Epistemic Goods Research Articles

Re‐examining the ancient roots of the concept of intellectual virtue

AbstractContemporary scholars working in virtue epistemology profess to take inspiration and build on the ancient Greek conception of intellectual virtues. In this paper, I show that, despite their claim, contemporary models of intellectual virtue differ in notable ways from the ancient Greek account of the concept. I pinpoint two major differences between the ancient Greek conception of intellectual virtues and the contemporary understandings of the term. These amount to (a) what the term of intellectual virtues includes and (b) the location of the value of intellectual virtues. I argue that re‐examining the philosophical history of the concept of intellectual virtue can have significant positive implications for contemporary virtue epistemology. Indicatively, I show that it could lead to the development of theories that maintain that intellectual excellences are conducive to leading a good life because their activity is constitutive of the human good—instead of locating their value, as contemporary virtue epistemologists currently do, in the epistemic goods that they enable the agent to acquire and/or in the agent's epistemic motivations.

Intellectual autonomy as the aim of critical thinking

Critical thinking is often nominated as a graduate attribute, a learning outcome, and is even offered as a discrete subject in schools and universities. Therefore, it is important to gain clarity about the fundamental goal or purpose of critical thinking education. What should instructors be aiming at when they seek to instil critical thinking in their students? In this paper, we argue that the aim of critical thinking is the achievement and maintenance of intellectual autonomy. In setting out our argument for this conclusion, we investigate the three most plausible candidates for the goal of critical thinking practice. The first such candidate is successful inquiry: inquiry that succeeds in obtaining epistemic goods such as knowledge, true belief, or empirically adequate explanation. The second candidate is epistemically virtuous inquiry, i.e. inquiry that exhibits the full range of epistemic virtues, including the skills and capacities needed to support them. The third candidate is intellectual autonomy. We develop an account of intellectual autonomy as a form of self-respect attached to one’s epistemic and intellectual life and argue that only intellectual autonomy in this sense does full justice to the practice of critical thinking.

Towards a Capabilities-Based Conception of Distributive Epistemic Justice

ABSTRACT Despite a growing effort in recent years to theorize epistemic justice as a species of distributive justice from within a Rawlsian framework, there is as yet no well-worked out capabilities-based account. In this paper, we set out to provide one. According to our sufficientarian conception, epistemic justice requires a distribution of capabilities that ensures to all individuals opportunities for minimal epistemic agency, publicly conceived. We argue that this conception has advantages over existing resourcist accounts of distributive epistemic justice inspired by Rawls as well as over Miranda Fricker’s tentative capabilities-based alternative. We contend that epistemic justice concerns a plurality of capabilities for epistemic agency, where the scope and nature of these capabilities is ultimately left open to discernment through public reasoning, but where equal emphasis is placed on contributing as well as retrieving epistemic goods and resources from common pools and on exerting combined capabilities as well as developing internal ones in the first place.

Epistemic Goods, Epistemic Norms, and Evangelization

A missionary religious tradition such as Christianity is distinguished from some other traditions by a commitment to the goal of converting others. However, the very nature of this goal and the norms that govern the successful realization of this goal are not often explored. In this article, I argue that evangelization can be undertaken for several distinct reasons, including epistemic reasons, particularly in cases in which evangelizers are aiming at the multivalent goal of fellowship. I argue that this account illuminates several possible models of mission, that it can provide resources for further evaluation and modeling of evangelical efforts, and that it might signify the need for theologically informed positions in the contemporary meta-epistemological debate about epistemic reasons.

The Epistemic Goals of the Humanities

Abstract The sciences aim to get at the truth about the nature of the world. Do the humanities have a similar goal—namely, to get at the truth about things like novels, paintings, and historical events? I consider a few different ways in which the humanities aim at the truth about their objects, in the process giving rise to epistemic goods such as knowledge and understanding. Two works in the humanities are used as test cases: the historian Tyler Stovall’sParis Noir (1996) and the musicologist Susan McClary’s article, ‘The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year’ (1987).

