Epistemic Phenomena Research Articles

Disinformation, Politically Motivated Reasoning, and Knowledge Resistance

We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, yet, paradoxically, we are currently facing an unprecedented global ignorance crisis that affects our personal and societal well-being, as well as the stability of our democracies. There are two key triggers to this crisis, i.e. two crucial obstacles to learning: first, the widespread sharing of disinformation, which, in conjunction with an overly trusting audience, contributes to widely spread false beliefs, and correspondingly reckless political and social behaviour. At the same time, though, and at least as critical, is the prevalence of knowledge resistance and distrust in expertise. What we need to solve this high-stakes puzzle is a social epistemological framework that is able to explain the complex mechanisms underlying these surprising and unprecedented epistemic phenomena. This article will aim to sketch the contours of such a framework.

Political Epistemology without Apologies

AbstractPolitical epistemology has become a popular field of research in recent years. It sets itself the ambitious task to intertwine epistemology with social and political theory in order to do justice to the relationships between truth and politics, or reason and power. Yet many contributions either expand arguments and concepts from traditional epistemology to political phenomena or use existing theories and frameworks from social and political theory to address the politics of epistemological questions. The former approach (prominent, e.g., in the epistemic injustice debate) leads to an epistemisation of political phenomena and concepts coupled with their de‐politicization, the latter approach (prominent, e.g., in Frankfurt School critical theory) leads to a politicization of epistemic phenomena and concepts coupled with their de‐epistemisation. Instead, it is argued that political epistemology requires reworking even basic concepts, due to its three foundational commitments: It is committed to the claim that socio‐material conditions of existence matter epistemically (minimal materialism), to the self‐reflection of the socio‐material conditions of political epistemology's own arguments and theories (radical self‐reflexivity), and to a specific form of epistemic humility (epistemic non‐sovereignty). Using the notion of normativity as an exemplary problem, the article closes by highlighting the difficulty of maintaining these three commitments.

Measuring Epistemic Trust: Towards a New Lens for Democratic Legitimacy, Misinformation, and Echo Chambers

Trust is crucial for the functioning of complex societies, and an important concern for CSCW. Our purpose is to use research from philosophy, social science, and CSCW to provide a novel account of trust in the 'post-truth' era. Testimony, from one speaker to another, underlies many social systems. Epistemic trust, or testimonial credibility, is the likelihood to accept a speaker's claim due to beliefs about their competence or sincerity. Epistemic trust is closely related to several 'pathological epistemic phenomena': democratic (il)legitimacy, the spread of misinformation, and echo chambers. To the best of our knowledge, this theoretical contribution is novel in the field of social computing. We further argue that epistemic trust is no philosophical novelty: it is measurable. Weakly supervised text classification approaches achieve F_1 scores of around 80 to 85 per cent on detecting epistemic distrust. This is also, to the best of our knowledge, a novel task in natural language processing. We measure expressions of epistemic distrust across 954 political communities on Reddit. We find that expressions of epistemic distrust are relatively rare, although there are substantial differences between communities. Conspiratorial communities and those focused on controversial political topics tend to express more distrust. Communities with strong epistemic norms enforced by moderation are likely to express low levels. While we find users to be an important potential source of contagion of epistemic distrust, community norms appear to dominate. It is likely that epistemic trust is more useful as an aggregated risk factor. Finally, we argue that policymakers should be aware of epistemic trust considering their reliance on legitimacy underwritten by testimony.

Epistemic Bubbles and Contextual Discordance

AbstractRecent work in social epistemology has drawn attention to various problematic social epistemic phenomena that are common within online networks. Nguyen (2020) argues that it is important to distinguish epistemic bubbles from echo chambers. An epistemic bubble is an information structure that merely lacks information or sources that would be relevant or important to the user. An echo chamber is a structure in which dissenting opinions are, not necessarily absent, but actively undermined, for example by instilling attitudes of distrust towards their adherents. Because of this, echo chambers are thought to be especially difficult to escape. In contrast, according to Nguyen, it is relatively easy to shatter an epistemic bubble: one simply introduces the missing information. In this paper, I argue that it is more difficult to shatter an epistemic bubble than has been recognised in the literature. The reason for this is the relationship between epistemic bubbles and interpretative resources. Despite their epistemic drawbacks, it is comparatively easy to gain knowledge from sources inside one's epistemic bubble because agents within a bubble share common ground. In contrast, it can be very difficult to gain knowledge from sources outside of one's bubble because interlocutors on the outside are less likely to have the shared context needed to facilitate communicative success. I argue that this problem suggests a different way to understand the nature of epistemic bubbles and our prospects for escaping them.

