Jessica Carter

Trust is a central theme within social epistemology, and for good reason: trust is critical to successful communication and knowledge exchange. Doing social epistemology well requires, accordingly, that we understand how to minimize the various ways that bad trusting, and untrustworthiness, wreck social-epistemic exchanges (and, conversely: how good trusting, and trustworthiness, can help to facilitate them). This chapter critically discusses the significance of trust and its theoretical cognates—distrust, trustworthiness, and distrustworthiness—in social epistemology. Special focus is given to the following issues: (i) knowledge on trust; (ii) the entitlement to expect to be presumed trustworthy; (iii) the normativity of trusting; and the role of defective trust and distrust in cases of (iv) epistemic injustice; and (v) the uptake and spread of conspiracy theories.

What is it to trust well? How do we do it? If we think of trust as a kind of aimed performance, capable not only of success but also of competence and aptness, we can put our understanding of what it is to trust well on an entirely new footing. This book takes this project up, and in doing so, it uses the core ‘trust as performance’ idea—which is developed and refined in substantive detail—in the service of explaining a range of philosophically important phenomena related to trust, including its nature and varieties, the evaluative norms that govern good trusting and distrusting (both implicit and deliberative), how trust relates to vulnerability, risk, negligence, and monitoring, as well as to trustworthiness and, more generally, to our practices of cooperation. The result, a telic theory of trust, opens up entirely new option space and a research agenda in the philosophy of trust that is methodologically in the spirit of virtue epistemology, but which takes on its own distinctive shape.

What is knowledge? Why is it valuable? How much of it do we have (if any at all), and what ways of thinking are good ways to use to get more of it? These are just a few questions that are asked in epistemology, roughly, the philosophical theory of knowledge. This is Epistemology is a comprehensive introduction to the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and scope of human knowledge. Exploring both classic debates and contemporary issues in epistemology, this rigorous yet accessible textbook provides readers with the foundation necessary to start doing epistemology. Organized around 11 key subtopics, and assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, this volume exposes readers to diverse, often contentious perspectives—guiding readers through crucial debates including Hume’s problem of induction, Descartes’ engagement with radical skepticism, rationalist and empiricist evaluations of a priori justification, and many more. The authors avoid complex technical terms and jargon in favor of an easy-to-follow, informal writing style with engaging chapters designed to stimulate student interest and encourage class discussion. Throughout the text, a wealth of up-to-date references and links to online resources are provided to enable further investigation of an array of epistemological topics. A balanced and authoritative addition to the acclaimed This is Philosophy series, This is Epistemology is a perfect primary textbook for philosophy undergraduates, and a valuable resource for general readers with interest in this important branch of philosophy.

What cognitive goods do children plausibly have a right to in an education? In attempting to answer this question, I begin with a puzzle centred around Joel Feinberg's observation that a denial of certain cognitive goods can violate a child's right to an open future. I show that propositionalist, dispositionalist and objectualist characterisations of the kinds of cognitive goods children have a right to, run in to problems. A promising alternative is then proposed and defended, one that is inspired in the main by Wittgenstein's ‘hinge’ epistemology as developed in his posthumous On Certainty.

In several passages, Frege suggests that successful communication requires that speaker and audience understand the uttered words and sentences to have the same sense. On the other hand, Frege concedes that, in many ordinary cases, variation in sense is tolerable. In a recent article in this journal, Michaelson and Textor (Citation2023) offer a new interpretation of Frege on the tolerability of sense variation according to which variation in sense is tolerable when the conversation aims at joint action, but not when the conversation aims at joint thought. We maintain, contra Michaelson and Textor, that whether sense variation is tolerable does not depend on the conversational purpose, whether it be theoretical or practical. Rather, whether sense variation is tolerable depends instead on the conversational background. This picture offers what we take to be a more plausible reconstruction of Frege’s own view.

The lack of knowledge—as Timothy Williamson famously maintains—is ignorance. Radical sceptical arguments, at least in the tradition of Descartes, threaten universal ignorance. They do so by attempting to establish that we lack any knowledge, even if we can retain other kinds of epistemic standings, like epistemically justified belief. If understanding is a species of knowledge, then radical sceptical arguments threaten to rob us categorically of knowledge and understanding in one fell swoop by implying universal ignorance. If, however, understanding is not a species of knowledge, then three questions arise: (i) is ignorance the lack of understanding, even if understanding is not a species of knowledge? (ii) If not, what kind of state of intellectual impoverishment best describes a lack of understanding? (iii) What would a radical sceptical argument look like that threatened that kind of intellectual impoverishment, even if not threatening ignorance? This paper answers each of these questions in turn. I conclude by showing how the answers developed to (i–iii) interface in an interesting way with Virtue Perspectivism as an anti-sceptical strategy.

