Dretskean Sensitivity and Higher-Level Knowledge

The debate on whether and why misinformation is bad primarily focuses on the spread of false beliefs as its main harm. From the assumption that misinformation primarily causes harm through the spread of false beliefs as a starting point, it has been contended that the problem of misinformation has been exaggerated. Its tendency to generate false beliefs appears to be limited. However, the near-exclusive focus on whether or not misinformation dupes people with false beliefs neglects other epistemic harms associated with it. Specifically, I show that misinformation also causes trouble for the epistemic goods of truth attainment, intellectual autonomy and debate pluriformity. Moreover, for each of these goods, I argue that emphasizing error-avoidance exacerbates, rather than mitigates, the harms caused by misinformation. These oversights and dilemmas show that prioritizing error-avoidance in the fight against misinformation is not a neutral default policy or necessarily a net positive. A shift in focus away from the spread of false beliefs as the main harm of misinformation is needed to better understand and counter its negative effects.

MORAL AND EPISTEMIC OPEN‐QUESTION ARGUMENTS

Analytic moral philosophers have been taking a renewed interest in friendship in recent years. They have been especially liable to consider friendship in connection with debates over partiality and impartiality in ethics. Many important styles of ethical theory hold up impartiality and equal treatment—under one or another interpretation—as central moral concepts and ideals. Yet friendship and other close relations between persons seem to involve partiality and differential treatment. We care more about what befalls our friends than about what happens to strangers, and we are more motivated to advance our friends’ interests than those of strangers. We seem even to have special responsibilities toward our friends which we don’t have toward strangers. If friendship necessarily involves such partiality, then there is a tension, at least, between the constitutive elements and dispositions of friendship and those of morality: they seem to pull in opposite directions. Contemporary moral theorists have responded to this tension in a variety of ways. Some have sought to bring the apparent partiality of friendship under the wing of a more fundamental impartiality, thus reconciling friendship and the moral. Others have insisted on the primacy of friendship, and partiality, over impartial moral conceptions—

In recent decades, comparative discussions of early Jewish and Christian traditions were dominated by questions of “political theology,” in which Paul, say, appeared as a kind of repressed touchstone within apparently secular conceptualizations and practices of the political (i.e., Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou). Economic crises since 2000, however, have produced more recently a wide-ranging philosophical fascination with the possibility of addressing similar structures of political life by way of a comparative and genealogical exploration of “economic theology.” The philosophical examples tell this tale of shift in focus. If early philosophical explorations of political theology were steeped in allusions to American exceptionalism, the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, the emergency suspension of laws prohibiting torture or the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, then more recent discussions of “economic theology” are similarly steeped in the massive proliferation of student and consumer debts, the European Union’s dramatic enforcement of austerity measures against the democratic will of individual member states, and the political implications of publically funded bailouts of banking corporations in the United States of America and Europe. This essay analyzes contemporary repetitions of early Jewish and Christian discourse as a way of understanding contemporary economic crises. With this backdrop, the essay makes suggestions about the important new role for an academic study of religion which is both comparative and experimental.

As the American political controversies of the 1850s were as much about the category of the political as about slavery, property, or territorial expansion, so did Emerson's focus shift from a philosophical exploration of politics to a lived experience of conflict and a new poetics of political writing. The essay “Politics,” published in 1844, explored an idealist vision emerging from Transcendentalism, but the engagement with British power and cultural authority that took place during his long visit in 1847 and 1848 opened up an existential challenge to the premises of that essay. Although critical of intellectual rigidity and closed minds, Emerson finds himself drawn to the inner assurance of British society. The marginal status ofEnglish Traits(1856), Emerson's account of his travels, is reflected in the relative paucity of critical discussion of the book.English Traitsrepresents, however, not only the confrontation with British pragmatism but a new perspective on the relationship between ideas and power. As the orientation of this text is away from Transcendentalist hermeneutics and toward irony, one way of reintegratingEnglish Traitsinto American intellectual history is to alter its status as a detour in Emerson's writing career, lacking in real significance, and instead to read it as one of the symptomatic literary productions of the 1850s.

Potential sources of false belief is a topic that is of some interest in epistemology. The topic is relevant to the theory of justified belief since, whatever else it is, justified belief is belief that is epistemically reasonable—where the relevant notion of reasonableness will have to do with the adequacy of the belief‘s grounds (or the processes through which it was formed) in connection with the twin aims of acquiring (interesting) truths and avoiding falsehoods. And the topic is relevant to the theory of knowledge as well since, whatever else it is, knowledge involves true beliefs whose truth is not a matter of luck—where the relevant notion of luck will reflect the way(s) in which the subject might have gone wrong in coming to believe what she did in the manner that she did.1