Learning from diversity: Public reason and the benefits of pluralism

The New Diversity Theory (NDT) represents a novel approach to public reason liberalism, providing an alternative to the traditional, Rawlsian public reason paradigm. One of the NDT's distinctive features is its emphasis on the potential advantages of a diverse society, with a particularly strong focus on the epistemic benefits of diversity. In this paper, I call into question whether societal diversity has the epistemic benefits that New Diversity theorists claim. I highlight a number of pernicious epistemic phenomena that tend to arise in diverse contexts, ultimately arguing that the only feasible way around these epistemic pitfalls is through widespread convergence on certain intellectual virtues. If these virtues are indeed necessary, then the benefits highlighted by the NDT should only be expected in societies that reflect certain kinds of diversity. More precisely, only the kinds of diversity that can still persist despite homogenization along the lines of certain intellectual virtues are compatible with the NDT's claims. Building upon this insight, I then highlight features of the NDT that require further development in order for it to serve as a compelling alternative to its Rawlsian counterpart.

Interthematic Polarization

Abstract In recent epistemology, belief polarization is generally defined as a process by which a 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, namely the process by which people's beliefs on unrelated topics become increasingly correlated over time. This paper argues that the latter type of polarization, here labeled interthematic polarization, is often rational from each individual's point of view. This suggests that belief polarization is not necessarily a failure of individual rationality, but instead a failure of the social structures within which we live our epistemic lives.

Ordinary knowledge as an epistemic phenomenon

Ordinary knowledge as an epistemic phenomenon

How to be a capacitist

Capacitism is the view that capacities come first in epistemological theorising: they are explanatorily basic and key epistemic phenomena are to be analysed in terms of capacities. This paper develops a problem for capacitism and outlines a motivated way of solving it.

Epistemic Explanations: A Theory of Telic Normativity, and What It Explains, by Ernest Sosa

No one has done more for analytic virtue epistemology than Ernie Sosa; indeed, one is tempted to delete ‘virtue’. This is his latest development of his teleological version of the virtue-theoretic perspective. It is characteristically excellent and will no doubt be a classic contribution to epistemology. I highly recommend it. The central commitment of teleological virtue epistemology is that core epistemic phenomena are explained by appealing to virtues that aim at the epistemic good. Sosa’s contention is that epistemic normativity is just telic (I’ll use ‘teleological’ and ‘telic’ interchangeably) normativity directed at the epistemic good. He has been developing this basic idea over the course of many decades; this book is the latest development. While it focuses on four rather distinct subject matters, the parts that are most central to the development of telic virtue epistemology (at least for this reviewer) are Parts II and III. The former is about how to fit suspension of judgment into a telic virtue epistemology. As we’ll see, suspension of judgment causes serious trouble for the telic part of telic virtue epistemology. In Part II Sosa aims to fix this trouble. Part III is about a host of foundational epistemic issues. Sosa’s aim is to further refine his theory in light of these issues.

On Deniability

AbstractCommunication can be risky. Like other kinds of actions, it comes with potential costs. For instance, an utterance can be embarrassing, offensive, or downright illegal. In the face of such risks, speakers tend to act strategically and seek ‘plausible deniability’. In this paper, we propose an account of the notion of deniability at issue. On our account, deniability is an epistemic phenomenon. A speaker has deniability if she can make it epistemically irrational for her audience to reason in certain ways. To avoid predictable confusion, we distinguish deniability from a practical correlate we call ‘untouchability’. Roughly, a speaker has untouchability if she can make it practically irrational for her audience to act in certain ways. These accounts shed light on the nature of strategic speech and suggest countermeasures against strategic speech.

Appearance and Explanation: Phenomenal Explanationism in Epistemology by Kevin McCain and Luca Moretti