What is it to base a belief on reasons? Existing attempts to give an account of the basing relation encounter a dilemma: either one appeals to some kind of neutral process that does not adequately reflect the way basing is a content‐sensitive first‐personal activity, or one appeals to linking or bridge principles that over‐intellectualize and threaten regress. We explain why this dilemma arises, and diagnose the commitments that are key obstacles to providing a satisfactory account. We explain why they should be rejected anyway, and then offer a new, knowledge‐first virtue epistemological theory of the basing relation that shows how we can substantially theorize about mental processes without these commitments. The resulting view plausibly captures the way in which basing is an inherently mental and content‐sensitive process.

In several passages, Frege suggests that successful communication requires that speaker and audience understand the uttered words and sentences to have the same sense. On the other hand, Frege concedes that, in many ordinary cases, variation in sense is tolerable. In a recent article in this journal, Michaelson and Textor (2023) offer a new interpretation of Frege on the tolerability of sense variation according to which variation in sense is tolerable when the conversation aims at joint action, but not when the conversation aims at joint thought. We maintain, contra Michaelson and Textor, that whether sense variation is tolerable does not depend on the conversational purpose, whether it be theoretical or practical. Rather, whether sense variation is tolerable depends instead on the conversational background. This picture offers what we take to be a more plausible reconstruction of Frege’s own view.

This paper develops and argues for a virtue epistemology that includes performance-normative evaluations of interrogative attitudes (IAs) and not just beliefs. In this way, it brings virtue epistemology to interrogative epistemology. The motivating thought behind our proposal is an analogy: as the semantic property of truth is to answering attitudes, so the semantic property of soundness (the property questions have when they admit of true, direct answers) is to questioning attitudes. With this notion of basic success for IAs in hand, we go on to develop notions of competence and aptness for IAs. Roughly, our view says that (1) IAs are competent when they manifest (rightly situated) dispositions to form IAs in sound questions reliably enough, and (2) IAs are apt when their being directed towards a sound question manifests the relevant competence. A complete virtue epistemology that treats both beliefs and IAs is, we argue, better positioned to account for the way that success in questioning sets up yet further success in answering. Moreover, our complete virtue epistemology generates evaluative norms on IAs not yet represented in the emerging zetetic literature.

Clowes, Gärtner, and Hipólito (2021) describe the Mind-Technology Problem as a new constellation of philosophical problems about the nature of mind generated by advances in technology we increasingly rely on to meet both theoretical and practical aims. We agree with Clowes, Gärtner, and Hipólito that the problems they identify frame a timely and worthwhile new research programme. We aim to contribute to this research programme by motivating and canvassing the key contours of four different Mind-Technology problems that arise for, and which are distinctive to, approaches to knowledge-how that give abilities a central theoretical role in explaining intelligent states and behaviour. The result is an agenda in the theory of know-how aimed at reconciling prevailing anti-intellectualist thinking about know-how apt abilities and their exercise with the datum that much of our know-how is increasingly supported by our use of smart technological scaffolding. We don’t fully answer the questions we raise; our objective is to put them on the map and show why we think they matter.

Intentional actions exhibit control in a way that mere lucky successes do not. A longstanding tradition in action theory characterizes actional control in terms of the _knowledge_ with which one acts when acting intentionally. Given that action theorists, no less than epistemologists, typically take for granted the orthodox thesis that knowledge is in the head (viz., realized exclusively by brainbound cognition), the idea that intentional action is controlled in virtue of knowledge is tantamount to the idea that the knowledge by which intentional actions exhibit control supervenes intracranially. We raise some challenges for this idea, and in doing show, we show how epistemic theories of actional control are naturally aligned moreso than has been appreciated with cognitive extension in the theory of mind.

In a series of recent works, Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson insist that, given the ease by which irreversible destruction is achievable by a morally wicked minority, (i) strictly cognitive bio‐enhancement is currently too risky, while (ii) moral bio‐enhancement is plausibly morally mandatory (and urgently so). This article aims to show that the proposal Savulescu and Persson advance relies on several problematic assumptions about the separability of cognitive and moral enhancement as distinct aims. Specifically, we propose that the underpinnings of Savulescu's and Persson's normative argument unravel once it is suitably clear how aiming to cognitively enhance an individual will in part require that one aim to bring about certain moral goods we show to be essential to cognitive flourishing; conversely, aiming to bring about moral enhancement in an individual must involve aiming to improve certain cognitive capacities we show to be essential to moral flourishing. After developing these points in some detail, and their implication for Savulescu's & Persson's proposal, we conclude by outlining some positive suggestions.

