Epistemic Responsibility Research Articles

The Academic Scientist’s Commitment to Epistemic Responsibility

The Academic Scientist’s Commitment to Epistemic Responsibility

Divine foreknowledge, evidence and epistemic responsibility

AbstractIn several recent publications, John Martin Fischer proposed a new solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge, which he dubbed the bootstrapping view. On this view, God can have limited knowledge of contingent future based on a combination of (a) God's knowledge of inconclusive evidence about the contingent world available to humans and (b) divine self‐knowledge and more specifically God's knowledge of His essential infallibility. On the basis of the former, God obtains knowledge about contingent future, and by virtue of the latter, God bootstraps this knowledge to certainty. Fischer acknowledges that the mechanism of bootstrapping remains opaque to us, but maintains that his view offers a consistent model of God's limited foreknowledge of contingent future in an indeterministic world. The essay examines the bootstrapping view and some problems it gives rise to, as well as presents a related model of divine foreknowledge that is consistent and simpler and gives God comprehensive foreknowledge.

Functional and pragmatic parameters of speech acts with the explicit mode of ignorance in scientific dialogue

The article is about identifying functional aspects of 1st-person statements with the explicit mode of ignorance (messages like I do not know… / We don’t know… I don’t know / We don’t know ...) in scientific discussions as a genre of scientific discourse. The relevance of the analysis is predetermined by the necessity to study various parameters of discourse (including both epistemic and pragmatic) as closely connected. The main research method is contextual and pragmalinguistic analysis. The sources of the material are transcripts of modern English and Russian scientific discussions in various fields of knowledge. The article identifies the illocutionary properties of ignorant statements, establishes their pragmatic functions, as well as determines their position in the traditional classification of speech acts. Taking into account the illocutionary orientation of references to ignorance makes it possible to identify representative, interrogative, axiological varieties of ignorance messages as well as their subtypes differentiated on the basis of the degree of their expressiveness, their vector of evaluation, the nature of the representative and interrogative role of speech acts with the mode of ignorance: fully expressive and conditionally expressive, positive and negative, preventive and hesitative, etc. The criterion “pragmatic functions” helps us specify additional functions of references to ignorance in scientific dialogue: to indicate a certain degree of the speaker’s epistemic responsibility for their words, to serve as a means of avoiding the answer, a way to prevent criticism, etc. Moreover, the work identifies factors determining the illocutionary nature of ignorance speech acts: the surface structure of the message, the general context of utterance, the position of the ignorance message in the dialogical unity, sincerity and felicity conditions of speech acts formulated as ignorance messages. References to ignorance are concluded to be quite a significant phenomenon in the structure of scientific dialogue, since they perform a number of important functions in it. The analysis scheme can be used to study statements with other explicit modes (knowledge, opinions, etc.) in various types of discourse.

In Defense of an Account of Degrees of Epistemic Responsibility

This article explores the concept of degrees of epistemic responsibility by examining the debate between Michael Bishop and Katherine Puddifoot on the internalist perspective on epistemic responsibility. While Bishop’s empirical evidence challenges internalism, Puddifoot argues it can be supportive. The author presents an account of degrees of epistemic responsibility, drawing inspiration from Martin Montminy’s idea of moral responsibility. The central argument suggests that an agent is epistemically responsible only if her reasoning strategy aligns with her epistemic abilities, a concept referred to as epistemic par performance. The paper discusses how the Bishop-Puddifoot debate contributes to this perspective, presents Montminy’s view on moral responsibility, and applies it to epistemic responsibility, emphasizing the importance of matching reasoning strategies with individual abilities. The article ultimately highlights the contextual, ability-dependent, and effort-inclusive nature of epistemic responsibility and offers a framework to recognize and credit agents based on their contributions and endeavors in expanding our epistemic horizons. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#73-74; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2023 P 95-112

The Collective Responsibilities of Science: Toward a Normative Framework

Abstract Scientists have the epistemic responsibility of producing knowledge. They also have the social responsibility of aligning their research with the needs and values of various societal stakeholders. Individual scientists may be left with no guidance on how to prioritize and carry these different responsibilities. As I will argue, however, the responsibilities of science can be harmonized at the collective level. Drawing from debates in moral philosophy, I will propose a theory of the collective responsibilities of science that accounts for the internal diversity of research groups and for their different responsibilities.