Reviewed by: Appearance and Explanation: Phenomenal Explanationism in Epistemology by Kevin McCain and Luca Moretti Caleb Estep McCAIN, Kevin and Luca Moretti. Appearance and Explanation: Phenomenal Explanationism in Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. iv + 195 pp. Cloth, $70.00 Since its beginning, phenomenal conservatism (PC) has grown rapidly in popularity as a theory of epistemic justification. In Appearance and Explanation, McCain and Moretti develop out of PC a new theory of justification that they call phenomenal explanationism (PE). Their goal is to integrate PC with explanationism—the view that epistemic justification comes from the best explanation—thereby creating PE as a hybrid theory. They ambitiously contend that PE captures the same basic intuitions as PC but is better equipped to handle epistemic phenomena as a whole, troubling objections to PC (and foundationalism in general), and skeptical [End Page 354] arguments. The book is comprised of seven chapters. This review will emphasize the first four. In chapter 1, the authors discuss what PC is and its merits. PC is the idea that "we should grant things to be the way they appear [or seem] to be, unless we have reason to doubt" our seemings. They point out some of the benefits of PC as perceived by its followers: It "provide[s] widespread epistemic practices with a rationale," "it offers a unified account of non-inferential justification for beliefs of very different types," "it constitutes the basis of fallible foundationalism," and has a strong "antiskeptical bite." In chapter 2, McCain and Moretti argue that PC is not sufficient to account even for noninferential justification. First, they argue, PC gives an insufficient explanation of the no-defeater condition. The no-defeater condition is the "unless we have reason to doubt" clause built into PC. PC does not explain why or how S's reason to doubt "interacts with S's seeming that e in such a way as to diminish S's non-inferential justification for believing p." Second, if the power of seemings to justify comes from the seemings themselves, then the seemings become unstable once the subject becomes aware of them. The upshot of this is that if seemings are sufficient for justification, then some beliefs that should not be justified would have justification. In chapter 3, the authors begin to elaborate on their view. The authors distinguish between mere seemings, paired appearances, and presentational appearances to show how appearances can have varying degrees of justificatory power. Seemings and appearances are used in a roughly synonymous way. Mere seemings are lacking in both sensations and presentational phenomenology, hence they provide a very weak form of justification. Paired appearances have sensations but not presentational phenomenology. They have greater justificatory strength than mere seemings but less strength than presentational appearances. Presentational appearances produce the strongest justification and include both sensations and presentational phenomenology. The big payoff from these distinctions is that they show how different appearances can produce varying strengths of justification. In chapter 4, Moretti and McCain first outline their version of explanationism, which is evidentialist in character. It is as follows: "Believing p is justified for S at t if and only if at t: (1). S has total evidence, E; (2). either (i) p is the best (sufficiently good) explanation of e (where e is a subset of E), or (ii) p is an explanatory consequence of the best (sufficiently good) explanation of e (where p is such an explanatory consequence if and only if the relevant explanation of e would provide an explanation of p's truth that is significantly better than the explanation it would provide of ~ p's truth); (3). it is not the case that p fails to satisfy (i) and (ii) with respect to e because of the additional evidence included in E." [End Page 355] Next, the authors merge explanationism with PC as understood through the threefold division of appearances given in chapter 3. The result is that appearances or seemings are necessary and sufficient for a subject to have evidence, but the subject is justified in believing some proposition p only because p is the best explanation of the evidence. Appearances contribute to epistemic justification because as evidence they regulate the capacity...

Socio‐functional foundations in science: The case of measurement

AbstractWe present a novel kind of “socio‐functional” foundationalism rooted in the division of scientific labor. Our foundationalism is social in that it involves a socio‐epistemic phenomenon we dub epistemic outsourcing, whereby claims from one group of scientists provide epistemological foundations for another group of scientists. We argue that: (1) epistemic outsourcing results in a legitimate form of epistemic foundationalism, (2) this sort of foundationalism can be used to shed light on the epistemology of measurement; and (3) epistemic outsourcing is a distinctively collective epistemic phenomenon.

Dilemmatic gaslighting

Existing work on gaslighting ties it constitutively to facts about the intentions or prejudices of the gaslighter and/or his victim’s prior experience of epistemic injustice. I argue that the concept of gaslighting is more broadly applicable than has been appreciated: what is distinctive about gaslighting, on my account, is simply that a gaslighter confronts his victim with a certain kind of choice between rejecting his testimony and doubting her own basic epistemic competence in some domain. I thus hold that gaslighting is a purely epistemic phenomenon—not requiring any particular set of intentions or prejudices on the part of the gaslighter—and also that it can occur even in the absence of any prior experience of epistemic injustice. Appreciating the dilemmatic character of gaslighting allows us to understand its connection with a characteristic sort of epistemic harm, makes it easier to apply the concept of gaslighting in practice, and raises the possibility that we might discover its structure and the associated harm in surprising places.

The safe, the sensitive, and the severely tested: a unified account

This essay presents a unified account of safety, sensitivity, and severe testing. S’s belief is safe iff, roughly, S could not easily have falsely believed p, and S’s belief is sensitive iff were p false S would not believe p. These two conditions are typically viewed as rivals but, we argue, they instead play symbiotic roles. Safety and sensitivity are both valuable epistemic conditions, and the relevant alternatives framework provides the scaffolding for their mutually supportive roles. The relevant alternatives condition holds that a belief is warranted only if the evidence rules out relevant error possibilities. The safety condition helps categorise relevant from irrelevant possibilities. The sensitivity condition captures ‘ruling out’. Safety, sensitivity, and the relevant alternatives condition are typically presented as conditions on warranted belief or knowledge. But these properties, once generalised, help characterise other epistemic phenomena, including warranted inference, legal verdicts, scientific claims, reaching conclusions, addressing questions, warranted assertion, and the epistemic force of corroborating evidence. We introduce and explain Mayo’s severe testing account of statistical inference. A hypothesis is severely tested to the extent it passes tests that probably would have found errors, were they present. We argue Mayo’s account is fruitfully understood using the resulting relevant alternatives framework. Recasting Mayo’s condition using the conceptual framework of contemporary epistemology helps forge fruitful connections between two research areas—philosophy of statistics and the analysis of knowledge—not currently in sufficient dialogue. The resulting union benefits both research areas.