Epistemic alienation

ABSTRACT The concept of alienation has been used to capture a specific kind of social ill or malady, and one that philosophers have argued is distinctive of life in modern society. I argue that there is a properly epistemic form of alienation present in modern society that arises due to a conflict between the dynamics of group knowledge and traditional requirements on the intellectual virtue of individuals. As group-based knowledge becomes increasingly widespread in modern society, the conflict with virtue becomes more pervasive, and the virtuous become alienated from fundamental epistemic goods. The aim of this paper is to examine this conflict and to highlight that the ‘social turn’ in epistemology is not free from costs.

The epistemic value of doombehaviour: beyond the prudential consequences of doomscrolling, doomchecking, and doomsurfing

This paper analyses a novel and increasingly prevalent category of epistemic behaviour: doombehaviour, constituted by the popular phenomena of doomscrolling and doomsurfing, as well as doomchecking, which is introduced in this paper. Doombehaviour, referring to the frequent or immersive online consumption of negatively valenced news, became ubiquitous during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. As this behaviour has since then been found to negatively impact mood and mental health, advice has been to minimise doombehaviour or even limit news consumption altogether. Yet, as I argue, this assessment overlooks the importance of the epistemic motivation instantiating the behaviour. By presenting an analysis of doomscrolling, doomsurfing, and doomchecking within the context of our socio-technical environment, arguing for the distinct instrumental epistemic values of these categories of doombehaviour, this paper provides more nuanced advice for individuals seeking to balance the potential epistemic benefits and prudential costs of this behaviour. Epistemically motivated individuals should refrain from doomscrolling due to the risk of consuming sophisticated misinformation. However, within the parameters presented in this paper, the epistemic goods obtained through doomchecking and doomsurfing may justify the prudential costs for individuals motivated to acquire knowledge of, or be informed about, current events. This discussion opens the door to further explorations of these increasingly prevalent and potentially harmful epistemic behaviours that have, so far, been ignored by the discipline.

The Pitfalls of Epistemic Autonomy without Intellectual Humility

ABSTRACT Individuals who possess the virtue of epistemic autonomy rely upon themselves in their reasoning, judgment and decision making in virtuous ways. Philosophers working on intellectual virtue agree that if the pursuit of epistemic autonomy is not tempered by other virtues such as intellectual humility, it can lead to vices such as extreme intellectual individualism. Virtue theorists have made a number of empirical claims about the consequences of possessing this vice – e.g. that it will lead to significantly fewer epistemic goods and a greater number of faulty beliefs. This paper reports the results of two pilot studies and initial results from a larger series of studies that attempt to shed light on some of the intellectual pitfalls of pursuing unrestricted epistemic autonomy. The studies provide empirical support for the philosophical claim that epistemic autonomy and intellectual humility are mutually supporting virtues by showing that epistemic autonomy without intellectual humility leads to increased belief in misinformation, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and decreased trust in scientific experts. They also reveal important contours of the complex and often delicate relationship between the virtue of epistemic autonomy and its more vicious cousin, strong intellectual individualism.

Manufacturing the Illusion of Epistemic Trustworthiness

Abstract There are epistemic manipulators in the world. These people are actively attempting to sacrifice epistemic goods for personal gain. In doing so, manipulators have led many competent epistemic agents into believing contrarian theories that go against well-established knowledge. In this paper, I explore one mechanism by which manipulators get epistemic agents to believe contrarian theories. I do so by looking at a prominent empirical model of trustworthiness. This model identifies three major factors that epistemic agents look for when trying to determine who is trustworthy. These are (i) ability, (ii) benevolence, and (iii) moral integrity. I then show how manipulators can manufacture the illusion that they possess these factors. This leads epistemic agents to view manipulators as trustworthy sources of information. Additionally, I argue that fact-checking will be an ineffective – or even harmful – practice when correcting the beliefs of epistemic agents who have been tricked by this illusion of epistemic trustworthiness. I suggest that in such cases we should use an alternative correction, which I call trust undercutting.