Should We Discourage AI Extension? Epistemic Responsibility and AI

We might worry that our seamless reliance on AI systems makes us prone to adopting the strange errors that these systems commit. One proposed solution is to design AI systems so that they are not phenomenally transparent to their users. This stops cognitive extension and the automatic uptake of errors. Although we acknowledge that some aspects of AI extension are concerning, we can address these concerns without discouraging transparent employment altogether. First, we believe that the potential danger should be put into perspective – many unreliable technologies are unlikely to be used transparently precisely because they are unreliable. Second, even an agent who transparently employs a resource may reflect on its reliability. Finally, agents can rely on a process transparently and be yanked out of their transparent use when it turns problematic. When an agent is responsive to the reliability of their process in this way, they have epistemically integrated it, and the beliefs they form with it are formed responsibly. This prevents the agent from automatically incorporating problematic beliefs. Responsible (and transparent) use of AI resources – and consequently responsible AI extension – is hence possible. We end the paper with several design and policy recommendations that encourage epistemic integration of AI-involving belief-forming processes. Keywords: phenomenal transparency, artificial intelligence, cognitive extension, adversarial attack, cognitive integration.

Injustice and subaltern environmentalism: tribal ecosystem and decolonial practices in Bhoopal’s Forest, Blood & Survival: Life and Times of Komuram Bheem

ABSTRACT A commitment to engage with the structural and historical processes that result in discrimination and injustice in the utilisation of natural resources and landscapes is an epistemic responsibility that must be achieved in order to imagine a just society in which environmental justice is a feasible possibility. Indian author Bhoopal’s Forests, Blood & Survival: Life and Times of Komuram Bheem (2023), translated from Telugu by P A Kumar, is one such literary narrative that vividly portrays the injustices endured by tribal communities in India at the hands of colonial forest officers, money lenders, capitalist extractive authorities, and other oppressive authorities. In this context, the article explicates this narrative of tribal communities to demonstrate and encourage alternative viewpoints and positions of tribal cultures that may confront the dominance of colonial-capitalist logic as a monolithic framework in environmental discourse. In doing so, the first section discusses the natural environment of the tribes and their way of life, followed by an intervention on the colonial brutality and injustices that tribals have been subjected to, and finally, how their resistance is deemed to be subaltern environmentalism.

Social Inquisitiveness: A Normative Account of the Social Epistemic Virtue of Good Questioning

Abstract In this paper I offer a characterization of the intellectual virtue of social inquisitiveness, paying attention to its difference from the individual virtue of inquisitiveness. I defend that there is a significant distinction between individual and social epistemic virtues: individual epistemic virtues are attributed to individuals and assessed by the quality of their cognitive powers, while social epistemic virtues are attributed to epistemic communities and are assessed by the quality of the epistemic relations within the communities. I begin presenting Lani Watson's characterization of the (individual) practice of questioning and its related intellectual virtue, inquisitiveness. While she does not employ normative language, I show that her description can be constructed through four norms. Then, based on an account of epistemic communities, I defend that, while epistemic virtues attributable to individuals have norms regulating cognitive powers, epistemic virtues attributable to epistemic communities have norms regulating social epistemic interactions and shared epistemic responsibility. I then present a robust characterization of the epistemic virtue of social inquisitiveness through its social epistemic norms: DISTRIBUTION, ACCESSIBILITY, SOCIAL SINCERITY, SOCIAL CONTEXT, and FREQUENCY. I respond to two possible objections to my account and conclude by offering suggestions to broaden the scope of the epistemology of questioning.

Teaching epistemic integrity to promote reliable scientific communication.