Sympathy, Interpersonal Awareness and Acknowledgment

According to a popular thought, sympathy is an epistemic phenomenon: in sympathizing with others we come to be aware of them as fellow sentient beings. This view–which I call the Epistemic View–effectively characterizes sympathy as a form of social cognition. In this paper, I will argue against the Epistemic View. As far as I can see, this view radically misconstrues the way sympathy is directed at others. I will at the same time provide some material for, and motivate, an alternative proposal according to which the primary significance of sympathy is practical rather than epistemic. On this account, sympathy is a form of interpersonal acknowledgment rather than interpersonal awareness.

Naturalism and the Projectability Challenge

Abstract In a recent paper in this journal, Bengson, Cuneo and Reiser (hereafter bcr) present a novel epistemic challenge to naturalist moral realism, which they call the Projectability Challenge. The Projectability Challenge aims to show that there is an important epistemic phenomenon, projectability, that naturalists are unable to explain, but which non-naturalists can explain. This flips a familiar dynamic on its head, since it is typically argued that the moral naturalist has epistemic advantages over the moral non-naturalist (see, e.g., Joyce 2006, Ch. 6; Bedke 2009). In this response, I argue that bcr dramatically underestimate the theoretical resources available to naturalists to explain the phenomenon of projectability. While bcr argue that no variety of moral naturalism can explain projectability, I contend that all varieties of moral naturalism can explain projectability. There is no projectability problem for any kind of naturalist realism.

Closed-minded Belief and Indoctrination

AbstractWhat is indoctrination? This paper clarifies and defends a structural epistemic account of indoctrination according to which indoctrination is the inculcation of closed-minded belief caused by “epistemically insulating content.” This is content which contains a proviso that serious critical consideration of the relevant alternatives to one's belief is reprehensible whether morally or epistemically. As such, it does not demand that indoctrination be a type of unethical instruction, ideological instruction, unveridical instruction, or instruction which bypasses the agent's rational evaluation. In this way, we can account for why indoctrination can occur for liberal democratic beliefs as much as it occurs for fascist, fundamentalist, or fanatical belief: for indoctrination is fundamentally a structural epistemic phenomenon.

Just How Testimonial, Epistemic, Or Correctable Is Testimonial Injustice?

ABSTRACT In her book Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Frickerargues that there is a distinctly epistemic kind of injustice, which she calls testimonial injustice, resulting from identity-prejudicial credibility deficit – identity prejudic causing a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word. Sheargues that testimonial injustice is correctable through hearers developing a capacity for self-correcting for it within a virtue-epistemological framework. In this essay, I examine Fricker’s argument, and conclude that Fricker’s exposition of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit is sound, but that she has not demonstrated either that testimonial injustice is a distinctly testimonial phenomenon or that identity-prejudicial credibility deficit is a distinctly epistemic phenomenon, or how a virtue-epistemic framework might be successfully employed as a corrective methodology. I further suggest that her conception of testimony as distinctly evidential is too narrow to be applied to everyday instances of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit, and should be reconfigured within a broader framework.

Home as the Quintessential Anti-Racist School: Reflections on Black Logics of Place and Opportunity, Parenting and Learning, Being and Striving

In this article, we share our process of reflecting together and our resulting thoughts on the idea of anti-racist schooling amid our current experiences as Black men and fathers, as educators and researchers, as faculty colleagues, and as friends. In our respective careers, we have each continually posed questions that critically examine a range of epistemic and empirical phenomena at the intersection of racialization and racism, injustice, socialization and identity, and the institutionalization of mathematical knowing, learning, and teaching. We hope to bring some of that prior work to bear on our reflections here—and in ways that, before now, we have never written.

Revisiting Epistemic Logic with Names

This paper revisits the multi-agent epistemic logic presented in [10], where agents and sets of agents are replaced by abstract, intensional "names". We make three contributions. First, we study its model theory, providing adequate notions of bisimulation and frame morphisms, and use them to study the logic's expressive power and definability. Second, we show that the logic has a natural neighborhood semantics, which in turn allows to show that the axiomatization in [10] does not rely on possibly controversial introspective properties of knowledge. Finally, we extend the logic with common and distributed knowledge operators, and provide a sound and complete axiomatization for each of these extensions. These results together put the original epistemic logic with names in a more modern context and opens the door for a logical analysis of epistemic phenomena where group membership is uncertain or variable.