Judgment's aimless heart

AbstractIt's often thought that when we reason to new judgments in inference, we aim at believing the truth, and that this aim of ours can explain important psychological and normative features of belief. I reject this picture: the structure of aimed activity shows that inference is not guided by a truth‐aim. This finding clears the way for a positive understanding of how epistemic goods feature in our doxastic lives. We can indeed make sense of many of our inquisitive and deliberative activities as undertaken in pursuit of such goods; but the evidence‐guided inferences in which those activities culminate will require a different theoretical approach.

Epistemic Autonomy and the Shaping of Our Epistemic Lives

ABSTRACT I present an account of epistemic autonomy as a distinctively wide-ranging epistemic virtue, one that helps us to understand a range of phenomena that might otherwise seem quite disparate – from the appropriate selection of epistemic methods, stances and topics of inquiry, to the harms of epistemic oppression, gaslighting and related phenomena. The account draws on four elements commonly incorporated into accounts of personal autonomy: (i) self-governance, (ii) authenticity, (iii) self-creation and (iv) independence. I further argue that for a distinctively epistemic virtue of autonomy; the above elements must ultimately reliably lead to valuable epistemic goods (for the agent herself and others). I then turn to the domains or ways in which epistemic autonomy so understood, can be made manifest. I suggest that epistemic autonomy is a virtue that allows us to appropriately choose (i) subject matters and areas of inquiry, (ii) methods, sources, and processes of belief formation, (iii) epistemic goals and (iv) epistemic stances or frameworks. So understood, epistemic autonomy has a role to play in shaping most every aspect of our epistemic lives.

Why Be Virtuous? Towards a Healthy Epistemic Social Environment

The paper argues that, although the role of responsibilist epistemic virtues is unclear in the framework of traditional knowledge-centred individualist and idealised epistemology, it can be properly understood if one considers other epistemic goods and activities, adopts insights from social epistemology, and acknowledges the non-ideality of our epistemic world. It proposes to explain the value of epistemic virtues in terms of their contribution to a healthy epistemic social environment. Specifically, it is argued that responsibilist virtues are essential (1) for respecting listeners who commit to testimonial justice; (2) for distinguished epistemic agents in their roles of teachers, guides, and exemplars; and (3) both to create and properly recognise these roles and epistemic positions within social networks. In that way, responsibilist virtue epistemology finds its place among the newly emerging topics of social epistemology.

Advancing the debate on the consequences of misinformation: clarifying why it’s not (just) about false beliefs

ABSTRACT 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.

Smart Environments

ABSTRACT This paper proposes epistemic environmentalism as a novel framework for accounting for the contribution of the environment – broadly construed – to epistemic standings and which can be used to improve or protect epistemic environments. The contribution of the environment to epistemic standings is explained through recent developments in epistemology and cognitive science, including embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition and distributed cognition. The paper examines how these developments support epistemic environmentalism, as well as contributes theoretical resources to make epistemic assessments of dynamic environments. The epistemic environmentalist procedure from the assessment of an individual environment to changes made to that environment based on promoting the attainment of epistemic goods is also discussed.

Epistemic injustice: complicity and promise in education

Abstract The 2007 publication of Miranda Fricker’s celebrated book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing gave way to a burgeoning area of study in philosophy of education. The book’s arguments create a context for expanding the scope of work on epistemic issues in education by moving beyond direct explorations of the distribution of epistemic goods and the role of power in curriculum development. Since that time, the rich scholarship on epistemic injustice in philosophy of education examines a variety of topics, including the impact of epistemic injustice on the experiences of teachers and learners more broadly (focussing mostly on students who are marginalized along lines of race, gender, class, and ability, amongst others) and the implications of epistemic injustice for educational research, policy, and practice. This special issue extends this line of work by compiling a set of articles that address a broad range of topics, some of which are well established in the literature and some of which open new lines of inquiry in the field. In doing so, the issue aims to establish the intersection of epistemic injustice and education as a distinct area of study that holds great significance and potential. In this paper, A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. Thompson introduce the issue by discussing these contributions, explaining why education is central to the study of epistemic injustice (and vice versa), and exploring the complex nature of epistemic injustice and education as revealed in the articles that comprise this collection—namely, education’s simultaneous complicity as a perpetrator and promise as a disruptor of epistemic injustice.