In an age of mass communication, citizens need to learn how to detect and transmit reliable scientific information. This need is exacerbated by the transmission of news through social media, where any individual has the potential to reach thousands of other users. In this article, we argue that fighting the uncontrolled transmission of unreliable information requires improved training in broad epistemic integrity. This subcategory of research integrity is relevant to students in all disciplines, and is often overlooked in integrity courses, in contrast to topics such as fraud, plagiarism, collaboration and respect for study subjects. Teaching epistemic integrity involves training epistemic skills (such as metacognitive competences, capacity to use helpful heuristics, basic statistical and methodological principles) and values (such as love of truth, intellectual humility, epistemic responsibility). We argue that this topic should be addressed in secondary school, and later constitute a fundamental component of any university curriculum.

Cognitive-pragmatic aspects of epistemic responsibility attribution

The article deals with epistemic responsibility from the perspective of a reader/listener. Viewed as a type of speaker commitment, epistemic responsibility is defined as responsibility for the reliability of what is reported. It is assumed to be verbalized through epistemic modals and evidentials. The relevance of the study is due to a high frequency of the term “commitment”, mainly in studies on the speech act theory, modality and evidentiality, combined with the insufficient theoretical development of the notion. The novelty of the study lies in the identification and description of cognitive and pragmatic features of epistemic responsibility attribution based on an experiment. Objectives of the research included assessing the perception of evidential-epistemic markers as epistemic responsibility indicators by native speakers of Russian, identifying communicative interaction aspects that influence epistemic responsibility attribution, as well as experimental verification of the epistemic responsibility model developed in our earlier studies. The analysis was carried out using a questionnaire designed specifically for this experiment. Respondents were students of non-linguistic areas of training (35 subjects). The study showed that Russian speakers perceive evidential-epistemic markers as epistemic responsibility indicators, and epistemic responsibility attribution is influenced by communication ethics and conventions. The findings proved the validity of the epistemic responsibility model under test. The research also yielded an improved interpretation of the epistemic responsibility concept, which can be considered, on the one hand, as the speaker’s mental state and, on the other hand, as a linguistic image of this state, determined by communication rules and the speaker’s intentions.

Science Denial, Cognitive Command, and the Theory-Ladenness of Observation: A Postscript for a Time of ‘Post-Truth’

ABSTRACT One worrying aspect of contemporary Western Society is the increasing prevalence of instances of ‘Science Denial’ in popular culture. Examples include both cases where well-attested scientific hypotheses are rejected and conversely, where scientifically discredited ideas are stubbornly retained. The paper raises the question whether the kind of argument for an anti-realist conception of empirical scientific theory considered in my contribution to the inaugural issue of this journal could in principle provide intellectual succour for these trends. The discussion proceeds through an examination of the role of ‘takings for granted’ in all reflective enquiry to the conclusion that a trusting acceptance of the general credibility of informants is a precondition for the exercise of individual epistemic responsibility, and that in that context an acceptance of at least the empirical adequacy, if not the truth, realistically understood, of the teachings of scientists in general is rationally non-optional.

Epistemic Responsibility and Community Engagement in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift

HIV/AIDS has pervasively affected the health and well-being of South African women, as evidenced by their exacerbating mortality rates over the decades. Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift (2008) is a critical intervention in this regard because, in focusing on the death of a young black woman owing to her infection with HIV/AIDS, it critiques the overarching and ingrained patriarchal ideologies that are hindering the treatment and prevention of this disease. The article seeks to examine Magona’s text as uncovering the lack of appropriate knowledge about HIV/AIDS, and the silencing of South African women in the articulation or dissemination of this disease-related knowledge. The article argues that Magona’s text emphasizes the delinking of taboos and highlights the necessity of the South African community’s engagement at micro and macro levels regarding HIV/AIDS. This engagement reflects an epistemic responsibility that is crucial to reducing the dreadful impact of this illness from both cultural and structural perspectives.