Simion and Kelp offer a prima facie very promising account of trustworthy AI. One benefit of the account is that it elegantly explains trustworthiness in the case of cancer diagnostic AIs, which involve the acquisition by the AI of a representational etiological function. In this brief note, I offer some reasons to think that their account cannot be extended — at least not straightforwardly — beyond such cases (i.e., to cases of AIs with non-representational etiological functions) without incurring the unwanted cost of overpredicting untrustworthiness.

Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore in this paper is that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge—either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how).

A key project in mainstream epistemology investigates the sense in which beliefs are vulnerable to knowledge-undermining luck and/or risk. This chapter will explore a related but largely overlooked question of how and to what extent our grasping connections between propositions is vulnerable to understanding- undermining luck and risk. The result will be a better view of how our attempts to understand the world are vulnerable when they are, and how to better mitigate against such vulnerabilities.

This paper is an extended prolepsis in favor of epistemic situationism, the thesis that epistemic virtues are not sufficiently widely distributed for a virtue-theoretic constraint on knowledge to apply without leading to skepticism. It deals with four objections to epistemic situation: 1) that virtuous dispositions are not required for knowledge, 2) that the Big Five or Big Six personality model proves that intellectual virtues are a reasonable ideal, 3) that the cognitive-affective personality system framework proves that intellectual virtues are a reasonable ideal, and 4) that weakening the reliability requirement through epistemic dependence or abilism means that common inferential strategies really are virtues. The paper concludes with reflections on the replication crisis in psychological science.

A popular view in mainstream social epistemology maintains that, in the face of a revealed peer disagreement over p, neither party should remain just as confident vis-a-vis p as she initially was. This ‘conciliatory’ insight has been defended with regard to individual epistemic peers. However, to the extent that (non-summativist) groups are candidates for group knowledge and beliefs, we should expect groups (no less than individuals) to be in the market for disagreements. The aim here will be to carve out and explore an extension of the conciliatory insight from individual peer disagreement to group peer disagreement; in doing so, I’ll raise and address three key problems that face any plausible defence of such a constraint.

Research questions in mainstream epistemology often take for granted a cognitive internalist picture of the mind. Perhaps this is unsurprising given the seemingly safe presumptions that (i) knowledge entails belief (viz. the entailment thesis) and that (ii) the kind of belief that knowledge entails supervenes exclusively on brainbound cognition. It will be argued here that (contra orthodoxy) the most plausible version of the entailment thesis holds just that knowledge entails dispositional belief. However, regardless of whether occurrent belief supervenes only as the cognitive internalist permits, we should reject the idea that dispositional belief supervenes only in cognitive internalist-friendly ways. These observations, taken together, reveal two things: first, that a cognitive internalist picture of the mind is much more dispensable in epistemology than has been assumed and, second, that pursuing questions in extended epistemology need not involve any radical departure from the commitments of more traditional epistemological projects.

I motivate and defend a new way of theorising about trust and trustworthiness – and their relationship to each other – by locating both within a broader picture that captures largely overlooked symmetries on both the trustor's and trustee's side of a cooperative exchange. The view defended here takes good cooperation as a theoretical starting point; on the view proposed, cooperation between trustor and trustee is working well when achievements in trust and in responding to trust are matched on both sides of the trust exchange. In a bit more detail, the trustor ‘matches’ her achievement in trusting (an achievement in fitting reliance to reciprocity) with the trustee's achievement in responding to trust (an achievement in fitting reciprocity to reliance). From this starting point, we can then appreciate symmetrical ways that the trustor and trustee can (respectively) fall short, by violating what are shown to be symmetrical evaluative norms – of success, competence and aptness – that regulate the attempts made by both trustor and trustee. The overall picture has important advantages over the received way of theorising about how trust stands to trustworthiness, and it clears the way – by identifying key questions that have been obscured – to making further progress.

What is it to trust well? How do we do it? If we think of trust as a kind of aimed performance, capable not only of success but also of competence and aptness, we can put our understanding of what it is to trust well on an entirely new footing. This book takes this project up, and in doing so, it uses the core ‘trust as performance’ idea—which is developed and refined in substantive detail—in the service of explaining a range of philosophically important phenomena related to trust, including its nature and varieties, the evaluative norms that govern good trusting and distrusting (both implicit and deliberative), how trust relates to vulnerability, risk, negligence, and monitoring, as well as to trustworthiness and, more generally, to our practices of cooperation. The result, a telic theory of trust, opens up entirely new option space and a research agenda in the philosophy of trust that is methodologically in the spirit of virtue epistemology, but which takes on its own distinctive shape.

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users’ attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers.