Ben Almassi

How can we make informed decisions about whom to trust given expert disagreement? Can experts on both sides be reasonable in holding conflicting views? Epistemologists have engaged the issue of reasonable expert disagreement generally; here I consider a particular expert dispute in physics, given conflicting accounts from Harry Collins and Allan Franklin, over Joseph Weber’s alleged detection of gravitational waves. Finding common ground between Collins and Franklin, I offer a characterization of the gravity wave dispute as both social and evidential. While experimental evidence alone may not have forced resolution of the dispute, there were also credibility‐based reasons warranting epistemic trust and distrust. Thus we see how social factors can have evidential significance and how expert disagreement can be reasonable. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Dept., Communication Arts Division, College of Lake County, 19351 W. Washington St., Grayslake, IL 60030; e‐mail: [email protected].

‘Feminist masculinity’ might seem like a contradiction in terms. One might have assumed that we can embrace feminism or embrace masculinity, but not both. If traditional masculinity is contrary to feminist values, a pressing query for feminist men is whether repudiation of traditional masculinity should move one to reject normative masculinity entirely, or to reframe and reclaim it instead. bell hooks and Michael Kimmel each counsel against discarding manhood and masculinity. hooks envisions feminist masculinity as an alternative to patriarchal dominance, with masculinity to be reconstituted in terms of love, integrity, and mutuality; Kimmel advocates moving from immature and traditional masculinities toward justice and democratic manhood, with a new model of masculinity that identifies real men with adulthood and doing the right thing. Neither proposal provides a viable stance for feminist men without collapsing into androgyny or risking erasure of some men’s and women’s identities and experiences. Building on Alcoff’s work on anti-racist whiteness, I suggest that feminist allyship practices ground a normative model of masculinity compatible with, and informed by, feminist values. We may understand allyship masculinities as open-ended feminist approaches to manhood: masculinities predicated on recognizing and responding to, rather than ignoring or accepting, the privileges and expectations distinctive of men under patriarchy.

Ghostwriting in its various forms has received critical scrutiny from medical ethicists, journal editors, and science studies scholars trying to explain where ghostwriting goes wrong and ascertain how to counter it. Recent analyses have characterized ghostwriting as plagiarism or fraud, and have urged that it be deterred through stricter compliance with journal submission requirements, conflict of interest disclosures, author-institutional censure, legal remedies, and journals' refusal to publish commercially sponsored articles. As a supplement to such efforts, this paper offers a critical assessment of medical ghostwriting as contrary to good patient care, on the grounds that it contradicts established general principles guiding clinical ethics. Specifically, I argue that ghostwriting undermines trust relationships between authors and their readers, and between these readers and their trusting patients, and in so doing contradicts the duty of respect for patient autonomy by obstructing informed consent. For this reason, complicity in ghostwriting practices should be understood as a violation of the professional ethical duties of physicians and other healthcare workers.

Throughout his work on the rationality of epistemic dependence, John Hardwig makes the striking observation that he believes many things for which he possesses no evidence (1985, 335; 1991, 693; 1994, 83). While he could imagine collecting for himself the relevant evidence for some of his beliefs, the vastness of the world and constraints of time and individual intellect thwart his ability to gather for himself the evidence for all his beliefs. So for many things he believes what others tell him, as we all do. Epistemic dependence is the responsible choice, he argues, because he can be reasonably sure that those on whom he depends know more about the subject than he does. Epistemic dependence on experts is a smarter bet than epistemic autonomy: after all, Hardwig reasons, “if I were to pursue epistemic autonomy across the board, I would succeed in holding relatively uninformed, unreliable, crude, untested, and therefore irrational beliefs” (1985, 340) [...] In this paper I argue against what I call Hardwig’s no-evidence thesis: that knowledge and belief based on testimony are knowledge and belief for which the knower possesses no evidence. Against the no-evidence thesis, I propose we recognize that layperson B’s good reason to believe that expert A has good reason to believe proposition p constitutes evidence for B for p. I argue that the reasons Hardwig gives for the no-evidence thesis are inconclusive at best; at worst the no-evidence thesis coupled with his recognition of expert interdependence exposes him to recent criticisms by Stella Gaon and Stephen Norris. By rejecting the no-evidence thesis, we can recognize with Hardwig the importance of expert epistemic interdependence while avoiding the paradoxical implications of his position.