A careful approach to artificial intelligence: the struggles with epistemic responsibility of healthcare professionals

ABSTRACT Machine learning approaches are being developed to contribute to the treatment of patients and the organisation of care. These new approaches are created in complex environments that include data and computational models as well as new practices, roles and competencies. In such settings, individualised conceptions of agents bearing responsibility need rethinking. In response, we elaborate on the concept of epistemic responsibility based on De la Bellacasa’s work on care (Bellacasa, M.P. de la. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press). To better understand these complex environments and the dynamics of responsibility, we use an ethnographic approach and followed Dutch healthcare professionals who learned the basics of (supervised) machine learning, while they pursued a project in their organisations during a four-month-long course. The professionals struggled with different interdependencies and this brought responsibility-in-the-making into relief. Rather than seeing (growing) relations and impure entanglements as standing in the way of responsibility, we show how connections are worthy of inquiry. We argue that connections are essential to knowledge and that producing epistemic responsibility means considering these embedded relations. In contrast to calls for control and clarification of machine learning techniques, and warnings that they create irresponsible black boxes, our care approach shows how responsibility-in-the-making reveals opportunities for ethical reflection and action. Our approach attends to how humans and non-humans are engaged in caring, reveals patterns around kinds of responsibility, and points to opportunities for avoiding neglect and irresponsibility.

Epistemic Complicity

AbstractThere is a widely accepted distinction between being directly responsible for a wrongdoing versus being somehow indirectly or vicariously responsible for the wrongdoing of another person or collective. Often this is couched in analyses of complicity, and complicity's role in the relationship between individual and collective wrongdoing. Complicity is important because, inter alia, it allows us to make sense of individuals who may be blameless or blameworthy to a relatively low degree for their immediate conduct, but are nevertheless blameworthy to a higher degree for their implication in some larger (or another person's) wrongdoing. In this paper, I argue that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of complicity. First, I motivate the distinction between direct and vicarious responsibility with three interlocking arguments, respectively appealing to: (i) the structure of rational agency; (ii) linguistic considerations; (iii) the role of ‘principal' vs. ‘accomplice’ in legal doctrine. I show how these arguments naturally extend to the epistemic domain, motivating an epistemic form of vicarious responsibility. I then examine complicity as a mechanism of vicarious epistemic responsibility. To fill this out, I engage with an epistemic analogue of the debate about the role of intention versus causal contribution in complicity. I propose a Casual Account of Epistemic Complicity, arguing that it accommodates a wide range of cases, and enables fine-grained explanations of degrees of culpability for epistemic complicity. With an adequate account of epistemic complicity on hand, we can explain what is objectionable about an important class of epistemic agent who, on an individual level, may be epistemically blameless or blameworthy to a relatively low degree, but whose relation to other individuals or collectives nevertheless makes them epistemically blameworthy to a higher degree. I explore some broader implications of this result.

Psychology’s reform movement needs a reconceptualization of scientific expertise

Science is supposed to be a self-correcting endeavor, but who is “the scientific expert” that corrects faulty science? We grouped traditional conceptualizations of expertise in psychology under three classes (substantialist, implicitist, and social conventionalist), and then examined how these approaches affect scientific self-correction in reference to various components of the credibility crisis such as fraud/QRPs, the inadequate number of replication studies, challenges facing big team science, and perverse incentives. Our investigation pointed out several problems with the traditional views. First, traditional views conceptualize expertise as something possessed, not performed, ignoring the epistemic responsibility of experts. Second, expertise is conceived as an exclusively individual quality, which contradicts the socially distributed nature of scientific inquiry. Third, some aspects of expertise are taken to be implicit or relative to the established research practices in a field, which leads to disputes over replicability and makes it difficult to criticize mindless scientific rituals. Lastly, a conflation of expertise with eminence in practice creates an incentive structure that undermines the goal of self-correction in science. We suggest, instead, that we conceive an expert as a reliable informant. Following the extended virtue account of expertise, we propose a non-individualist and a performance-based model, and discuss why it does not suffer from the same problems as traditional approaches, and why it is more compatible with the reform movement's goal of creating a credible psychological science through self-correction.

