Jonathan Matheson

Members of oppressed groups are often silenced. One form of silencing is what Kristie Dotson calls “testimonial smothering”. Testimonial smothering occurs when a speaker limits her testimony in virtue of the reasonable risk of it being misunderstood or misapplied by the audience. Testimonial smothering is thus a form of epistemic paternalism since the speaker is interfering with the audience’s inquiry for their benefit without first consulting them. In this paper, we explore the connections between epistemic injustice and epistemic paternalism through the phenomenon of silencing. We argue that when you silence your testimony as a result of epistemic injustice it is an act of epistemic paternalism and that it is epistemically permissible. In fact, self-silencing resulting from epistemic injustice is a particularly clear example of permissible epistemic paternalism.

According to evidentialism, a subject is justified in believing a proposition at a time, just in case their evidence on balance supports that proposition at that time. Evidentialist justification is thus a property of fit – fitting the subject’s evidence. However, evidentialism does not evaluate the subject’s evidence beyond this relation of fit. For instance, evidentialism ignores whether the subject was responsible or negligent in their inquiry. A number of objections have been raised to evidentialism involving cases of irresponsible inquiry and the relevance of unpossessed evidence. In this paper, I argue that while these objections miss their mark, they do help motivate a distinct, and richer, concept of epistemic justification. This different concept of justification, what I call ‘robust justification’, supplements the evidentialist account of epistemic justification with an assessment of the subject’s evidence with respect to their inquiry. According to this proposal, to be robustly justified in believing a proposition at a time, the subject’s evidence must support that proposition at that time and that evidence must be the result of the subject’s responsible inquiry. While robust justification is not necessary for knowledge, I argue that it is an independently valuable epistemic state.

In this paper, I will explain and motivate the common consent argument for theism. According to the common consent argument it is rational for you to believe that God exists because you know so many other people believe that God exists. Having motivated the argument, I will explain and motivate several pressing objections to the argument and evaluate their probative force. The paper will serve as both an accessible introduction to this argument as well as a resource for continued research on the topic.

In Vices of the Mind, Cassam provides an accessible, engaging, and timely introduction to the nature of epistemic vices and what we can do about them. Cassam provides an account of epistemic vices and explores three broad types of epistemic vices: character traits, attitudes, and ways of thinking. Regarding each, Cassam draws insights about the nature of vices through examining paradigm instances of each type of vice and exploring their significance through real world historical examples. With his account of vices in hand, Cassam turns to addressing three questions in the remainder of the book: how can we be responsible for our epistemic vices? how can we be aware of our epistemic vices? And how can we address our epistemic vices? This book provides an excellent introduction to the debates about epistemic vices and is easy to engage regardless of one’s philosophical background. In being the first book-length treatment of epistemic vices, Vices of the Mind is sure to shape the debates surrounding epistemic vices for some time. In what follows we provide brief chapter summaries and raise several challenges to the account Cassam defends in the book.

The Equal Weight View is a view about the epistemic significance of disagreement that is thought to have significant skeptical consequences. In this paper I do two things: (i) apply the Equal Weight View to cases of religious disagreement, and (ii) evaluate some consequences of that application for the rationality of religious beliefs. With regard to (i), I argue that the Equal Weight View implies that awareness of the current state of disagreement over religious propositions, such as God exists or God doesn’t exist, gives us a defeater for any non-skeptical attitude toward such propositions. With regard to (ii), I examine what this entails about the rationality of religious beliefs. In particular, I examine how troubling the theist should find these consequences, and argue that they are not as troubling as is typically thought.

In this paper, I develop and respond to a novel objection to Conciliatory Views of disagreement. Having first explained Conciliationism and the problem of divine hiddenness, I develop an objection that Conciliationism exacerbates the problem of divine hiddenness. According to this objection, Conciliationism increases God’s hiddenness in both its scope and severity, and is thus incompatible with God’s existence (or at least make God’s existence quite improbable). I respond to this objection by showing that the problem of divine hiddenness is not made any worse by Conciliationism.

The purpose of this paper is to bring together work on disagreement in both epistemology and argumentation theory in a way that will advance the relevant debates. While these literatures can intersect in many ways, I will explore how some of views pertaining to deep disagreements in argumentation theory can act as an objection to a prominent view of the epistemology of disagreement—the Equal Weight View. To do so, I will explain the Equal Weight View of peer disagreement and show how it entails that deep disagreements between epistemic peers are rationally resolvable. I will then examine a challenge to the Equal Weight View that claims that this consequence is untenable. Having motivated the challenge, I show that there is a viable response to make on behalf of the Equal Weight View. I conclude by considering and responding to several objections to this response.

In this paper, I will connect some of the philosophical research on non-doxastic accounts of faith to some psychological research on grit. In doing so I hope to advance the debate on both the nature and value of faith by connecting some philosophical insights with some empirical grounding. In particular, I will use Duckworth’s research to show that seeing faith as grit both captures the philosophical motivations for non-doxastic accounts of faith and comes with empirical backing that such faith is voluntary and can be both valuable and rational.

We sometimes seek expert guidance when we don’t know what to think or do about a problem. In challenging cases concerning medical ethics, we may seek a clinical ethics consultation for guidance. The assumption is that the bioethicist, as an expert on ethical issues, has knowledge and skills that can help us better think about the problem and improve our understanding of what to do regarding the issue. The widespread practice of ethics consultations raises these questions and more: • What would it take to be a moral expert? • Is anyone a moral expert, and if so, how could a non-expert identify one? • Is it in any way problematic to accept and follow the advice of a moral expert as opposed to coming to moral conclusions on your own? • What should we think and do when moral experts disagree about a practical ethical issue? In what follows, we address these theoretical and practical questions about moral expertise.

How do people form beliefs, and how should they do so? This book presents seventeen new essays on these questions, drawing together perspectives from philosophy and psychology. The first section explores the ethics of belief from an individualistic framework. It begins by examining the question of doxastic voluntarism-i.e., the extent to which people have control over their beliefs. It then shifts to focusing on the kinds of character that epistemic agents should cultivate, what their epistemic ends ought to be, and the way in which these issues are related to other traditional questions in epistemology. The section concludes by examining questions of epistemic value, of whether knowledge is in some sense primary, and of whether the ethics of belief falls within the domain of epistemology or ethics. The second section extends this traditional debate to issues concerning the social dimensions of belief formation. It begins with essays by social psychologists discussing the past three decades of research in 'lay epistemics'. It continues by examining Humean, Kantian, and feminist insights into the social aspects of belief formation, as well as questions concerning the ethics of assertion. The section concludes with a series of essays examining a topic that is currently of great interest to epistemologists: namely, the significance of peer disagreement.

The generality problem is perhaps the most notorious problem for process reliabilism. Several recent responses to the generality problem have claimed that the problem has been unfairly leveled against reliabilists. In particular, these responses have claimed that the generality problem is either (i) just as much of a problem for evidentialists, or (ii) if it is not, then a parallel solution is available to reliabilists. Along these lines, Juan Comesaña has recently proposed solution to the generality problem—well-founded reliabilism. According to Comesaña, the solution to the generality problem lies in solving the basing problem, such that any solution to the basing problem will give a solution to the generality problem. Comesaña utilizes Conee and Feldman’s evidentialist account of basing (Conee and Feldman’s well-foundedness principle) in forming his version of reliabilism. In this paper I show that Comesaña’s proposed solution to the generality problem is inadequate. Well-founded reliabilism both fails to solve the generality problem and subjects reliabilism to new damning verdicts. In addition, I show that evidentialism does not face any parallel problems, so the generality problem remains a reason to prefer evidentialism to reliabilism