Linguistic justice in academic philosophy: the rise of English and the unjust distribution of epistemic goods

ABSTRACT English continues to rise as the lingua franca of academic philosophy. Philosophers from all types of linguistic backgrounds use it to communicate with each other across the globe. In this paper, we identify how the rise of English leads to linguistic injustices. We argue that these injustices are similar in an important regard: they are all instances of distributive epistemic injustice. We then present six proposals for addressing unjust linguistic discrimination and evaluate them on how well they can mitigate the specific types of distributive epistemic injustice that we identify. We accept that there is much more to be said. But we hope that what we say will motivate other philosophers to take these types of injustices more seriously and encourage them to make academic philosophy a more inclusive global community.

Open-mindedness: A double-edged sword in education

This article examines the question of whether and under what conditions teaching open-mindedness to students could have negative effects. While there has been much discussion in the literature about the potential downsides of being open-minded, the question of whether teaching this trait to young, untutored minds could result in more negative effects than positive has received little attention. Yet, given that a primary focus of the literature is providing models for use in educational contexts, exploring the potential risks of encouraging students to emulate such models is imperative. In this regard, the article presents three concerns. The first is that students may lack the full intellectual character to avoid the pitfalls of open-mindedness that have already been noted in the literature. The second concern is that students who exercise open-mindedness may incur social costs that cannot be compensated for by epistemic goods. The third concern is that educators, particularly at universities, often face certain non-ideal conditions that may make it difficult for them to effectively cultivate open-mindedness in students. I ultimately conclude that, in light of these concerns, we should approach teaching for open-mindedness with great caution. However, we should not avoid it altogether. Preliminary suggestions are offered on how instructors may attune their approach to teaching for open-mindedness to mitigate the identified concerns.

The curious case of uncurious creation

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to answer the question: Can contemporary forms of artificial intelligence be creative? To answer this question, I consider three conditions that are commonly taken to be necessary for creativity. These are novelty, value, and agency. I argue that while contemporary AI models may have a claim to novelty and value, they cannot satisfy the kind of agency condition required for creativity. From this discussion, a new condition for creativity emerges. Creativity requires curiosity, a motivation to pursue epistemic goods. I argue that contemporary AI models do not satisfy this new condition. Because they lack both agency and curiosity, it is a mistake to attribute the same sort of creativity to AI that we prize in humans. Finally, I consider the question of whether these AI models stand to make human creativity in the arts and sciences obsolete, despite not being creative themselves. I argue, optimistically, that this is unlikely.

Decolonization Projects

Decolonization Projects

Intellectual Virtues for Interdisciplinary Research: A Consensual Qualitative Analysis.

Through a qualitative approach, this study identified a specific subgroup of intellectual virtues necessary for developing interdisciplinary research. Cognitive science was initially conceived as a new discipline emerging from various fields, including philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and anthropology. Thus, a frequent debate among cognitive scientists is whether the initial multidisciplinary program successfully developed into a mature interdisciplinary field or evolved into a set of independent sciences of cognition. For several years, interdisciplinarity has been an aspiration for the academy, although the difficulties limiting the success of interdisciplinary collaborations have begun to erode that initial optimism. Our analysis suggests that the problems hindering the success of interdisciplinarity can be overcome by fostering certain intellectual character strengths in scholars. The Consensual Qualitative Research method was used to analyze nine semi-structured interviews involving researchers with a long personal trajectory of interdisciplinary research between the sciences and the humanities. Three virtue domains emerged from the interviews' analysis: (i) intellectual virtues, (ii) social virtues, and (iii) interpersonal intellectual virtues. The virtues of the third domain intersect with intellectual and social ones. They are intellectual because they pursue epistemic goods. But, unlike other intellectual virtues, they only develop in interpersonal settings, so they can also be considered to have a social component. Interpersonal intellectual virtues can be thus defined as intellectual character traits that facilitate the acquisition of knowledge (intellectual motivation) with and through other people in a reciprocal way (social environment). These virtues are essential for developing any successful collective epistemic enterprise, interdisciplinary research being a privileged context where these qualities manifest themselves in a relevant way.