The Constitutive Aim of Inquiry

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in epistemic agency among philosophers. This development is in part owing to a growing interest in mental agency and epistemic normativity, along with associated concepts such as epistemic responsibility and the relationship between epistemic rationality and practical rationality. Most authors have focused solely on our agency exercised in the process of acquiring or forming beliefs in response to reasons. But some have examined temporally extended procedural epistemic agency, in particular our agency exercised in the process of inquiry. In this article, I argue for an account of procedural epistemic normativity grounded in a conception of the constitutive aim of inquiry. In doing so I will examine how an account of the constitutive aim of inquiry may both differ from and be like accounts of the constitutive aim of belief and the constitutive aim of intentional action. I propose that the constitutive aim of inquiry is understanding and that the aim of understanding may provide us with the norms of inquiry.

Epistemic Theodicy, Epistemic Evil, and Epistemic Responsibility

The paper explores the concept of epistemic theodicy and strengthens an argument that reconciles human fallibility with the existence of an all-powerful and benevolent God. This argument is grounded in epistemic responsibility, emphasizing our epistemic autonomy. The paper supports two aspects of this argument: the role of epistemic agency in shaping beliefs and belief formation based on experiential rationality. The paper begins by introducing the concept of epistemic theodicy and its relation to the problem of epistemic evil. Next, it presents a succinct version of the argument based on epistemic responsibility. The paper then focuses on epistemic agency, proposing a notion rooted in reasons-responsiveness and highlighting the agentive nature of belief formation. It provides an outline a of view of epistemic rationality grounded in experiential rationality, showing its compatibility with the responsibility-based response to the problem of epistemic evil. The conclusion reflects on the significance of these accounts of agency and rationality in the context of epistemic theodicy.

Collective deception: toward a network model of epistemic responsibility

Collective deception: toward a network model of epistemic responsibility

How I live [participate] now: Re-negotiating social belonging and linguistic participation in book-group discussions

Abstract This paper focuses on how Gabriella, an upper-secondary student in Sweden, re-negotiated social belonging and linguistic participation in book-group discussions involving students in the school subjects Swedish and Swedish as a second language. Gabriella immigrated to Sweden due to forced migration. As a Swedish language learner, she worried that her language proficiency was regarded as insufficient by her peers. Within the frame of linguistic ethnography, and with the aim of identifying Gabriella’s trajectory of participation in book-group discussions over time, audio-recorded group discussions about the novel How I live now, interview data, and observational fieldnotes were analyzed by means of an epistemic stance analysis. Building on learning as participation, it was possible to unfold how Gabriella went from a passing participant to a driving force. Her trajectory of participation was spurred by the content of the novel and a sense of epistemic responsibility to share her first-hand experience of war, while her classmates responded with silence. From an educational perspective, this paper emphasizes the importance of classrooms as contact zones where students are not only provided with rich opportunities to gather around literature that stirs up questions of what it means to be human, but more importantly, it accentuates the need for literary education to include responsive practices to help students accommodate each other as co-learners.

On the Justified Use of AI Decision Support in Evidence-Based Medicine: Validity, Explainability, and Responsibility.

When is it justified to use opaque artificial intelligence (AI) output in medical decision-making? Consideration of this question is of central importance for the responsible use of opaque machine learning (ML) models, which have been shown to produce accurate and reliable diagnoses, prognoses, and treatment suggestions in medicine. In this article, I discuss the merits of two answers to the question. According to the Explanation View, clinicians must have access to an explanation of why an output was produced. According to the Validation View, it is sufficient that the AI system has been validated using established standards for safety and reliability. I defend the Explanation View against two lines of criticism, and I argue that within the framework of evidence-based medicine mere validation seems insufficient for the use of AI output. I end by characterizing the epistemic responsibility of clinicians and point out how a mere AI output cannot in itself ground a practical conclusion about what to do.