons. I argue that we ought to psychologize only when we are in a position to know that the other person is wrong about their reasons. My argument has profound epistemological implications for political discourse.
Georgi Gardiner, University of Tennessee
TITLE: "She Said, He Said': Sexual Assault Accusations and the Preponderance of the Evidence"
ABSTRACT: A ‘she-said-he-said’ case is when a third-party evaluator hears of a rape accusation and denial, but lacks other significant individualised evidence corroborating either assertion. There is no further witness, alibi, etc. In such cases, I argue, probably the accusation is true. A ‘she-said-he-said’ case is when a third-party evaluator hears of a rape accusation and denial, but lacks other significant individualised evidence corroborating either assertion. There is no further witness, alibi, etc. In such cases, I argue, probably the accusation is true. This epistemic asymmetry underwrites a paradox. The ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard formerly governed Title IX sexual misconduct investigations at US universities. I articulate four plausible claims that, if true, show the ‘preponderance’ standard is too low for such proceedings. Advocates of the ‘preponderance’ standard—and I count myself amongst them—must deny at least one of the claims.
Dennis Whitcomb, Western Washington University
TITLE: "Epistemic Injustice and Question-Asking"
ABSTRACT: My project is to build a theory of “interrogative injustice”: the analogue of testimonial injustice, for cases where the speaker is not asserting but instead asking questions. In these cases, a hearer would prejudicially reject, not an assertion, but a question-asking. But what is to reject a question-asking? This issue turns out to be trickier than it might at first appear. I’ll explore some attempts to resolve it. These attempts are designed to help us theorize about interrogative injustice, a kind of epistemic injustice that stands to question-asking as testimonial injustice stands to asserting.
Guest appearance by philosopher and singer/songwriter Nomy Arpaly (Brown University).